Modern Wisdom - #416 - End Of Year Review: 2021's Lessons, Hacks & Fails

Episode Date: December 30, 2021

Jonny & Yusef join me to recap our favourite lessons, hacks and stories from 2021. Expect to learn why Yusef spent Christmas praying to Hasbullah, Jonny's strategy for becoming more productive by taking things out of your life, the ultimate reason to do simple tasks as soon as they appear, why moral tastes explain the explosive reactions we've seen this year, how extracting yourself from your business might make it more effective and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get perfect teeth 70% cheaper than other invisible aligners from DW Aligners at http://dwaligners.co.uk/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Access Propane's Free Training - https://propanefitness.com/modernwisdom  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - 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

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guests today are Johnny and Yusef from propanefitness.com and it's an end of your recap episode. We're going to talk about our favorite lessons, hacks and stories from 2021. So today you can expect to learn why Yusef spent Christmas praying to Haspelar. Johnny's strategy for becoming more productive by taking things out of your life. The ultimate reason to do simple tasks as soon as they appear, why moral tastes explain the explosive reactions we've seen this year, how extracting yourself from your business might make it more effective, and much more. If you're thinking, oh, one end of your review, fucking good idea that, wish I'd done one,

you still have time. Head to chriswillx.com slash review. You can get the free annual review template, which is the exact process that me and you, Seth, and Johnny use every single year to review our lessons from the last 12 months and set goals and put a plan in place for the year that is coming up. chriswillx.com slash review. But now, let's time to review one hell of a year with Johnny and Yusef. How was Christmas? Did you do anything interesting? So I just did, this was my first Christmas, not in the hospital, which was nice. So just spent some family time. I did all the Christmas man things, cranberry sauce, turkey, wrapping paper, all of this. Did you carve the turkey? Did the special say Grace to Santa at the beginning?

Is this what someone who's Muslim thinks that white people do? This is what white people do at Christmas. They pray to the turkey and then you have the star which is Hasbala and he sits on the top of the tree. And you have to say grace to Haspala, and then everybody does bad dance moves, and invade the country. And then you're allowed to eat. Yeah, and then, no, that's you, that's your people. That's what you guys do. Is this your first experience of a Christmas celebration

or have you had more than this? I think one of. Yeah, first. It's one of everybody's that isn't it? True. I think it was the highest Santa rating of all the Christmases that I've had. Like the most Santa. Really full beans. Yeah. For the centre. None of the food, the food items do not have anything to do with Santa. I need you to get, you need to separate these two things out. Hustballar, Santa and the food items are... The lurs can throw. Three separate.

The food is a bit rubbish as well, like Christmas cake. No, if it was nice, it would be available for sale the rest of the year. No, that's ridiculous. You can't say that. For example, Easter eggs are nice, but they're not for sale for the rest of the year. Cream eggs are nice. Cream eggs are available all year round because they're just a different shape of hang on. Cream eggs are available all year round. Yes, they're the one type of egg outside of the egg world, the legitimate egg world. Along with Mindy eggs. Actually, yeah, Mindy eggs are also available. It's quite easy. I feel like we've talked about this before, but there's a guy online who made,

so he bought an Easter egg, cream egg, and he was disappointed because it was a hollow, large chocolate with little cream eggs inside, and he was disappointed because it was a hollow, large chocolate with little cream eggs inside and he was like, no, no, no, I can't be having this. So he bought 37 small cream eggs and made a solid Easter egg. Which probably weighed about two kilos, yeah. Oh, yeah, absolute diabetes, but he did it. So Johnny, what did you do? but I did it. So, Johnny, what did you do? Not much, really. I went to my parents. I prayed to Santa. I'm outside London and I slept at my hospital. And yeah, quite quiet Christmas, actually. It's quite nice. Do you get anything cool? Do you get any nice presents? No. Socks.

Socks. It's all... It's Africa. Socks and hankity. Nice. Always the tree. Yeah. I think once you cross 30, that's all presents become. Yes, isn't it?

And you're actually a bit pleased about all of them as well. The saddest thing is the joy that you take from thinking, I don't need to buy shower gel for the next couple of months. is the joy that you take from thinking, I don't need to buy shower gel for the next couple of months. I got four by 500 min of shower gel. This year, two litres of shower gel. You do condiments, not condiments. What's the word? Yeah, there's a word beginning with con, something. Confectionary.

What is it? People listening to like toiletries. Toiletries. You do them by the gallon. Are they all treasurer? Are they all treasurer? This is a story because I tried to transport two litres of treasurer, shampoo to Iceland when we were travelling over there.

And we had to dump them in a bin. Chris took a hair salon with a hair product in his suitcase and then wondered why it was over the limit for a week. Yeah, the lady, the Edinburgh lady wasn't happy, was she? How was your Christmas, other than getting a lot of shampoo? Good, man. I've even a lot of shampoo. Good man, I've eaten a lot. I've had, I'm surprised I didn't pee be in the gym today

because there was a lot of calories behind those lifts. An awful lot. A lot of swelling. Yes, extra water. Yeah, very much so. It was good, I got a new backpack, I got some cool shit that I've been after for a little while and I fell asleep at like 7pm every day.

Just a classic British Christmas. You know, just phasing in and out of consciousness based on where your blood sugar's at. And then as you did, as you did down, you realised that you fall in asleep again and you wake up watching fantastic beasts or whatever. Oh, well, it's fun. Yeah. That's a very good summary. I, the falling asleep things weird,

because even after a night of like eight and a half hours, it still gets like 6.30 am still, sort of like, moving up and so. Yeah. But you're also not used to having over 200 grams of sugar in a single day. That's true. In a single bowl, a single meal. Yeah. That's true. In a single, in a bowl, a single meal.

Yeah, yeah, that's true. I believe the word was cosmetics. Yes. Ah, can relax. No, I'm frantically. In the start of a podcast as well, you'd be like the whole time. You know, Christopher, be like, well, what's your lesson for the year? But like, fuck, don't know me.

I don't know. I've got no lessons. I'm afraid I've been taken up searching for this one word now. So. Okay, so we're going to do lessons from 2021, a couple of lessons that we've taken away each. I did a big 400th episode, 19 lessons from 400 episodes. The reason that it was 19, nothing special about that, but we can go through some of the things that we've taken away from this year.

Also, if anybody wants to do an end of your review and hasn't done yet, they can go and get my template, which is free, chriswillx.com slash review. It's the exact process that I follow, and I think you do as well, Seth. I think it's the same one that you use every year to kind of round out the lessons from the previous year, and then set some plans and goals and stuff like that for what's coming up. So I guess some of the things that we talk about today may have been brought out by that, but I haven't done mine yet.

