Modern Wisdom - #341 - Life Hacks 205

Starting point is 00:00:00 What's happening people, welcome back to the show. My guests today are Johnny and Yusef from Propane Fitness and it is another Lifehack episode. If you're unfamiliar, we run through our favorite tools, apps, websites, strategies and resources for a productive and efficient life. Everything that we go through is linked in the show notes below if I've managed to find discount codes or anything like that, it should be down there. So today, expect to learn how to crush singing Happy Birthday. Why Yusef is leaving Evernote the most fun way to spend 12 pounds, how to get YouTube premium for 94 pence, the ultimate warm up routine, why Johnny is now the most interesting person in the room, how to sleep in Amsterdam Airport, and much more.

Starting point is 00:00:42 On top of that, the next couple of weeks are looking mad for guests, including Dr. David Sinclair, one of the world's leading longevity experts, Rob Reed talking about bio weapons, Rupert Spirer, Ryan Long, the comedian, Daniel Schmacktonberg is back on for another episode. Danny Trejo, the world famous Hollywood actor James Nester, the guy that wrote Breath, JPC's, comedians, Stuart Russell, the guy behind the alignment problem and Ryan Holiday back on for round two. It really is a jam packed couple of months coming up and the best thing you can do to continue to support the show.

Starting point is 00:01:18 If you love what I do, share this with a friend. There's three buttons in the bottom press, copy link and just post it in a group chat or fire it on a work intranet or something. That's the only thing that I would ask of you. That and making sure that you've pressed subscribe obviously, but you've done that, haven't you? You've done that because you're a good human and you're not a waste of space. But now it's time to learn some life hacks with Johnny and Yusef.

Starting point is 00:02:04 Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome back to the show. It is another life acts episode tools techniques and tactics for productive and efficient life. I tried to get some of the world's most productive people on to join me today but none of them are available. Then I asked Dominic Cummings he wasn't available so I've settled for Johnny Newsef from propane fitness.com welcome the show gentlemen. Hello, it's a pleasure. What have you been doing recently, other than the first time that we've been out for food, inner venue, post pandemic, so far happened last night?

Starting point is 00:02:35 Not much. Well, it feels like I'm doing a lot, but that's just like occasionally leaving the house and going to places. Gosh, like I can't handle this. Novelty. My calendar's really strained. Novelty. I'm enjoying it. I'm enjoying the slow, I'm pleased that there's a road map of gradual release,

Starting point is 00:02:56 because I think if it had just been in your house for a year and then... Like features of Apple products. You don't want the virtual reality headset right now. We want it to be drip fed to us over the next. That over the great way of looking at it. I don't think anyone would be ready for like augmented reality. So you need to phase it in. I'm fine. Yeah, just push it back. Keep on pushing it back by four weeks. Anyway, on this episode, if you're not familiar with life hacks, we go through whatever we've come up with to make life a little bit more efficient and effective over the last few months since

Starting point is 00:03:23 our last episode, all the links to everything that we talk about, if there's any discount codes or whatever will be in the show notes below. And as is tradition, up first is a hot potato for Jonathan Watson. There you go, Johnny. What have you got for us? Got it. I have an automation, a phone, an iPhone automation. As we were just talking about, I just have an old, cheap, chatty iPhone XR, so I'm sure the new ones can do this automatically. But one of the automations I have set up

Starting point is 00:03:55 is to automatically turn on low power mode at a low battery percentage, which just gives me peace of mind. A little bit, give me a nice landing strip, doesn't it? Is that not inbuilt already at 20%. There's an unoption that pops up and says battery is low. Do you want to turn on low power mode? I don't even get that.

Starting point is 00:04:15 I don't get that. It's already on. So when battery, 20%, when battery hits 20%, just turns on. There's an automation that runs that just turns on low power mode. So you've saved yourself from this notification that I'm talking about? Because the notification happens quite a lot, doesn't it? Moderately. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:04:33 So how do you do it? Where do you find the automation? So it's in, you know, there's like a shortcuts app inside of your iPhone in there. So if you have a just a play around, it's something that I've wanted to like ask you both about whether you have any of these, maybe there'll be some coming up today. But there's loads of stuff you can do, you can like custom code things. The most advanced I've got is I have a shortcut to my inbox in Omnifocus and it turns on low power mode. But it's just little things that you do all the time that you can just make your iPhone do for you. I made one that turns that blue light on there behind the vertical bookcase in my bedroom.

Starting point is 00:05:10 And it also, hey Siri, enabled. So hey Siri, turn on the bedroom light. That comes on big pimping. Big pimping. Ali and Ali Abdals is, okay, Google turn on fire and ice and all fucking hell breaks loose in the room where he records his videos. Like, things descend from the ceiling. This small woman comes up, Venezuela comes out of the floor and makes sure that she

Starting point is 00:05:39 swept everything and cleared it away and then she descends back into the basement. You've got to wonder why he's got a Google home thing there. Yeah, that's what I was talking about. That was my first thought. I kind of weakens the whole thing. Like it's cool, but obviously. I'm pretty sure it's okay, Google. I'm pretty sure it is.

Starting point is 00:05:56 Yeah, it is. Yeah. Shortcuts are coming to Mac in November, which is going to be big. Will it? Because most shortcuts not already enabled by third party applications. Alfredo. Yes, but so what shortcuts for Mac is going to be is an overlay of automata, because automata is a bit big and scary. It's like that there's terminal for the real Navy Seals and then there's automator for like the infantry and then there's shortcuts for the... Can be done. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:06:31 That's like the... Okay, cool. So automatically turn on low power mode and you go into shortcuts for that. You, Seth, the Smith Master. What have you got for us? I suppose I've got to start with the biggest announcement of the year. Is the, I'm leaving ever note. It's a show. Okay. So Apple notes, after all that, it was right under our noses. Now, it's sort of slowly emerging smoke face.

Starting point is 00:07:03 As you're stalk talking. Yeah. So funnily enough, Apple notes over time has just become more and more robust, stable, fast, and ever-node has managed to... I've never seen a software company manage to actively come a carzy themselves. Like, they were doing so well. They were doing so well. First, move our advantage. Huge customer base, really bought in community. Then they just pulled the pin. They were like, you know, it would be great if we just knew how we're building. Just knock every, yeah.

Starting point is 00:07:39 Just send all of our customers a poo in the post. That's not the equivalent of what they've done so what did the three things that have made you leave Evernote and what are the three things that have made you go to Apple notes? Speed. So Evernote used to be fast external brain being able to quickly access anything in the command bar. And they got rid of the command bar and they made it slower.

Starting point is 00:08:02 Now, those two things alone for something that's supposed to function as an external brain, means it's no longer fit for purpose. Your brain cannot have a lag, even if it's only a five or a 10 second lag. The mobile app can be up to 30 seconds, and it's not acceptable for something. So even though there's a few features that you might lose, I think for the sake of Apple notes with the alpha short cuts so that it's basically you can access a note from anywhere. Definitely worth it. There was a few exciting things coming to Apple notes as well, which is tags and quick note. So you can just have like in the corner of a screen, a kind of working memory dot TXT that Cal Newport calls it to just bong things in.

Starting point is 00:08:46 So if you're in a web page or whatever, you can keyboard shortcut just send it straight to that quick note and deal with it later. Something that you can do now on iPhone is change one of the settings so that, you know, when you swipe in from the top, the control center, there's a note button and you can ask it to always open up the same one.

Starting point is 00:09:06 And that can be your like, or a random, you can activate it. Yeah, you're kind of writing. Yeah, that's cool. That's cool. Why, why not notion? Notions good, but it's not really a writing, it's not really a writing app. It's more of a workspace like we use notion with propane. It's great for collaboration and tables and internal databases.

Starting point is 00:09:26 And it's good for organizing bits of information, content feed, that kind of thing. But it's cloud-based. It's not, you don't own your notes. And so if you're offline, you can't access stuff. So, yeah, if they introduce offline mode, which they keep saying they won't, but if someone comes along and did that.

Starting point is 00:09:48 I have to say, so for the people that aren't really into note-taking, as I really haven't ever been, I started on Evernote because you told me to and I used it for a bit and it was okay, it was more power-user-y, I guess, than Apple Notes. But I've just checked here, I have 1,824 notes on Apple notes. Every set of notes for a guest, for an episode is on there, all of the tracking for my adverts and stuff are on there. For the more power-based stuff, it really is far too unsophisticated because it's just a really slim, downward document. But for the seamless stuff like you're talking about and the brain dumping stuff, it really is great. That being said.

