George Mack
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And he goes on and talks about, yeah, we're going to get around to it. We're going to get around to it. And it just ends with... I mean, I personally don't think many people watching this will consider replacing fax machines as an issue of depth and complexity.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So just the two contrasts here of fax machines on the trains in the UK and reverse, like landing a rocket, is two complete polar opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to travel and logistics.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So again, for the people listening, you have a series of Nazis saluting to Hitler in 1936. And you have this guy in red here, who's believed, there's debate who it is, but he's believed to be a guy called August Landmasser. What I love about his story was he originally, like most people have this idea that when Nazi Germany comes around, that they're going to be the one.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
There's an incredible Twitter account at the minute called Days of NHS Spending.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
The Palm Jumeirah Beach? Yeah, so the Palm Jumeirah Beach in Dubai, it's a tweet where it talks about it's the most expensive, I think, physical infrastructure ever built. Mm-hmm. And it equates to 30 days of NHS spending.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And he just constantly, anytime anybody talks about a number that's going to be saved or a crazy amount of spend, it's just constantly quantified into the number of days of NHS spending. Absurd.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
High agency is, in my opinion, the most under-discussed and most important idea in, let's say, the 21st century. It's one of those ideas that once you see it, you can't quite unsee it. It's everywhere. But the problem with it is is it's quite hard to define.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Well, brings me on to my next one. So we have two contrasts here. At one end of the spectrum, we have the US Department of Education on the low agency end, which it's something around $20,000 to $30,000 they spend on students per year. And they are ranked, it's the highest in the world the US spends on education. Meanwhile, they're ranked...
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Uh, between 20th and 35th, both for literacy and numeracy. So spending so much money, getting so little out of it, it's a wild start of something along the lines of over 50% of Americans have lower than sixth grade literacy. So on the right end is one of the best books I've ever listened to. It's about an hour long.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And I'll just open up the question first because it's completely reset this question for me, which is what is a 10 year old capable of? And this book kind of answers that question. So it's called Don't Tell Me I Can't. It's written by a 14-year-old at the time called Cole Summers.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
that puts Anne Frank in their house and stands up. But realistically, we're way more likely to be these individuals here. And according to the story, August was part of the Nazi party, kind of went along with the LARP because it kind of made sense, fell in love with a Jewish woman and very much, okay, began to hit an agency test with reality.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And essentially, just to contrast it to the Department of Education, it starts with him very early on, around about five or six years old. And his dad served in the military and had an issue in training that basically left him disabled and with injuries for the rest of his life. And one day he's getting raised by his dad and he's about to hit the age of going to primary school.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And they see these kids misbehaving and saying some awful shit outside of their house. And they decide, you know what, we're going to homeschool them. And he opts in for that decision. He goes, I don't want to hang out with those kids. Unfortunately, his dad then ends up needing lots of operations throughout his homeschooling. And he one day is kind of sat there.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
His dad's recovering from all these surgeries. And he says to his dad... how do people get rich? And his dad just replies, I imagine at the time, on so much medication and just trying to keep his kid busy. He goes, I don't know, because they're a poor family. He goes, maybe go and watch some Warren Buffett videos on YouTube.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So a six-year-old goes and starts watching Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger videos on YouTube, consumes everything about Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, understands Munger's iron laws of prescription, starts learning everything about business and compound interest. all for himself on YouTube. Then at the age of seven, the age of seven just goes, well, I'll just start my first company.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Seven-year-old starts his first company, selling rabbits to the local restaurants, gets it up to a thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue. And that's real revenue, not like a Shopify bullshit screenshot, right? A thousand dollars for a seven-year-old. At the age of eight, he then learns about Amazon not paying tax. How is Amazon not paying tax?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So he starts just teaching himself the tax code online at the age of eight. At the age of nine, he buys his first vehicle, like a car. What does he do with it? For the farm. So it's not him, but he owns the vehicle, but people are working on it, yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And at the age of 10, he buys his first house for $10,000, watches YouTube videos, learns like flooring, how to do the wiring, completely flips the house, makes a profit on the house, and... Has he got any help? Is anyone assisting him with this? I don't know the ins and outs of that specifically. I've got to probably do more research on that. But the book is incredible.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And there's a bit in there where he goes to scouts because he's still interacting with the kids. But what the crazy thing is, he didn't know that that wasn't normal. He was just going online. And he goes to scouts and he's chatting to the other kids about what they've been up to that day. And they're saying, yeah, we've just been remembering the planets.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So we have Earth here and Mars and da-da-da-da-da. And he's like, when are we ever going to use this? And he goes, what about you? What have you been up to? And he chats to them about like payroll, tax compliance. It's pretty much this nine-year-old at Scouts.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
But not that, I think the key asterisk on that story is not that everybody should, not every 10-year-old should be buying their own house, but it makes you question the education model that we discussed earlier. And I think that's probably one of the biggest inputs of low agency into people. And- His story in particular, yeah, makes you question, well, what is a young person capable of?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And you see all these Nazis saluting at once, and he's the one guy with his arms crossed that He ends up getting punished for marrying a German woman, ends up in a concentration camp. She dies in the concentration camp. But there's just that beauty of every single person saluting as a Nazi and him there with his arms crossed just beautifully signifies high agency in a moment.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Yes. Like in school, if you copy people, you're punished and given a detention. In life, if you copy people, you're labeled a successful franchisee owner. Yeah. But there's like endless amounts of those behaviors where a lot of adult life is about, from my experience at least, seems to be about unlearning behaviors that happened during school.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
When you actually go down the rabbit hole of the education system, like this Prussia model that came over and it was primarily created to create industrial factory workers. And it still looks like that to this very day. That you have...