So I still need to do my end of your review. So Johnny, I've actually done it every year since last year. Wow. Wow. Wow. Indeed. If that's not the testimonial that I've always wanted, then we go. Johnny, what have you got? What's your first lesson from 2021? There's the hot potato. It's fresh out the oven. So the I have actually done my end of year of you.

Like a good boy because I thought I would be that's a whole point over this episode. But no problem. I mean, I might have said this in a life hack before, but just the idea of like taking something away. So if you, I think a lot of people who listen to these episodes, I imagine probably do or try and do a lot of things, whether it's like personal development or hobbies, or if you run a business, you're probably trying lots of different stuff. You're trying to like build a build your own podcast or

or do similar to what we do in probing. You've got like a lot of a lot of things that you're trying to juggle. But I think it's very hard when you're doing a review process like this and planning the next year to think oh well because you naturally just think I want to do more of all of it and get all of it all of it better and hit PBs and all of it. But it's very hard to know whether any of it's working. So stuff that I've done throughout this year, some of it's forced, some of it's not forced,

was stopping doing a few things. And I think you either realize just how much of an impact it has and you're even more convinced on it, like more convinced that you have a B. Or you're like, actually, you know what, I stopped that, but I didn't really notice anything. So two examples of me from that were, when I, so I didn't train, I had COVID, or I had a cold, like a really bad cold in December, didn't train again, both times, like, because sometimes I think I'd be nice to have a month off training,

it'd be nice to have a bit of time where I don't have to go to gym. When I'm forced to not train, you realize just how many things, and you said this before, Chris, just how many things it impacts you, stopping mevitating for a while, realizing how much of an effect that has when you don't do it. But for example, things like a gratitude journal or journaling in general, when I stopped doing that, I don't notice that much. So taking things away, and then there's loads of examples on the business side as well. So if we've stopped this year, like we stopped the podcast, and only when we started getting people saying, like, where's the podcast

have we decided to bring it back in again? So yeah, just testing something, whether something's actually helping or not by practicing, not doing it for a while, banning yourself from doing it for the- It's like in a elimination diet, but for your daily productivity system. Yeah, or anything. Like even as down like certain exercises or like try not squatting for a while, see what happens, see if you notice anything, for example.

Well, we never know, right? This is a fucking thing. You never know what is contributing to your success or failure in life Until you start to take things away because if you add stuff in and this is always the problem whenever someone says Oh, man You've you really look like you've made great progress in the gym during the first quarter of this year What is it that you've done that's caused that progress? And you like bro? I have no idea. I did 10 things I did I did a bunch of different things my diets diets changed, my sleep changed, my programming's changed, this

has changed. Or it's what you did in Q4, the year prior and just actually what you did. Later, it's gains. Yeah. It's a worse nightmare. Stopping doing things that are working forever. It's terrible. But yeah, so first lesson is, I think when you're planning next year, pick one thing to deliberately stop doing for a while. So, especially if it's something you're not quite so, I think we've all got that thing in that morning routine or life while we're not quite sold on it, but maybe do it because we think we have to. Just try not doing it. Like, for example, I tried not tracking my calories while

I was dieting for a period of time this year to see if I could get away with it. I can't. Catercars are clean up. Some people can. I listened to this podcast and I was like, it was so convincing. It was with Eric Helms and a dietitian, they were like, not tracking's way better than tracking. Just eat by feels basically. Yeah, that sounds so much better. Try it for a month, game-dewy. Was that right? Lesson-learned. Yeah. Back to tracking.

Yeah. It really depends on, because I think we're all with probably front-running Chris's lesson for the year actually, because I know you mentioned this when I saw you last week. But I guess it depends on, do you value the progress or do you value the lesson more? And that's I guess short versus long term. So as you say, if you're doing a training program that is just throwing the kitchen sink at it and hoping that you get big, you might be happy with the fact that you got big and not really wonder about whether it was the split squat or whether it was the the

lateral raises or whatever. But as Johnny says, like, if you're interested in continuing to make progress, it's useful to know which part of it was helpful and which part wasn't. It's in software design, they call it exploit versus explore, is that right? Something like that. So you go through a phase where you're trying trying to find your best of and then putting all of your resources into the best of rather than it being more diffuse because you've already got so many units of like time-energy attention. Yeah, it's nice to say like, let's just do the maximum,

let's approach, just do everything hard all of the time and you'll make progress. But the book recommendation from last year, Chris, essentialism, is a book that I think I'm going to need to read a few times and it covers Johnny's lesson, they're called the negative pilot, where you take something that you're doing and you say, right, I'm going to actively not do that and see what happens. And I suppose that's similar to what you were saying about choose what you're going to suck at. Or choose what you're going to do. Oh, man, yeah.

So, Johnny, as you've been saying that, one of the lessons that I have this year, overlaps with what you're talking about, and then one of the ones that just didn't make today's list, but now has made today's list because you've basically brought it up. Oliver Birkman, who wrote 4,000 weeks, he says, in advance of making goals,

you need to choose what you're going to fail at, because a lot of the time when you decide to focus your attention on something, inevitably that takes your attention away from other things, then as you notice that those other areas start to slip, you feel the foam out and you think, oh, fuck, fuck, fuck, I know that I said that I was going to focus on getting into a relationship or socializing more with my friends, but I've noticed that my condition's dropping because I'm not going to the gym as much or I'm not making as much money

because I'm spending more cash on nights out and stuff like that. So then you alter your perspective and you start to try and just do everything at once. The fear of losing gains in certain areas mitigates your ability to focus on one area in any case. And that's like, it's so hard to let that go because you say that maximalist approach.

Everybody's looking for, yeah, I know, I know like the normy NPC version of this is that I need to focus and I'm going to have to let some areas fall behind. But how do I get everything at once? It's like, no, you can't do that. You can't really lose fat and gain muscle and get a girlfriend and save for a house and you know you can't do all of these things at once. What are the priorities

that you really really care about? It's exactly that. You look at people and you go, oh no, that's just recommendation for the wreck. You know, that's the suggested serving size. No, no, no, no, that's the bad. I mean, I mean, the whole thing. size. No, no, no, no, that's to bad. I mean, I mean, I mean, the whole thing. On the whole fucking box. Yeah, man, I mean, my to run off the back of that one, Johnny, my first one is a quote from John Maxwell, which summarizes Greg McHughan's ascensualism perfectly. You cannot overestimate the unimportant of practically everything. And that's John Maxwell. But in the poll, Twitter of a quote. Can you say that again?

