Mental Models 103 - George Mack - #178

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, humans in Podcastland. Welcome back. My guest today is none other than longtime friend of the show and current Modern Wisdom all time download record holder, George Mack. We're talking about mental models, one of my favorite topics. Having the ability to make good decisions is one of the most important skills you can have in life. And hopefully today, we will provide you with some more tools to add into your mental model utility belt that will make your choices even more accurate. We are taking some brilliant learnings from people like Nassim Taleb, Naval Ravikant, Winston Churchill, and many more. Don't forget, if you are new here, or even if you're a long time listener who hasn't pressed the subscribe button yet, go and do it now. It will take less than three seconds and it will make me very happy indeed. Also, if you have any friends that you think would enjoy this show, I would appreciate nothing more than you sending it to them. That is the way that this show is growing. The plays and the listenership are absolutely flying through the ceiling and that is only due to assistance and support from people like you. So the more people that you can send it to, the more that you recommend it, the bigger it gets, which allows me to access even more fascinating humans to deliver directly into your ears. I keep getting messages about the Patreon as well. I am on with that me and Video Guy Dina setting that up as quickly as we can. So the Modern Wisdom Patreon will be here very soon. I will keep you updated. But for now, it's time to get better at making decisions with the wise and wonderful George Mack. Oh yeah, PS, while this music's playing, go and check if you've pressed the subscribe button. And if not, give it a hit for me. Tap, tap, tap it, tap, tapity, tap, tap, tap it away.
Long-awaited return to Modern Wisdom. How are you, brother?

**George Mack** (2:17)
I'm good, I'm good. How are you?

**Chris Williamson** (2:18)
Very, very well. The crowd has been anticipating this one for a long time. You feeling ready?

**George Mack** (2:27)
Yeah, as ready as you can be, I guess. Let's go.

**Chris Williamson** (2:30)
Yeah, for sure. So my first question, you are currently the title holder of Modern Wisdom's most ever played episode. So just looking at the best played, your first, then Dr. Eric Feigelding explaining about a global pandemic, two episodes with Morgan Housel, who used to write for The Motley Fool, Ben Greenfield, Brian McKenzie, then another episode with you, Derek Sivers, John Aserath and Aubrey Marcus. So that comes out the top 10 Why do you think our episodes, our first one specifically and then the second one, why do you think that resonated so hard?

**George Mack** (3:07)
Bot farms, mainly, bot farms everywhere. It was a two to three month operation involving about 10 to 20,000 pounds, VPNs, different IP addresses, because you need it all to come from individual phones as well, but it was well worth the effort.

**Chris Williamson** (3:25)
Yeah, because we also made our episode was the fourth best podcast of 2019 as voted by Podcast notes audience, so the bot farm also useful for that as well.

**George Mack** (3:39)
Yeah, yeah, they do. They do all sorts. So I'm trying to now diverse into politics as well. But we'll see how that goes.

**Chris Williamson** (3:48)
Okay, so let's say that someone hasn't listened to our first two episodes, which they should totally go back and check out. Let's say that they haven't. What is a mental model? Give us the Twitter bio description of mental models.

**George Mack** (4:03)
I always actually struggle with this one. I guess the way I view it is like metaphors, analogies, or just ways of taking principles from different disciplines and then almost trying to keep them in your own mental toolkit that you can apply. I just find it a fun way of trying to put together a world with trillions of different inputs.

**Chris Williamson** (4:28)
I get it, yeah. I think the analogy you used on the first episode was if you think of your brain as the operating system, mental models are the different apps that you can install to give you functionality and to improve your decision-making. And that's now, although it's copyrighted, George McGill 2019, I've been using that as like my one-liner too. So let's get started. What have you been thinking about recently, what you're dropping on us today?

**George Mack** (4:53)
Yeah, I'm just thinking, I've got a few things here. I was trying to think what we haven't been through as well, so try and keep things a bit fresh. Otherwise, it's just a repeat, right? A repeat after a replay. So, the one that I've been thinking about a lot, just in general, because it comes so difficult to me as a person, and maybe it was a certain generation I was brought up upon, of leverage and what that actually means, like the ability, the way I view leverage is similar to way, I think it's Peter Thiel who talks about technology, which is the ability to do more with less, and that for me of a generation who was brought up on YouTube videos talking about 16-hour work days and like, hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle, is a very hard concept to sort of wrap your head around. And when it started to begin to click for me, because I was always one of those people who want to talk about how hard they work, and you realize a lot of that's just signaling, it's just bollocks, it's not actually achieving a result, was the, it might still be up there, but there's something called Steve Jobs' Lost tapes. Have you seen it?