Starting point is 00:10:24 The synchronization as well, between devices. Yes, seamless. Absolutely. I'll be outside in the garden or I'll go for a walk, listening to a guest, noting down some things I might want to talk to them about. And then I can be finishing a note as I walk in the door and see it pop up on the computer as I walk toward it, which is, it's shit hot, right? When this is the advantage of going single architecture, single operating system, Apple across everything, but you can seamlessly link your AirPods between different devices

Starting point is 00:10:49 and switch between the two and all the rest of it. What do you use, Johnny? So it's interesting hearing you talk about your Apple notes volume because when you've told me this, I looked at my Apple notes and I have 1,529 notes. And I was saying this to you stuff that like I try to use, so I try to use note, I try to use Evernote, and I try to use Notion, then I try to use Craft, all on kind of use as you stuff's evolved through this journey, kind of people are just lagging behind him holding onto the coattails. Yeah. The premium productivity guy. But when I like need to write something down, I just, without even thinking about it,

Starting point is 00:11:30 I open my phone, open Apple Notes, and I just make a quick note. But why is that? It's quick. It's just like, there's no lag. Yeah, so like, wait, I suppose we'll have a note, like you open it up, and then you make a note, and then you've got to make sure later on that, like you put the note in the right place. It feels, for some reason, it's not this, just free form thing that you can put information

Starting point is 00:11:50 into. Whereas Apple Notes, it's literally just the list of notes. It's kind of what you need. It's just kind of what you need. It's not full of this and stuff now and they've made it better. But the original Apple Notes was literally just a list of blank documents. If they could, if they could have the main feature from Notion, which is pages within pages,

Starting point is 00:12:08 so hyperlinking notes within notes and nesting them and organizing the structure of the folder system in that way, that would be game over. Because that's the only thing that I'm really missing. It's such a, actually that and the toggle function, you know, to toggle down. Those are the two main, like to think about that, it's not exactly a power user feature,

Starting point is 00:12:30 but from a user interface perspective, it's so useful. So space efficient, isn't it? Yeah. Like, have that accordion. Yeah. And well, I suppose another one for people to check out then, if you want what Chris just describes, but you're kind of in between, like not wanting to do like, Rome research or obsidian, is have a look at something called Noter. It's currently in beta, N O T A dot m D. Absolutely beautiful. Like it's, it's just amazing. It's a mark down editor though, so it won't work as an external break because you can't put big files in. But it's purely for writing and yeah, linking your ideas.

Starting point is 00:13:03 If you're just doing writing, is it Odyssey? Not Odyssey. No, there's another one. There's Scrivener, which a lot of people use. And what else? Scrivener's one of them, but as... Oh, Eulices. Eulices, that's it.

Starting point is 00:13:19 Yeah. So those ones are for like screen, right? Screenplay is a novel and that kind of thing. Yeah, interesting. Anyway, my first one, so this is from my speech coach, Miles. So those ones are for like screen, right? Screenplays and novels and that kind of thing. Yeah, interesting. Anyway, my first one, so this is from my speech coach, Miles. And he identified the fact that when you're singing happy birthday for someone, everybody begins one octave higher

Starting point is 00:13:37 than they should do. And then when you get three quarters of the way through the song and you need to do the key change, you get nailed by that high note. So yeah, exactly. So what you really want to do is give it beans at the start like happy birthday to you. Like, and then when it gets to the happy, but you can just, if you've got it, give yourself headroom above the happy birthday song, right? Start one octave lower than you think that you need to and you and then if the kids aren't impressed and grab the face, smash it into the cake and go are you not entertained?

Starting point is 00:14:12 Fantastic, especially the second part. So if you're, so you start off sounding like a bit of a willy but you have the last laugh because you hit that high note. Key change, everyone else sounds like a 13-year-old trying to speak. You... Well, what people tend to do is just... Just almost kind of mouth that section. Yeah. Well, just mime it.

Starting point is 00:14:35 Especially the men. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, for the kind of the few strong people who can hit that note. But the worry is if you're still leading the pack and bellowing, you might be the only person singing. It depends on how good you are. Does everyone's going to be like, did he start one octave lower? Fuck, he and hell, he must listen, modern wizards and life hacks. Yeah, but there's always, there's always a couple of people, I've always noticed this,

Starting point is 00:14:57 when you're singing Happy Birthdays, there's always a couple of people, like, classically trained in theatre and belting out some operatic cello monster from the far side of the room and you're like, just leave it to you Yeah Maybe to you anyway, I really don't like singing happy birthday to be honest. What would you do? What's too long? Do you prefer for he's a jolly good fellow or hip hip hooray? Hip hip hooray Away with the whole thing. Really?

Starting point is 00:15:25 Yeah. It's just a bit too long, just awkwardly, especially if you're the one being sung too, and you're sat with a cake hype. I think that's part of it. I think part of it is the cringe-fest awkwardness that you need to endure. Because if it was easy,

Starting point is 00:15:41 it wouldn't be a sacrifice by anyone? It's the birthday bumps, but the PC new version, isn't it? The social birthday. With jazz hands. Yeah. The slight social awkwardness that everyone has to endure, that you're kind of like seen as a bit miserable and grumpy if you don't like smile and play along.

Starting point is 00:15:59 But it's his birthday. Yes, it's everyone's birthday once he heard. Right. Jonathan Blobson, what you got? Jonathan. Yeah, and Sebastian. This one, I think, you might both be... Well, you certainly won't be surprised about it, because I already told them about it, but I think you might be surprised at a Chris, which is... Linkist.

Starting point is 00:16:23 Okay, we've technically, technically already featured this three years ago, but I'm more, more than happy for you. You know what, this is the messy middle, like he's gone from like the just just read book summaries to must have fully architected. Yeah, to just read book summaries. I've got a reason. I've got a key. So, the, and I don't think it works for it. So what Blinkist is for anybody who doesn't know, it is a book summary service where they, and you said has a bad version that they are ill-dejews in a second called short form. I think that's what it's called.

Starting point is 00:17:02 It's like a 50 think it's called. I think it's called. I think it's called. I think it's called. I think it's called. I think it's called. I think it's called. I think it's called. I think it's called. I think it's called.

Starting point is 00:17:12 I think it's called. I think it's called. I think it's called. I think it's called. I think it's called. I think it's called. I think it's called. I think it's called.

Starting point is 00:17:20 I think it's called. I think it's called. I think it's called. I think it's called. I think it's called. I think it's called. I think it's called. I think it's not enough to get in the most podcasts. I would try listening to an audio book, but then you get the, like it was a cold winter as morning in 1985. You don't really get anything in 50 minutes. So I thought I tried it, I did the trial, and it doesn't work for every book, is there a problem?

Starting point is 00:17:36 So like books that are incredibly deep and complicated that can't really be done justice in 50 minutes, I wouldn't advise it. But if there's a book that you like I've always fancy reading perhaps that's a fair most like self-improvement books are a single concept that are padded out. What are some good examples of ones that you have blank-kisted? Essentialism. I really listened to. So this was my test. So I wanted to see if I could get the sort of the gist of essentialism from the blinks. And you more or less can, I think anyway.

Starting point is 00:18:11 Have you read the full book to compare it to? Most of the full book. Not covered together, but most of the full book. So it's a, if you want to kind of pick up concepts from popular books, but you don't want necessarily to commit to read the whole thing, I think it's a pretty good service. When I originally go on. Why not optimize.me? Because I tried both of these three or four years ago and I compared and I came up with

Starting point is 00:18:40 the synopsis of Brian Johnson does a better job of this. You think so? Yeah, I think so. I feel like Brian Johnson, all of his summaries, the same, it's always like, and this comes back to our fundees, brush your brain. Yeah, don't forget about me, hi, chick, said me hi. So I think that's the reason why not Brian Johnson.

Starting point is 00:19:00 Okay, yeah. It's just a bit, he's a bit much, isn't he? Maybe, I mean, given the fact that not many people, especially in the UK know about him, what he is doing, I'm aware he's got a business underneath him, but optimized up me is a fucking titan. Does it still exist? Yeah, yeah, he's going towards his 1000 philosophers notes, he's getting to working his way slowly toward that, isn't he? Which is just ridiculous. What's your preference, then, Seth?

Starting point is 00:19:32 Honestly, I am still using, I'm still just doing full books. Same. I've never been able to get it. And it's more because when you're listening to a book summary by Blinkist and so well I'm sure Johnny might disagree with this but what you're getting is not the summary of the book but you're getting what the guy who works at Blinkist deems to be pertinent points of the book and that might not overlap with what you think are pertinent points of the book. Now that might be good enough for you to get the gist of it and then

Starting point is 00:20:10 say like, okay, that's a good idea. I think it's functioned as an advert for me to read the full book. So if you're using it as like a tap-ass to be like, oh yeah, actually, I like that one and I'll go deeper into this and then brilliant, but I don't think you can get the full-time and attention with a summary. Completely in simpatico here, mate. Like, If you like to read books, you get sent lots of suggestions and you don't know what to read. That as a thin end of the wedge to work out should I dedicate, the Ryan Holiday talks about this, he reckons that the rest of his life, he's got about between 200 and 400 books that he can read, cover to cover, left. That's how much time he thinks he's got like some particular figure and he goes, when you think about it like that, you're like, okay, am I going to dedicate one of those to something that 300 pages in, I'm going to realize

Starting point is 00:20:53 his total bollocks. So yeah, I think it comes down to like why why are you reading the book? And so I think like pick up the book and think, well why am I reading the book? Like if it's a book that you want to read because you really like the author or you really like the side of writing or you really want to sort of bury yourself in a concept, Blinkist is not the right strategy for that. But even if you want to enact behavior change, surely, because let's say essentialism, right? If you listen to essentialism for 15 minutes, it's a very profound lifestyle change to become an essentialist, which I think both me and Yusef have converted to the Church of Greg McHughan on this.

