Modern Wisdom - #1037 - Life Hacks: A Christmas Special (2025)

Episode Date: December 25, 2025

I'm back on my old couch in Newcastle upon Tyne, with Jonny, a virtual Yusef & George to catch up on what they've learned this year, what their best hacks were, and their reflections on 2025. Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get a free bottle of D3K2, a Welcome Kit, Travel Packs, plus bonus gifts (US only) when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom New pricing since recording: Function is now just $365, plus get $25 off at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Merry Christmas, everybody. For the people who joined the podcast within the last five years, the last few million, three million subscribers. This is my living room in Newcastle. And this is Johnny. And this is George. And that's Youssef, and he's in Malaysia. And this is a Christmas episode. We've got one day to turn this around. So Merry Christmas. It's Christmas day. Enjoy the turkey and the pigs and blankets. And we are, going to do some lessons and life hacks and fails from the last 12 months. It's kind of a Christmas tradition, I suppose, and also another part of the tradition, is that you go first, Johnny. So give us a life hack. All right. My life hack, which might not be allowed, we'll see if it gets past the Chris rule, has already been a life hack. Okay. Is that all right? It's the best wants. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The reason it's a life hack is I was speaking to a few friends about this and neither of them had heard of it. And I was like, you know, I thought Chris has been really building attention here.

I know. Well, it's, it's the waking up app by Sam Harris. Okay. Why's that bad? He's been sponsored. It's not. Have you been paid off by Big Sam? Big meditations come to me.

I think, well, do you guys meditate? Yes. No, yes. I think it is the, well, so the hack specifically is download the app using, download the app and listen to the fundamentals like theory series and it's like five audios with sam explaining why you should meditate and i think that is the thing so i've meditated every day this year just first time it's ever happened and it was that audio series but that's not a meditation it's not just buy-in yeah so the app is also i think it makes it it's just like a daily

audio you can follow they're different every day okay it's like daily programming Cross your programming for meditation. But this was important because it got you to buy into doing... Yeah. So there's like an analogy he uses in it, which is... This isn't word for word, but it's something like everyone's in a dream about being a human being. And it's like the dream is you're in a prison cell. And everyone's trying to make the prison cell nicer by like buying things, moving around and changing where the windows are.

And that's life. And meditating allows you to just wake it from the dream. And it's a completely different way of... of viewing kind of that everybody's absorbed in their thoughts and their feelings and just being run by their mind and meditating is just waking up from the dream. But that series completely changed how I feel about meditating. But this, you're not saying this as someone who hadn't meditated a lot before. Yeah. You've done thousands of sessions of meditation previously. Yeah, but I think the difference is it's kind of like the switch where you go from, like going to the gym because

like you think you should to it just becomes like part of your personality part of what you do and that identity change for me was that series do you feel that yesuf yeah the identity shift is is big as well the uh the quote of watch your thoughts because they become your words what's your words because they become your actions what your actions becomes they become your habits become your beliefs, your perception, your identity. So like starting at that means that the downstream habits are much easier to stick to. I also love the rearranging the furniture in the prison cell analogy. So how long are you doing these sessions for? I'll do like, so the standard one is like 10 minutes long and I'll do, I'll do that as the minimum and then if it's

going well, I'll keep going. If it's like, you know, there's days, especially one's way, like, makes you have your eyes open. They're hard. They're particularly difficult. Yeah. It's just sort of, like, those are difficult to do. But if it's, I think the easiest way to make it a, an effortless habit is not trying to do 30 minutes or 40 minutes, just have a minimum and then let it roll. So how is getting out of the prison cell going?

I, good question. I have glimpses where I'm like, oh, this is just a dream of being in a prison cell. What does that mean? The difficult, well, what does it mean? it's the identifying with your thoughts versus it's the experience of a self I feel like this is for the first life act this is going I also don't feel like I'm qualified to talk about this that's what this show is called I referred to the referred to the app because I think Sam is qualified to talk about it but it's a

it changes your perspective and your relationship with yourself and with now with the present moment the happiness trap doesn't even need to be that metaphysical. It's just like usually we are motivated to do something to close a gap between desire and outcome. And we do that. And our brain goes and just releases a bit of like some neurochemical that makes us happy for a moment. And then that neurochemical depletes. And then we think that we have to go and achieve the thing in order to give us ourselves permission to release the little bit again into our brains. And it's just that cycle. Whereas if you realize that it's your brain that's releasing that stuff and you can just do it on tap, then you've short-circuited the whole

process and you're not having to chase something out there. Such a good point. There was a resurface clip of the first Huberman episode that I did from mid-2020 that I saw the other day and he's got this line in it where he says it's all internal. Everything in life is all internal. You finish a marathon in first place and you've been working your entire life to do it and you run across the finish line. and that sensation, no one else comes along and drips dopamine down the back of your brainstem. Like, this is just you generating all of this. Now, obviously, we're designed to respond to what happens in the real world. Like, that's the entire way that we're sort of adaptively evolved.

But it does suggest that, well, if you can get closer to the root of where all of this stuff's coming from, which is just internally, you can probably, at least make it easier to achieve what it is that you want without having to fight into a headwind all the time. Well, even the real worlds are farce because you have ten times the number of neurons going from your brain to your eye

than you do from your eye to your brain. So your eyes actually taking more information from your brain than the other way around. So your brain's constantly creating a prediction of reality. So the best example is, you know when you're kind of walking downstairs and this happens to me way too often.

where you think there's another stare and you're at the end and you kind of feel the stare and then your foot goes down and you for a second you feel it's there and then you go oh shit and then you fall but your brain kind of simulated the reality so your brain's constantly making these prediction models that don't actually exist and then when you have an error or you have a failure that's when it constantly corrects so like when you think something's lemonade but actually it's water yeah exactly does that happen a lot to you once a week but you know that

there's that moment at the moment of like something horrible's happening something horrible's happening yeah right I know it's fine it's just water it's just water all right that's good one waking up by Sam Harris it's a meta hack isn't it it's the thing that like change your relationship with now

and everything happens what was the call what's the intro course thing called again it's called the fundamentals so in waking up there's theory practice there's like lectures to listen to there's all the Alamot series but there's a There's an initial intro series called Fundamentals by Sam, where he's basically trying to convince you to meditate. And it's like five audios.

They're all about 10 minutes long. Awesome. Wow. It's like that time when you made me read the beginning, all of the beginning of the six-minute diary. Yes, yes. And you insisted, and I was like, okay, I'm reading it. But reading it is what got me to use it every day.

Of course. Reading that intro. Have you heard of Jana meditation? Here we go. Yes. Here we go. This is a fun one. of um because i think what happens to a lot of people is they go via the mindfulness route which

is what a lot of people get onboarded to but you realize oh that's just a way so there's lots of different ways it's like thinking about exercise and only looking at running exactly um which is basically what's kind of happened in that space but the jana meditation idea is when you essentially keep rather than focus on your breath you focus on something that brings you great joy and it goes the best description i've heard of it is it's like a panic attack but for joy and then you pulse and pulse and pulse you'd think of your child for example think about that, think about that, think about that

and it's a much sometimes a quicker way than trying to delete all thoughts. What's your thoughts on Jana, Seth? The two things that George is talking about there so at the Vipasna retreat that I did is 10 days of floodlight meditation where you're scanning with as open focus as possible and trying to dial up the fidelity

of your sensation so that you can start picking up like 10 microsensations per second. That's used in a retreat setting because I've heard it described as like rubbing bits of flint together. It's like it needs a lot of time and momentum to get going and then it builds the fire. Whereas Janna meditation is a lot more like hyper-focused. It's kind of like the laser beam versus the floodlight. I've not achieved Janna. I know George is just chilling in Janna right now, but yeah, it's super compelling. There's a, there's a movement. Can you remember the name of it, George? I think it's the guy who said it's a panic

attack for joy. He's like a tech founder who was really stressed and now runs Janna retreats in the States. Yeah, I know who it is, but I've forgotten the chap's name off the top of my head. There's a few. He's got a good description of it. And then Michael Burby as well has all of his retreats on YouTube. So you can follow along. All right, Seth, you're up. What have So I have a life hack, however, I think I need your guys help because I'm struggling to have some kind of categorization system in order to place the life hack in. Does that make sense? Go on. So if you have any suggestions on how I might categorize the aforementioned life hacks, that would be really helpful.

Do you feel like some of them are like physical and some are digital? Yeah, yeah. This is a joke. This is a joke. For the people who are in the last 95% of subscribers, this is a joke that has been done 30 or 40 times. Probably it's like a decade old. Yeah, yeah, it's getting there. Okay, first one, here we go.

This is like you mentioned, Chris, about the curve of the large proportionate. portion of people who are actually just tuned in now, and I'm just like, what? These guys are mental. So my hack is use Uber for flights. Use Uber for flights. Honestly, I cannot believe how easy it is. So in the five minutes between landing the plane, getting reception, and standing up and leaving, I booked my next flight to Vietnam on Uber, on mobile. It's like, it already has your details. and you just go, book, done, and it gives you Uber credits like 10% for every flight booked.

So the benefit of this hack is that you're not having to go through, like, random airlines and SkyScanner or Google flights, or any of that stuff. It just gives you the best price with the easiest booking experience. And they don't charge a markup. I don't know what the business model is for that part of Uber, unless it's just, like, lost leader, but brilliant. So I'm never going back to booking flights any other way. I'm just doing it now.

I'm doing it now on my phone. Uber travel. I mean, Uber, when you actually look at it, the number of different things that Uber can do is pretty insane. You can get them to collect parcels for you. You can get them to drop off different stuff. I didn't know that they did flights. What's the difference between this in SkyScan?

Because I'm a big SkyScanter stand. As far as I understand, SkyScanner, you still have to get redirected to the airline and then you have to fill in all your details like four times and your passport number and all this stuff. So like currently I'm in Malaysia but I've gone via like Singapore and they're going Brisbane, Sydney, Vietnam, Bali, like through lots of little airports and stuff and these shitty little airlines that have websites that barely work and you're just like trying multiple times to book it. Like I spent 40 minutes trying I booked something on like Batik Airlines, couldn't get it working. Uber, 37 quid, like, took

five minutes. Wow. Price freeze. Oh, yeah. So they freeze the price and they let you change the dates flexibly as well for like an extra three pounds or something. The cost of freezing is just 18 pounds. Stay safe from price increases while you plan your trip. Oh, they also have the This is really, really, really fucking good. Top tier I've hacked. They also have a thing where if you book a flight now and the price drops in between now and the flight happening, you get the difference. Wow. Big hack.

This is, this is, you've really come out of the gate swinging here. Jesus Christ. Well, this is proof. Well, yeah, unfortunately, Sam Harris isn't involved in this one. Uh, okay, um, I'm going to go off the back of this one, um, just because it, it makes the most sense, flighty. Have you had a flighty? No.

Oh, my days. Okay, so I learned this. Do you flyty premium, Chris? Of course. You're fucking flighty premium. Talking to a flighty veteran here. Uh, so flighty is a flight tracking app. And what it does is it automatically links in with your calendar, your email inbox.

When you book a flight and the confirmation comes through, it automatically loads everything in. And it tells you gate changes, delays, where your luggage is going to, what terminal you leave from, what time you're boarding. It can give you a history of the last time that the flight, all of the last 30 days of the flight, how much it's been delayed, for what reason? If there's any adjustments that get made, it'll tell you immediately as well. While you're in the air, it'll track your journey and then bring you back into land. it tracks all of your previous stuff. It is, it's outside. So you never need to, once you start using flighty,

you will never check another airport board again because it's all there and it gets updated before the board because the board usually takes a little bit of time, but this just comes through from whatever the central hub that's giving all this information out is. And it's just, it's seamless. The number of times that I have not missed flights, especially when you've got connections and it's outstanding.