You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything. You cannot not underestimate the unimportance of not everything. Look, you're confusing everyone. Stop it. Stop it. You're down in Surrey and you know that I can't get to you. That's Haram. So my realization for this year is that the ultimate productivity system is to get really

clear about what you want and then to ruthlessly call everything else. If you really, really want to make progress in a particular area, just forget about the other things, forget about the FOMO, forget about the failure, and that all of the Birkman thing plays a part of this, right? Choose what you want to suck at. So for me this year, I really, really wanted to rehabilitate my Achilles and to get about the failure. And that all of a Birkman thing plays a part of this, like choose what you want to suck at. So for me this year, I really, really wanted to rehabilitate my Achilles and to get my lower back into a place where it's super, super stable

and I can start to build a good training program in 2022. So I knew that my condition was going to drop this year. I'm like, okay, I'm probably gonna look a bit chitier than I usually will do and maybe my left and my strength and maybe training's gonna be a bit boring. But okay, like, when I notice that, when that arises, and I think, oh, I don't look as big,

or my lift aren't as strong, or training sucks a bit, that's the price, that's the entry price that I was prepared to pay in order to make the progress that I wanted to make. And it helps to mitigate that short and long-term thing as well. It helps to keep you in a long termist mindset. It's like, look, you wouldn't have a problem with dieting for one week before you go away on holiday, but talking about doing a rehabilitation plan for an entire year so that you're training

for the next five years can be really, really strong. There's like a time discounting problem that we have with that, right? You just think, oh, it's so long. It shouldn't take this long, but you go, look, the body takes a fair bit of time to recover. So, yeah, you cannot overestimate the unimportant to practically everything. The ultimate productivity system is to get really clear

about what you want and then to ruthlessly call everything else. And the only way that you can get really clear is to do something like an end of your review, to look at what are the lessons I've learned from this year, what are the single goals that I want, health, relationships, career, and personal growth, like the four areas, just single north staff for each of those. And if you got those by the end of the year, you would be so buzzing with your achievements because there's going to be tons of downstream things that you can't predict in any case. You don't need to say, I want to learn a new skill or try a new sport because you're just going to do that as a

byproduct of existing. That doesn't need to be on the list. It's like, what's the real, real big change that I want to make, the forcing function change? And yeah, that's, it's so funny how both of our lessons for this year have been to do with taking more away rather than adding more in. Yeah, I think that feels just like the phase where out there, you know, you go through it, when you go through any sort of personal development journey, I think the first phase of it is just doing absolutely everything and adding, adding, adding, adding, and you end up with a five hour morning, you end up with most of your day being your morning routine. Correct. And then you're like, hang on a second. This is ridiculous. Yeah, I've got a half an hour sorting my spreadsheet to track my

sleep data that's been output by my woup and my aura ring to make sure that, yeah. It's definitely right. Actually, I could have just slept another 30 minutes. Yes, yeah, precisely. Yeah, it's um, do you think, you know how girls that spend lots of time together, their period cycles, their menstrual cycles tend to align? Do you think that we have productivity cycles that have aligned because of the same reason? I would say so.

That's real science as well, right? That's not row science, you say. Real science, doctor approved. Thank you. That your productivity, mesocycles align. Alighter. Yeah. And you also, you're more productive when it's the full moon because...

Oh, I certainly am. ...gravitational pull on the lunar energy. Because of the chef cruise. Yes. So that's mine. You said what you got. So this actually leads on to very nicely this one, but you have to do the negative pilot stuff first. You have to know what you're exploiting before you do this tip. So if you're not doing that, do you negative pilot pause the podcast now?

Before we do this Limit everything. So, once you know what it is that, yeah, what it is that you should be doing, usually the first thing that comes up is, oh well, I don't have time to be doing that thing. And we know from the last few chats we've had, we've always kind of circled back to screen time, is that usually if you say you haven't got time to do something and you look at your screen time and you see how many hours you're binging away on stupid apps, you probably do have the time. So then the next question is rather than try or the next thing to do is rather than trying to increase your reading speed or how efficient your training is or how high quality your do is rather than trying to increase your reading speed or how

efficient your training is or how high quality your meditation is by using your binoral beats and your infrared helmet and all this stuff, sometimes you don't need the life hack, you just need to do more of the thing that you know that you should be doing. And I think sometimes the mindset of maximizing the speed and things means that we end up actually cutting corners on just the total volume of time that we spend doing something. Give us an example. So, I'm so guilty of it, listening to things on two or three times speed and therefore spending less time actually listening to something, than saying no I'm going to dedicate an hour and a half to hours to actually get through a book or rather than

trying to use the muse headset and the biofeedback and all that. I'm better off meditating for 40 minutes a day than trying to get 10 minutes of pristine quality meditation. People do it with training quite a lot as well. Like, you know, you see the guy come in with this compression... Ecclusion. Ecclusion training and all these kind of advanced techniques. But he's not, he's missing 20% of his sessions. So, the overarching theme there is really stop trying to perfect your form if you aren't actually doing the reps in the first place. Obviously both are important but quantity and quality are both needed and if

you let one slip then you're losing a big side of the equation. So like reading about meditation versus just using that time to meditate. So yeah, I read so many books about meditation. And I look back on them like a lot of them were saying kind of the same thing. And it's difficult because, you know, there are, there's the occasional book that you're like, whoa, that was a game changer. That's really leveled it up. And, you know, what was one of those books for you? So for the standard of bypassing their mindfulness meditation, I think mindfulness in plain English is very good.

For concentration meditation, Ajahn Brahms book called Mindfulness Bliss and Beyond, I think even though it's not about mindfulness, it's about the other side of meditation is fantastic. Cool. One of the just the kind of top quote from that was that enlightenment comes from the soaring summits of silence within. Nice. I don't know what it means, but it's nice. It's nice. That doesn't. That sounds great. Yeah, I think it is a blending between those two right and Chris Sparks a couple of years ago said to us in order to pick something up You have to put something down So when you're thinking about adding stuff into your productivity system or your daily routine or your habits or your life for next year You have to presume that the amount of time that you spend being productive is the amount of time that you have

If you just think oh, I'll add this in and I'll down regulate my sleep or regulate my efficiency to be able to fit in, playing rugby, joining a rugby team and training two nights a week and a Saturday afternoon. Well, sleep, a massive one. People will have all the sleep kit and the like of the Ben Greenfield magnetizer for you, mattress and the sleep mask and all the stuff,

but they're doing six hours. No, being bed for six hours, yeah, precisely. Go to fucking bed for a little bit longer. Yeah, Jesus. Yeah, that's good. I had an experience, this was like years ago, with Eric Helmsman coach, saying to me, he banned me from asking him any questions about car back loading and car timing, because it was like, if you you cannot send me a message in email asking me about car timing while you are hungover like you are completely missing the point on like you missed today's train session you're because you're hungover and you're asking me about timing your carbs like there's a layer it's kind of like

this is like a keep it simple stupid Approach right stop fucking sweating the small stuff. We know a guy Johnny and I who is is huge and if he's listening he'll know who he is We saw him in the gym and Johnny was chatting to him about training program and it turns out he's just done 531 for Several years, but wasn't that what you said on what under life facts a little while ago, if you could go back 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, and give yourself one piece of advice, it would be, oh, sorry, two pieces of advice.