Starting point is 00:21:32 So, it's a good example to use, because both of us are huge evangelists of essentialism, to absorb that message, which I agree, it is a book that has a single concept, do less of the trivial many, do more of the vital few, focus on your highest contribution. There it is, that's the book. But in order to be able to take that insight and feel the discomfort and hear the stories and learn the examples and think, right, this is something I'm actually existentially bought into. I think you can only achieve that unless you are, and you're not, but unless you are someone that is very easily swayed, like if you can be convinced of an argument in 15 minutes

Starting point is 00:22:14 for an entire book's concept, so much that you change your life around it, then maybe it works. Well, so I think that depends on the strength of the concept. So I think some of the most convincing things I've ever heard have not been like a five-hour thing, have been like a quote, for example, like a snippet of stoicism you can read and you're like, oh, fuck saying, that's right. And then you remember it and you can sort of recite it and talk about it. You have to be in a receptive mind state, you have to have an empty enough mind to hear that and be like, ah, right, it has to like have enough space inside you for it to bounce around on echo and be like,

Starting point is 00:22:48 oh, yeah, I need to do this. But certainly for essentialism, it was so far, I was so far down the bad habits of being a non-essentialist that even though it took me maybe four months to read the book like a longer in bits A lot longer than that. But it's still like, that was just about long enough to be able to fully digest it. Really? Not because of the complexity, but just because of the like, you need it in bits so you can be like, ah, yeah,

Starting point is 00:23:18 okay, I need to do this. And I think the way I look at it is like, it's a single concept that the reality of it is just very hard to do. So whether you spend 10 hours reading the book or not, I don't think anyone's less, anyone's more effective at saying no to things they ultimately normally do because they spent the entire time reading the book. I said, another example might be like digital minimalism. Like, you probably don't need to read. And, you know, I'm sure I'll get criticized by all the huge fans of these books, but like, I know a lot of people,

Starting point is 00:23:53 and I'm one of them who read the entire book who still have a problem with that. Right, so like, I'm absolutely convinced by it. I was convinced by it 10 minutes into the book. I've got the concepts of it, but like, did I need to read the whole thing to get the concept probably not. Could I have got the same thing from the summary probably?

Starting point is 00:24:10 So I think it, there's a lot of books that kind of fit into that category that are sort of general self development that are generally a single concept and there's hundreds of thousands of them. And if you want to read a lot of them, explore these different ideas and like pick and choose from a menu of things of like, I might want to try these five things to improve my day or whatever. I think it's quite a digestible way of doing it. It certainly seems to fit into your daily routine as well. This is a really important thing that if you have a particular block of time for an amount

Starting point is 00:24:39 of time, the reason that most podcasts aim to be around about an hour to an hour and 20 of the longer ones is that you can finish a podcast to and from your commute within a day. The optimal length and why a lot of BBC World Service and all this stuff, their podcasts tend to be about half an hour because they just want to get one commuting. So what you need to do is find media types that match the blocks within your day with which you can consume the media types. And as we've seen, if you don't do the audiobook on the morning because you need to pay an inertial price to get over that momentum so that you actually feel like you're enjoying

Starting point is 00:25:17 it. So yeah, man, hey, if it works for you, I'm all for it. Seth, what you got? Speaking of birthdays, this is just something you can do as a target for each birthday, as you get older, to set some kind of, like, just something fun for yourself so that the, my example, which is the most bro way to do this, is bench press my bodyweight for my age each year. And so something that, I mean, doesn't that, it could be like, say physical target or whatever

Starting point is 00:25:51 that's associated with your age, just to keep you on your toes and be like, oh, okay, like as I get older, I have to have some measure of progress. Like obviously it would be lovely to be benching like 75 kilos for 70 reps in 40 years. But I don't expect it's gonna be achievable forever. But yeah, just having some kind of target

Starting point is 00:26:12 so that you're not just like aging and crumbling away. What are the things? Can you do that? I didn't do it this year actually. So the life factor I don't idea to, but you should try. Yeah, because the gyms were actually. So the life factor, I don't idea too, but you should try. Well, yeah, because the gyms were closed, so I didn't have a bench press.

Starting point is 00:26:30 Mike, your housemate weighs similar to you. You could have just bench pressed him. Could have just, yeah, true, actually, floor press. Floor press, yeah. Harder as well. Oh, Mike, sorry, it's my birthday. Do you mind just, lying on me, pretty fast? You're crossing your legs.

Starting point is 00:26:42 What are the ideas do you think you've got other than bench press? So a bench press is a bit of a bro, but you, I mean, a squat, very achievable. Like for most people, well into the 40s, you could squat your body weight for that many reps. You could run for that many minutes. You could meditate for that many minutes. You could write that many pages or set it as like a monthly habit. I like that. I've got one that we have all used and all used together and I'm surprised that

Starting point is 00:27:13 no one's brought it up yet. I'm glad that I've managed to take it. The AeroB Pro disc, which is a type of frisbee, I suppose, if you're, it's technically a disc as I was corrected by my coach a couple of weeks ago, I sent a video of me and said, I'm playing frisbee on a field and he said, that's not fucking frisbee, it's a disc. Apparently Americans take frisbee and disc very seriously. But yet the aerobi pro, it's the record holder for the world's longest disc throw, which is insane. This guy launches it out of, I think, a baseball stadium or something similar. And yeah, it's just having that or other similar sort of games that you can play with a couple of mates or one mate slacklining was another one that I got into a couple of years ago, which is awesome. Aerobi pro, I got the same aerobi boomerang

Starting point is 00:28:12 that you can use. Nerf, those sort of whistling Nerf, American football, things with the fins behind them. Just having that, I think it's 11 pounds or 12 pounds, and the amount of sheer joy that even just us have got, let alone the times that we've used it separately is ridiculous. Everyone should have one. It is brilliant. There's a low learning curve. Like, slackline, you can't just be like, oh, let's just go out for a quick slackline with beginners.

Starting point is 00:28:41 They have to, but aerobie, like, anyone can throw something. And if they can't, it's great for the last time. We looked, the last time that I did it with you, you said, we're on a field near your house and it was Saturday evening, 6 p.m. peak, David off-cool water and barbecue on the ground with cans of red stripe time and we just decided to find the longest straight line in a two football field long field and started launching this thing perfectly flat really because we practice quite a lot so quite I'm sure everyone else thought that we look like pricks, but to me, I felt like a king. Yeah, I felt like a king. You don't want to get it in kind of bridge of the nose, do you? If it's kind of coming at, because it's so flat, you can't really see it. I'm just just appears for a second.

Starting point is 00:29:36 Yeah, you have the most elegant disc form, Johnny, ever. It just appears, yeah, it's so smooth man honestly it's like when you watch it is amazing at polling are you really is that not long leave is that I think it helps there's a few things like there's a few sort of niche things like that where so with with with frisbee or disc there was a field in my first year of uni there was a huge field next to it, and we had a aerobi, and we just spent hours and hours throwing it. So I think anything like that, if you put a lot of time in. So another example of that's guitar hero.

Starting point is 00:30:14 No way. Do you get a guitar hero? That is it. That is a skill that I didn't expect you to have. Expert level guitar hero. Can you do what is it through fire and flame? Just about to ask. Oh, really?

Starting point is 00:30:28 That's like the ultimate level, doesn't it? I need to see this. So the difficulty with it is, like, I went into a game about two years ago and said, you still sell guitar hero and the guy laughed at me. Ha, ha, ha, ha. You stood it, stood and laughed at me. And apparently it's like, like this most sought after thing you

Starting point is 00:30:46 just can't get a hold of them and just stop producing it. That's crazy. Wow. But that guitar here is another example of like friends round and it's just in the corner and anyone can just have a go and some people are naturally really good and some people are telling you. I guess an Intender Wii is probably kind of similar to that, right? Have you played table tennis on your Oculus Rift?

Starting point is 00:31:06 No, I sold it. I told you I sold it. You sold it. Apparently. So you can play table tennis, and because it's already quite a light game, anyway, there's not much resistance, it feels the most real out of all the things you can do in the world. Does it fall to cross into reality?

Starting point is 00:31:21 Do you improve your real world table tennis tabling? I reckon there will be a few skills that you can port quite well, probably surgery to some extent as well. I saw during the build up to the Logan Paul Floyd Mayweather fight that Logan Paul was preparing with a virtual reality headset on and a pair of VR gloves. I don't know why that was so. Do you know why I have the Quest, the cheap one? Quest bars. Quest bars. An Oculus Quest. They brought out a really low priced one.