So flighty, I think premiums maybe 30 bucks a year, 10 bucks. Super cheap. You can also add friends so you can see when your friends are flying, where they're flying, if they're delayed as well. So you can track all of your friends' flights also. And it automatically links in, and then it gives you reports at the end of the year, how long you've spent being delayed and stuff.

There's some like cool additional things. But largely, never check another airport board for what gate. Am I leaving from? where's my luggage gone to what time do I need to get there it's got a little island a tracking island and it also pops upon your home screen

so it's fantastically designed everybody that started using it I just can't believe it so you get the gate information before anyone else does basically that's the big thing is gate information plus live island that sort of tracks everything

but you just never have to think again and it's all automatically linked in with your emails has it changed how early you get to the airport Not particularly Even for international now I'm typically getting to an airport

About an hour before I leave That has been a high risk strategy But in America you've got TSA And clear and things that can fast track you through security What's the spread of airport arrival times in this room I usually arrive about an hour before I'm going to depart So usually about half an hour before boarding What are you?

Mine's like 90 minutes Okay yeah for me it depends where I am if I'm in the US a lot earlier if I'm in the UK a lot later I feel like if you were at the castle airport you could arrive 15 minutes before go straight through if it's Heathrow you need to go out a bit more time yeah I always love because everyone's got like one yolo maid who just turns up like 15 minutes before and chances it yeah unfortunately America has much more flux between the side of the queues. The UK is usually pretty consistent unless you're at Heathrow, whereas in Austin,

sometimes the entire terminal has just been filled with people, hundreds of yards of people, and then other times there's no one. So I don't know whether that's because the airport needs a bit of work. George, what have you got for us? I don't think we've spoken about airlines enough. my one i'll go in with um something different which is chess clocks oh god oh god no no i yeah i know where he's going to go with so it's one of the ideas i got from uh the writer tim urban who obviously did the amazing ted talk on procrastination and then ironically spent like six years procrastinating on his book, and he said the biggest lesson from it was when it comes to deep work, which I've got another point, I'll come on to in a second, but particularly when it comes

to deep work, if you can get four hours done in a day, I think you're in the top 1%, but a lot of people think, oh, I work eight hours a day, I work 10 hours a day. And he found that when it came to writing the book, he would go to write it. And then little bits of work would come up. There'd be a Slack message here. There'd be an internet scroll here. So the chess clock methodology is you essentially set it up where you have 16 hours in the day. Okay. And your goal is to get four hours on one side of the chess clock.

And whenever you're doing anything that isn't the thing, you have to hit it over. So if you go to go to the bathroom, hit it over, go for a walk, hit it over. Somebody comes in, hit it over. so there's always an immediate price to bullshit or to distraction and you realize oh wow first off when you do four hours like properly four hours that is a lot of time and then a lot of the time you'll be there at 12 p.m. going wow like there's just all this kind of free time for the rest of the day if you don't have a chess clock like the other simple approach is to just literally set an alarm for four hours and then at any time you stop you have to pause it so there's just always it hacks the kind of brains circuitry that there's always some form of punishment for distraction, whereas previously there isn't. And the amount of times you can convince yourself you're doing something that isn't the actual thing is significant. I can see that working for like an external problem. Like someone comes in, someone rings you, email, whatever. But I think the main barrier

to deep work is like an internal. So you're doing something. And then you'll think, oh, I just need to do this and then you open a different window. Pause the clock. But it's the problem for most people I don't think is like I'm aware I'm distracted I'm distracted, but I'll just be distracted. I don't think people are aware that they're being distracted. Do you not? I think, well, this is the thing about the clock is that it's kind of they're ticking

and you have to be a little bit more honest. And even then I'll be aware of, is this a clock worthy pause or is this, is this actually a justifiable use of time? So just having that there and that punishment there is pretty, What are your most common debates about whether it is or is not a clock-worthy pause? Filling up a glass of water can be on there. Just like all girlfriends come in. You know what I mean?

It's like little things like that, but I'll tend to pause the clock, yeah. So if you're like, if you're writing and you're like, oh, I need to like go somewhere to get this reference for this thing. Yep. That would be fine. But then if I, let's say, for example, I need to go to a tweet to find the specific thing. that's fine. But if I then go on the newsfeed and start scrolling, clock has to change. So that's where it works. This is why the clock works really effectively, whereas other techniques, it wouldn't work. Because, because...

This is great, George. The other thing that it separates out is if people think, oh, it's a speed thing or it's an efficiency thing, I need to be able to work faster or write faster or whatever, versus it's just a not spending enough time on task thing. Yeah, that's a big point, that you don't need to probably be more efficient or more effective or better or whatever. You just haven't realized how little time you're spending doing the thing you're supposed to be doing.

Yeah. This isn't a half, but it's related to this. I have an app on my laptop that is like a blocker that every time I go to like open email, it goes cold turkey it's not cold turkey it's similar to that but it especially if there's someone else in the room and they hear how often it goes me and then you tell them why it's going uh-uh you just seem like a baby it's like anytime i try to open email i message what's up and you just just make it feel so stupid okay all right johnny are we on lessons yeah whatever i want whatever i want take whatever you all right well i'll give

I'll do a hack that's similar to what we've just been speaking about, which is brick for iPhone. You guys seen that? It's a nearfield communication thing that you've got to tap to unlock your phone. Tried it? I never knew what NFC stands for, Chris. That's a lovely little bonus. I didn't expect you to describe it like that. It's very, very accurate.

Yeah, it's very detailed. You've got to tap a thing to get your phone to work. Yeah. So you set like a schedule on your phone. Like we've all tried all these like app blocking things that you can just ultimately delete the app. You have to like go to where the thing is in the house. Press unbrick and then tap the NFC device. It's just been the most effective thing.

So as you could, I've had a year of like, block it, trying to block myself from having to press the chest cloth. And it's been the most effective thing because having to like, stand up, go into another room, press unbrick, go, and then look at Instagram, just not going to happen. Because I'm still using Opel from two years ago when you suggested it. I just, it's just not quite as like, because you can get around that, right? Yeah. There's nothing more, I think, humiliating than getting around Opel.

I've seen people do that. In front of others. Yeah. Let me just show you this thing on YouTube. Oh, wait, no. Hang on. Can you wait for 27 seconds? please.

Pause session. Did you ever get the box, Johnny? No. I think it was a Jordan original, wasn't it? That's putting your phone in a box. George and Kimberly have got a timed box. Yeah. That you locked both your phones in for a weekend.

Yeah, we did it on a Saturday, put the phones away in the box for the entire day. It was fun. You get incredibly bored. And I just replaced it with a moleskin notepad. right he walks around he walks around with a fucking note pad not to like he thinks he's he thinks he's ernest heman way but that is one of the best hacks i didn't even have this one written down which is on the phone topic um getting a moleskin pocket notepad so it can go in your pocket because what's interesting is this thing here this thing right here this device it's always whispering to you

even now it's saying scroll go on this go on that let's yeah go on the the email and make the sound, right? But not, not George, not if it's bricked. Not if it's bricked. But even then it whispers,

you can't access it, but it's still whispering, it's still telling you to do it. It's whispered. Because you have the association, you have the Pavlovian conditioning with this device. What's interesting,

as soon as you have the Moleskin notepad that you walk around with is that you then that then begins to whisper to you. So when you take it out and you go for a walk, it's whispering, oh, check page three,

that thing that you wrote down the other day. So having a moleskin notebook is, can you just sit with your thoughts? You could do, but I'm going for a walk and then I can capture my thoughts so I can sit with my thoughts and then I can capture the best ones. Can you think about a potential, just top of your head,

potential problem with going from digital to analogue? You could have written this down in your phone. Obviously, lots of issues, phones very distracting, all the rest of it. Can you think of perhaps an issue of having a single hard copy of your most important thought? I suppose losing it. Well, yeah, I mean,

Because it's interesting you said that, that's a very, that's a very sort of fortuitous prediction. Because we went to Dean's Italian. And as you were extolling the virtues of your moleskin notepad, you left it at Dean's Italian and they'd binned it. So he lost all of his biggest thoughts. Hold on. So how does that feel? I saw Chris's counter move coming about two minutes. I purposely held off.

explain why. That wasn't a mole skin notebook. That was like a real shit notepad, so I think the way it was just binned it because it was nothing. That's why I upgraded now to a mole's skin notepad. Because if you see a mulskin notepad. Why do you keep saying moleskin not? Because of this reason. Is it made

of mole skin? Actually, don't know. It's a brand, isn't it? Yeah, I don't know. It's a brand. Right. So your argument... I'm really hoping that George is bringing out like a, this is why I have a carbon copy system. This is James Smith taking down the creeteen industry, isn't it? Yeah. So you're hoping that waiters understand the value of a Moleskine notebook versus just...

I'm afraid to tell you, I don't think that... We'll see. I don't think they need it either. Okay. But the point... I think the point of these sorts of things is... I remember, like, you bought a light phone, didn't you? Years ago. There was, like, that movement of buy, like, a Nokia 3210 and live your life off that.

But then you need Google Maps, and you need Uber, and you need to send someone a message, or you need to ring someone. Having those features is useful. If your phone's in a box, you can't... use your notepad to book an Uber. But if you just remove the things that whisper to you and to get them active again, you have to get up and go into the other room. It's friction. It's just increasing friction. It's like having foods in the house to prevent you from. I do, I do remember I had a lockbox thing, timed lockbox, not too dissimilar to yours,

but it had a plastic see-through cover and there was little holes cut out of it. So you could actually use the phone. You could swipe through different things on the phone. and kind of use it. Right. But yeah, didn't you tell me that if you lock your phone in the box, you have to ring customer service.

If you can't get it out, you basically... Smash it with a hammer or ring customer service. Because you can accidentally put it on for 30 days rather than 30 hours. I'm sure somebody's done. Yeah, Mike smashed his with a hammer. Really?

So, yeah, it's just in his room with... It's not like a family and they all put their phones in the box and the kid ends up like smashing the box. I haven't seen. Like coded bias or something. All right. So brick.

Brick. All right. An NFC device. It's Opal with a physical thing in it. All right. In other news, you've probably heard me talk about element before, and that's because I am frankly dependent on it. And it's how I've started my day every single morning.