It would be by Bitcoin and do five, three, one with progressive overload as you're training program for the next 12 years. You'd be massive and rich. You have a pretty good time in your 30s, wouldn't you? The the challenge is what's the, what is the like 45-year-old version of you would say now? What's that piece of advice for now? Do 531, probably. Probably. Probably. Probably. Yes, to be fair.

By Bitcoin, by Bitcoin, it's 2531. Fuck! Fuck! Sir, what are you thinking? Just come down, just do 531. So, I think it's a funny problem. Just do 531. I should have just done 531 the whole time. What was it doing? Right, Johnny, what you got?

What's number two? God damn it. So, this is, I think this is something I've heard you talk about before. You might have even done a video on this, Chris. But, just the whole thing of of like make every year when you make progress or you hit a new milestone or it's all numbers really isn't it generally like achievements things that happen and they generally feel the same like I think especially money feels the same. So like this year in in propane we've

hit like new arbitrary milestones or we've always wanted to hit or you know you hit a new low way in or a to hit or you know hit a new low weigh-in or a new PB in the gym and I was saying this tobacco like it's getting to the end of the year we've hit the target to wanting to hit financially but I feel just the same way as I did last year and the year before and the year before when I do this review process of like but what's the next thing and unless you're like 10 to 100 x your personal income, your life's going to be pretty much the same next year. There's a quote that says, something

I heard Paul Mortes say, which is, I've never heard it. I've heard like this idea before, but never heard it phrase like this, that the outcomes you hear are the rewards you get for running your system or for pressing play on your system. So if you're just running this process all the time, you'll naturally just hit these arbitrary numbers and milestones. And so I think the lesson or the thing that I always come back to when I look at this stuff is trying to just accept that like, certainly the way I'm wired, I think a lot of people are wired, it's just by like little mini wins, like little bits of progress are really all that matter. So setting something that you quite like

doing on a day or a week and then just character just care about the mini wins and almost forget about the like, it's so hard at this time of year isn't it because everyone's like, I really want to hit, I want to get that promotion or I want the next milestone, whatever that is. And you forget about the, like when you step on the scales and hit a new low weigh in for the week, that doesn't matter because it's not the big number, but actually it's really all that matters if you just stay motivated. Really annoying about that thing is that you never, you never want to believe people that say that, that have actually been there. So because you always go, oh, no, when I hit a million, I'm like, I'm definitely going to be happy. Oh, yeah, it didn't make him happy, but that's because

whatever. Like, I remember watching, yeah, I remember watching Ali Abdel talk about when he first hit his million subscribers and million dollars revenue for the year. And he was, you'd always talk very flatly about, you know, it's just he don't have adaptation. Like actually, I was probably most happy when I first hit my 500th subscriber because that meant so much to me at the time. And when I hit a million, it was kind of like, oh yeah, well here we go, when I hit a million pounds. And And yet for some reason you look at that and you go, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no pounds down the back of a chicken shop seat because his hedonic adaptation had kicked in. And yeah, it doesn't really matter how many times you hear this story, you don't want to believe that it's true.

But man, it's so fucking true. It touches on a bunch of different things that I, that again, didn't quite make my list, but a like unbelievably important celebrating little wins, giving yourself the, allowing yourself to actually have a celebration. So me and Dean got, when we hit 100K, we got balloons and we took photos. It's a dumb thing, but that we wanted to do it and it made us feel really fucking good. And you're like, yeah, that's a thing. That's a memory now. We did it. We worked really, really hard. I hit this goal. And before I decide to set myself the next one and start obsessing about what's coming next,

Morgan Howell has a quote in the psychology of money where he says, the number one thing that you need to do to win the game is to stop moving the goalposts further away from you. Every single time that you hit a new financial goal, you then move the goalposts further away. Ben Hardy. That's nice. And then quickly move it straight away. Benjamin Hardy in The Gap in The Gain, which is The Gap in The Gain by Ben Hardy's Ben Jimen Hardy in The Gap in the Game, which is The Gap in the Game by Ben Hardy's brand new. It's only come out about a month and a half ago. It's 160 pages. You can read it in a weekend or you can listen to it. It exclusively talks about this problem.

And he says that setting goals in this sort of a way is like running toward the horizon, that every single step that you take, your goal moves the same distance away from you. And the problem is that we all love the byproduct that we get out of this, that not fear of insufficiency, but that constant desire for more motivates us and continues to get us to move forward. But like one of the lessons lessons or the lesson that I had that didn't make the list, which is now making the list, is that the outcomes that you're going to get in life are going to come along for the ride in any case. Fearing about whether or not you're going to get them is a fucking pointless exercise that just annihilates your enjoyment in the moment. Like you are going to get to the place that you're going to get

to based on the skills that you have and the work that you put in and the people that are around you and support you. And really, that's probably not going to change. If you decide to fret and be anxious and be really, really concerned about what's coming next and constantly think about what you're going to feel like when you hit this next goal, or if you just do the thing,

there is no difference between the man that obsesses over the thing and does the thing. Probably doesn't help. Probably negatively impacts your performance. Well, so that's the thing that was kind of attached to this, which is that ironically, I have found... This is a bit woof-woo of this. This is something I was spoken to you. Lunar energy. But lunar energy, exactly.

No. It's a hospital. Yeah. But the as soon as you kind of I find as soon as you like accept that, like, oh yeah, the numbers arbitrary, it doesn't matter, you just hit it anyway. And actually, it's easier to hit that way. And this has happened so consistently to me that I almost don't even want to acknowledge it for fear of accepting the the the Chi or something but like the the more you just like I'll just how do I just like do all the things I need to do today and forget about everything else the then oh oh shit I've hit this new target that I had six months ago and I've not even really thought about it since then we'll be able to worry you kind of

worry about it like if you're looking for something in the house and you're like, I know someone's smart, Alex can be like, Oh, well, it's always in the last place. You look because then you stop looking. But I mean, you're looking for something. And then you're like, Oh, you know what, forget it. And it's and then immediately, it turns up. There's something to do with the ease and the grace that you go through life with for doing stuff like that. I think this is a big part. John Vav Viveki this year on the show really reminded me the importance of an embodiment practice. Getting out of your head, just getting into sort of just feeling the way that life is.

And Johnny Wilkinson on that high performance podcast, he's saying, find joy in the present moment. You know, washing the dishes is no more or less important than winning the World Cup final because if it's less important that means that I am less important as a human when I'm not playing rugby. Am I less important now than I was then? No, I'm not. So that pushes the woo and the like lunar energy even further than you, Johnny. But I don't know. I think I think you're so laughing because for about a week you said thought that Johnny Wilkinson was Wayne Runey. Did you really?