Starting point is 00:31:53 Yeah. Not the one that's a couple of ground. It's like 200 quid. Facebook make it. I own one of those. Okay. So I've played table tennis on it. We need to test it out. Someone said that the next step is that they take her front and side profile photo of you and they can map it as your face. And because it has eye tracking inside it, you could have a chat with someone and be making eye contact with them fully digitally. Well, they've just added this feature to it, which is hand tracking. So, you know, how

Starting point is 00:32:27 there's normally the controllers. Now, you can just use your hands. Does that front facing cameras? Yeah, right. So, you can pinch and throw and grab, and it completely tracks. And the weirdest thing about it is, like, why it sometimes feels real as you do that. And the hand responds how you would think your hand responds. And so I suppose there's a there's a moment where your brain thinks like, this is just reality. You've all seen that video of the guy doing the climbing up the side of the

Starting point is 00:32:55 mountain in the middle of a game, stop or something. And he falls off that and crashes straight through in the real world, crashes straight through the screen because his body tips him over thinking that that's what's happened. Anyway, by an aerobi pro disc, everybody needs one. When we do a life hacks on a server next, I'll bring the Oculus and we'll film some examples. Do you remember when I was in the

Starting point is 00:33:16 before a life hacks where I made you guys watch VR porn? I do remember that. I thought it was a VR horror thing that you showed us. I showed Johnny the porn All right I was thinking like if you said for my watch the same thing use this vision Right like a zombie thing. Yo Han what have you got What have I got is it me? Is it what you said no, it's just been What did he say birthdays is a benchmark target

Starting point is 00:33:48 Bench. Mark target. What am I going to say? I've gone. It's also a birthday thing. I was reminded of it because it was my birthday a week ago. I got an email from myself on my birthday that I wrote a year ago. The reason that I wrote the email to myself a year ago was because of, how's it called? Follow up then. No. Six minutes. Oh, three birds. Six minute diary. Oh yes, one of the weekly challenges. So I had it on my to-do list for literally months to write this email to myself and I was like, oh yeah, I'll do that.

Starting point is 00:34:30 It's the Kabuki movement systems of moving it to the next day. And I eventually did it. And I got this email from myself and it was bizarre reading it. Can you give us an excerpt? It was just sort of the way that I wrote it was like what I was doing at the moment, so I was speaking about, so we just got into lockdown in the UK, or like we'd been in lockdown for a couple of months, and like I was talking about how I think it's gonna be

Starting point is 00:34:53 back open again for August and all sorts of stuff, and then things that were going well, talking about things that were just happening in propane, like we were just about to hire Alex, stuff I was doing in training, stuff that was like plans we had for the rest of the year. And then like, stuff I wanted to achieve that I've done all of which is really cool. And then like, see you in a year. I got this email. It was so weird, you like read it and you think, this is a scam or something, this is weird.

Starting point is 00:35:17 And yeah, oh no shit, I wrote this. And so it would really reflect. Yeah, it's really fascinating. I did that for myself a while ago. It was a website that sends you an email in 10 years time. So I did it at 18 and received it at 28. And. Oh my God. Yeah, I mean, there's people that do it with videos as well, isn't there? If you've seen like the viral video of like a conversation

Starting point is 00:35:38 with my 12 year old self and they've set it up like a back and forth conversation. That's cool. Yeah, I am. I've said for ages, it would be so fascinating to be able to take snapshots of your consciousness and then be able to revisit them because the things that consume your mind now and the things that consume your mind two years from now are so well, they should be different if you're making progress, right? You should be casting off the worries and the concerns and the anxieties that no longer matter and you should be focusing on the worries and the concerns and the anxieties that no longer matter

Starting point is 00:36:05 and you should be focusing on the things that do. We all should be moving toward an essentialist's life, I guess, in one for both in terms of our thoughts and our actions, but yet even just thinking about, okay, so what am I doing at the moment? What are my predictions for the rest of this year and then stress testing those or comparing them against what actually happened? That's pretty cool. I think I did, like, what am I doing? What am I, like, what's going well, what's not going well? What am I worried about? What am I like working on? And the interesting thing was all the worries, like none of them happened. Not a single one. All of the things that I was working on, I got done. And then like some of the things that I was

Starting point is 00:36:38 like clearly consumed with just don't even know even a feature anymore. So it is just this reminder of like at the time that was just my absolute my reality like consumed a hundred percent of my day. It's your world yeah. And now like so little bit matters. So the I use as you said just mention I use something called follow up then. So you just send it to service where you send an email to like one year at followup then.com and it just sends it back to you in a year or you can set it as a specific date or whatever. But it really easy thing to try. I highly recommend giving it a go. Send an email to yourself. Is it number one year or is it O any one number one year at follow up, then.com?

Starting point is 00:37:19 Awesome. All right. The date as well. Wait up. This is from Alice, who is a new member of team propane. And I feel like she's going to beat me up if we don't suggest this one. Tesco, owned brand stuffing. So the reasoning behind this is that when you're dieting, stuffing is a great kind of filler. It's pretty low calorie, it's very flavor, some very rich with flavor. So it hits the spot with all of the like when you have like a savoury kind of but it's very low calorie density.

Starting point is 00:38:00 She said if you're out of the Tesco one, then little is also a pretty good substitute. You have to be in Lidl to get that though, don't you? You do have to be in... That's how it works, you know. That's tough for me how it works. So we were... She was like, I'm a bit reticent to say this because if I do, and then everyone goes on, buys it. She'll be struggling up against lower demand. I'm pretty convinced that a good portion of the net worth of Lindalsk Farg has been directed from this podcast. So Tesco, what are the macros on it?

Starting point is 00:38:37 Pretty good. So neither of us have tried it. She only recommended this to us like a couple of days ago, which is a big listener of the Lifehack series, especially. I was saying that stuffing is one of those things that I feel like I am never given enough off in a meal. Well, it's such a rarity to even have it, right? How many times a year do you have stuffing? Maybe for me, it's easily sub five, yeah. Yeah. And then whenever you do, you never look at a plate and go, easily sub-five, yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:39:05 And then whenever you do, you never look at a plate and go, a bit much stuffing up there. Yeah, it's walking out of the way. What is this? What is this stuffing there? It's really nice, isn't it? I really like to have my favorite bits, but there's never enough of it.

Starting point is 00:39:18 And it's never something anyone talks about. What if by using it as a dietary aid, you spoil stuffing for you? Well, I can buy it. Is that a price that you're willing to you. Is that a price that you're willing to pay? Is that really a price you're willing to pay? I'm quite keen for just get it out by system 1s and for all, and just have a big bowl of stuffing. Of the remainder of your life's quota allowance of stuffing in one sitting. She's just seeing it's like, because it's one of those things that like, when you were

Starting point is 00:39:42 a child, you think, well, when I'm older, I'm going to be able to make my own dietary decisions. And if I want enough stuffing, I'm going to bloody hell enough stuff. I'm just going to wait for the conversation. Johnny, what are you eating? It's a bowl of stuffing. Leave me alone. I've been waiting for this for 15 years, just leave me alone. My own man now.

Starting point is 00:39:59 Okay. Right. This is a life hack that I got that was submitted from Craig Davison. He heard me talking about YouTube Premium on the last episode, which everybody should get. Everyone needs YouTube Premium. I am now four, five, six, one, steep. Michaela Peterson told me to get it,

Starting point is 00:40:17 and I do not regret it at all. It is fantastic. Now, the life hack is that if you set your billing location to Argentina, you can get a... He said it's on the last one, I think. You can get a YouTube premium subscription for 94 pence. I didn't say it. I might have told you about it separately.

Starting point is 00:40:37 I might have messaged you about it. Anyway, it's a very crisp solution. Well, it's not a crisp solution. This is the most you solution that I've ever seen. Well, no, it reminds me. Mine's to bypass all that and just use e-net like a considerable person. OK, so Craig says, if you've got a VPN, you need to get a VPN. You can get a surf shark.deals slash modern wisdom.

Starting point is 00:40:57 And you need to set it to Argentina. Then when you get to the payment, you add a random Argentinian address, but include your UK postcode somewhere in Address line one. Work for me with Starling Bank, no difference at all, and you only need to use the VPN as a one off. 94 pens a month, YouTube premium. I can't think of a better way to spend 94 pens. There we are.

Starting point is 00:41:21 OK. Silence as the crowd is stunned. I just don't want to stir the pot. I feel like I'm fairly Like I'm fine with it. I'm not changing. I'm also not changing, but if the price if price was a limiter if you said 12 13 pounds a month YouTube premium. Yeah, it's a Travel tavern if you said that it's too much then here is your Here is your thin end of the wedge. Right, Johnny, what you got?

Starting point is 00:41:47 So, I'll open with a question for both of you, which is when you last trained in the gym, did you do a warm-up? Very briefly. Yes, but that's a recent thing. I'm not sure if I've faced my mortality. Interesting. Manel pause. So that's basically the life hack. It's not, I suppose it's not really a, there'll be some people who listen, but obviously, mate, but having a, like a written written down thing that you do each time warm up makes such a difference in training. And it's the first thing I skip. It's like, it's like year seven PE level advice. I'm circles. Do you do arm circles?

Starting point is 00:42:39 Yes. So I actually do arm circles. Hang on, can we back up for a second? Hold on. Are you as an international level power lifter telling us that a game changing life hack for you is doing a warm-up? Yeah, this is because the power lifters warm-up is empty bar for three reps, 60 kilos for three reps, 80 kilos for like, no, well, hundreds, you just go up in 20 kilo plates, but maybe a double, and then you would spend. It's either that or spending like 45 minutes doing all kinds of like weird hip activation,

Starting point is 00:43:16 and then two hours later you hit a first, you'd work set. So I think the only thing that really matters is just elevating body temperature, like for most people. Did you listen to the episode I did with Dr. Sam Spinelli about how to create the perfect warm-up? So I actually think I did.