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background to me I really underestimated the potency of the attribution error and cognitive dissonance so what I mean by that is keep me right on this Chris because I feel like this is your absolute wheelhouse that we over attribute other people's behavior

to their character but we under attribute it to situational factors but then for ourselves we over attribute situational factors and we under attribute that character because it's too painful for us to just be like oh just because I'm just a shit person rather than like oh it was because the bus was late and because whatever but easy to be like oh they were just dick and it can't have been that they were sleep deprived or looking after their toddler or whatever else the classic the classic one is

I cut that guy off because I'm late for work he cut me off because he's a bad driver yeah great example so the the broader lesson that I'm seeing here is that people are a lot more emotionally driven than I think I'd really given it credit for. Like outside of our extremely autistic bubble, there is, there's so much more cognitive dissonance that drives people's behavior and thoughts and actions. And so, you know, this thing of people buy with emotion and they justify with logic. It's not just buying behavior, it's everything. And the moment you start spotting this, you see it everywhere. So everyone listening must have had an experience where you're speaking to someone who has a particular

stance or gripe or position or something. Could be on politics, could be on a relationship issue, whatever. And the more you start to kind of get into it, you realize that they're just rotating their complaint. Or like they're moving goalposts, but still being, pissed off about something until you're like ah actually like the pissed off comes first and then the justification comes later um so it's that people don't actually want to get to this kind of rational objective truth um they just want to feel safe and they just want to hug and just want to be heard um and so i don't know who said this but it's a quote of we only see what we want to see we only hear what we want to hear

and our belief system is like a mirror that only shows us what we believe so the lens or the glasses that we see the world through tell us more about the color of the lens than they do about the world out there I certainly this year

since trying to do more emotions work have sort of come to the realiser or the belief that most of the thoughts that we have are bottom up not top down you feel a thing and then you come up with a story that explains why you feel the thing

as opposed to you're accurately determining that story from your brain downward? It's very convincing as well because it's what the brain does. Like it's a sense-making machine, isn't it? So the body goes, oh, I'm anxious, all my parts going, whatever. And then the brain has to quickly be like, oh, well, that's because this. And it just like pulls together random things and thoughts to create this, like, to weave this narrative. And then it holds onto that and it becomes, it identifies with it. It's such a, like, such a weird process, but it just is happening.

in the background all the time. How have you changed the way that you operate or have you applied this in any way? Is it just an insight that's interesting philosophically? Just realizing that there's no point trying to argue with what someone's saying or trying to like convince someone on the head level and instead just like just give them a hug and look or like metaphorically and speak to the heart and realize that it's the that that's the stuff to address first before you get into any of the, um, what someone, so rather, rather than listening to what someone is saying, listen to what they're feeling. There's also this, uh, like side argument that people can go down when they touch that, which is that, uh, people are irrational, they, uh, they're not

logical, they're driven by emotions. And there's this great, uh, account, Chris Larkin, and he has this great line, which is, um, emotions, illogical, you're just bad at logic. And when you actually actually get deeper to a layer. Well, why is that anger there or why is that anxiety there? We almost, we start with logic and then people kind of deny the emotional level. But then even beneath that, there's this kind of logic for all of those emotions that exist that we, we don't even get down to the basement and then don't even get to the point where you realize there's a basement in the basement. All right. My next one. Yeah. My next one. Seth, that's good. Owala bottles

seen one of these No seen one of these before you've seen one of these around the house of this so everybody needs some form of water receptacle and I've cycled through quite a bit I've cycled through Yeti

I've used steel protein shakers which are good for the protein thing the reason that I like these Oala bottles this is that's Mark Zuckerberg's Ranch's logo for you there The reason that I like these ones, they're insulated. They have got this size in particular, it's got a good capacity. It's nearly 700 mil.

This spout thing here allows you to sip it like a straw, but also drink from it. This can hook through something and hold on, and it'll keep stuff cold for a few hours. It doesn't look to. It comes in every different color that you can imagine. You can customize the whole thing. thing. And if you want to get something printed on for yourself off of somebody else that's a logo or a word or something etched in it, you can. And it's 20 bucks for one of these. They're really cheap. They're fantastic. And I adore mine and I use it all the time. And I think everyone,

yeah, pretty much everybody from the team's got one. And it's very satisfying. It's very satisfying. It looks nice. Is it metal? Yeah. Yeah, it feels nice. Johnny, if you watch the office You know the Christmas special Where David Brent's like a salesman And he's going around on the road And he's like doing the water off And he's giving him the whole pitch

It was literally like that And I was just expecting you to go at the end So who does your tampons Well, nice You know who does your hydration Let me go I thought you were I thought everything was Yeti

You moved away from that Why are they better than Yeti The sip spout The magic straw or whatever they call it, is really satisfying. It doesn't make me feel a bit like a baby, which, I'll take you know. Yeah, it's okay. Yeti's good. They probably have better insulation. It'll keep stuff colder for longer, maybe. But the sizes of Yeti are a little bit more cumbersome. You can either go from one that's definitely not big enough to one that's almost certainly too big. And the

smallest oala size, which is this one, is really good and fits in the side of most, backpacks and... Is that a litre? No, I think it's seven, just over 700. Which is for a single seven, if you get over a litre, even over close to what a liter, you probably don't want to drink the same thing for that long. Maybe you want to cycle it out. It gets heavy, but 500 mills know anywhere enough.

So it's the optimal size. This is currently, come back next year when I disagree with myself. When I have a different phone blocking method and you have a different out of the bottle. Well, I'll still be recommending waking me. Oh, yeah, okay. Well, anyway. This was Johnny's Razor that we left last years with, which was come back to me in six months

after you've been using this hack. It's a 90-day. And then I'll leave you. Yeah, well, I guess people won't even know about that. We did 20, 30 episodes of life hacks back in the day, which is still a non-insificant amount of this entire podcast inventory. And one of the most important ones was that after a while, we realized someone would come in all full of beans because this brand new life hack that they

were in love with. I must tell you about a way to get YouTube premium for free by getting it through the Argentinian VPN service. And then you have to wait 90 days to find out that you get charged back for fraud online or whatever it might be. I'd never forget, Eric Jorgensen taught us about that one where if you try and cancel your Zoom subscription, they immediately offer you with 30% discount. stuff like that. But there's some second order consequence. Oh yeah, but it's downgraded you. You get ads on your own Zoom calls now or something. But yeah, anyway, 90 days. If a friend comes to you, this is a meta life hack. A friend comes to you and says, me, you've got to try this new,

this phone blocking method. And you say, okay, how long have you been doing it? You're two weeks? You go, okay, come back to me in another two months and we'll see if you're still using it or if it's broken your life. I've had people complain about the life hacks episodes because they watched them in order and they would get like four or five episodes in and the thing that they'd been doing. You've contradicted yourself. We were like, no, no, never ever do that. Do this instead and that's just the cycle. Well, the issue is that the pace at which we drip fed life hacks episodes when we started was appropriate. It was every couple of months, every three months or so for four years. If you just watch them like binge finishing Game of Thrones,

You do speed run through our development, which is probably quite a dangerous. You just don't listen in reverse chronological order because you'll mess yourself up. Oh, God. Maybe that's the right way to do it, though. It's start at the end. It'll be the stuff in the first episode is probably the things we're all still doing. It is.

Sleep with your phone outside your bedroom. All right, George. Mine's more of a lesson or a two-part lesson. So one of the lessons this year was, so when I originally wrote the essay on a high agency, One of the bits of feedback that I got and other people gave me as well is that the concept's not necessarily new, but it gives you a bit of language to refer to a think. And I've had that for a while with that term. And I was like, I mean, when one level above that, I was like, hold on, I don't have a bit of language to refer to when I need a bit of language to refer to something. So I told a friend Henrik that, and he gave me from Scott Alexander this, he calls it an idea handle, which is when you create a term.

or a name for a thing, and then you can kind of pick it up in the world. And a big thing for me this year has been around language, which even where Yusuf is right now, which is beautiful, side tangent here, in Malaysia, they don't use plural. So rather than say tables, they say table, table. So you just realize when you study language, so much comes back to you. But one bit of language I've been kind of playing around with is we've spoken about this before around forgetting things and how much we forget. And I found this story about a seven-year-old boy called Henry. And one day he's out and about playing in his drive in Connecticut. And a cyclist doesn't see him and clatters into him, knocks him unconscious. And he wakes up and the next few days

he starts having a few seizures. And by the age of 25, he's having 25 seizures per day. And this is in the 50s. So he's trying everything to get rid of this condition. So he goes and signs up for experimental brain lobotomy surgery. And he wakes up from the operation and he has some good news, some bad news and some awful news. So the good news is that the brain surgery has basically cured his condition entirely. So he has no more epileptic fits. The bad news is that he won't remember the good news because the awful news is it's destroyed his ability to form new memories. So he lives from the age of about 25 to 85, not forming any new memories. So every day his psychiatrist would meet him and get to know Henry well over the years, and each day he would meet his

psychiatrist for the first time. But there was a specific bit of detail about Henry, which I call Henry's mirror, which is every morning he would wake up, he would look at himself in the mirror, and he'd be shocked and perplexed at how old he was, because in his head he was always 25. And I kind of call this idea Henry's mirror, which is the problem with amnesia is not only do you forget, it's that you have amnesia of your amnesia. And it's this idea that all of us right now have some bit of Henry's mirror in us. You don't even realize it, because by definition, you've forgotten it. So the classic example I use is, okay, Johnny, can you think of a clear sentence of thought from yesterday? Bear in mind you had 10 to 70,000 on average. Can you think of one?

No. But when you're in these overthinking spirals, it feels, it feels, it feels so real, feel so tangible, and then it just fades away, and all you have is a face that's getting older in the mirror each day. It's very apocalyptic. Before we continue, I've been drinking AG1 every day for years now, because it's the simplest way that I've found to cover my bases and not overthink nutrition, and that is why I've partnered with them. One scoop gives you 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and antibiotics.

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Has this changed the way that you show up, if at all? I think the big thing I've tried to change more. First off, when it comes to overthinking, trying to realize that as a thought loop's happening, trying to stare in that mirror for a second, and go, hold on, how many times does this happen? Because this could be the 60,000 of the time this thought has happened, but I can't remember anything from yesterday is one thing.

The second thing is just very basic level, just trying to document more. take more photos, take more videos, journal more, and without realizing it's such an asset that's going to compound further and further in the future. Even like today, to be honest, if you, it's fun that we get this for like 20 years from now. We can go, oh, what we was doing that day.

But otherwise, like, the average person, the memory just goes. And then your life just goes. Yeah. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. If you use day one for journaling. Do you guys use day one?

No, you're such a day one. I do use day one, and I've used it more this year than any other year. It just gives you, every time you go to make a journal entry, it's like, on this day, a year ago, two years ago, eight years ago. How many entries have you got on day one now? I've been using it for like, I think 15 years. Wow. But how frequently are you doing it? I try and do it every day.

Really? Yeah, just like contents of mind and a picture every day. What's been the story? So you've got thousands of entries. Yeah. Holy for the thing, the main takeaway from all of it is like, it's just the same stuff. It's just the same. The same worries, the same things you're excited about, the same feelings.

Well, I think 10 years ago, you're like, what's the point? Well, we assume that the Henry's mirror thing is true in as much as all of the problems that we're dealing with now feel fresh to us. But when you look across the expanse of time, in the same ways you've got the same feat that you did 10 years ago, your psychological construction is made up of the same biases and fundamental fears. which I think, Youssef, to your sort of emotions point, is why that's such a powerful way to communicate with people. And also the, it's why I've been trying to dig deeper, sort of even deeper than just talk therapy gets you to by unpacking, okay, and where are these patterns coming from? And what are the emotions I'm unprepared to feel? Because I think that is really the only way to get to the bottom of the etcher sketch and to fully, fully shake it loose.

Well, you're right that you're the same, you're obviously the same person that you were 15, 20 years ago, but last year we talked about this where you think that your journal, especially in Johnny's case, we've got 15 years of day one journals, is going to be useless in like the very early stages. You're like, what does my 19-year-old idiot self know about how I should be conducting my life now? And then you look back on it, and it's just exactly the same stuff that you're like, oh, God. And it's like, life is a spiral curriculum, and it'll keep spanking you with the same lessons until you finally absorb it, change what you're doing, and then the world around you will stop, like, hitting you with that same lesson.

What's that, is it young until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate? And we see that often with other people more clearly. you know, when you see someone who's always running into the same, like, style of problem and you're like, oh, yeah, it's because they're creating it. So one hack for this, it was actually one of mine for today, but whilst it's on the topic, is kind of what I call like this time technique. So let's say, for example, you're going through insert difficult moment. So let's say, I don't know, you're going through a breakup or you have in your case, Johnny, maybe a difficult issue of a member of staff or I'm trying to say about my members of stuff

No, you know what I mean like running a business you're going to have those don't say me you're going to have those issues so what I kind of recommend or I've been doing this one about three or four years

which is I'll think of okay so let's say it's a work conflict right I will then go okay can I think of two or three times that are the most similar throughout my entire career

like this so I kind of write down those events and write down the date and then I ask okay, if I could go back in time now with all the knowledge that I have now, and if I could turn this event into one of the best things that ever happened to me, what would be the three actions that I would take? Like, okay. And then next to the date, I write, okay, well, what would be the worst three things that I could do with all the knowledge that I have now? Because you have

this detachment from the event, and you have like an extra 20 IQ points. And then once you've done that, just scribble out the date and replace it with today's date and pretend it. it's you from the future that's come back. And that's such an effective way, because even though we do forget so much of the past, the real stuff that you do remember are the most emotional events. And even now, you can look back at things five to ten years ago and have such detachment.