I was like, well Wayne Runey is a really good fit in my head. When you say the word Johnny Wilkinson, a picture of Wayne Runey comes up in my head. And I was thinking, wow, he's so erudite and so thoughtful and with some manco. I'm sure you said to us Chris, like listen to Johnny Wilkinson, a use of listen to it, he's like, wow, and then like, is this Johnny Wilkinson, the foot of Wayne Roode? I don't remember that. Like sports, not my thing, but I know that's not Johnny Wilkinson. Fucking hell.

Yeah, man, I think that's like an absolutely mega lesson. Whatever it is that you're trying to do, the outcomes are probably going to be the outcomes that you're going to get and fretting and annihilating yourself and being neurotic about it, on-root to doing it, changes literally fuck all about the outcome except maybe negatively impacting it and it ruins the entirety of your journey up there.

The analogy that Ben Hardy has is he says, you're climbing a mountain, 99.9% of the climb is the climb and only 0.1% is you standing on the top of it. But do you want to really hate all of that bit up there because you're terrified about the prospect of not making it to the top of the mountain? But equally like no one summits Everest by accident, do they? Like they're just going, oh yeah, I'll just have a crack at that. Like how can that be? Like they have a plan and execute it in the way that they find

like a very consistent. Did you watch Nim's Purge's documentary? That 14-peaks thing. Shit, the bed. You watched that, Seth. No. Worth a while. Really, really good watch.

Hard, hard, busted. Crazy, uh, Gurg, Seth. No. Worth a while. Really, really good watch. Hard, hard bastard. Crazy, GERKER, X, special boat service, special, British, special forces guy, holds the record for the highest, the 14 highest death zone mountains in the world. So the 14 mountains that are above 8,000 meters. And the previous record was six and a bit years. And he does all 14 in eight months. He does one of them with a stonking hangover. Like the worst hangover that anybody can believe in. And then he does three of them in 48 hours.

He does like the three of them in Pakistan, gets this weather window and does K2, which is the second highest and something else and something else. And all of the climbing community are just, they gobsmacked. They can't believe that this guy is a complete freak. The one that he does with the hangover is the most egregious of the lot. Something about the climbers, just missing a chip in their brain for fear of it.

No fear. So I, two years ago, went up, Hellvellen, which is basically a blessing comparably. So that's 3000 feet tall. What's that height? 950 meters. Okay, so eight and a bit times that. times that. Yeah, okay, so I climbed up our fellow and honestly, for days afterwards, it was wiped. Like, I thought it was going to be not that bad, it was really difficult. Like, people listening and laughing, I wasn't, I'm not cardiovascularly in the best condition possible, but my God, there's that harder than you think. And then I watched this guy do, like, on consecutive days some of the times that

and the best bit was when he's there's like all those climbers The climbers like round the the base camp of one of these mountains going I will can't do that. We can't do that the way there's too bad new arrives and go say yeah And then the next morning just does it anyway Yeah, man, you say right, Seth what have you got to watch your next one? So, my own is just, it doesn't get easier, you just get better. I think we expect when we hit certain milestones that you'll somehow, like, life will get easier as well, but it just changes the, whether it's because we're changing the goalposts or just because you're just hit with new bouts of like a, the problems that you would have in a 100,000 pound business are very different to what you'd have in a 10 million

pound business, or a 100 million pound business. It's not necessarily that as easier, just because there's more money, just because you've achieved what you think is the, the, the metric that you're going for is just the, the type of problems change. Somehow it's somehow, somehow it's a really, really good bit on this. Very says people presume that one day they're going to have fixed all of their problems. What, did you think that one morning you were going to wake up and all of your problems would have been solved?

Like playing a video game and arriving at a level where there's no more enemies, there's no more landscape, there's nothing to do. Yeah, it's in box zero for your entire life. No, problems are going to be a part of life. You're always going to have challenges. How does it mean, what's the difference between getting better and being easier?

So for example, if you lift weights, yes, like 100 kilos is going to feel easier, but now the challenge is 200 kilos. And so, and that feels just as hard, if, if anything, probably more painful in some ways, because your skin hasn't got thicker, you, you, you, to connect with tissue isn't that much, but, you know, so it's just the's just that as you level up, yes, like what all you've done is you've made yourself stronger to deal with bigger and bigger challenges. And you can coast, you can, you can stay out the previous ones, you know, it's the equivalent

to the guy who is just always benching 100 kilos and everyone's doing increase it because he's just, he's happy doing that. Fine, all the power to you if you want to do that, but I suppose that It's this not that's fine way to live life if you're always well within your capacity Ed Cohen is famous for giving that answer at seminars when people like what does it feel like the square a thousand pounds And he just says well, what's your one rat max? And so 150 is like exactly the same as what it feels like futist caught 150 See isn't that what you're doing? Yeah. But of course it is. So I suppose it's just get, like, learn to enjoy the frustrations

or learn to just accept the frustrations and the, like, whatever it feels like now is how it'll feel at whatever level you're at. And it's always going to. And so yeah, I suppose the two lessons there are don't get complacent, but also don't expect to wake up one day and be like, ah, right, everything solved now. And as I've gone up a level, there's no new problems at this level. It's not going to be an empty level. It's a series of different problems.

All right, my one. So this was a bit less productivity focused, but just opportunity cost is a mental model that most people will be familiar with. It's by going to the theme park, it means that you can't go to the gym, the cost of going to the theme park is the fact that you can't go to the gym. There is a choice between the two, that's the opportunity cost of you going to do a thing. So I felt like there was an equivalent to do with uncompleted tasks. So I called it the anxiety cost and I learned this by realizing that at the start of every morning when you wake up, your daily tasks reset. Let's say

that every day you need to walk the dog and meditate and answer emails and do whatever, right? That resets every morning as soon as you wake up. The time that you spend throughout the day up until you do that task is filled with room-in-it-of-thoughts about the fact that you still need to go and do the task. What that means is the sooner that you can get that task done, the sooner you can feel relieved about the fact that you no longer have to think about it. So the anxiety cost is the amount of time that you take up thinking about the fact that you haven't done a thing.

Let's say that it's somebody's birthday coming up and you know that you need to buy them a present. You could buy them a present right now and never have to think about the fact that you still need to buy them a present. Or you can wait for the next month and how many times you're going to think about the fact that you still need to buy them a present, or you can wait for the next month, and how many times you're going to think about the fact that you still need to buy them a present, you can mitigate and reduce the anxiety cost by just doing the thing that you need to do sooner rather than later. We all know someone who at uni would always leave the essays or the dissertation until

the absolute, yeah, the absolute last minute. I, so not to blow my own trumpet or anything, but I, I got my dissertation in like probably a month early and I remember people were saying to me, oh, that you're so organized or motivated to whatever and it's like, not really, I'm just avoiding the pain. Like I've got two types of pain I could experience here, either the anxiety cost or the all-nighters it well anxiety cost and the all-nighters and stuff or the trying to get it done a bit early and you know you have long summers at uni where you're doing actually nothing well that's just time that you could be doing that like there's nothing special about that

time where you can't be so yeah it, I don't think it's any more virtuous to do one over the other is just what kind of pain do you want to experience? I think there's all the time about like, I should just go to the gym in the mornings. I have a, honestly, all the time. Like it'll get to 4 p.m. I'm like, oh, God. Why didn't I try it earlier?