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
You have somebody who's in charge of the classroom. You have... People moved from cell to cell. Uniform. Uniform. And also you're told when you can eat. You're told when you can go to the bathroom. You have to ask for permission to go to the bathroom. Peter Thiel, I was thinking about this the other day.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
He has this question of what do, or what does, what opinion do you hold that few people agree with you on? And this idea of trying to get you to become an independent thinker, which is quite a difficult question to answer. I certainly struggle with it. But there's a flip of that question, which is what do essentially most people agree upon, but nothing's changing?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And I think it's the education system is definitely not a good thing. It's obviously not necessarily, there's worse options, right, before it existed. But I can't think of anything that as many people agree upon that this thing's a bad thing. doesn't prepare you for real life.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And a good indicator of a training system, I was thinking about this, a good indicator of a training system is how closely it mimics the actual thing. So driving lessons are incredible because you're literally driving and it's painful. But meanwhile, school, how much do you remember from school? Essentially zero. I was thinking about, you know who I'd love to meet?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Whoever is in charge of foreign languages in the UK, like the department level. I've never met anybody who's learned Spanish, French from school, apart from like, bonjour, bonjour, hola. That's it. But we still keep going along with that.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Next thing I would like to run through is we have two videos. So one, which is high agency in a video and another, which is low agency in a video.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Have you seen, I need to double verify these studies. I'd be interested to replicate them. There's a guy called, I think Dr. Land who worked for NASA and designed these creative thinking tests to basically gauge how creative somebody is.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And the way they would do that is ask, for example, number of solutions, different types of solutions they come up with, how they vary from everybody else's solutions, things like that. And a five-year-old on average of the 1,500 that they surveyed scored like 98% on creativity. Kind of follows up every five years and it just... It looks like the reverse of Bitcoin's price.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
It's just down, down, down, down, down. And, you know, we spoke on the previous show of the average person dies at 25 and isn't buried until 75. At the follow-up of the study, the 25-year-olds, 2%. was the 2% of them scored as like creative thinkers. And it kind of makes sense when you're put through this model of wrong, right answer, set curriculum for you, Pavlovian conditioning.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Don't think outside of the box.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
That doesn't go down well at schools.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
My brother tells me this funny story of when he was at school and he was probably not the most well-behaved kid at school. But one day he was like flicking around the history books and became fascinated by communism in Russia and China and all these people going down this bad ideology. And the teacher goes, what are you doing? He goes, I'm just absolutely fascinated by this, sir.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
He goes, yeah, that's great, but that's not on the curriculum. And just went back to something about Henry VIII. Completely changed the curriculum. But it is fascinating. I do think we're at this momentous period of time where you now have chat, GPT, Claude, all these AI tools coming in where...
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
even the work now is just completely redundant even this model of preparing for an exam like talk about feedback loops you don't find out your exam results to even forget even judging exams itself not finding out your exam result for three months is such a terrible feedback loop within itself yeah uh rory sutherland told me this really uh funny parable so he said um
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So for the people listening at home, there's this absolute nut job on a hill dancing like a madman. And the whole crowd is looking at him like he's lost his mind. One guy's joined.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
That's so Rory. Well, off topic, but I have to include it. There's the, on top of plane experiments, Charlie Munger tells that one of, he goes on a plane, terrorists hijack the plane and say, right, you've got one last dying wish before we blow this sucker up. think wisely. Then he goes, can I tell you about the beauty of Costco's business model?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Yes. Let me, um, let me skip ahead. Skip ahead. Just before I go on to that one, we have, I just wanted to show you this cause it's just fucking cold. This is the topography of tears. Have you seen this? The topography of tears? Yes. Like, so yeah, this, um, photographer, I will come back onto your question, but just quickly, let me blast through this.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Uh, this photographer took different types of tears and put them under a microscope. And here, for example, is tears of grief. Here is tears of joy. They actually look different under a microscope. Wow. So this is just, this was just a way for me to try and get this into the show because it looks so cool. But like the agency example here is being at a funeral and thinking. Fuck.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
I never got in touch for the last few years and now they're gone.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Tears of grief. At the other end, tears of joy of, fuck, I'm so glad that we did that holiday together. Or I'm so glad that I arranged all those trips that I did with them. So I thought that was a... That's fascinating.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So yeah, that's high agency in a video. And just to contrast this now, the next video in terms of getting people to actually experience it is low agency in a video from Derren Brown.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
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#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
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Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Yes, because fundamentally it was possible. That's the big thing. And this is, I try and say this in the least offensive way, but I think there's some truth to it. that a lot of high achievers or high agency people are often described as being on the Asperger's or autism spectrum. And I think the reason behind that is that all their bottlenecks are just logistics and operations.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And there's that Justice Potter Stewart line of around when he was trying to define pornography, when he was asked in a government inquiry, can you define pornography? And he came back with the ultimate reply of, well, I can't define it, but I know it when I see it. So in lieu of the episode today, I know you rent out all these beautiful studios.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
It's just like, just you look at someone like Elon or Zucker, somebody like that, Bezos, and a lot of it is just logistics operations bottlenecks. Whereas for maybe people who like myself that go through the education system and really struggled to then break out of that way of thinking, it's creativity bottleneck.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
It's a emotional bottleneck is a big one of like, what will people think if I do this? Yep. Um, But there's so many different bottlenecks that aren't logistics and operations, but for people who have a little touch of the TISM or the Asperger's. What's the opposite of high agency? It would be low agency.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
It would be outsourcing your worldview to other people who are just outsourcing their worldview to you. And you just have this kind of reflexive mirror. What's your one around the, is it the Faberlene paradox? Is it that one?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
In the essay around high agency that I've written, which we can link to, essentially what I call them are low agency traps that are just...