Starting point is 00:43:34 Yeah. It was quite a while ago. Yeah. Awesome. Anyone that needs to design their own, just go back and listen to that. You can be within 10 minutes up to speed with, not 10 minutes of the podcast, yeah, it's 50 minutes. Podcasts longer than the warm up, but designing it makes sense. What's yours? Walk us through yours briefly. So I do a, like, empty bar. So I train in my garage, so I don't have any cardio equipment

Starting point is 00:43:58 or anything like that. So I do an empty bar, like barbell complex. I've just like some basic movements for sets of 10. I do some foot, like a light foam rolling, just to sort of feel a bit less, a bit less tender, a bit more supple, and then things like, it depends on what I'm doing, so I'll do like leg swings or like some dynamic stretching, for lower body or upper body. It only takes like 5, 10 minutes, but prior to touching the barbell, I'm sweating. Apart from the complex. Apart from the complex. It is technically my defense, a different barbell. So, prior to touching the main, the barbell of the day, it's a, I'm sweating. I think that's the key thing. It's like, I know it sounds so, it's always speaking about last night, right, about how you start off doing simple things and

Starting point is 00:44:43 you make everything immensely complicated, and then you come back to just like it might be a good idea to just sort of get nice and warm while they're doing some some strange sector size but like especially if you train for any kind of performance are you doing you know compound heavy lifts the performance of the session is better the injury risk of the session is lower you generally just feel better but it's the first thing you skip and I very rarely see people doing one consistently. Unless you do a CrossFit class or something where it's part of... Built-in.

Starting point is 00:45:13 You said was it right out or prescribed it somewhere? Is it on a board somewhere in the... I actually have it in an Apple Notes file that's been tinned into a checklist. I don't know whether you've used this, but when you use a in an Apple Notes file that's been tinned into a checklist. And I don't know whether you've used this, but when you use a checklist, functional Apple Notes, the thing at the bottom gets grayed out and gets shrunk to the top.

Starting point is 00:45:33 So basically just like, you don't do it. And then at the end, I just uncheck them all. So I just have it on the ground, I'm on my phone, press through it as I'm doing it. And then I just make sure I'm, you never thought we're putting a whiteboard up in your, I have, yeah, I have.

Starting point is 00:45:48 I quite like going off phone whenever I'm doing programming that's been written for me, constantly checking my phone, doing stuff just, I appreciate for a powerlifter that's got all manner of gizmos attached to the bar speed and that's RPE and all that stuff. If I could show you the spreadsheet that I have to navigate to just do a training session, it's frankly ridiculous. It's pushing the limits of Google sheets. Yeah, it resource limitations. So to give you some perspective, it's so big and vast, the sheet that I will, like enter what I've done.

Starting point is 00:46:24 And it takes five or six seconds. Bear in mind, this is cloud based and Google takes five or six seconds to calculate what that means. So the idea of like just using a whiteboard instead of that might be a bit of a challenge. Too low tech. For the warm up, I could definitely do it for sure. Nice. Seth, what you got? I've stolen this one from Johnny. Now I don't know if we discussed it on the last one. But the hack is, if you're ever faced with a office box of crispy cream donuts, don't piss about.

Starting point is 00:46:59 Don't go for the plane disc with the ring in the middle. Just go for the nice one, like the Nutella or the Biscoff or whatever, because we looked at the calories and they're not that different between the plane boring one and the all singing, dancing, flashing lights one. I'm going to throw a spanner in the hood. Oh no, okay. I prefer the original glazed. Well that's fine if you prefer it then then you know you because it's still slightly lower calories. It's just not that much lower than but I resent your implication that it is of a lower caliber. I resent your implication that, pejoratively for most people,

Starting point is 00:47:47 they don't want you, the basic bitch ring thing. That is my people. That really reduces your preferences, that no, everyone's like, oh, I like the vanilla mission, the real problematic for me. However, the real thing to avoid is the mocker, because that is, the mocker crispy cream doughnuts is similar calorie amount to any of the doughnuts. So just eat a doughnut.

Starting point is 00:48:15 Why does it taste bad? Well, I think it, I'm sure it'll be alright, because it's very calorie. Are you bad melding in dough donut that you've never eaten? What's the reason to avoid the mocha because of the calories? Oh, the mocha drink, not a mocha flavor donut. Right, thank you. We are all on the same page now. Right.

Starting point is 00:48:35 Okay, so your argument is when faced with a selection of crispy cream donuts, the calories across the board are fairly similar. So just pick the one flavor wise that you're going to enjoy the most and don't really concern yourself with the calories. Yeah. Because from a percentage, like from the amount extra, it's still a couple under calorie to donut. So just enjoy yourself. Don't try and pick a low calorie donut because it's not going to happen. I like it. What am I going to do for this one? So this would have been really perfect if the government hadn't decided to wreck everyone's travel plans.

Starting point is 00:49:12 But I'm going to put this one in as people may be getting ready to, a lot of people from America listening and people getting ready to start traveling around. It's a double up life hack. The first one is Gate D2 in Amsterdam Airport. So Amsterdam Schiphol is a commonly used connecting airport for many flights going through Europe and to further on. They have designed the entire airport very well,

Starting point is 00:49:42 but it's done in a manner that makes it incredibly hard to sleep if you can only sleep lying down because everything has those judding up bars in between that they're masquerading as armrests, but actually they're just to stop people from sleeping. However, Gate D2 in Amsterdam Airport is almost never used. It's all in alcoves and they don't have any armrests on there. So you can go if you've got a three hour layover, often coming back from somewhere you've arrived at 7am and you're waiting to get to your next place at 10am. You can go there, set an alarm for a couple of hours.

Starting point is 00:50:18 If you've got a face mask in a pair of airport pros, you're silent, dark, able to lie down. You're in a place that's so low traffic that your possessions are probably fairly safe, and you can stretch out. There you go. Gate D2. The other cool thing about that is, at Gate D2, it will just be a load of modern wisdom lessons. So you can just speak, it's like a real life discord server, yeah.

Starting point is 00:50:41 I'm mad, you listen to that, no. There are good air'll be loads of people lying down with an eye asking that part pros and you'd be like, this is weird. This is us. But these are my people. None of them want to talk to you, but you'll just know you'll be in good company. I love that. And the second part of this was something that I did in, Dubai last year, which I can't believe that I never did before, as soon as you arrive anywhere on holiday, just go to the nearest supplement store and buy a small part of protein. No one ever hits their protein target when they're away.

Starting point is 00:51:19 You're always just in between meals and struggling to get stuff by whatever nitroflex or... I've seen muscle. I've made a mistake in New York. I bought muscle milk and then... It does not sound great. It sounds great.

Starting point is 00:51:35 It's nice, but it's... Eastrogen? Predominantly sugar. Oh, it's basically a weight gainer with like a tickle of protein, but it's just big. What you really want is ideally like a way concentrate or an isolator or something, don't you? But it's easier than taking it out with you because that's got all manner of potential havoc

Starting point is 00:51:52 to reconsight if you're luggage or getting stopped. I'll also, what's this big bag of powder that you've got here? But yeah, just go and holiday, get yourself a shaker by what is it? What's, is it like a two pound or a one kilo? Yeah, half kilo is not gonna be enough. One kilo will get you through that.

Starting point is 00:52:09 Be like two shakes a day for a week, not that you need that necessarily, but you'll hit your protein much more easily. It'll keep you satiated, and you'll just feel less guilty. So something that I was feeling grateful for the other day. So I went on like a travel around the UK and was in a similar situation where like you're some short on protein, you haven't had much

Starting point is 00:52:30 fiber and you think like I'd be great, I have a couple of protein bars that will sort me out, it does like, ticks both boxes. If you go back like to when we were navigating supplements for the first time, the thought of being able to get a protein bar from like any WH Smith you go past would just be unheard of. You to get a protein bar from like any WH Smith you go past would just be unheard of. You'd have to get them from like predator nutrition or you know, it would only be like predator was the only place to have that. Best store owned by a man with a face tattoo, yes. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:52:57 Exactly. And they've got like shelves in the back that are all just pro hormones and then some quest bars. Now, you go to boots and get like every grade bar flavor and it's brilliant that that exists. So I used to pack types of protein and take them with me. The fact that you can just get them wherever you are now. Brilliant. Brilliant. Johnny, what you got? It is me. So this is another, this is similar to Blinkist, but it is Curio. You hit it over the phone. Nope. Yusef has, because Yusef was, Yusef saw the Curio product map two years ago when it was about

Starting point is 00:53:42 to be released. I mean, you signed up for the beta. I actually think that you enjoy pre-release product more than the full release. Is such an anticipatory being, aren't you? Yeah, it's just like the greyhounds pulling at the unleash. I just want to try the new thing. What are the only people I know who gets actually excited about apps being released and updated? It's so exciting.

Starting point is 00:54:07 But having you as a friend in our friend group is perfect because we're never going to miss anything because we were alerted about it eight months before. When it got leaked on Apple News.io, like, you know, we're sweet. Okay, so what's this Curio thing? Curio is... So the first thing that actually drew me to them was their Instagram ads are really impressive, I think. So their, like, their angles are really impressive, which is, and you may have seen them,

Starting point is 00:54:34 there's people going down an escalator and like the London Underground. And everything's in black and white, apart from one person who's listening to something. Everyone's reading. And this one person's listening to something and they're in bright vivid colors and the angle is like, be the most interesting person in the room.