Well, the patterns are the same, which means that the solutions will probably still work. If you can think of what you would have done previously in a situation that's analogous and now you in the present are facing something similar. Yeah, it is I love you, Georgian Because that's what emotions are supposed to do, aren't they?

It's supposed to be a navigation tool as feedback for, oh, you took a wrong step there, like, here's how to change in future, but we often don't and then keep experiencing the emotion. Yeah, the universe just continues to shout louder until you hear the lesson. The goal is to get, before it's screaming in your face, the goal is to try and jump that a little bit sooner.

All right, Johnny, what you got? Johnet. Johnet. I have a lesson which ties in beautifully with this. Wonderful. Because one of the problems with having 15 years of journals is I can see this like journey of me chasing all these little things. So like I wanted to venture 100 kilos and then I wanted abs.

And then I wanted a 2-1 degree and I wanted a job. And then I wanted propane to do well. And I wanted certain revenue levels. And it's always just this next thing. You can see it happening through the journal entries. And you realize it changes nothing. Like in those same entries, there's still worries problems, the same worries, the same problems.

And you watch you through time achieve these things. And you're still worried about the same stuff. And that creates this feeling of like, what is the point of doing anything? But the thing that you realize woven into all of it is the thing that's changing the whole time. is the like the traits that are that you and how your character is changing because chasing those things that are difficult require like delayed gratification they require like dealing with difficult emotions they require like

all of the skills that you have to build and all of the traits you have to build to build a business to a certain level or to diet for the leanest you ever be whatever it might be you you change so So it's this idea that like the goals, I don't think they really compound, they kind of do, but like the dopamine you get from that doesn't compound, but the traits that you get from chasing the hard things is the compounding. And that immediate, that realization immediately flipped back to like, it's absolutely worth like listing out loads of really big difficult goals and chasing them.

Because the, I don't think there's any faster way to change who you are, to improve you all. And it's something that like being a, my daughter is an hour of an age where like she's, She's gone from being a baby to being like a little person. And I'm like, oh, God, like, there's a proper, like, responsibility here to be the example. And I think the best way to become the example is chase the difficult things that require the traits to come as part of the journey. I love the, um, what your takeaway from that, Johnny, because some people would be really nihilistic about that. They'd be like, oh, well, there's no point chasing anything. That's the first feeling.

feeling is like oh that's the point yeah whereas you're like actually this is a way to play the game without having to be fully sucked into the game well you still need to be conned by the game into believing that the game is what you want to play like this wouldn't work you would not be able to get yourself to do the hard thing if you didn't think that the other side of the goal of the hard thing was completion satisfaction self-actualization rest but I think people think, oh, when I get a million turnover, I'll be happy. That's not true. But when you get a million turnover, the person that you've become. Yeah. And so you just change the thing. The goal is kind of like the side quest to the thing. But that's the goal is the thin end of the wedge. The goal is

what gets you through the door. Yeah. Because you're not thinking, I can't wait to feel dissatisfied in this goal, but happy about the person I've become. Yeah, like you achieve the goal. You get the little, like it's the James Smith thing like Orwin's feel. It feels exactly the same. Yep. Then you're dissatisfied. But you've changed. The thing is you can't, you don't know that at the time. And the only way you can know that is those, is like being able to see what you two years ago, how you two years ago dealt with a challenge. I think this is why progress feels so good and losing ground feels so bad. This is great for you, somebody who's been on a relatively linear journey of getting better, more mindful, more peaceful, more successful, more capable, more resilient, whatever.

But if the thing happens in the opposite direction, whether you've achieved your goals or not, even maybe worse if you've achieved your goals, you say, I got the thing I thought I wanted. It turns out that just as you, I was a bit disappointed with how much that didn't satisfy me, oh, fuck, and I'm now a worse person in some sort of a way. you're a boxer who gets the Olympic gold medal gets fucking head injury and now has to deal with that also I'm unhappy about the fact that the gold medal

didn't make me as happy as I thought it would and I'm now worse off Well and Henry's mirror like you've wasted time in the process Is that just like you're now 85 just because of the brain injury in that example Yeah the point being that the saving grace you have around goals being more unsatisfying than people think they're going to be, is that you have transformed yourself into something which is more evergreen than the goal

and the brief drip of dopamine, which is all internal anyway, than that is. You've got something more than that, and hooray. But imagine if you didn't get the progress. So I'd argue that aside from becoming like severely injured or disabled or something in the process, dealing with the hard things is where the trait changes happen. So you can go through the thing that feels like I'm going backwards. And at the time, yes, you're like objectively going backwards by the measure, by the revenue level, the body fat, whatever, the strength level, but the traits are still improving. Because I think anything extremely difficult. What about if you run out of motivation? What about if you dumped all of your enthusiasm into something that it turned out wasn't,

wasn't right that's assuming that that's the end point that might just be halfway your your your position here is that given a long enough time horizon you're going to track and trend up into the right yeah like if you look at look at your journey to here as an example like you sat on this sofa how many five years ago six eight eight years ago eight years ago like if you watch the recordings back i do you seem completely different very and everybody would be like oh Chris is, you know, what a fantastic existence Chris must have, like being this famous podcaster. But that's really the side quest to the development as a result of it. It's a good part. I mean, what was the first one that we filmed? Love Island.

Love Island. What's it really like to live on Love Island? Episode 17? 14. Episode 14. So, yeah, we were sat on a different couch, but the same living room in May, April. on May of 2018? Different couch. Definitely a different couch. Yeah, I remember getting this. Leather couch. Yeah.

And yeah, you're right. You're right. That it's, I want to be in a different country. I want to not have to stay awake till three in the morning running nightclubs. I want people that I respect to know me and respect my work. I want. And then you go, okay, at each of those junctures they were satisfying, but the satisfaction was short-lived.

What was longer lived while the person that you became? So do you think if you'd picked, so the goal you had was, I know, it wasn't like explicitly the goal at the time, but the goal was like, I'm going to build a top 10 podcasts in the world. No, it was not that. No, yeah, just to give a big asterisk there. We, we was on a beach during COVID, and it's sort of been two and a half years into the podcast. Yeah, not an insignificant amount of time. Yeah, and Chris just said, if, I was talking about goals and where he wants to take things, he goes, kind of pauses for a second. He goes, I think, I think 100,000 subscribers.

As soon as I get that, I'll just chill out of it. I'll be happy then. I remember, hey, this whole production staffs, enjoy it. You've got 100,000 now. I remember when I was in the first year of university, and I remember buying a tub of protein and looking at it and thinking, after this one, I think I'll be done. I was 18 and weighed about 76 kilos.

But it was that. No, sorry, 69, I was 69 kilos. Fucking hell. I remember when I hit 70 kilos when I was 20 years old and I was like, I am fucking huge. I think if you picked an easier goal, your development would have been totally different. But this is a big, this is a big homozyism where he says, um, the person that you become along the way, like, how can you say that you're a man who can do hard things if you never did hard things? Then Jimmy Carr repurposed it even better and it's, yeah, this insight, I think is, it is a, it is a, saving grace to a lot of people who feel that their goals are hollow.

So I think that's a wonderful lesson, like a really, really lovely lesson. All right, Yusuf, what are you got? Yeah, think of how many bags of protein you've eaten since then, Chris. So you did the same with balloons as well, didn't you, where like, 1,000 subscribers. You and Dean had a cake and balloons and a party. Each subscriber level has got bigger and less grand in its celebration, yeah. did we even do a number of billions less for four million subs we didn't do we did we did something for a billion plays but yeah for four million subs i don't think it even

registered well we need to get a piece of artwork and do that we did for the eighth in the world eighth in the world i had a what was supposed to be a red velvet cake but it wasn't it was a carrot cake masquerading as a red velvet cake and it was awful it was horrible i tried i tried to eat it in utah they didn't go well it's crazy to think It's crazy to think for like a hundred thousand you did this mega party and then for four million you probably just sent a bicep emoji on Slack. That's it. Yeah, probably the porn hub emoji on Slack.

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slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. All right, Seth, what you go? So just to piggyback off, Johnny's there because I really like the takeaway of like the person that you become, I think there's another thing that you can draw from that too, so I fully agree, but you were

talking about like chewing on the menu. So mistaking the menu for the meal. and ascribing that as the, to your happiness. And we're the ones that always move the goalposts for our happiness every time we hit a particular milestone and we renegotiate the contract with our brain so that we end up in this trap where, you know, your brain releasing a little bips of some neurotransmitter,

but you raise the bar of, oh, but it has to be, have to achieve an even higher bar to get the same little blurt of dopamine. And a lot of it's because we almost feel like it's too simple to just enjoy the basic pleasures of life that are immediately available of health and relationships and nature and the sun and friends and things that you would act like if they were taken away from you, you would actually want to exchange everything for that. So there's a book by a media giant who wrote, he came up, he was like the head of PC World magazine and a bunch of conglomerates called, it's called Felix Dennis, How to Get Rich. And it's like a tongue-in-cheek book about like, you know, I'm sat here at the age of 84, writing this book to you, dear reader, who's, you know, probably in your 20s or 30s. And despite the billions that I've amassed, I would swap places with you in an instant because you have the one thing that

I don't, which is time. And I would still have the better end of the deal. So it's almost like that the things that we're chasing, like most people listening to this podcast are probably in the top like 20% of global wealth anyway. And yet we think that if we get to the top 19% or the top 18% or whatever, that something's going to change. I saw Ferris shared this quote from Marianne Seldes the other day. The hardest thing to teach a student and to believe consistently is that there is nothing out there to go and get. There is no part, career, opportunity for which you should be searching and scrounging and

coveting. All of the preparation is within. And if you keep yourself mentally and physically fit and you remain generous with yourself and others and stay deeply in your study about your craft, whatever is yours will then arrive. So with that in mind, it's like there are basic pleasures that are always available. And when they're gone, like health, for example, when they're challenged, I think all of us have gone through some health challenge in the last 10 years where we've suddenly been like,

oh, wow, actually, I could really do with a bit more of that again. So instead, it's like enjoy those pleasures and then organize your life such that you can enjoy the passage of time as you move towards your goal, and then you've got the best of both worlds. I think this is, it might sound to, it's probably almost certainly would have sounded to us eight years ago when we started the pod opulent maybe entitled detached from reality in some sort why just get stronger bigger more rich more popular whatever um why needing to make everything so abstract but this leads into my favorite my favorite lesson from the entire year which is that unteachable lessons are unteachable and this has been the best essay i wrote it in january and then

dropped it on Rogan a couple of weeks after that. And it's still just, it's a fundamental truism that there are a particular category of insights about life that you cannot learn without experiencing. And money won't make you happy. Fame won't fix yourself worth. You don't love that pretty girl. She's just hot and difficult to get. You should see your parents more. You should work less. You should spend more time in a hammock. You should enjoy a holiday without having your phone you'll never care about anything that you're thinking of apart from when you're thinking about it like all of these lessons over and over the next follow account won't matter the reason that people proclaim them with such like grandiose ceremony when they get there

is that they can't believe that that was the case despite the fact that generations of parents and media and literature and archetype and myth and songs and art have done told us, here are the pitfalls to look out for. And it's this weird kind of like cute narcissism that we all have where we think that that might be true for them, but not for me. My particularly, it's the classic, like, oh, shut up, granddad. Like, I'll figure it out myself. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. My unique constitution would allow me to dance through this minefield, a very well-laden, very well-described trip-wise, and I won't trip on any of them. So I'm working on the next build this unteachable lessons thing because I think it's so good um one of the so first off I guess you are if