Yeah. Yeah, like I've gotta do this big session and I could've just done it this morning and now I could just continue doing the task that I'm doing and I'd quite trying to know earlier. Yeah, I've got to do this big session. I could have just done it this morning, and now I could just continue doing the task that I'm doing. And I'd quite like to finish, but I have to stop because I'm not going to do my gym session. But the trouble is, you can apply that thing, that idea to everything.

You have to do everything immediately. Well, yeah, I've got to write that email. I've got to make that for the whole day. I'll do it all now. That's what the negative thing comes in. Yes, try doing nothing. You've never taken negative pilot, like level 10, the frozen telekivation where I just do nothing ever and see what happens.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I do get that man. I got you know. So we know a family friend who just cancelled all of his direct ebbs and just waited for people to get back in touch with him. Because he looked through his bank and he was like, oh, there's too many. And I don't know what goes where just blank cancel, just blank kit, everything. And he said barely anyone got back in touch with him.

So wow. Probably got Bayless coming to his door now, though. But yeah, we'll take you to the time. Yeah. After a while, they get the authorities involved, aren't they? It's um, that anxiety cost a big deal. But you're right. Yeah, we'll take you there. Yeah, after a while, they get the authorities involved, aren't they? It's that anxiety cost a big deal, but you're right. There's probably a limit to what you should apply this to.

But with things that are easy fixes, if it's a short time investment, choosing a birthday present for someone is such a perfect example. So look, it's going to take you five minutes. For someone that you need to get a little one for, it's going to take you five minutes. If it's some of the, you know, just someone that you need to get a little one for, it's going to take you five minutes to choose a, choose a birthday present. Just fucking do it. Just do it now immediately. Or paying a, paying a parking fine, paying a parking fine, especially because the anxiety cost actually comes with a legitimate increase after two weeks in the amount of money that

you need to pay. So that's perfectly correct. That's how it should be. If you leave it for two weeks, if you've left the anxiety cost in the pay double, you prick. Well, then it becomes a real cost. Yeah, so there's not just the anxiety cost, but there's the risk of forgetting about the task.

Just knowing in the back of your mind how there was something I needed to do, but I can't quite put up, got a letter. Yeah. Now it's on the right. Fucking do it. Johnny, here you go. Is it right, you said? Uh, uh, let's see. It is me. So, thank God. Whoa. The potatoes, cool. It's done. So this is in relation to the last couple of years, but I think it applies to most stuff. And I've been really getting into a guy called Zedog MD.

It might be fun to get on the podcast actually. Zubin. Domaya. Domaya. I was going to say Dubrovskirz and thing. But he went through the pandemic and then kind of polarized views on it and all of the sequely that we're seeing from how people respond to it and we were saying the other day, Chris, that there seems to be this weird tie-in now of like different

ends of the political spectrum having like mixed in their views on theology. Yeah, how the fuck how the fuck it is that far left and far right have managed to agree on the same thing which is that big the the large Farmer at the top of the tree is trying to kill everybody like what the fuck do yoga moms and Poppulous right wing is having common. Oh, they all hate big farmer now apparently Yeah, it's it's become kind of paked into the actual identity. And I remember seeing this because I'm politically completely apathetic and I like to think that I'm quite

evidence-based or at least empirical with the way that I look at things and obviously working as a doctor as well, you see much more of a clinical side of it. And I remember like, why have people gone so mental? What is, what switch has flipped in people? And actually, this guy's adogate explains it really clearly, which is that people see everything through their moral lenses, and it blocks their ability to see reality clearly. And you'll be much more achieved with this. I've not read the righteous mind

by Jonathan Hyde, but he talks about the different moral taste buds and how each of those taste buds touches a different part of our palate and causes us to swing to one side of the spectrum or the other. And when we've got, we're faced with two choices basically over the last couple of years. It makes for a very harsh swing and then obviously that's reinforced by algorithms and echo chambers and all of that stuff too. So I think having that maximum of just realizing that people only see things through their own moral lens gives you a bit more compassion for how people can get to such wacky conclusions.

And this is wacky on both sides of the fence, right? There are people that are so militantly pro-vaccine and so militantly anti-vaccine. Like both of those stances seem to lose a lot of the new ones because like anything that you're 100% or 0% on is inevitably probably not, because the world doesn't operate in that. Nobody should be able to say it. At the very, very best, it's like 99.9% versus 0.01%. Like that's where it is at the most extremes. There's two quotes that come up that make me think about that.

That Go Into Bogle taught me that a lot of ridiculous ideological views, again, moving away from like vaccine stuff, but just any ridiculous ideological view or extreme ideological view, is a signal of loyalty to your own side and a signal of threat display to the opposing side. So it's not about the fact that you believe or don't believe it's that this is a badge of honor that you need to wear in order to be a part of our group. And if you don't then we know

that there's something up with you. This is exactly it. And so now even if you the inner scientist in you says, okay, well, based on the evidence, I think this is my conclusion. If that betrays the group that you're identifying with, suddenly it's a problem. You now have a moral choice of loyalty versus betrayal, rather than truth versus false, which is ridiculous. It also impacts your ability to do sense-making yourself,

right? That you don't know your emotions start to feed into your own ability to be rational. And you go, I don't actually know what I think about this anymore. I'm genuinely unable to separate out what I think factually from what I feel emotionally. Well, what's interesting is that just to run through, I've got the six moral taste buds here. And as you hear them, you'll be like, oh, actually, I can see how COVID will have completely touched on everyone's trigger buttons with each of these. There's care versus harm,

fairness versus cheating, loyalty versus betrayal, authority versus subversion, sanctity versus degradation, and liberty versus oppression. It's all of those big trigger buttons for people, especially in Mac. Covid 101. I've never read that. I need to, the righteous mind sounds like a good, a good one to add onto the endless list of books that I'm never going to read. I just assumed you're hard because you're. No, so the Jonathan Heipock that I love is the happiness hypothesis.

That's the one that I got through this year, which is fucking outstanding. Yeah, man, that's a serious one. That's a really... There's a guy that posts on my, that I've met a couple times, you know who he is yourself, we've met him. I'm not going to say his name. In my mind, not the person you're thinking of. In my mind, like a very intelligent guy.