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
easy uh and i've documented maybe nine or ten but i think there's infinite amount of agency traps just part of being a human being so there's a few which i can read now so i one is called the midwit trap and the way i was thinking what's a fun way of actually explaining this about boring people and it's a SMS message.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So imagine you're in a third world jail and you've got somebody who's in the midwit trap and you text them, hey, any updates on breaking me out of this jail? This is how the midwit trap would think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lots of updates from me. I'm on day 30 of my juice cleanse. I'm thinking of doing a degree in criminology to specialise in how jails work so I can get you out.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And I've also watched 30 TED Talks on the topic. So the midwit trap, I've got a PhD in the midwit trap, is this idea of trying to be smarter than you are, an overcomplicating thing. So for the midwit trap, where it comes from is the midwit meme. So you have the guy on the left, the guy on the right, the guy in the middle, two opposite ends of the IQ bell curve.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And the guy on the left and the guy on the right often come to the same simple conclusion. The guy on the left can't overthink things. So he just goes for the simple answer. The guy on the right is so intelligent that he's demystified everything and come back to the simple shit. And the guy in the middle is the one who's managed to overcomplicate things and overthink things.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So like one meme that I made is guy on the left makes something people want. Guy on the right makes something people want when it comes to business. Then in the center, it's, I'm going to do this five-year consultancy program, and then I'm going to watch all these TED Talks. And then once I've done these surveys, I'm ultimately going to find the thing.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So the guy in the midwit trap would never even get moving with any agency towards breaking out of a federal jail because he's constantly overthinking and trying to intellectualize things too much.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
When I was thinking about high agency originally, I had four things that underpin it. So if you imagine high agencies like this table here, and then you have the four legs, the four things that I think underpin it are clear thinking, resourcefulness. bias to action, and disagreeability.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So if you even go back to the Wright Brothers story there, the amount of clear thinking that they needed to do throughout of, oh, okay, oh, the aerodynamics, let's actually take these to first principles and test it.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
The amount of resourcefulness of, and I probably think resourcefulness, interested to get your opinion on this, it's like creativity and persistence combined, like the ability to create new novel creative solutions. Bias to action is just like moving, moving, moving Napoleon style.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And disagreeability is the guy earlier when Derren Brown rings the bell who sits there and goes, well, maybe I don't have to follow everybody else. And perfect example being the Wright Brothers rather than just carrying on their bike shop and trying to build that into an enterprise disagreed with the whole consensus based off the laws of physics that people could fly.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So you have those four things. And I think going back to your point there, intentionalism is like a sister of like clear thinking. Yes. It's like a clear thinking leads to intentionalism. Yeah. Doing what you meant to do. Yes. Because yeah, there's definitely a difference between high agency. You could theoretically be high agency and unintentional that we've spoken about before. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
It's the George Soros thing, right? It's George Soros, who I'm sure we're going to get flagged immediately on YouTube for mentioning the Soros. But becoming one of the most successful hedge fund managers ever. And if rumors are to be true or believed to be true, he wanted to be a philosopher.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
and he spent his whole life like just crashing the pound and trailing away but just kept going up but Bill Perkins has that bit in his book about that mate of his who said stop me when I get to 20 million and just keeps going at 50 million and he's now at like multiple billions and he's still going because he's addicted to it so yeah you could have resourcefulness
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Clear thinking, biased action, disagreeability, but without intentionalism is a dangerous one. You're fully fucked. What are some of the other low agency traps? Another one kind of related to what you mentioned there is the rumination trap. So, hey, any updates on breaking me out of this jail? Sorry for the slow reply. I've been thinking about it.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Yeah, before you know it, they remove the actors. And you just have ten people standing up and down to the sound of a bell. And I love that video because it perfectly encapsulates low agency where... And it's so easy to fall into of just looking around at other people, assuming that they know best, and then realising that all the other people were just looking around at other people.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
I know I've spent the last year thinking about it. I think I just need more time to think. I'm trying to think about my overthinking problem. If I can solve that, I think I can start. So the rumination trap is one I began to learn a lot more from doing cognitive behavioral therapy. And it's just this endless loop. I mean, we were chatting about this the other day.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
of if you could analyze the 50,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day and really see them. The problem with the human brain is you have these 50,000 to 60,000 thoughts, but because they're constantly in short-term memory, you don't fully... If you could see the graph... You'd love a dashboard. Yeah, if you could see the dashboard, you'd go, I've thought about...
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
I've worried about that conversation with somebody 20% of the week for the last three years. And it's just ruminating around. But when it's there fresh in consciousness, you don't see the dashboard. You don't see that. So you just ruminate.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So a personal rumination story that I had was, and the problem with rumination is you try and forecast into the future constantly. That's the big thing from cognitive behavioral therapy is you're, they call it the crystal ball or you're trying to forecast in the future ahead. And unless you can get a perfect outcome, You just kick the can down the road.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And then ultimately you end up with not much road left and just a lot of cans. So one that came to mind for me. So when I was thinking about clear thinking, there's the three big decisions, right? There's where you live, who you're with and what you're doing. And one thing I struggled with for ages was I'm in this location right now. Maybe I could go to this other location.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And what would happen in my head is I would have option A of me staying in current location or option B going to new location. And when I would think of option A, it would go nightmare mode. So everything that could possibly go wrong would go wrong. And the other option has worked out perfectly. And then I'd flip to the other option and the reverse was true.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
When I had left and gone to that location, everything's gone wrong and I've now missed out on everything. And as a result, it's this... doom loop that then begins to occur. And the more you kick the can down the road, the more you ruminate, the bigger this thing becomes. And it's this absolute doom loop cycle.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And it's this giant game of...