Starting point is 00:54:47 I said that's so cool. I caught my attention. Clicked on it. So it's the same problem as Blinkist, which is like I have these windows of time where I just want to listen to something interesting. So Curio takes like articles from, you can ask it where to pick them from. So it's basically what you guys do with pocket where you're sort of self-sourcing the information, but it does that for you and it's taking it from, like, wherever you want to listen to stuff, like the economist financial times, like stuff that honestly I would just never read,

Starting point is 00:55:14 but I end up listening to, I listen to stuff about like AI or like the labor market, or like stuff that is actually really interesting, it's not all just current affairs and news, it's like really detailed concepts and topics that are just narrated by people. And it's a subscription. It is a subscription. How much? I think it's like 40 pounds a year. That's not much, isn't it? Well, not when you consider that like what you get for that, I think it's pretty good. So Curio sounds like an audio equivalent of the browser, which

Starting point is 00:55:42 I think I've mentioned to you guys before. Now the browser is five articles per day hosted on a sub stack, but also delivered to your inbox, but also you can get an RSS reader and stuff like that. And they have the listener, which is five audio podcasts of some kind or another. But the main thing, I think that both me and you are getting out of Curio and the browser is just stepping out of our echo chambers. Now what you realize as soon as you start to listen or read stuff like this that's curated by someone else is how narrow your own vision of what you are interested in is. You think, I am so much more interested in tons of stuff. I'm really going to enjoy all of this. And I listen to the same six podcasters and read the same whatever.

Starting point is 00:56:25 But the problem is, if you decide to venture into this new podcast world or new article world or whatever and you get the wrong article from that or the wrong podcast, you're like, that's not really for me. So what you need is someone to take the top filtering of the best stuff from the best channels and feed it to you. So yeah, I think I think you I'm interested in Curio and if people prefer to read the browser is fucking it's so it's the only reason that I have things to talk about that aren't already from my kind of world view. But it's a very good point like you have to have the curation because it's like you know if you've you've got a friend who's like, oh, I don't like prawns. You know, like, one of the last time you had a prawn, our 10 years ago, and you're like, right,

Starting point is 00:57:09 well, try one of these and then they try and you're like, oh, actually, no, that wasn't a very good one, but then they've already thought like, price, all prawns are terrible. Yeah. And they've tired them all with the same brush. Well, so you nailed it, which with like all of these, all of these publications. I have some really interesting stuff in them. But none of us have the time or the patience or the inclination to sift. And because there's so much stuff that we

Starting point is 00:57:32 won't find interesting. So if there's a service that just does that for you, and it's constantly varied, and it's from different places. So there was an article I listened to this morning about Steve Jobs and some stuff he did at Apple. And then there was one about AI. And then there was one about how bars and restaurants in the UK are struggling to hire people because of the way the labor market is changing. And it's like 50 minutes of time, you know, that was really interesting.

Starting point is 00:57:54 To open your world view in a way that you would have never been able to do yourself as well. Exactly. Yeah. That's a really good one. I hope that the platform and stuff is good. Right. It is. Seth, what you got? That's a really good one. I hope that the platform and stuff's good. Right. It is. Seth, what you got?

Starting point is 00:58:07 This is from Andrew Robson, who you are. You are betraging other people's life hacks because you don't have any. I've got loads, but we've got my previous one. So I just, I don't know if you guys know this, but I split mine into physical and digital. I don't know if you guys know this, but I split mine into physical and digital. So mine was digital, very similar to Johnny's previous one. I thought, ah, we could do with the physical one now. So Andrew Robson, lovely man who we've worked with, has suggested. He said, I have a life hack for people with dogs. Thanks for that, Johnny, that I keep meaning to send you. You can get lint rollers,

Starting point is 00:58:44 which you can wash under the tap and reuse. They take 15 seconds to wash. So there's a macro level hack at a system level that removes the need for that, which is that when you're picking the dog, get one that doesn't malt. When you get a dog, don't they need to be groomed more frequently though? Correct. So you've jumped out of the frying pan. Well, it just depends which do you consider?

Starting point is 00:59:11 Where do you want your battle to be on the dogs back or on your floor? Would you rather be like having to Hoover a pair is constantly for the entirety of the dog's life or just have this one batched thing that happens once every six weeks. Um, do you know the brand of this, Yusuf? It'll be like pound shopped. But what's it called? It's called Washeable Lint Roller or something. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:59:34 For dog hair, cool. Okay, yeah, I'm all for that. Have you seen, um, I think it's Shark, the vacuum manufacturing co-ever you got a shark Hoover, Johnny, that's got the hair removal. No, but I've seen what you're referring to. Yeah, because if you've ever had a Dyson stand up vacuum cleaner and hair or something's got caught in it, the sound that occurs, it emanates a noise that is like what I imagine judgment day will sound like. It is so painful. That was happening upstairs. I had to keep my mic about 10 minutes ago because the upstairs neighbors seemed to be just like, I think they're deaf or something. They're just the who's

Starting point is 01:00:19 friends. What's it used to have sex? It's the same flat but they they've rotated, so they've gone from sex to loud hoovering with lots of hair. Was there a person who kept deferring their alarm by a couple of minutes every morning as well? Yeah, she would set the alarm for 5am, and then snooze it every 10 minutes for two hours. Oh, thank you. Oh, thank you.

Starting point is 01:00:42 And just because she must enjoy snoozing or something. So I she knocked on the door because I had a parcel for it. And I was like, by the way, you know, your Alexa, do you mind just so what happened was every night, you just hear like a mumble, and then an alarm is set for 5 a.m. And alarm is set for 5 10 a.m. And alarm is set for 510 am and alarm is set for 520 am all the way up to 7am. What did she say when you asked her to stop being such a prick? Looked a bit surprised. Well, because you've like, she'll feel seen and exposed because it's like probably her little habit that you know what a solution to this would be, sir, if it would probably

Starting point is 01:01:21 maybe cost someone will be able to tell us in the comments, but I reckon it would cost less than 1500 pounds. And I think that you would be able to extend the cord of your lamp, put a layer of sound insulation in, put another board in, and then put a slightly lower ceiling in with more, with the same plastering over and then put your light back in. And I reckon for 1500 qu 1500 quid you could depending on how much sound from above you contributes to your life's misery. I reckon you could get rid of it for probably background. But as in soundproof my ceiling. Yes. Not ask her to soundproof her floor.

Starting point is 01:01:56 Alternatively. Well, it's the same thing. Yeah. It's one and the same. You could also just get some great earplugs. Or airport pros. I get like, you know, shotgun shooting ear defenders and then you can be out like a light. But the more annoying things when you're podcasting to be honest,

Starting point is 01:02:12 because I just immortalize. We haven't picked, I've heard anything. Because I've been tapped, tapped, tapped, tapped, and tactically. Right. As is tradition toward the end of a life hacks episode, stuff that we have been either reading or watching on Netflix and such. And I am going to open up with Marcella. What do you think?

Starting point is 01:02:38 Sorry. Oh, come on. Come on. What? Have you seen all of it. Have you seen all of the season? Yeah, right up to the Irish season. Really, really peed us out towards the end, doesn't it? Yeah, okay, so it lags a little bit. But I just saw it. It was strong opening. Yeah, it was different.

Starting point is 01:02:58 It's sort of like an edgy line of duty, less about the actual story lines and more about the main character who is going through some dissociative psychotic breaks and you kind of see this get worse. And then the end of season two is probably one of the biggest twists in a story that I've seen in quite a while. I just thought it was quite compelling.

Starting point is 01:03:19 It's on ITV, which annoyingly, unless you upgrade for £3.99 a month on ITV Hub, has inbuilt, hard-coded advert on TV that you can't get past. However, they have a seven-day ITV Hub pro-free trial, no obligation. So if you read... And if you register in the Czech Republic, you can post code to somewhere in Russia and you can get it. They can never catch you. But you can just, if you want to pound through three seasons of Marchella, you can do it within the window of time of that.

Starting point is 01:03:55 But yes, that's my first one. Johnny, were you been watching or reading or YouTube video in recently? Time on BBC with Sean Bean and Stephen Graham. Blasted. Blasted. You've blasted. I love it. You've seen that mega mix, that super cut of all the time that Sean Bean said, blasted. What's that show that you was in for millions of seasons? Not Tinker Tadal or Soldier spy. It was like the Napoleon Bonaparte shit where it's from... Oh, um... Oh God. Anyway, that thing, um, and...

Starting point is 01:04:34 A single word. Highlander or something like that. Frontier. No. Sharp. Yes, thank you. Yes. Looks like it should have been called... it should have called it Highlander. But anyway, this is super cut of him saying blasted all the different times he does it. Anyway, time.

Starting point is 01:04:53 So he has his... I think it's what his natural act is. Like, excuse me, mate. It's brilliant. So it's a very... well, I mean, I don't know. I've not been to prison. So I can't... but I imagine it's a very, well, I mean, I don't know, I've not been to prison. So I can't, but I imagine it's a very quite, so I'll normally watch things in the evening and like to wind down before I go to bed. This actually kept me up because it's so like intense. Yeah, anti-advertise. Well, I mean, we did a podcast with a doctor who has just come out of prison after two years,

Starting point is 01:05:28 and his description was... He sounds like... So I've listened to that, he sounded fairly relaxed about the whole thing, I thought. Yeah, I mean, he got day leave to go and do a masters. Yeah, I can go. That helps. You think Sean Bean should have just asked to be... You're doing masters.