I was very daring, brawn. Quite, quite, quite, like middle of the road views and all that sort of stuff, but like everything he posts at the moment is basically comparing the vaccine rollout to Auschwitz, seriously. And like making some really, and I was saying this to back in the day, like it makes me, I can feel the things that he's posting, slowly make me think like, do

I need to like reconsider how I feel about all this stuff? Because this guy is like so convinced and someone will ask him a question beneath, like just a question and he here attacks them. And then like all of his friends, like, attack the person too. And you're like, what is this guy seen? That he's convinced that this is Nazi Germany. And I've got my booster book tomorrow. Like, what? Is it like, how is this happened?

Like these are people who like, ostensibly, totally normal two years ago, and suddenly something has just pressed all the buttons. The same thing goes for people that are pro mandate. I really, really struggle to understand how somebody can be pro mandating a population to take for a disease which doesn't have the, anywhere near the sort of mortality that you need to think about mandating something for.

I use this example on a debate which is never actually going to get aired, but I said, can you imagine, give yourself a thought experiment where this disease has 100% mortality of all females. Would you support a vaccine mandate? In that case, it's like everybody would. Everybody would say, yeah, the army gets to come in and hold you the fuck down, It's like everybody would. Everybody would say, yeah, the army gets to come in and hold you the fuck down because the alternative is the end of human civilization and every female on the planet dies.

So it's not a difference of kind. It is just a difference of degree. I understand that there's a spectrum. But when nowhere near the threshold that that should have, so for me to think like, what is it like for someone to believe that you should mandate people to take a medical procedure to get a vaccine. I'm like, fucking hell.

That's another situation that I can't get my head around, but people have gone down both of these rabbit holes. Well, and the fact that you've now shied away from 100% on either side, you're kind of somewhere in the middle now, well, now you're the enemy of everyone. Oh, yeah. That's a Sam Harris problem, right? That out on the extremes, you get agreement from your own side, but in the middle, you get disagreement from both. Like, I think James Smith posted

something on his story the day about like, it's fine to not get the vaccine, but if you end up in a bed and ICU, then you're a executive. And everybody like jumped on him. As like, how dare you say that? Like that doesn't just say that. Because what was he saying? That really actions have consequences that doesn't just say that because what's he saying that really actions have consequences that's yeah that's all the same. I think everybody would agree that like a lot of people who don't smoke get annoyed that like smokers take up a lot of hospital care or that you know that's why there's like extra taxes on these things but people don't like

that argument when it's applied to something that's like a choice that you, you know, text requests Chris Wittley about it. And you know, you're like, it's bomb, but it's all over the TV. It feels, I mean, people keep on bringing up. And rightly so, people continue to use the fat people, there's most of the people that get hospitalized, overweight or a lot of the people that have huge comorbidities are overweight, should we penalize people that are fat when they decide to go into the NHS as well? And the only real difference that you can see, again, it's not a difference of kind, it's just a difference of degree, is the decision to be thin takes a lot of time, whereas the decision to take a vaccine is an immediate one.

So all that it is, it's just the ease. The people that are pro, that are saying, um, somebody that is, uh, unvaccinated shouldn't be given this hospital bed, but the person that's fat should be given this hospital bed with the fucking diabetes to lose their leg or whatever it is that they're getting. The only difference that that person has there in their head is that getting fat is something that's far easier to do somehow and it happens over time, I don't know. People always find that kind of question. That's the kind of thing they ask in medical interviews, like you've got three patients and two beds, you know, one of them's a child with cancer, one of them's a

convict that's come out of prison for doing this and he's a smoker and then the third one's a heroin addict, like which one do you give a bed to and what's the relative like life extension that you can provide for each of these people and you've got to kind of talk through the different moral decision making matrices. It's like the trolley problem with AI, like what, who do you run over? But the people who, you know, people say, ah, like, you know, fat people over the problem because they, like, they shouldn't be fat. I think it's that, you know, if it was suddenly everybody who has less than 5,000 pounds

in their current account dies of COVID, or everybody who gets less than seven hours of sleep dies of COVID, or everybody, you know, you could pick, everyone's got a thing that they're a bit shit at that comes down, so like, but, like, it's poorly managed. But that might be someone who's overweight, but is very successful financially or has a really immaculate house or whatever.

So you just pick something that happens to be the thing that you're not, it's all air fault and that's the problem. That's a good way to put it. The thing that the most annoying group, and this is, it doesn't matter whether you're pro or anti-vaccine, are the people that are so militant to jump on debates online. Like those are the people that COVID should have got. Those are the ones that it should have fucking killed. The people that decide to take the most extremist, outlandish, like totally bombastic view and immediately start spurting out their opinion. Whether it's

well informed or not, bro, this is not the hill that I want to fucking die on. So get out of my comment section. Like I do not care enough. And people think that this is some sort of a stand that you're really, really going to give a shit about. It's like, dude, I don't give a fuck about your half-baked, cod psychology opinion about why this is actually happening. So to be drawn into this thing, there's actually like, there are bigger problems in our day-to-day lives that we need to sort out. Sort your fucking relationship with your daughter out. Like, how about that? How about that?

There it is, the will in some surgical rinse. Surgical insertion. Moving on, Johnny, what have you got? Scalpel out. So one of the things I realised this year was that, and this is a business, I guess it's only really applies to business owners, I suppose. Some of our like best weeks and months were either where I wasn't online at all, so I was away, or I worked less for whatever reason, which makes me feel like I make things worse, firstly, like when I'm trying hard, it is worse. But also just I think a reminder that I guess like as a, I think I heard Jeff Bezos say like he considers himself to be paid to make like one to three decisions a day,

like one to three high quality decisions a day. And I think as some, if you're in charge of something either in charge of a team or you're in your own business or whatever you're trying to do, like really the thing that you, the moves you forward is just having a few hours of like clear energy filled headspace to make some decisions and make, do a few key things and actually like constantly trying to push the ball to the head all the time, often just makes it worse. And I'm always, we had a quote that you said, although what I'm referring to, it was a business mentor of ours, said something like, you know, as a business owner, you're like, you're like someone in the SAS, you're like, in through the window, kill the target, and get out

again, like, don't like, set on the sofa for five hours. And I think it's so easy to do, fill your days with things that don't necessarily matter when it's just the few things you could have done. Do you think that this is a byproduct of people that are small business owners and entrepreneurs that have started things from the ground floor up because they have that sort of firefighter putting out the small problems, operations first, I'm going to do the logistics, I'm going to fix the problem. Like that's what all three of us have grown up running businesses as the guy that the book stops with. I wonder how much of that is programming from how we came up.

For the first couple of years of us running propane, we were doing the marketing, the accounts, the delivery, the making the logo, like posting on Facebook, just literally like you are the entire HR, you know, you're the entire suite of departments on you. When I have a problem, I email HR, which is you, sir, I mean, he forwards it to me to deal with, to deal with. Toxic culture problem in that. It's a work culture, it's horrendous. Yeah, it's awful, awful place to work.