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And then you go, I don't want to think about this, which makes the thing bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
The biggest thing that I actually found for people listening who probably had that doom loop that I have and still have, is in terms of getting a bias to action is rather than calling it a decision, just moving to experiments. So just looking at the two and going, oh, okay, I think this one has 60% probability. This one has 40% probability.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
I'm going to go with the 60% one and I'm going to fully back the decision and I'll book time six months from now to review how it went and then change if not. Because I realized in the five years spent ruminating about the two different options, I could have lived in both cities multiple times.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Yes. So much time wasted. And the thing I love about that is if you actually just did the thing, the amount of real data that your amygdala can't just sit there creating these doomsday scenarios. The big realization I had when I spoke to the CBT guy that I worked with was when you actually...
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
look at those nightmare modes that are playing what's really strange about rumination is it skips like two to three years in the future and the worst case scenario it's always i won't be able to cope the worst case scenario will happen i won't be able to cope and people will judge me is what happens in the doom loop in the rumination cycle but it always skips two to three years in the future and he made a great point of it's like a horror film it just starts now and goes two to three years in the future he goes but real life's more like a documentary what's you have agency what's all the steps yeah
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
that that leads you up you can bail out or change or adjust course at any point along that yeah i think a good way of moving out the rumination cycle i kind of caught the difference between clear thinking and muddy thinking and ultimately we spoke about this the other day The kind of aphorism I have, you know, the Nietzsche thing of never trust a thought that happens indoors.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Never trust a thought that happens in your head is a good rule of thumb. And I like that Balaji idea of transformation. So if thought happens in my head, it's not true until I've drawn it out, written it down, spoken it out loud to another person, create an equation, put it in a spreadsheet, whatever it is.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And I actually think probably 50% of the benefits of therapy is just going from head to out loud.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So here we go. This is the high agency question. So for people listening at home. The way to identify the highest agency person in your life is if you woke up here and you have sweat with dirt and dirt with sweat all over your body. For the people listening, this is a photo of a prison cell. Yes.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
One thing on the writing side that I found specifically useful related to that is a photo can't do this, a video can't quite do this, But writing actually gives you the ability to go back 10 years, let's say 10 years in the future now, and understand how you think today, or be able to now today, go back 10 years. It's a snapshot of your mind. Yeah, that's how I thought.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And because so many of the thoughts just disappear completely down the drain, it's so beautiful in that regard. What about some more traps? Some more traps. So we mentioned specificity there. So this is the vague trap. So- Hey, any updates on breaking me out of this jail? Yes, I've been working around the clock. Amazing. Any specific updates?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
I don't have any timelines yet or deadlines or action items, but I'm working on it. And yeah, the vague trap is, I think, such an easy one to fall into because you're just trying to avoid falsifiable criteria. The biggest takeaway I took from Musk's biography was it's just like endless anecdote of We're going to do this by X date this time.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And then there's a timer around the office to the second counting down to that specific thing. And then the gas, the metaphor around if you have a container, the gas will just expand or increase based on the size of the container constantly. It's just a Parkinson's law written all over the factory. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
There's a great line of general ambition gives you anxiety, specific ambition gives you direction. But I mean, specificity everywhere is so important. Even in writing or talking, the more specific that you are, the more impactful it can be.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And I actually find the reason why specificity, we avoid it, people in the vague trap, or at least myself, the reason why we avoid it is because there's a failure point.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Yeah. And if you can just live in that generality, it's impossible to ever have agency, I think.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
You're not drinking days and you've woken up in a third world prison cell and you have a phone passed under your door and you can call one person to try and get you out of there. Who is it? And everybody weirdly has this kind of idea in their head of who they would call in this scenario. And when you actually begin to grill people about who they would call.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
The question, I mean, the question shit. Like it's fundamentally shit.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Yeah, that's the first bit of advice you give is ask a better question. And I think if you look at the vague trap and how often it comes up, it's because of just even the question he asked there, it's just a lack of, it's a complete lack of clear thinking. It's just like clear, like muddy thinking, what I call it is just like vague gifts in my head or like JPEGs or words that are popping up
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
It's not the amount that they bench press. It's not the car that they drive. It's not the novels that they've read. It's not the family background they're from. It's maybe sometimes. If they're the royal family, then maybe. It's something else. And that something is high agency. And yeah, I'm looking forward to the chat today because we can go into more of the specifics of it.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And it's never going, what does that mean? Writing that down, getting more specific, more specific, more specific. A great example would be, how can I be happy? It's probably the vaguest fucking question that's ever existed. And if you just view the brain as a questioning answering device that we're constantly asking questions and you basically, it's like asking a computer just an endless loop.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
It never closes and it just completely expands into infinity, which then leads to this anxiety. But let's say, for example, okay, example of general question, how can I be happy? Specific question would be, what does my dream week look like hour by hour? What does my nightmare week look like hour by hour? Where am I right now between the two?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And then what's the easiest first step to move up that? That's so much more specific versus like a general thing. And I think that's probably the biggest sign I notice whenever I'll get a DM, whether it's a personal thing or a business thing. The easiest questions to answer or the best people are always, I mean, the most high agency people. It tends to be super specific.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
I've tried A, B, C, D, E. I saw that you mentioned F. I've done this specific thing here. This problem happened here. What do you think? Versus, hey, mate, I want to do this. Anything? Question mark. It's so vague. And as a result, it's so boundless that you could almost never apply knowledge because it's too general. Yeah. What other traps? Is there anything else? Let me see.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Yeah, we have the final one, which is the cynic trap. So, hey, any updates on breaking me out of this jail? Question mark. I posted my idea on Reddit for feedback. This user called twatmonkey72 broke down why it was a dumb idea. And then I spoke to my cynical British friends and they said, people like us don't do big things. I don't think there's any hope. Sorry.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And just the reply is, you've literally not attempted anything yet. I think the cynicism thing is definitely one of the reasons I mentioned the British thing in there is definitely a close, a one that's close to heart, just experiencing the difference between Britain and America that we've spoken about countless times.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
The upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure. Yeah, I think... I think that's partially true. But I think if you zoom out, so that's at the individual level, I think that's true. But if you zoom out, the kind of arrogance to be cynical when you look at just from the wheel to the horse and carriage to the car to the airplane to the rocket.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
I think I tried to create a word for it once. You're going to hate this because it's terrible branding. But like this...