Starting point is 01:05:43 You're doing masters. Busters. Busters. Busters. Busters. Er, right. Time. What's it on? I play BBC. Cool.

Starting point is 01:05:53 I like it. Seth, where you go? The Mortal Kombat movie 2021. You described this last night over dinner as the sort of movie that six-year-old you would have designed the time the ten-year-old. Ten-year-old, okay. Ten-year-old me, like it, the, yeah, the plot was written by a year and nine, so 13-year-old. But it's, it's you, if anyone born around 1990, it was a cultural phenomenon. And so to see it realized in very good production value and it's brilliant, it's very much like satisfying it in a child. It's not the

Starting point is 01:06:34 kind of thing to take your girlfriend to, I think, definitely would not be very popular. But what it is is the contrast. So they, because they did a because they did a film back in 1993 or something. And at the time, I remember watching it and being like, whoa, this is really scary, really graphic. And you've got scorpion takes off his mask and he's like a flaming skull. And looking back, it's actually a bit enough. It's all clearly a polystyrene

Starting point is 01:07:03 that's been dipped in petrol and sat on fire and things. But when you see the contrast against the current film, it's like, oh, this is good. There's lots of silly little quips and the occasional gratuitous like someone reaches into this big reptiles heart and pulls it out and then says fatality and all that stuff. So there's some cheese kind of fourth wall breaking. I mean you're watching a Mortal Kombat movie. It's a movie based on a video game that was cheesy. It was always going to be that. That's hey if you if you reckon it's good. I've just gone back and looked at what we suggested

Starting point is 01:07:37 on the last life hacks. Did both of you watch three identical strangers? No. Did you not? But you did, you sir. I did. Yeah, what did you think? Do you enjoy it? Fantastic. Like, you come away with a real sadness about...

Starting point is 01:07:55 Yeah, it's quite malencali-y. Yeah, humanities, like, level of cruelty. I think you're Johnny. I've realized why I've not watched it. And it's quite, like, I don't buy a thing,, it's the, I don't want to spoil it. So I've just realized why I've not watched it. And it's quite, it's not embarrassing, but stupid. It's in my to read list. Yeah, well, you see. Struggle with that, I imagine.

Starting point is 01:08:13 Apple notes, you're just going to be difficult. It's very, it's now in the correct list. Cool. No one needs to worry. My next one is gangs of London. I think both me and Johnny have watched this. Film or a series series? It's very shithole. It's probably the best series I've watched this year.

Starting point is 01:08:33 It's probably better than the most recent season of line of duty, which ended like a damp squib. I think it might be the best series ever. It's really good. It's an hour long each episode for six or seven episodes. It's huge budget. Each individual episode looks like a movie. It's got full star-studded cast including some new people that you won't be familiar with. Couple of guys out of Peaky Blinders. It actually the first episode watches like a guy Rich, you know, with a fighting in the

Starting point is 01:09:06 bar and it's all, oh, mate, you fucking, you want some do you? Like, it's all kind of real cockney gangster shit. And it just, everything gets wrecked. And it's so good. It's so fucking good. HBO. I think HBO. Yeah, so it's a sky Atlantic. Sky Atlantic, yeah. So anyway, you can watch sky Atlantic. Yeah. Now TV or whatever. Has it? I was superbly impressed. How do you guys manage to span multiple networks? I feel like it's hard enough just trying to navigate like suggestions. One. So what? so people, word of mouth and then you go, I'm going to get a subscription

Starting point is 01:09:50 to these different things. Oh, no, no. So I have, I have a completely legal, of course, a maybe to my, my Amazon fire stick, which through using VPN is again completely legal via Argentina, but gives me access to a few more channels and movies and stuff than might usually be typical. But the way that it works, you can favor it to different movies on that stick to a central home screen, favorite different movies on that stick to a central home screen. And both my housemates are quite big into films and movies. So we all, whenever someone suggests something to us, we just favorite it and put it in there. And then it means that we all have a pool of stuff to watch. That's brilliant. Yeah. So we're just crowdsourcing. We're, we're, we're, we're three degrees of separation away from whatever a thousand degrees of separation each of different things.

Starting point is 01:10:49 One of my housemates is super into movies and series and stuff and there's always something good in there, always. And Gangs of London was one of them. What's the guy that's just been cancelled for not Keno? Who's the guy that's... been cancelled for not Keno. Who's the guy that was... No clock. Yes, no clock.

Starting point is 01:11:10 The, what was it called, viewpoint? Yeah. Yeah, that was... That's really good. That was really good, but didn't they not publish the final episode? Because... It's available on ITV Player, but it never got aired on TV. Right.

Starting point is 01:11:23 Okay, so I can go on to I TV player and watch the film episode. Yeah. Yeah. That was good until you started touching all the cast, wasn't it? Yeah. It's interesting that you said not Kano, because if you Google him, there's loads of articles about how they constantly get mistaken for another. I think they were in a film together. I think they look fairly similar similar ages, similar builds. They're always playing the same characters.

Starting point is 01:11:49 That's it. They're in similar films, similar series, playing a similar kind of role. Except one wraps and the other one touches people. Yeah, I don't know who either of them are, but it's not ideal to be mistaken for professional toucher. If you're a professional rapper. Johnny, anything else, any other ones that you've watched around? I don't know whether we've mentioned this one before. It's a film called Knives Out.

Starting point is 01:12:18 You've seen it before. So it's a bit like it's almost like a, it's a, it's a bit like-hearted, it's like a game of Cludo, but a real, it's like a, it's really hard to describe what sort of film it is because it isn't like a true story and it isn't completely serious. It's based, it's like a Cludo who done it situation. Daniel Craig's in it and he does a Texas accent in it, which initially is like what the hell you're doing mate, but then you, Daniel Craig is fantastic in it and he does a Texas accent in it, which initially is like what the hell are you doing, mate? But then you then you the Daniel Craig is fantastic in it. Lots of very famous actors.

Starting point is 01:12:51 It did really well. It got lots of recognition. It's called Nives Out. Would highly recommend. Where's that? It's a film. So like, I'm sure it, I mean, I watched it like a year ago. So I think it'll be on prime or Netflix or something like that. Go you. Seth. I have been watching a seminar by a guy called Michael Radouga about, so he calls it the phase, and it's, if he've heard of lucid dreaming or astral projection or out of body experiences, it's basically all of these like hypnagogic semi-sleep states that he just calls the phase

Starting point is 01:13:30 and it's fascinating. With the phase, do you say the phase? Yeah, it's a three hour. R-A-D-U-G-R. Radouga, yeah. Sounds like a pastor. Yeah, linguine. Is this you? Is this you? Is this on YouTube? Yeah, I actually used to work in a pasta factory when I was younger, but I got fired because I made a few silly mistakes. This is a joke. What did you do? I'm not a few silly. Oh, oh, one of the pharmacists came and said that to me when I was like mid I think I was like mid-cannulating someone or something.

Starting point is 01:14:16 I was like, yeah, okay. And then like 10 minutes later, you're like, right, anyway. So it's it's it's basically a walkthrough of how to achieve these states where your body goes to sleep, your mind stays awake and you're able to navigate the inside of your mind in a very like spatial way, which is pretty cool. Have you been able to replicate this? No, I've been I've only been doing it for like two days. It takes like months of practice, but it's a very systematic method to doing it. So if anyone's interested in exploring that world, I have a very practical one lucid dream before. I suppose you have to remember that you don't know otherwise that it's not a lucid dream, but yeah, I had one lucid dream before, and then as you otherwise, that it's an allocid dream. But yeah, no, I had one allocid dream before. And then as soon as you realize what's happening,

Starting point is 01:15:07 it jolt too out of it. Yeah, there's lots of practices to not get excited. Oh, yes, I mean, then you're like, I pulled back to your body. Sorry, I'm sorry. Yeah, that's funny. Jed McKenna, I told both of you guys about this over dinner last night.

Starting point is 01:15:21 I got introduced to his book through Jim O'Shaughnessy when he came on the podcast and I get tons of book recommendations but for some reason this one stuck with me and I'm really glad that it did. He is a enlightened mystic, I suppose technically although he hates the the term mystic and he's written a series of three books just about his experience as someone that's enlightened. Now you think, well, how many other people claim to be enlightened? You've got books from the Buddha and so on and so forth, but Jed Mechanor is an alias,

Starting point is 01:15:52 and he's never revealed who he truly is. So you would say, well, why would someone claim to be enlightened if they're only using an alias, if they're not going to then repay themselves with the brand equity to a personal brand by being the person that is enlightened? And upon reading it, it's basically a 50% a journal, 50% a reflection on his journey to get to where he is. But he often just talks about discourses that he's had. He's just sat down with someone and he was waiting at a coffee shop and this 17 year old girl

Starting point is 01:16:20 came over and started jibbing him for being the person that's supposed to be enlightened. And then they end up going on a bike ride and he talks about this experience, but he's very much no BS. There's some swearing throughout the book. And I've never read something that's made me so convinced through a two dimensional form that is plain words on a screen that don't move that somebody is enlightened. Like the clarity that he writes with is outrageous. And there's three books, and they all have the same cover, and they all have the same like shit. Windows 98 clip art photo of a border collie on the front.