you chase something that you were warned was hollow to arrive there and find out that the warning was correct you were in good company that's the first lesson of the unteachable lessons thing but the second one is that they are unteachable so the self-castigation of I should have known what I didn't know before I knew it. Like I should have seen this thing coming or whatever. That is simply not the way, the unteachable lessons are self-reinforcing. They are unteachable,

which means you have to do them in order to be able to understand them. And I think this is what maybe a good bit of us are reckoning with now, that unteachable lessons don't really matter all that much until you're at the stage where you've learned that the lesson should have been realized in advance and you knew about it and then you get this guilt and you get the shame around oh fucking hell how could I not have seen did the guys not tell me

did they not say that the four million subs wasn't the answer that the so on and a da da da da and um I think what I realized was unteachable lessons is is cool to point at but doesn't actually give anybody any sense of all it does is mark the way to the edge of the cliff that they are going to jump off of. And on your way down, you'll realize that you're in okay company. So maybe you feel a bit less lonely. But the next one is you can't realize this stuff before you've experienced it. And because of that, you shouldn't be whipping yourself into

pain and saying, what an idiot, I shouldn't have done this. It's a justification for self-compassion that way smarter, way richer, way more accomplished, more worldly people who had more advantages than you knew more and did the exact same thing, bigger for longer, till the end of their life, they died trying to do it. And okay, like, you dedicated however many weeks, months, years, decades to this career relationship, pursuit, goal, dream, whatever it might be, to find out that what was at the end of the rainbow wasn't a part of gold. you're in good company what's that programming

like you can't just take it on faith otherwise you'll be sat there with FOMO yeah it's the Naval thing it's far easier to achieve your material desires than to renounce them I think it's like the best reason to achieve them to clear them off 100% it's way easier and this sounds

like a thing to say but demonetize it's literally easier to buy a Ferrari than it is to rid yourself of the desire to get a Ferrari that doesn't speak to how easy it is to get a Ferrari it speaks to how difficult it is to be able to rid yourself of the desire for Ferrari

if you really want to become in being able to get the Ferrari in the first place isn't it yeah but yeah I think like a really bad credit rating yeah true bitches the um I think like if if by big naturals gaining a certain amount of money you remove your desire to get more money fantastic the quickest route to getting rid of desires to achieve it. Yeah, yeah, 100%. Um, what if I got next? You know, one we've discussed before, actually, um, not on the show. So you spoke then about giving up desires. Another problem is, is envy or jealousy. And I've, one of the things I've tried to do rather than give up

envy or jealousy is have a bit more of a stricter criteria of when I'm willing to be envy or jealous. So what I kind of developed is this idea I call call call of duty versus war. So call of duty is kind of what I project Johnny's life to be like right. Like maybe some of the highlights that I hear and the wins and all of that stuff. And then the war is okay, when I've actually been with you for a week and lived your life. If I'm envious of the war, then that's fine. But if I'm envious of this call of duty 1% highlight reel that doesn't exist, then that's a problem. So I use, I mean, I use two examples. I mean, one of them is, um, uh, is a business guy. We both know, super, super, super successful. And he's got everything, beautiful family,

amazing business. Um, crushing it year on year. And he's got to the scale now where we're talking, it's a huge mega business as with him. You can easily feel envious. He goes, yeah, I've got, um, I think it was 2,000 lawsuits. this month. When your business gets to that scale, you're constantly dealing with litigation from so many different angles. Wasn't he dealing with this personally as well? I don't, yeah.

He was like, he jumped in on some email while you would. Yes, yeah. And he's, he, I mean, he's one of my favorite people in the world. But I go, oh, wow. Like, if I want to be envious, I've got to go to the war. I've got to be, oh, I also want the 2,000 emails a month. And likewise, I mean, me and you were on the road trip. And I think it's probably good for the viewers, because I think a lot of people could

look at you and go, good. guy, super successful, rich, knows loads of people. And that's the kind of call of duty model. Me and Chris are on a road trip in America. And we're going to put the tunes on and blare through the roads. And then Sky, your podcast ads manager calls up. And I think the way people assume the ads work for the show is probably, oh, Chris just gets a load of free stuff and money, right? That's what I think they think. Whereas you kind of then get to sit there with the war and it's guy going, yeah, they're just not happy with that Instagram story. It's Chris going, I filmed that one four times now. Why are they not happy with it? And I go, oh, okay, my model before was the

call of duty and now I'm seeing the war. So unless I've seen the war, I'm not envious. And if I see the war and I like it, I'm willing to be Napoleon. I think when Mark Zuckerberg was on Joe Rogan, he describes like his morning. And it's like, he wakes up and he doesn't look at his phone because when he looks at his phone, there's just loads of value. Oh, yeah. Government's Oh, God, like that never goes away. Like, it doesn't matter how big the business is. Just gets more. Well, the emails are just worse.

Yeah. It's the emails that, like, 15 people below you didn't have the answer to. Well, that's another Sam Harrisism where there will never come a day when you don't have any problems. What did you think that you were going to wake up one day? There'd be no problems, like getting to a video game level where there's no more enemies to fight. No, your problems will change, but having problems will never go away. The line from your idea about Call of Duty versus War is nailed by. James Clear here. How many people love the idea of a thing, but not the reality? It doesn't make

sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it. If you don't want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire. To crave the results, but not the process, is to guarantee disappointment. Beautiful. Nailed it. Popper has this idea, he's like one of the founding fathers of modern science, that essentially life is problem solving. And then David Deutsch builds upon his ideas, which is, there's a few things, but one, all problems, unless they defy the laws of physics, are fundamentally solvable. So that's the optimistic note. But there's a caveat there, which is, as soon as you solve a problem, it leads to another problem. So solutions are infinite, but problems are also infinite. So let's say we solve the problem of fire. Okay,

now we have the problem of smoke. Okay, we've solved the problem of smoke. We've got a chimney. Okay, now we've got a dirty chimney. Okay, we're going to, we've solved that problem. problem by getting some children in to clean it. Oh, no, we've got the problem of child labor. And it's just and it's both the beginning of infinity, both for problems and solutions. So life is problem solving. Very good. Johnny, where you go. I have another lesson, which is, it's a dad-based lesson about being a dad. Have you seen American Beauty? Have you seen the film American Beauty? No. No. Tom Cruise. uh no oh um shows that i haven't seen it that's my that's me verifying that i haven't seen american beauty kevin spacey i'd recommend watching it's really good there's a scene in it where um

there's a guy watching he just sat mesmerized watching a bag blowing in the wind and he ends up in tears because there's he can't believe the amount of beauty in the bag floating in the wind and i've always been really jealous of that scene because there's a guy that's just absolutely mesmerized with something completely normal and ordinary and everyone's like going around chasing like the new thing, the novel experience, the new like location, possession, whatever. The thing,

the thing that I've noticed that I wasn't expecting about being a dad is the, is watching, watching your child see something for the first time completely reintroduces you to life, like little things before they just became part of the background,

part of the scenery. So like the first time, they watch a dog bark, the first time they see a bird flying, the first time they hear a noise, you're just transported for that split second into like, oh god, yeah, like that is, that's crazy that thing. And it's a complete, it's a, I think like you guys probably had this like one of the challenges of like you get older and you feel like time goes faster and faster and faster and it's just the same experiences on repeat. It's a really nice, like, pinpoint back to like, oh yeah, like that cups colder than I was expecting it to be oh yeah the moisture feels really weird

and 10 minutes goes by so that's been a really cool something I wasn't expecting to happen but it's been a really cool experience this year that is so lovely it's been great seeing that in you as well johnny over the year i've honestly i've like seen your heart open and like almost unlock this like aspect to your personality that um that your daughter's brought out in you. Thanks, man. What is it that's going on with us? Right?

Because you've had a kid, but none of us have. A moleskin notepad. You were on a moleskin notepad, but none of us are. I just get this sense. I don't know whether anybody else that's listening feels it,

but 2025 was a very feely, yeah, generally, I think, for a lot of people that were around me. It was like a big emotions, yeah. I think our, lessons and realizations each time we do this and they're being weirdly similar. There's definitely we're on a trajectory that's sort of moving at a similar kind of place. You see that when you have a load of girls around one another, their menstruation cycles

sync up, so it's similar, yeah, yeah, even remotely. Interesting. Yeah, that's, that's cool, man. I mean, look, the, the opportunity to revisit something old for the first, time is just super cool and obviously because you're marrying this with a deep meditation practice that's consistent you're getting at this from multiple angles it's funny as you started the story then about the film i started staring at the carpet and i was in this gaze for the carpet for like five seconds because one of my favorite stories um that i read this year was from Morgan Housel's book. I don't know the name of the chap, but he, um, he's blind, uh, from basically birth to about 45. And he has this experimental eye surgery and he can see for the first time.

And he's after the surgery, just at the opticians just staring at the carpet for like an hour. And he's just fascinated by the details of the carpet. And I realize I walk past carpet all the time and don't think about it. Yeah. So wouldn't it be crazy to be a live, for a long time, but experiencing something for the first time. Because you see those videos, well, you see those videos of babies that hear for the first time, but they're usually three or four or something. And you go, well, how much life would you have experienced up until that point? But if you're someone who has a sense of self and maybe a partner and a position in society and all the rest of it, and then you get reintroduced this, you know, cosmic

dose of novelty and wonder into a system that already is pretty well put together. I think I told you about this ages ago, the elderly clout hypothesis. We talk about the perils of fame too young, but never the perils of fame too old. Like what happens if you're 60 and you become the most famous psychologist in the world to say, well, you know, Jordan Peterson had to navigate that. You get plucked out of obscurity. You think you know who you are. You think you know your place in society. And now that's, you've been ripped. From your moorings, and we've got to try and work out who the fuck am I in this new world? Yeah.

And that, like, I think we've all, we've all experienced that when we downloaded Alfred for the first time. Like, everything we knew about the way we interface with technology suddenly just like, oh my God, I've been driving with the brakes on. I've been seeing in black and white all my life. there is a bit of me that thinks because the growth of the show is so like fucking exponential so many amazing low-hanging fruit insights to me feel cheap to do because they've been done maybe multiple times before but because of the exposure that people have had to it even within the same stream of content which is modern wisdom and me we probably do need to go back

I think there should be like a required reading like new to the show yeah we've got to go through the OGs you're right because otherwise we're going to break the Alfred service headspace calm and then arrived at waking up truck pad speed Romwad you need to sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom right this is one of the problems

some of the hacks that we believed in the companies are defunct now I'm pretty sure you can't get like sponsors the protein works I think actually went into administration and there's there is of us They're in the show notes at some point. Well, it was Romward. Then you were on Ron Ward.

I was a Romod model. Do you, do you stretching now? I do none. I don't do much stretching now. George does loads. Do you? A little bit. Stretching all the time.

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Similar to Johnny as well, periods have synced up. I have taken a bit of a journey from head to heart over the year too. And like massive amounts of of gratitude for being able to like spend your guys' birthdays together like to travel with you all and like all of all of that stuff like really just really seeing an appreciation for it. Like almost like Johnny was saying about his daughter where if you were transported, I think Hormosi talks about this where it's like if you were transported from, you know, your 90s into today and you're like, oh, I've suddenly got on a

I'm suddenly 30 again. I've got another years to live. It's like you'd see it with a whole new new level of gratitude. But my big one is me becoming post-truth. This is the beginning of a hard right-wing pivot from Yusuf here, isn't it? Here we go. The mirror only smiles when you smile

has been my mantra for the year. and it's just as concrete as it sounds like you're sat staring in the mirror miserable and going I don't like what's in the reflection I need to try and change that thing in the reflection and the mirror represents the world around you whereas actually you can never change the reflection

all you can do is bring the positive energy to it and then everything else reflects it back to you so it's just moving from left brain overly empirical have to get to some objective truth out there in order to give myself the permission to say that this is true or adopt a belief or adopt whatever.