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
alzheimer's of the zeitgeist like i call it zeitzeit sounds it's fucking awful i know it's it shouldn't be on the podcast but um we just have this weird cynicism around basically all the crazy ideas that have occurred we now just completely take for granted and then when we look at agency in the future um well that's just absurd so we're in this weird middle zone of never appreciating the
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
But the problem, once you actually begin to experience it, you get more of an understanding. But then the real problem that I kind of struggled with is how do you actually... It's a je ne sais quoi. It's difficult to describe in words. What is it? So I kind of created this model here, which I call the high agency spectrum. Spectrum being the operative word. Yes. So essentially, imagine you have...
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
just the riper of it you know like back like back to back high agency people high agency people high agency people then i'm sat there on an emirates flight getting annoyed because my diet coke's flat um never appreciating that and also not being able to appreciate that there's literally infinite potential knowledge creation and it's so easy to be cynical
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Yeah, there's five key ones that I identified. So there's no unsolvable problem unless it defies the laws of physics. There's no adults, we spoke about previously. Adults don't exist. Adults don't exist. There's no way. Um, there's, uh, there's no guarantee you won't die screaming, which is one of my favorite ones. Um, I'll tell you the, uh, the story behind that one.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
I wanted to be the first guest ever to bring some props. You brought props. To kind of get people to experience high agency and then we can define it with words.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
There's a old Joe Rogan podcast, uh, with a guy called Kevin Smith, uh, And he comes on and fuck man, this is, he, he comes on and he's telling the story of his dad. And he talks about how his dad was this great guy, like was one of the people that never made any mistakes, worked for the postal service, just kind of gave up on his hopes and dreams just to make his family happy.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So never made, never saw him make a mistake once. And he's out for dinner one evening with his mom and his dad and his family at this amazing dinner. His dad goes back to the hotel. He gets a call at 3am and his brother says, you need to come down to the hospital now. Like dad's not well at all.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
He turns up to the hospital and his mom is crying hysterically in a way he's never seen anybody cry before. And his brother just looks at him and like gives him the nod and just said, like, can just tell that his dad's died. And he says three words that he says sticks with him that still haunt him to this day. He died screaming. And as a result of that, he said, fuck it.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Like even a good guy like that, he died screaming. It's just an absolutely horrific site. And he kind of justified that for having agency of his existence is that ultimately if you can do everything, everything, everything correct. And you ultimately die screaming. What's the point in not like chasing whimsies or just doing ridiculous shit that you can think of.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Because it's such a, I think the amount of people that die screaming that never get spoken about because everybody has this idealized fantasy that they're just going to die peacefully in their sleep or take a load of LSD and sleep the hookers and come their way out of it. But realistically, yeah, there's no guarantee that you won't die screaming. What does that justify?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Well, I think it's the most extreme way of like a stoic way of looking at potential mortality in its face and realizing not only am I going to die, I may die screaming. Therefore, you know what? The bell's ringing right now and people are standing up. Thank you
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
two doors behind them are all the people you would call when stuck in a third world jail and at the other end of the spectrum is peak low agency is the last people that you would call when stuck in a third world jail if you were stuck in like a paper bag you wouldn't call them right yeah And what is the fundamental difference between these two groups?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
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Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Because if you looked at them on paper, you go, there's no gender, race, age, politics, wealth, career title, LinkedIn profile. Like what specifically is it? And I was stuck on this idea for years, like trying to chip away, chip away, chip away, chip away. And essentially kind of came to the conclusion of like, this is actually the most simple way of defining high agency is
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
are they happening to life or is life happening to them? So what you'll ultimately, anybody who you would call to break you out of a third world jail, you would define as happening to life. The people that you would be least likely to break you out of a third world jail the ones that life is happening to them.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And then once you begin to see that spectrum, it's such a more simple like Occam's razor of really understanding high agency. And fundamentally this isn't, it can be like a nice, okay, this is a cool like self-help concept, but actually agency is bigger than that. Out of the six to 7 million species on earth, human beings are the only ones capable of agency. In the known universe,
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
understand how things work and implement it into reality and happen to life and shape their environment that we just now completely take for granted like me getting annoyed at the flat diet coke on the emirates flight um is a big thing the second thing which is probably a little less esoteric that i i really really like as a a metaphor is when you're in the complete low agency and
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
first off is high agency in a meme okay so as you can see here you have person a and person b and essentially for the people that are listening you have two people trapped on a desert island identical people but with two different fundamental frames of reality one is using the wood to get help the other is using the wood to kind of escape the island
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Everything is super general. And it's like, I don't even know where to begin. I don't even know where to start. One thing I love doing, a little experiment I got, was going, okay, let's say I have a problem right now of... I had a friend at the minute who, uh, he's an extreme, but a friend we both know actually, he's an extreme workaholic to a point that I've never, I've never seen before.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And he was talking about how it's a problem. He just doesn't know where to start. And I said to him, I go, okay, where are you at right now? Out of 10. And it suddenly takes this kind of general infinite universe all the way down to, okay, well, a bit of a binary choice and you can never say seven, right? So he goes, he goes, um, I'm a three. And I go, okay.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And I go, why are you at a three, by the way? Like, why aren't you at a two? And he goes, to be honest with you, because I've actually like not worked tonight and I've come here to see you. I go, okay, so we're getting some specificity here. And I go, okay, well, what would take it up to a four? And he goes, well, If I left the office before 8 p.m., I'd give that a four. I'd go, okay, great.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