Starting point is 01:17:01 It's almost purposefully as if it's written to put people off from reading it that don't know what it is. And I wonder if I should read this. I wonder if that's part of it. Man, it's awesome. You can't get it unordable, doesn't exist unordable. You didn't get anyone to do an audio book for it. There's no videos of him on the internet. There's some amateur-done-home narrations of the book over kind of nice images, I guess, but that's as far as you get. Well, luckily, I'm going to listen to it using speech central, little bonus life hack there. It's a free app for iPhone that turns any PDF into a scrubbable audiobook. Speech central.

Starting point is 01:17:43 Yeah. But you have to use the PDF. You can't just use it natively whilst browsing the internet or whatever, which is like speechify. Yeah, it's not like it's done for like a library. So PDFs or and you can say you can export it as like a MP3 as well. And it reads the PDF. Yeah, you can even take photos of books so like scan things and it'll be to an audio. But what are the voices like? Are the voices any good? Just like the Apple, Siri ones.

Starting point is 01:18:10 Okay, that's speech-ify thing. I haven't tried it yet, but I know that he's friends with Ali, that do the owns it, and there those guys seem to be really working hard to try and get whatever you call robotic voices as naturalistic as possible. I think that's that technology is going to boom over the next two years. I don't get how you can do deep fakes of someone and yet text to speech is still a bit jetty. Yeah, true. I don't know. It's probably running ahead of what's commercially available. Maybe that's what the iPhone 13 is holding back to have something to give us all. Does it just take phone calls for you? Hard and mad. Lovely.

Starting point is 01:18:54 That's just our dream, isn't it? You've heard the Google AI system, like in a hair salon answering the phone and dealing with the thing that I have. That is incredible. That, yeah. Well, you can say Google, please book a haircut for me at two o'clock on Tuesday. Oh, no, this is the race. Like the Google assistant works at the salon

Starting point is 01:19:15 and answers the phone. And like someone says, like, are we got any availability on Thursday? And it like, just because I have Google being your customer support, basically. Yeah. I think they're not tested to see if people could tell whether it was a real person or not, a known hotel.

Starting point is 01:19:28 Absolutely. A video of it. Yeah. Yeah, learnt a code, headwriters. Get on Python and see C++. You can have to learn the code. I think this is one of Google's like black ops operations where there's like a year to

Starting point is 01:19:45 search engine, but we also have like 10 companies in the ether that are just developing all these pretty worrying bits of software. Oh, here's another one actually. I don't know how anyone can access this because it's on my completely legal and totally VPN secured stick, but it's called Next. And I want to say it's on ABC or NBC in America, and it is about a misaligned super intelligent, artificial general intelligence that gets released out into the world, and they then have to try and control it, but it's completely, factually accurate in terms

Starting point is 01:20:17 of the different ways that the architecture would need to be constructed. So it's someone that's read super intelligence by Nick Bostrom and other things. You've got to be have like consulted for it. Well either that or they've read the book because they talk about recursive self-improvement, they talk about intelligence explosions, they talk about whole brain emulation, it's on this server, it's trying to get out, it's manipulating shit, like it's very dramatized obviously and it's like it kills this guy's father in front of him and all this stuff happens. But it's a pretty good watch, especially if you're in a way existential risk, it's like, it kills this guy's father in front of him and all this stuff happens. But it's a pretty good watch, especially if you're into existential risk. It's basically like

Starting point is 01:20:49 ex-risk dramatized. It's pretty cool. It's funny. I was talking to Ben the other day who says that like 90% of his headspace at the moment is consumed by the singularity and the existential risk. And I was like, Ben, 90% of my headspace is consumed by like the note-taking apps in Galarit was like, when that's all, when they're all going to converge. Someone, I didn't answer this question on the Q&A, but someone asked, how do you not become blackpild when you're learning about so much existential risk? Like, how do you not just go full nihilism? And it is a good question. I think, I think my nihilism is defeated only by my sort of laissez-faire approach to life generally. My laziness is the antidote to that. But yeah, I totally get why people go to the Future of Humanity Institute and completely dedicate their entire lives

Starting point is 01:21:43 to trying to solve these problems. So that, I think that's my question with it, is like, when does that happen? You know what I mean, you get like, what's the threshold that you cross? Yeah, you get so, the more you read about it, the more you learn about it, you're like, okay, this is a problem and shit,

Starting point is 01:21:57 this is really a big problem. When do you just drop everything and go and like, go and get in the first trench and try and help us? Well, I mean, none of us are working on the single biggest, most important problem that we have in our lives at all times. We get distracted by things that are of lower priority. I think you actually need to be a very unique and single-minded type of person to even take that kind of an approach.

Starting point is 01:22:22 It's a very like, selfless thing, isn't it, to say, I'm going to pursue something that has no immediate financial gain for me or... Fuck, look at what? It's just all about the future of humanity. Yeah, look at the effect of altruism movement. Look at the people that are doing EA properly, like Rob Wiblin from 80,000 hours. He is spending his life trying to work out the best way to get other people to spend their lives in service to work. And if they can't do it in trying to work out the best way to get other people to spend their lives in service to work. And if they can't do it in service to work, he's working out what's the best way for people to give some of their wage every single year toward the most effective altruistic donations that you can. Like he is

Starting point is 01:23:00 like orders of magnitude above being selfless. He's being selfless for being selfless for people being selfless. Crazy. The thing that Jordan Peterson said on your interview with him, where it's something like, you know, whatever you find yourself being interested in, that's the thing you should just absolutely double down on. And then it, as long as we have a broader, broader spectrum of people with interests, like most things are covered. So you end up with someone was saying, like, someone had been researching influenza viruses and like had a lows of research about COVID when it happened, because it just was something that he was interested in. Was that one of you two? No, but it doesn't, it totally doesn't surprise me. You end up with these like really niche situations, because it's just someone's passion and they just decided to vote their entire life to it and as a result, we end up with

Starting point is 01:23:47 this spread of things. So there's also the counter argument of like, if everybody just did that, then there's a lot of things that suddenly get dropped and a lot of life just sort of ceases to function anyway. So the way that it works is that the normal distribution for a reason, right? The fastest part of the distribution tends to be in the middle on the things that people converge on. And this is the topic of my TED Talk, right? Like it's your duty to give the world the universe what only you can give it because only you can.

Starting point is 01:24:17 And that's how we maximize human potentials, civilizationally. But you are right as well that as people get more and more opportunities to do something, if someone just becomes like a professional what sits eater, you know, just dissecting the minutiae of how to eat a what's it in the most optimal way, you think well that's probably a bit of a waste of a life. But if you have to pay that price, you have to have the what's it eater for the influenza specialist, then I don't know. But like people, you know, things silly to happen, don't they? Like things don't know maybe like people you know things to lead to happen don't they like like like all these turn on yeah yeah so like if not everybody

Starting point is 01:24:50 can just optimize like that because then unless some people are really interested in like you know driving a bus or you know that's their absolute passion and things still run fine robot to be it's been has been quite a detail. Anyway, I think we're probably about there. We'll leave it there. What's been happening in ProPain World? Is there anything new for people that want to become online coaches to know about with you guys? There's the link, the training that we always promote has been updated. Cool. Talk us now. Even better. It's just more, it's just more complete. So like the more people we work with, the more like stuff we test, we're always like, hey, we did this and it worked with this many people. So we added into the training. So the free,

Starting point is 01:25:34 the kind of module that we give away, the reason we give it away is like people who don't want to work with us or the people who can't afford to work with us. It's like, well, this is everything you need to have like a decent crack at itself. If you try it and you get stuck, press that button and speak to us otherwise, there you go. So that's just being updated. Same link. Which is? I think you know it, Chris. Well, there's two. Is it pro-paintfitness.com slash modern wisdom? Is that one? Yeah, that's the main one. Cool. Well, it's much more good than it was before. Farer than it was before. Farer. Yeah, better armed good main one. Cool. Well, it's much more good than it was before. Better than it was before.

Starting point is 01:26:06 Yeah, better arm, good. Both of them. I like it. So yes, if you're an online coach or a PT offline coach that's looking to transition online or just increase your revenue, that's the place to go. propinifitness.com slash model wisdom. Jents, until next time, maybe it'll be on my couch. We don't know.

Starting point is 01:26:23 Yes. If I like it, I think it will be. Legally permitted. And back to the next one. What's the last one we did on the couch? Got the CNR Day one? No, we've done some life hacks once since then. Since then.

Starting point is 01:26:36 I think. Yeah, it might have been the Christmas one that we did just before February, unless we slightly had one in between then and and the February March shutdown. I don't know. What are the two? Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, thank you very much for tuning in. propinifitness.com slash modem wisdom if you want to go and check out what the boys do and if you need any of the links for what we've gone through today in terms of life hacks.

Starting point is 01:26:59 They're in the show notes below. Feel free to submit your life hacks in the comments as well or send them to someone, preferably not me, but send them to someone and they might appear on this podcast somehow. Gentlemen, hey thanks bye. you

Modern Wisdom - #341 - Life Hacks 205

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