Actually, no, you can, you choose your beliefs. We choose them anyway, so it's not as if you're suddenly becoming woo-woo by doing that. It's just being conscious about it and then bringing whatever energy you want to see reflected back into the world. And in doing that, it's just been, it's like opening up a different gear in my mind.

that's been a big shift in just how I'm choosing to see reality. Very feelsy. We're all very feelsy, which I love. Do you know what it makes me think? It makes me think that the intuition that I had for most of the last 12 months was right. It's like this is a big, like my biases are being confirmed. and it's not just you yeah it's not it's not and you know I think certainly at least from the show's perspective a lot of what I've talked about over the last 12 months has been less hardcore hustle and grind Goggins mentality thing I contributed to that you know the the industry of fuck your feelings bro just work harder I had you know I served my time contributing to that but even fucking homozy started to make the pivot this year where he's thinking well maybe i should pay a little bit of attention to what's happening below the

neck maybe i maybe i should care a little bit more and uh yeah this you could say like a good summary is it's all vibes ultimately but what you're trying to do is construct some external situation or life or level of success or belief system or whatever externally to make yourself feel something internally but there is a more direct route there Well, the post-truth idea, Yusuf has probably stems from, I don't know Yusuf, but Derek Sivers has this book called Useful, But Not True. And he has this. I haven't read it, but yeah, very much.

You can read it in a couple of hours. So there's, yeah, Sivers has this useful but not true. And he starts off with this story of, obviously, for people who don't know, he ends up being a quite a successful entrepreneur, internet programmer, et cetera, et cetera. but what a lot of people don't know is when he was 17 he crashed into a lady that was driving and broke her spine and she was paralyzed for the rest of her life and he carries this from like 17 to 34 just like ruminating on it day after day after day like what he did and like how all his success is meaningless because he's such an awful person and one day he goes well

I'm going to take some agency over it I'm actually going to go and see her and apologize so he turns up at a door she answers the door and he immediately starts sobbing, like in tears and he goes, it's me, Derek, I'm so sorry, I crashed into your car, I paralyzed you. And she's like, hold on, hold on. She goes, come on, walk on in. And she's walking. So they both, like, sit down.

And he kind of discovers that he didn't paralyze her. Like, she, like, broke a bit of a vertebrae, but she's been fine ever since. And what's interesting is she's been blaming herself for the accident ever since. So they both end up crying, realizing that they both had these kind of false memories in their head the entire time. yeah it's scary to work out that your worldview is incorrect which it is yeah yeah and it's a emoji but in how many other places do you think that you've hit a woman how many how many assumptions do you have about yourself or about the world or about the past that weren't that aren't that way oh well and this is I think one of the problems that you have with going too

deep into the therapy speak world without having action and I'm sure if I was to make this would be cool if I was to make a prediction for next year I get the sense that we will or at least for me I predict that I'm probably going to

keep moving through the emotions thing but realize it's made me less effective and actually try and come back out the other side into more action-oriented stuff but doing it from a more embodied place. Like, okay, I've looked into the abyss and I've stared at the shadow a little bit and now I'm going to try and re-garner the fuck your feelings, bro, just work anyway, but while actually feeling them. Well, that's what you were saying while back, Chris, where like,

it's not that we're throwing out the idea of being able to do hard work. It's just not conflating the actual pain of the work with the progress. Yeah. Do you think that, you know, the thing, I think we probably all have this before you like meditate or do any kind of self-improvement stuff is that will this sap my desire to work harder or do you feel like that's happened? You can get there. I think I can get there, yeah, because I can, not in terms of not wanting the goals anymore, and perhaps part of this is simply just achieving a lot of the goals, but at least a good bit of it for me comes out of well how much of what I was doing was to hide from emotional states that I didn't want to feel like I feel lonely so I'll work hard or I feel frustrated so I'll work hard or I feel insufficient or inferior so I'll work hard and in that you hide you artificially bolster your sense of self-worth because you don't feel like without that you're enough.

So you're chasing enoughness and you're injecting work rate into it and it's doing two things. It's pushing you towards something which makes you think, well, I'm moving in the right direction. It doesn't matter if I don't love myself today because tomorrow I'll be better

and you have this sort of permanent manana, manana, maniana, maniaering of that. But the other thing is by being so busy, it drowns out the fleeting thoughts that make you doubt stuff in any case. So a busy calendar is a hedge again. to existential loneliness. And if you just stack your day back to back, I'm moving in the right direction. So the long term, like, I'm doing the thing, thing gets sorted. Plus, the immediate I've insulated myself from being able to hear the thing thing is also happening. So I think it can.

But ultimately, if the reason that you work so hard is so that you can finally feel good about yourself or be happy or have good vibes. And if in the process of doing that, you destroy the vibes and you don't make yourself feel good about yourself, if you can just access the vibes directly, it doesn't matter. Like, you have actually managed to find a shortcut through the mountain by tunneling straight through the middle of it. And it's still wet clay. For me, like, all of this stuff is still really, really, really fucking wet clay. But I think it's the, I think it's the right way to go. And I think that a lot of people realize this as well. And there is kind of two worlds. There's the people who are still, like, looking at the top of the mountain, and then

some people who have done a little bit of stuff, maybe got to some kind of an altitude, and they're like, oh, don't think that I need to go any higher. I think I actually need to go down and reassess my route. And the people who are still on the climb just do not understand the perspective that the people who have gone a little bit higher up got, and that's fine, because eventually they'll get there and it's the unteachable lesson and so on and so forth. But it does lead to, it sounds much more like upward aiming and supportive and noble to be on the climb. And it sounds like privileged bourgeois to say, you know, man, I'm just like working on my vibes, dude. But I get the sense that anyone who's sufficiently mindful is going to end up there in any case.

So I think this is a path that everybody's on just at different stages. The best analogy I've heard for this is that it's not about whether work, hard work, laziness, whatever, there's no moralizing of the thing itself. It's about if you're using feelings of insufficiency to drive your work, then it's like you're using dirty fuel, which will eventually destroy the engine. So it's not hard work as bad. it's if the dirty fuel is the thing which is driving you to do it then that's going to collapse and why you're working hard yeah i think i had like the it's weird that you said that because i had like i've been thinking about this a lot of like the feeling that you have achieved a thing you've been chasing a long time and the like the the drive you kind of feel the drive going away

a bit the what i what i think the next step is is like you've just completed caller duty on hard and now you need to start again at level one but on veteran and you kind of know like oh it's this level that guy's there and that guy comes out that door and you hear me so you're kind of going through that you pick a different thing to chase that's going on josh this sounds very technical which you shouldn't be but do you think it's playing call of duty again in a hard level or do you think it's playing a new game i think it has to be the same game because that's then you're like navigating the new goal but kind of knowing like, oh, this happens.

Because I think the problem with, like, the first goal with the, I want a bad gender kilos is you, that is the beginning of the journey of, this is it. It's the type of way. I just need this type of way. I just need 100,000 subscribers. But when you pick, like, if Chris picked 10 million subscribers, you're, all right, well, yeah, here we go again.

But do you think. Same journey. So to use the 100 kilos one, do you think it's, okay, now I've got to do 110, 120, or do you think it's, oh, now I want to get my resting heart rate down to this, or I want to get great a Pilates or what? whatever it is. It's, so I think like that's the, obviously it can't be the same goal. So I, the call duty is just an analogy. Do you see what I mean? Yeah. So the reason it's like, it's, it's picking a new goal that, that challenges

you in a different way, but you know that like this is just the, this, that's how you get the fuel, that's how you get the drive back. So it doesn't matter if it's the same thing or a new goal, it's just a bigger thing than previous essentially. Yeah, but it's the, it's like, because I think when you have those fields, of like, oh, you know, I've just kind of, I've reached this goal and it was just fulfilling this thing. And I think that just means, like, you've arrived at the tail end of that, like, you've, that particular arc. That's the final level. Well, you think, you think in arcs a lot, I remember one of the insights from relationships

101 that you had, which I think is still true, is a lot of people restart the same cycle with a new person, assuming that they're going to get some more longevity out of it, whereas it's not, this relationship will be different. Yeah, no, it's, it's largely the same arc. from excitement to familiarity and people think that the familiarity is an indication that they should switch to get someone who the excitement lasts with for longer yeah but it's not that arc is pretty locked in and i think that you're true this is certainly true for me with the live stuff you know it's sufficiently similar to what i do but sufficiently different that it's a new

territory a new video game to try and conquer and it feeds into the main thing but i'm starting from But I'm starting from zero. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I guess the tighter and tighter spirals thing, Yusuf said before, is so true as well. Because in the micro, or if this is done too frequently, what this looks like is a non-essentialist worldview. It looks like you're trying to do lots of things at once, which means that you're not good at anything. It can be anything you want, but not everything. But you can be lots of things as long as you periodize when you're focusing on them. I couldn't have done live tour, write, podcast or the rest of the

they moved to them around. I couldn't have done that all at once but if I chunk them into sufficiently dedicated sufficiently long durations, I'll probably get away with it. All right, we'll do one more little round. And if there's any absolute slammers, just do a couple.

This is a new one for me which I haven't written about yet. Just because you can lift it doesn't mean you should and this is the inverse of the region beta paradox so most people if things get sufficiently bad it galvanizes them to get out of a situation something that's challenging or painful or difficult but if you have an unusually high tolerance for discomfort and are pretty resilient then you become like the david goggins of suffering like fuck the boats i'll carry the whole fleet and what happens is you're able to put yourself into a situation where you can sustain discomfort or a wrong path

or a challenging position or a job that you shouldn't stay in or a lifestyle that you need to check or whatever. You can continue to push yourself through that because your capacity to hold on and to just keep going is so strong that you go way, you find that the basement's got a fucking cellar with a trap door in it below the bottom of the line that most people's region beta would have kicked them out the bottom of. It's like, oh, this was already bad enough and most people would have been galvanized into action. But for some reason, your capacity to like just keep going is so great that you do and you do and you do and you do and you do. And it's strange because the things that you get praised for in public are often very damaging in private. The resilience that you need to get yourself through work is not the sort of thing that you're supposed to have in your friendships, for instance.

If a friend continues to misuse you or take advantage of you or isn't there or it's just bad, bad influence or whatever it is, like if that's in work and you're trying to get this particular piece of coding or website to work and fit together, fuck the Zapier integration won't do this thing. I'm trying to get this client. I'm going to fly across the well and do all the rest of it. That's fine. But if it's you trying to regularly chase down a friend that's self-destructing, there is a limit. There is supposed to be a limit to that. and yeah the realization just because something's heavy doesn't mean you should lift it and the reverse of that is just because somebody carries a weight well doesn't mean it isn't heavy so from the outside a lot of the time people that listen to shows like this one and read your guys's stuff and george's stuff they're usually the most put together person in the room typically

they're the one that their friends turn to for advice because you listen to you read that psychology stuff don't you what should i what should i do about my relationship with my mother or whatever it might be. And what that causes is for a lot of people to never ask the question of the person who usually answers and go, hey, how are you doing? Can we check in? The audience, it's like, no, no, no, like, I really mean how are you, like, what's, what's, let's turn this around. And, uh, it takes a, it takes a real brave friend, it takes a real sort of impactful friend to push through the competence defense mechanism that everybody has up. Um, um, And, yeah, in some ways, that's another curse of competence that people don't see you as someone that needs reassurance or steps in to check on you.