I've got a little step there. I go, what would take it to a five? What would take it to a six, seven, eight, nine, 10? I go, okay, first off, let's just do the four immediately. And then as soon as you have that, you have momentum. One of the things I love, and I'll probably put it in a piece of like a template that people can use, is just what I call the video game Apple Note.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So you have, let's say for example, to-do list in Apple Note, build a website. The problem with that is that's starting the video game on level 56. So one, I had this fascinating realization that two, sorry, one person that I knew was the laziest person I've ever met, couldn't like open his mail. I couldn't get out of bed and like make himself some food.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
but was one of the best video game players at that specific game in the world. I would spend 16 hours a day on this video game. And I go, well, do they have an agency problem? Or is there a reality just a poorly designed video game? So the video game Apple Note is just level one.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Let's say whatever it is, whether it's from opening mail to going to Kitty Hawk and taking the planes into the sky, there's always a level one. And that's what video games are incredible at, that they adapt to where you're at and then just slowly move you up again, completely the opposite of school. So level one is always just dump down thoughts on topic.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And what I love about that is no matter how complex the thing is, from curing cancer to flying planes to opening the mail, you can always dump down thoughts. And then you check it off. And level two is create the next five levels based off level one. And what's beautiful is when you check level one off, level one's small enough to start, but isn't overwhelming.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So you have that video game bit of dopamine. Then when you check it off, you're like, fuck. Let's go. I'm on level two. And then each step is enough. So key thing with video game design is it's enough of a step to feel a challenge, but without overwhelm. And if it's too big of a step, like level 56, build website, That's too big of a step.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
of what we know, and by the way, we only know this via agency. We are the only thing that we know of capable of agency. Even today, like we are sat in a studio in London and I was listening to David Deutsch explain this concept.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
You're just constantly in frustration, so you just quit the video game. It's a terribly designed video game, but breaking things down into micro steps is such a key thing in video game design and ultimately increasing agency. Yeah, I mean, this is the...
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And yeah, you need to... If you can figure out ways that you can constantly make that first step, because 50% of the battle is that first step. So if you have that, great tool. Another tool more related to, so we spoke earlier about the four tenets of high agency. You have clear thinking, you have bias to action, you have resourcefulness and disagreeability.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
On the disagreeability point, which I think is a huge, huge part of it, The question I like to ask people is who's your favorite podcaster, creator? Me. Thinker. So let's say all the people listening to it right now who have the Spotify wrapped with you top of the list. Yep. what do you disagree with Chris on? Because there'll be a percentage, nothing, right? It's all good, baby.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
But there'll be a percentage of the audience, unfortunately, probably less so with your audience, but there'll be a percentage of the audience that says, Chris says sky is red, therefore sky is red. And that's actually a great disagreeability test because the amount of times I put gurus on a pedestal And then they'll start, they'll say a lot of wise shit and then I'll just start drifting.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And then they'll start drifting and I'll just go with them. But that ability to say who do you admire the most and what do you disagree with them on is a great disagreeability test. That's really lovely. Another one is who do you disagree, like who do you, what's the, maybe the strongest held opinion that you have?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
whether that's politically, business-wise, theoretically, and who's the best person on the other side that you've heard? Can you answer those two questions?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
of we're in London today and it's only thanks to agency because it's December right now in London that me and you aren't dead within two to three hours because it's the clothes that we wear human agency it's the heating here like the UK itself is a product of agency of human agency because without clothing which we kind of
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
That fear of being exiled from the tribe like Napoleon on his small little island. I think a big thing in that that I got from CBT to loop it back to what we said earlier is when you're doing disagreeability things is to write down the prediction beforehand that your amygdala has given you.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So for example... Oh, and then you get to stress test between what I thought was going to happen and what actually ends up happening. And then you begin to slowly but surely...
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
take away the weapons that that monkey mind has and it'll still fire but you go okay i mean it's interesting you're firing about me going and asking out this girl or chatting to her yeah but i remember the last time you talked about how if you're going to approach this girl she's going to throw a drink in your face and blah blah blah is going to happen but we actually i got a number and we went on a few dates so just comparing your brain's forecasting mechanism which will always be the amygdala firing the nightmare mode when it's always actually more likely a documentary it
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Yeah, and then you're just constantly... You have the benefit of the historian's hindsight where you begin to see, oh, it was all ABC, but in the time when you was living through it, it was so... You're living through the fog of war, but it's so easy to forget the fog of war afterwards.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
born into and assume has always been a thing, but no, it was the result of human agency, without heating, another thing that we just take completely for granted, the UK would not be possible. So he argues that this idea that we're going to... go to Mars and terraform it and shape it that it's actually a livable habitat. The UK is already that.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
The golden years seem to never happen in the present. It only seems to exist in hindsight. Yeah. One of the high agency techniques is what I call viewing the present with a historian's frame. So both at the personal level and then at the wider kind of societal level as well. So trying to, at the personal level, okay, going, I see these old photos of me on Facebook. I'm like, I used to wear that.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
I used to post this shit. I'm like cringing at myself. And then you go, hold on. You can hear that voice whispering. Me five years later is going to be cringing. What I'm doing right now.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And then, but trying to ask that question now and deal with it probably speeds up the cycle a little bit because each time there's that story of like the Zen master where he goes, yeah, one year ago, I thought I had, oh, sorry. After one year of studying Zen, I thought I had all the answers and then I realized I was wrong. Now I have the answers.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And then after two years, I realized I was wrong again, but now I have all the answers. After four years, I was wrong again, but now I have all the answers. And it ends up with him going to like all the way to his grave and saying the exact same thing again. Now I realize I have all the answers and just realizing it's constantly wrong.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
But even then, if you zoom out and you go, right, okay, that's at the personal level, but then at the societal level, the ability to view the present moment now with a historian's perspective is, trying to detach from the fog of war, there's a beautiful line in The Sovereign Individual where he talks about the Roman Empire falling.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
He said that, for example, it's an easy question right now, which is when did the Roman Empire fall? People can just give the specific date that it fell. When did the Roman society recognize that the Roman Empire fell? For the majority of people, it was not on that day. Some day, for some people, it was weeks after, it was months after.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
For some people, it was centuries after that they fully realized that the Roman Empire had fallen. And he makes this great line, which was, if CNN existed, as the Roman Empire was falling, they would not be on the news saying, hey guys, the empire has fallen. They'd be denying it.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
They would be, by the time the news catches up, basically, if you wait for the news, you will be wrong or you will be late.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Your favorite hotelier? This is fucking peak high agency, man. So this I got from the My First Million podcast and tells the story of of the Patels who left India to go to Uganda.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Nobody should feasibly live here, but it's just human agency.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
The Patels essentially start as these slaves or work people that are very low down in the society, and that Indian work ethic just work their way up to the top of Ugandan society and own huge businesses throughout Uganda. Idi Amin comes in and says, no, no, no, no, no. Africa is for Africans, not for the Patels.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So we are going to take everything off you and nationalize this and give it back to the Africans. So not only are we going to take everything from you, we're going to give you 30 days notice. My rent contract is at least like 90 days notice, right? So we're going to take everything from you and your families and we're going to kick you out.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So the Patels, some of them went back to India, but India at the time, I think, had a Bangladesh problem where they basically argued that the Patels had been gone for so long that you're almost no longer Indian now. So they almost have no home. A lot of them went to the UK, so you have a lot of Patels in the UK, and a significant amount, or a small amount, sorry, went to the US.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
All the way down. And that's why once you see it, you can't fundamentally unsee it because it's not the only thing that makes human beings unique, but we are the only species that is fundamentally capable of happening to life.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So they arrive, gone from high up in Ugandan society to immigrant in the US with nothing. And the Patels, what they do, they begin to start motels. And they realize that, well, A, the whole family is going to work on this. So we've got free labor. So we can kind of undercut people there. We're all vegetarians. So the food's going to be quite cheap to keep us going.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And we can just live in the motel. So that gives us a competitive edge there because we don't have any cost for rent. So like the cost of our business is so low and we could just start creating motel businesses. So start with a few motels, more and more Patels arrive and they're constantly helping out their brothers, their cousins, their uncles, their second cousin, et cetera.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
The Indian advantage. Oh yeah, like that. And just constantly, okay, well, if we can get 5X revenue, sorry, if we get a loan that's 5X revenue on this, we can buy more and we constantly just use a bit of debt, buy more motels. Nobody can compete with us because we have this. So the Patels kicked out of Uganda and Arrive in America, there's nothing. Keep compounding, compounding, compounding.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And it's an absurd stat now of something around 70 to 75% of motels in America are owned by a Patel. Just talk about peak agency, like life happening to them. And meanwhile, managed to complete the... 70 to 75% of motels in America.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
No, I think, honestly, you can, as a writer, sometimes go, I think this is a really important idea. I need it to get out in the world. It was more, it was psychosis that was like eating my brain. And I just wanted to explore the topic because basically the goal of the essay was the thing I would have liked to have read at 13 rather than had written at 30.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And just exploring that concept because, like I said, and I sound like a broken horse, but once you begin to understand that everything's essentially just an agency problem. Agency issue. Yeah, it's endless, endless possibilities from fixing climate to fixing cancer. It's just all agency.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So the way I always joke being outside the UK for two to three years and then coming back, I learned more in the two to three years outside of the UK about being British than the 25 years being inside it. And funny bit is when we did 4th of July this year and we're in Nashville. And I mean, funny story is Chris, like everyone's like taking photos of the fireworks.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
I'm looking, seeing all these people taking photos of fireworks, photos of fireworks, like soaking in the moment. And there's just Chris on Apple notes, like writing down a quote from Nietzsche or something like that. And I just said, spot the artist to everybody around us. Anyway, it was quite a strange feeling being in that environment where it's people going, USA, USA.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And I've kind of realized at that moment a few things. So one, I've never met an American that doesn't celebrate the 4th of July. I've never met a Brit that knows their national day. I'm called George. It's St. George's Day. And I realized, actually, I don't even know the day. And I realized no Brit even knows the day. I think it's April 23rd. And I then reflected more on the UK.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And the way I view the UK right now, it's like an icon that has an autoimmune condition. On paper, it's this incredible historical figure, but it's just kind of eating itself alive.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And I even think that people like myself and yourself, one thing that I noticed that maybe people who have a lot of optimism for the UK then complain about people moaning and don't realize that they're then starting this thing. I Everyone in the UK moans so much. So I kind of come at things like one of the early thinkers that's definitely affected how I think has been Rory Sutherland.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