And I think, yeah, beware of using what your praise for in public, your resilience in your private life. And just because someone carries the weight well, it doesn't mean it isn't heavy. That's great. It's RPE. It's RPE for personal life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is. I think this is kind of the same thing you're talking about

but like if you're a person that is like in charge responsible for things you're by default the person that people come to for like advice or what do I do how does this work I think that straight away makes it harder to be like I'm struggling

because that you I think the feeling that that creates is like if I admit I'm struggling they then have no one to ask like what I'm the guy I'm supposed to be the guy or the girl. So I think that I've definitely felt that feeling of like when you're supposed to be kind of holding all the everything together, you sort of have to maintain that like facade to a degree,

even if you'd like, I don't know what to do. If you say that suddenly the whole thing for us. That's an interesting one. I remember reading Endurance by Alfred Lansing and he's talking about Shackleton's diary entries versus what everybody else's diary entries are. Right. And Shackleton's diary entries are just racked with self-doubt and uncertainty.

and the whole experience is him just swimming in melancholy and fear. But the soon as he puts the diary down, he steps outside and he just galvanizes this entire group. So I do think that in a professional context, and if you are a leader, this is a price leader's pay that nobody else gets to see. But this is the reason that you're supposed to have a fucking supportive spouse or good friends who don't work for you

or a therapist that you can talk to or whatever your outlet of choices, is, but somebody who's there and with whom you can go, I don't fucking know what I'm doing. I don't know how to get out of this. And I think that's, yeah, the value of multifaceted social group. Napoleon has this line that a leader is a dealer of hope. Could be Churchillian drift, but I'm pretty sure it's Napoleon. Napoleon drift.

And my literally takes me onto mine, which is perfect. So to do very much like a Christopher Nolan reveal now, I'm going to criticize my previous one to then you come in here. It's been a setup all along. So the reveal is I think right now in 2025, 2026, the deep work, which is kind of sitting there focus without any distractions, is extremely useful. But it's currently overpriced relative to the amount of people that probably listen to your show and do that. and what I call deep sparring is significantly underpriced, which is kind of what you discussed then, right? That you can't say to people, oh, I'm struggling with this, particularly people that are relying on you. But like, I've realized now,

there's probably about three to five people in my life where we can sit down, go for dinner. I did this on Friday with my friend Harry in London. He went for dinner, spoke everything through, and our laptops there, and he was going through issues. He's facing. I was going through issues he was facing and vice versa. And there's this Nick Kamatra line of when I advise other people, I gain 20 IQ points.

And when I advise myself, I lose 20 IQ points. So you essentially gain 40 IQ points because they get to come in and look at all your problems. And they're a super smart person. And then you get to go in and look at their problems. And then the next time you come back, because you've been together, you're kind of endlessly smarter. It's like what we spoke about at the start of the just before we recorded, the film Oppenheimer, you needed that deep sparring time in person. If Feynman was in South America and Fermi was over there, like it wouldn't happen. So there's something that, yeah, that,

and what's beautiful about the deep sparring idea is you probably need like three to four hours a quarter and then you stack up all that deep work on top of it versus you sitting in your own little cage, ruminating, coming up with the most absurd conspiracies about yourself and then working on top of that, I think it's a huge negative. Do you think the other people in the deep sparring need no, should they have no context? They have to be kind of completely separate. No, I think you probably want somebody who you don't directly work with, but you want somebody who you really, really respect. Like a good rule of thumb I've tried to take this year, which is ignore like all criticism from critics and like listen 100% or criticism from creative people or people that

doing things. So I think in that regard then, I mean, you probably could think of four or five people that you could sit down with. And the thing is it's kind of, they call it a live straddling poker, which is when you go in, other people start going in. And I think there's some truth to that as well, where if you go in and say, hey, I'm struggling with this, what do you think? If you were to take over my life with a VR headset on, what would you do? They come up with gems. And then they immediately go, well, I've got this thing. And it's beautiful. It's licensed to go there. I think especially for guys. And this is one of the problems upon reflection with a lot of what's happening in the UK, I think,

because you kind of have a multiplier effect of already a British allergy to earnestness and sincerity, plus the male allergy to earnestness and sincerity, and they kind of stack on top of each other. But if you can find somebody who is prepared to go there and you open the door, that typically is reciprocated, the problem is when you do it with the wrong person and they go, what the fuck do you mean, mate? I was, I was laughing because Harry is the absolute master of that.

He's the antidote because he will just drop in an absolutely wild take on something and just be like, prove me wrong. And I don't think I can even repeat any of those takes, but yeah, it's the perfect thing. You have to have sparring partner or friends that you can drop absolutely anything with. Put it on the table in front of you and everyone just goes, all right, let's dissect this. What's interesting as well is if you study history, this is so common. So you had the Lunar Society in the UK during the Industrial Revolution where all these pioneers,

so Erasmus Darwin, who was Charles Darwin's grandfather, James Watt, and about 10 of the leaders of the Industrial Revolution or poetry at the time would meet during a full moon. Because this is obviously pre-electricity, James Watts, still working on what he's working on. They know during a full moon, they'd meet in somebody's garden, and they would all discuss. So the whole foundation of the Western world was built on that. You then have Benjamin Franklin in the US way. He'd have these like junto societies that he would host and he would mingle. I was literally reading the other day, the book about the start of Uber.

So Uber starts because one guy is frustrated that he can't get a taxi. So he's doing what I occasionally do, while order from multiple taxi companies at once and the taxi arrives. So he's then banned from all taxi apps. And one day he's watching Casino Royale, and he sees James Bond with his GPS technology, and he goes, hold on, because that's an idea. And Travis, who's the other founder of Uber, he hosts these jam parties at his house since he sold his company so he can just mingle and meet people. And they're playing table tennis, and that's where the idea of Uber comes from. So this idea of kind of sitting by yourself, I think, is just a fallacy that is a very modern thing, that deep sparring is so significant throughout history. The lone genius theory for sort of how history gets moved forward is so...

It's so fucking bullshit, dude. I guess that would be another lesson from this year. I put it in one of the vlogs that came out recently, which was you can go pretty fucking fast and quite far on your own. And even if it's not as trite as like if you want to go fast, go on your own, if you want to go far and go with other people, that I don't know, you can probably, with enough resilience, if you're the David Goggins of suffering, can just fucking grit your teeth. and make it to 80 and you'd have you'd have done fun but it'll be way less fun like if you want to have fun do it with other people so not only you're more effective it's also it's also more fun and it's easier yeah so you can get that you would let's say that you can get it done but you would have it be done with more discomfort more self-doubt and yeah you get to celebrate this

fucking thing you get to celebrate whatever it is that you're doing with other people there's a great line of um you know the whole gladwell concept of 10,000 hours which has been debated but even in that context there, if you meet with smart friend and discuss these issues, you've now got 20,000 hours, because you've got their 10,000 hours. If you have 10 people, you have 100,000 hours. You can see where this is going. Should you be as friends with as many people as possible? Yes. Okay. You got any assignments to finish off with? You got anything that you really wish that you'd said? I have a little hack that I've found useful. Run it. It's, so it's being more practical with gratitude, practical ways to engineer that feeling. Because I've always struggled

with that, then about you guys, the whole, like, write three things you're grateful for, you end up writing the same stuff. So one's a question that you can ask daily and one is the thing that you do one time. The one time is ask chat GPT or whatever your AI choices. So say, I am 35, I live in this city, this whatever, describe a Monday a hundred years ago. And the level of, you just need to read it once and you're like, oh my God, like, heating not having to eat like spam for dinner not having to navigate through like a world war and all these things and you just suddenly see like little things in your day that you can microwave completely take for granted you're like wow you sent me that passage is that what

you've just got out no which which passage you can refer to uh where water like i had a shower i woke up in a comfy bed and i did something else and you compared it to a queen an emperor Yeah, from... I mean, I could do a six-hour series on this, right? But even just study any part of history and you realize everything's so much worse than it is now and also everybody's always complaining. So you kind of realize the matter how much better it gets,

everybody's going to always be complaining. I mean, you study World War II. It's not even that long ago. And you go, most of the people... We would have been on the front lines. Here's a crazy start. The average age of the Luftwaffe that were bombing the UK was 26. the average age of the RAF pilots

is the reason why this isn't modern wisdom is the reason why we're not all speak of German you'd be fine with the blonde hair blue eyes toys is the average age of an RAF pilot 21 and you know how average is work there's going to be a few of us blokes that are bringing that age up like the and you just kind of

go oh my God like it's it's never ending how much better it's gotten but how much people will still keep complaining So I have just a little twist on the gratitude thing because I did in that bedroom there, the time capsule from, you know, the last decade of my life, there is nine or ten six minute diaries and there's six months each. So it's a lot of daily writing. And the gratitude never got below the neck for me. And that sounds great. And I'm sure that it's shocking. The question I would ask that I would get you ask yourself is, does this feel like I'm feeling? feeling it, or is it just another sort of cognitive thought experiment? Well, so this is my second one. Beautiful. So that's the, that's how I teach you up without knowing.

Yeah, I did. That's like the, you know, shift the canvas. It's like, oh, all these things that I take for granted. How nice. The second question that you can ask yourself every day is, which I think I might have mentioned before, it's just what would, what would 80 year old me have appreciated about my day today? And that's stuff like, I got to walk to the.

shop and buy a drink and walk back again without nothing hurt or like I'm at this part of my relationship with my partner and we got to do this and we've got all these plans and all these things to be excited about and we have a holiday coming up and I get to go with whatever that's the stuff that I feel I think that's the way that like I really struggle with write three things you're grateful for but I find that question you pick you pick the stuff you would ignore because it's the stuff that when you're 80 just won't be there anymore that you overlook

which is that's what 80 year old you will be grateful for what do you think those biggest things eight year old Johnny will be thinking I think it's the I think it's the feeling of excitement about what's still coming that like my daughter's a certain age and getting to see her grow up

like friendships watching people achieve things there's so much to be still be excited for Not to say that goes away when you're 80, but I think you're facing very different, very different 10 years when you're 80 years old. Have you heard that quote? The quote from A.N. Whitehead, civilization advances by extending the number of operations

we can perform without thinking of them. So, like, Johnny from 100 years ago doesn't, like, Johnny from now doesn't have to go up the mountain and milk the goats and then, like, wash the clothes in the wooden pot, all this kind of stuff, and therefore can do stuff at much higher orders of operation. There's that famous email from Steve Jobs. I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow, I didn't breed or perfect the

seeds. I didn't make any of my own clothing. I speak a language I didn't invent or refine. I did not discover the mathematics that I use. I'm protected by freedoms and laws I didn't conceive of or legislate, et cetera, et cetera. And then it's like, at the end, it's sent from my iPad. like just a little hat tip of like we're standing on the shoulders of giants yeah yeah that's good the gratitude thing is hard to get right um certainly try the genre stuff give that a go the panic attack

of happiness yeah panic attack of joy see what happens it's michael the guy from earlier i'll put your touch for him what do you guys think 80 year old you will be grateful for for me the obvious one I was reading this chess book it's called Ken Alfred I was reading there's this book

called Ken Lou so he does these short stories and there's one called Paper Menagerie and kind of the ending is he's reading a letter from his mom after she's died

and he's a Chinese family and they say the saddest the saddest feeling in Chinese culture is to grow over an age where you're ready to take care of your parents and realize they're no longer there. So that's probably the one that I think. I'd be like, oh, wow, my parents are still here.

Oh, that's cool. That's cool. I like the song by Ken Liu as well. Like Ken Liu, Ken Libudibu Dabu Dautsu. Ken Liu, you know that one. Oh, but it's going to be Christmas number one after that rendition. Jesus Christ.