I do think the UK has a bit of a marketing problem. I don't think you necessarily need crazy technology or things like that to fix this. So one of the absurd ideas that I have is essentially looking at St. George's Day and comparing it to the 4th of July and going, well, what's happening here? Why is nobody celebrating St. George's Day?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And why is everybody, regardless of their politics, celebrating 4th of July? Again, it comes back to clear thinking. I think 4th of July, what it has is a recent enemy, which was unfortunately us trying to conquer that beautiful land, which we never should have let go. And there's a clear story that unites everybody. George killed some dragon? I don't know. I don't know the story.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Nobody knows the story. And now it's just associated with racists and bigots. So my idea would be fix the UK's advertising, scrap St. George's Day and announce Dunkirk Day. First off, good meme, sounds good, good branding.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And essentially, I think it's a better story than 4th of July, because no matter where you stand in terms of your politics, in terms of creating an enemy, you could have every problem with the British Empire and the UK and Britain and the state of it. Dunkirk was an extraction, not an act of war. Yes. And against the apex, awful human being of Adolf Hitler. And it's still fresh in our minds.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
It's still recent enough to some extent. And you could argue if Dunkirk didn't happen, does Western civilization even exist now? Certainly the UK, we're probably having the exact same conversation, but sprechen Sie Deutsch, right?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And both of us aren't August Landmaster and we're just going along with it like low agency little bitches. So- First off, yeah, Dunkirk Day. And I'd argue, make it quite unique. So first off, we have to make it British. So from midnight to 12 p.m. on the day, everyone can moan. Everyone can complain. It's not too cringe like the American style.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Growing up in the UK, you naturally potentially have a default low agency setting. I remember when I first heard the idea, it was Eric Weinstein on Tim Ferriss' podcast, and I had to pull over the car and write this down. I was like, oh, okay, this kind of begins to explain so much of the world and so much of my personal world.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
You're allowed to moan about the mistakes the UK has made in its past, currently making, and is going to make.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Yes, have it until 12 p.m. You can criticize the country, drink tea, blah, blah, blah. Come 12 p.m., allowed very rarely as brits to remember just how fucking awesome historically this country has been so dunkirk being obviously a key a key pivotal moment there and just imagine this in the uk right you've got william shakespeare Alan Turing, John Lennon, the Gallagher brothers, right?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
You've got Pankhurst and the Suffragettes. Whichever way you want to go, we've got it all. The tourist demand that I think you could bring in for Dunkirk Day, even from Harry Potter. I mean, even Crick of What's It in Crick, who created DNA or discovered DNA. One of them was British and it was done in Cambridge University. I'm sorry, America. But you can't compete with that.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Like the history that this country has and the ability to turn that into a national day that maybe unites people at least for an afternoon and potentially brings in billions of tourist revenue by just a little bit of marketing, I think is completely untapped potential.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
You want to go to highagency.com and the whole essay that me and Chris spoke about today will be on there. You can read the whole thing and anything else, just George Mack on Twitter. My DMs are open. Dude, I love you. Thank you. Love you too, man. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And then, as I mentioned, once you begin to see it, you can't unsee it. You see it every single way. And I've got some examples on the boards that I'll come on to. But it's so important to me because once you realize, you know, your line of like skill issue, everything is just skill issue. Everything is basically an agency issue.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Like when you actually, one of the fundamental beliefs I think of around high agency is that all problems are solvable. And once you begin to take that on board, as long as it doesn't defy the laws of physics, like this isn't self-help, it's physics. All problems are solvable with enough knowledge.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So using the spectrum. I've got two examples that you're going to like. Here we go. So on the right-hand side of the high agency spectrum, we have SpaceX. So the recent chopsticks landing. So SpaceX starts with Elon selling PayPal and... Deciding, as you do, to just get into rocket science. And rather than go to university, he decides that that's a painfully slow download process to learn.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So just gets a load of rocket science books and starts happening to life. Creates SpaceX. And one professor, SpaceX was this early startup, not the juggernaut that it is today. The best rocket scientist professor, I believe, in America. He goes, I can't believe it. Like five of my top 10 students are working at this company called SpaceX. He goes, I need to meet the guy that runs that.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So Elon arranges the interview and this guy has a load of questions for Elon. What are you doing? And immediately he realizes the reason why Elon's taking this meeting is to find out who the other five were. Boom.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
And you kind of see this idea that two people with exact same fundamental realities, but a completely different, like low agency here, high agency here. So you see high agency in a meme there. Then, and this one was quite difficult to get printed in London without people asking questions, is high agency... high agency in a moment.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So anyway, it keeps obviously goes through all the ups and downs and you end up with a rocket reverse landing, catching with the chopsticks and reducing the legs that's needed, the amount of repairs that's needed as a result of massively accelerate the human's ability to happen to life.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
All problems are solvable, right? Yeah. I say that let's now contrast that with, do you recognize this on the left? It's a train in the UK? Yes. It's not just any train in the UK, Christopher. It's Northern Rail's trains. So for people outside the UK, these would be the trains that... You have Northern Rail in the Northeast, right? It's not just a Northwest thing? Cool.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So I would have got on this coming from the Northwest of the UK. And just to contrast SpaceX, obviously at the other end of the high agency spectrum and Northern Rail at the other end of the high agency spectrum. So what I wanted to, I did bring it just to read it out. So this is a recent inquiry into Northern Rail.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
So you have the mayor of Manchester sitting down with the head of the trade unions for Northern Rail or the people that work quite high up at Northern Rail. And throughout the last few years, anybody who's experienced Northern Rail, it's too expensive. There's trains getting cancelled constantly. There's delays, etc. So they're doing an inquiry into what's going on. It starts with the mayor.
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
I've heard you're still using fax machines to do these things. Can that possibly be true? It's very much true, Chair. How? How on earth is that the case in 2024? Well, that's a very reasonable question. It's our challenge to get rid of them. We have plans to get rid of them. You could do it tomorrow. We absolutely could. Are you going to do it tomorrow? We're not going to do it tomorrow. Why?
Modern Wisdom
#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny
Because the tools we use to get information and messages to our crew will iron faxes amazingly. We will get there in the end because we're forced to because fax technology in telecoms turns off. Our plan that we're putting forward, anyway, it cuts in. The mayor goes on to say, how have we poured millions of millions of privatized money into this? And we're still using fax machines in 2024.