Wow. Okay, Yusuf, anything beyond that, I don't know how you're going to top it. Yeah, so I've got... And sorry for derailing your hack there, Johnny. I've got some like micro ones, but obviously Johnny and my hacks are so similar that in knowing we'll have this episode coming up, I went through my obsidian, which has definitely passed the Watson filter, still using it. and looked at my George folder and thought, I just need to celebrate a few of the hacks that I've stolen from George and have served me well. So the boardroom exercise,

which is basically you're sat, at a boardroom in your mind when your mind is too busy and you go, okay, I've got different versions of myself all around the board. So you might have like the finance accountant version of you with the green cap and the cigar or you have like the romance version of you with the rose in their teeth and the um the gym version of you whatever all these different kind of mini personas and you just give them all a chance to have their say so everyone else shut up you you've got five minutes take the floor voice what you need to say and as you work your way around you just clear out

the pipes and it's just the the quietest that your mind will ever be so george thank you for that one. Framing decisions as experiments, big one I've learned from him this year, of rather than deliberating over a decision that is a two-way door, you can just treat it as an experiment, and then it just gets rid of any sense of like, oh, I've got to get this right. final three I'll take them unless there's any

comments or questions on those so far keep running it okay this is difficult just for people's reference I've got no visual feedback so I'm just like talking to myself we're having a great time we're loving it you know, Hojicha. So if you like coffee, but you're weaning yourself off, you can go decaf, but also Hojicha is roasted matcha. It's got that kind of caramel-y, chocolate-type

taste, but with much lower caffeine, same level of thionine as matcher tea. So becoming more popular, lovely drink, very, very wholesome, especially in the wintertime, or you can have it cold, iced. So Hujica, using voice notes as a trigger to go outside, either listening to or recording voice notes, I've just set myself a rule where I have to be walking around to send or receive a voice note. It just stops me from being a slug at my desk and, you know, it just gets me up and out. The final one's a little bit long, so I might skip it off a nest. However, I'll steamroll through my last view.

Take a photo of the room key slip with your room number on it when you check into a hotel. Good one. Just as you get it, just have your phone out. Take a photo of it. I've been on tour a lot. I've been through, oh, God, 50 or 100 hotels maybe in the last couple of years. and you, especially if you're going back to back to back, there is no way you can remember your room number.

I've been lost. I've had to go back down to not lose my room key, but to just be reminded of what room I'm in. That's a particularly embarrassing one. So just take a photo of the room key. Uber Black XL in America, they don't do it in the UK. Uber Black XL is so nice if you're in the States. It gets a big escalade or a Ford Explorer or something with a guy in a suit,

and it's usually maybe twice the price, two and a half times the price of a normal Uber. so probably not good for big journeys but if you're out with some friends if this is a dicky one from your birthday in Miami that he used it's just such a nicer experience if you've got four people four people will go

in an UberX but it'll be pain UberXL you've still got bags of room we use two UberXLs as our tour van basically for all of tour with the soundboard and everything else that we needed to take and then the last one is a quote from Franz Kafka in 1912 and it's basically a summation of all of the life hacks that we've ever done.

It's a distillation of everything that you need to do in your life. So Franz Kafka in 1912, dearest, I beg of you, sleep properly and go for walks. I think it's so great. It's a single sentence for how you can probably get most things better in your life. Yeah. Well, everything's better with those, too. things. Sleep properly and go for walks. Double do that. That's the first entry in

his day one that he's looking back on 20 years later and be like I've still haven't slept properly, I've gone for enough walk. Do you get anything left? Yeah, I'll speed through. We're doing a little speed round then. Number one

is, I told you about my if I become the Chancellor of the Exchequer, how I would increase the GDP by 3% overnight. I would install large white boards in everybody's home. So I think just having a large whiteboard always there, there's that line, it's Kidlin's law of them. If you could, if you can state a problem clearly, you've already solved it by 50%. And my kind of twist on that is when you have a whiteboard,

it's actually 70% because it kind of stays there staring back at you and eats part of your subconscious. That's number one. Number two, and I want to make sure that I get a bit of context here because it does sound stupid this one, but let me just test the room. one thing I discovered during COVID, I would do a lot of text messages, a lot of voice memos, and a lot of scheduled Zoom calls. How often do you just randomly ring a friend? I actually do that quite regularly. You do it quite a bit? Never.

Never. And I find myself, and I think there's probably a lot of people listen to the show that do that as well, where it's like, hey, mate, do you want to chat tomorrow at 9? And it's that, you know, that meme of there's two guys, one's trying to stab the other, and it's like me and like one schedule call my entire day. versus I will just randomly pick up the phone That's being my thing like this year is to just randomly ring people whenever like a nutcase and just check in on friends because you just stopped doing it

and I've not actually had a phone call with a friend for 18 months What's your pick up rate? What's the pickup rate on the calls? About 30, 40% Okay. Yeah, and then when you factor in dial backs it's like 70 to 80%

and you just end up having conversations that you wouldn't have and it leads to that kind of deep sparring idea. This does create a deep, deep anxiety in Johnny though it's the reason he doesn't text back too quickly Quickly. Yeah. Well, that's a separate conversation. The hack for the hack, go on, double dial. What do you mean? Ring them against right away. Okay. Really? That makes it feel like emergency. Yeah. So if I rang you once. Right, but it's not an emergency. But it doesn't matter. Right. So you've got to assume one of two things. I'm either actually not available, in which case the double dial isn't going to work. Or I am available, but I'm busy. Which means that the second one just pushes through a threshold. to a level of severity that is inappropriate

for what you're trying to do and boy who cries wolf all you've done there is optimise your pickup rate on the first time you call them but future times they're going to go oh that's double dial Johnny yeah meanwhile his house is on fires yeah okay so you're worried about boy who cried

wolf because okay and also you've I think it's it's more a fun conversation right that's the whole game there is to have more fun start me off if adults just don't have fun I don't need to like optimize my conversion rate on a chat with it. But you want to speak to more people then, surely. Then you just call somebody else. Yeah, they'll ring back when you call somebody else.

Yeah, just go on the area manual style. I think this has touched your nerve in you guys. I feel like if you're going to ring someone, ring them twice. If you're going to ring them, you want to speak to them. Do it properly. You're sounding very entitled. Well, I think it's entitled to ring someone. I'm going to call you so many times after that.

If you double dial, I'll answer. There you go. The point is, right, you ring someone because you try to get in touch with them. So act like you're trying to get in touch with them. But this is not like a formal conversation. It's very like, what's up? What's going on? Fine.

You guys are inferring that if I ring twice, it's an emergency, but I'm just trying to speak to you. Which is the purpose of the first quarter. Always be closing. Always be calling. Anything else? Let's do. I mean, you said, I mentioned it. They only can do some fun ones of just creating your own language.

language. No one else speaks. So you need subtitles on for the rest of this part. But no, just like changing words. So Yusuf mentioned not using decision, using the word experiment. And you realize, oh, when you use that, you're lighter on yourself. But also the best part about it is you tell everybody else you run an experiment. You say, hey, I'm going to move to this place.

Oh, it's a big decision. Everybody kind of reflexively acts like it's a big decision. It's Kapil Gup to a stand-up comedian who goes on stage. One version of him immediately apologises after the offensive. joke, the crowd picks up on it, the other version just kind of laughs it through and there's what you guys worried about. It's not a big thing. Have you considered, though, that there might be some decisions that warrant you taking them seriously and also warrant sort of a serious reception and your making light of it may cause your friends to be a bit more blasé than is warranted?

Perhaps you shouldn't try and base jump for the first time ever off that cliff. Yeah, I mean, no, it's vice and it was going to be fine, so he was having a laugh. I mean, I'll chat to that about my 20 children I've just had. No, I mean, there's an expectation advice. I always find these conversations a bit like, it's like somebody's so far this way, right? Somebody's sort of overthinking like what they're going to order from a dinner menu to then like, oh, maybe don't just have three kids with three different women. It's like, it's like the, you know, the classic thing of you have a female friend who says, oh, I don't want to go to the gym, I'm going to get too bulky. And it's like, I've been trying that for years.

And I can't do it with 10 times the testosterone. So I don't think you've got to worry about somebody going from not being able. This is specifically for people that are struggling with decisions. Like the decisions that are reversible, labeling them as experiments is useful. Other one is if I say the word problem, what's the kind of emotional reaction that you get? Constriction. Constriction. Pain, frustration.

If I say the word puzzle. Excitement. Pain. Frustration. I'm working on a new one for the news I've been thinking about because the news is just Because of all of the news that you can see

Even I'm going to call it the gel man's Because you know gel man amnesia Or the currents Or the wrongs Because it's just Do you remember Because you've been doing this for as long as I've known You've been doing this for nearly eight years now

Remember when you tried to rename The Un-toilet Bowl Hit P that drops on the seat. I didn't try and rename that. I tried to give it a name because it didn't have a name.

Okay. What was it? Can you remember the name? I can. Yeah, it's catchy, right? It's fly dripping rather than fly tipping. It doesn't have a name.

Think about... I've got an Amex in there with 16 digits on the front. I haven't been able to recall it. Must have used it 200 times in the last couple of years. I can recall fly dripping. The fact...

that my brain has decided to hook itself into the name for piss on a toilet bowl, but not the 16 digit number which is in between me and maybe getting out of a third world jail cell. It's also the name for piss on a toilet bowl that three people in the world would recognize. Many more now. Yeah, many more now. So there's just, I mean, probably a good one to finish on is, um, book recommendations specifically around language. So there's a book called the etymologicon, which is where I got a lot of this stuff from.

There's a bloke. Mark Forsy. He's amazing. So he has this line in here where he's talking about Milton, and this guy invented the following words, right? This is how generative this man was. Impassive, obtrusive, jubilant, loquacious, unconvincing satanic, persona, fragrance, beleaguered census, undesirable, disregard, damp, criticise, irresponsible, lovelorn, exhilarating, sectarian, unaccountable, incidental and cooking. He created all those for his words. So fly dripping. You've got to keep churning them out there. Have you seen Shakespeare's equivalent? No. insane. The number of words is great. The number of words that Shakespeare are created, which

are part of common parlance now is wild. But it's where we just accept language as it is. A fun one is from that book is where the word, and it's Christmas related, is where the word Turkey comes from. So we think it's basically because it's the, it came from Turkey. But interestingly, in Turkey, they call it essentially Hindu referencing to India. So it didn't come from Turkey and it didn't come from India, but it's this whole chain that exists. So Turkey did not come from I remember in that book, because I've got the paperback at that same book next to my bed after you recommended it. And shit comes from German words, is it schizer? But there's a couple of interesting potential explanations for it, one of them being store high in transit.

So if you had manure and you were taking it on a ship, you wouldn't want it down low where people could smell it. You'd want it in one of the higher storage units, store high in transit. It's one of these situations where I guess you get kind of a Churchillian drift explanation that's culpable but wrong because posh is port out starboard home and it was also to do with the sides of the ship that the upper class were going to be put on but store high in transit. Mark Forsyth on the show soon. Seth, you got anything before we leave or are you going to join us in saying goodbye in Malaysia? Yeah, I wish I could be with you guys. I'm glad to at least have a seat on the laptop. You've been sat on a, you look really comfy. You've been on one of the cushions in the corner for the entire episode.

That's it, ladies and gentlemen, Merry Christmas from us here. This is cool to be able to do this again every year, every wintertime back in Newcastle where we first started doing this podcast coming up on eight years ago now. Have a good period. Eat everything that you can. Take some time off and do a little bit of reading and review in between now and the new year. I know it's super duper intense but I think it's a

if used right it's a really nice period some people get sad around this time of the year but it's the shortest day of the year just went 21st so it's like typical stuff gets dark and then it gets lighter so I hope that our touchy-feely life hacks and lessons

has kept you appropriately festive and all of us except for Yusuf because he's selfish and in a different country we dressed up appropriately so anything to say Are we done? We're done. Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas. Give some love to your family members or if you're in Malaysia, family member, family member. Excellent. Merry Christmas, everyone. Merry Christmas. Unreal. Let's go. Woo!

If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom Reading List. It is 100 books that you should read before you do. die, the most interesting, life-changing and impactful books I've ever read with descriptions about why I liked them and links to go and buy them. And you can get it right now for free by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillex.com slash books.