But yeah, so this idea that having a busy month and overly busy month, they're working too long on too many hours on a Monday impacts your Tuesday, which impacts your Wednesday. And I think just as woo as it sounds, protecting the energy and the head space you have of other things, because actually doing like two hours of focused work on something, or even just two hours of thinking in a day, is more important than spending all day in your inbox.

I can't remember who it was. Sorry, go ahead. No, no, that was it. I can't remember who it was that said that if you look at the role of a business owner or a CEO, like specifically what they actually do, they're a hard to replicate complex decision engine. So that's what the value is. That's why the person at the very, very top of the tree gets paid so much because they can aggregate all of this data, both objective, subjective, qualitative,

quantitative, the felt sense, all of that stuff, right? They just aggregate all of this shit that's going on and they like, and they just spurt out a single answer at the end of it. And the presumption is that that answer is the right one. Like that, there are complex, a hard to replicate complex decision engine. And that is why, you know, as you go further and further down the chain of command, people are, it's easier to find a cleaner that knows how to clean than it is to find a CEO that knows how to CEO, because that cleaner skills are more replaceable than the CEOs are, because they're very, very specialized into this particular business at this particular point in time,

within that market, within this nation, within these market conditions, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Yeah. All right, my one, my one. So this was from a fail, actually, from this year, to lessen from a fail. So my personal goal for this year

was to reduce my screen time on my phone. And by any metric that you want to choose. Like I just haven't done it. I just haven't been able to reduce screen time by a substantive amount. I did it for the first quarter and then maybe for the first half of the year, I was making okay progress and then that just turned into not okay progress. And then while I was out in Texas, that screen time ticked up more because I was spending more time away from other people which meant that in order to get in contact with them blah, blah, blah. And it came back to realizing why that was away in Texas, although screen time had ticked up while I was in the house, overall, it actually gone down. And that

reminded me that focus on building a life that creates the habits you want. So you can turn notifications off on your phone and sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom and go grayscale and do all of the things, right? And do all of the things. Or you can live a life that makes you not want to look at your phone. Like you can try and use James Clears motivation framework in order to build up a habit of going to the gym and you'll do one push up today and two push ups tomorrow and blah, blah, blah. Or you can just find a training regime that you really, really enjoy in a group of people that you want to do it with and you're going to go to the gym as a byproduct of the life

that you've created. I think a lot of the time we take a very, like, himmetically sealed semi-autistic view of the solution to do this, which is to kind of brute force it through the correct process or whatever it might be. But people have fluked the same outcome, the same sort of process built life outcome that you're looking for, simply by the life that they go through. No, there'll be tons and tons of people out there who are very, very fit simply because

they play a team sport that they love and they can't imagine not playing that team sport. Like they have created a life that builds the habits that they want. And a lot of the time it isn't even about habits. Like we don't know the habits that we really, really want. It's that we have an outcome goal that we want and we presume that those habits are going to get us toward it. It's like, I want to be fit. I want to be stronger.

I want to look good. I want to do whatever. Okay, there are a million fucking ways that you could get through that. I want to earn more money. I want to do whatever it is that your goal is. Just trying to create a life that helps foster that. You know, who are the people that you're spending your time around?

What's the sort of daily routine that you've got? What are the things that you consume in terms of news sources, content, and stuff like that? Those things will direct your life far more, I think, than trying to, or at least equally as much as trying to brute force your way through some habit process. It's quite hard to compete with the guy who's having fun. Correct. Correct. It's what like CrossFit does for most people, right? You know, you see CrossFit as who are just shredded and really strong and they don't even really train, they don't really do anything with their diet or like train for strength necessarily. They just love CrossFit. And like five years

later, they're in great condition. Shack is the mind of fit and mobile. They just enjoy Crossfit. And it's very, I think, yeah, it's finding the difficulty is because of phone, I think, for a lot of people, me included, is this, like, it's a filler thing. It's not, you know, when people say, what was you so disappointed, you know, look how many hours you have on your screen time and that's time you could be spent doing something else. It feels because you don't have the four hours of whatever screen time in a chunk at the start of the day. It feels very hard to

say. I'm going to stop that. So it's the CrossFit, it's the perfect example of that. Because you've got someone who like CrossFit programming is chaotic by definition, but if you just nail it and just train really hard and do a lot of stuff, spend more time doing the actual thing, then you're going to outperform someone who's like meticulously trying to like, over-optimizes programming. But... Practice there. Ring, ring something. Yeah, well, actually, they just do crossfit. You had the best life hack around this, you said, which is to have a different

holding pattern activity. We all have those moments where we're waiting for 90 seconds for something. What is it that we default to? And almost always it's, I'll get my phone out of my pocket. I'll pick my phone out. It's frightening because that has got to be such a large chunk of our screen time. Yeah, you're waiting for, you're waiting in the line at the supermarket. What is it that you default to? You're waiting.

Jumping jacks. Yeah, well, just thinking of something else that you could have. So for me, it's been, the solution for that has been to put a Kindle on my desk. So for instance, exporting the amount of time, it takes me probably about an hour a week to export files of different manners.

And maybe even more, actually, maybe you sort of put to two hours. And it just means that when I export files now, I just get the Kindle out. And I'll just read whatever's on there. So that's a new holding pattern activity. Problem is that I don't have the Kindle with me when I'm in a supermarket,

or when I'm waiting to get my tires changed at fucking quick fit or whatever it might be. I had a client who used to, once a week, he would move the Kindle app on his phone to where his Instagram was. So he would like, you know, you find, it's amazing. So like, you'll move something, you know, I've really, I've really tricked myself here. I've hidden it in a folder on the third screen. Then before you know it, you've

got this like slick move where you flick to the folder and open Instagram before you know what's happened. Yes. But if just once a week, you just have a reminder to just move Kindle to where Instagram is. Yeah. Before you know it, you're in Kindle. Yeah. I've got to keep like, up doing yourself. Yeah. So I think like you could view it as well. How do I imagine if I turned a third of my screen time into reading time like a screen time still bad? No, well, that's the problem. That's what Tristan Harris says exclusively, right? His issue isn't with screen time. It's with what screen times used for. If you could have it be really mindful

and have people's retrospective assessments of how they spent their screen time be really, really happy and whatever. But it's not, for the most part, when people look back on the way that they spent their time on their phone, they don't feel too good about it. They don't feel like it added very much to their life. They don't, I mean, fucky. When me and George were in Dubai last year, there was a girl who showed us a screen time and it was 12 hours a day, consistently 12 hours a day and eight hours of that was on TikTok.

Unbelievable. There was a four hour session on TikTok one time. So, did she do it while she was eating or did she? I don't know. I can't remember. It made me feel so uncomfortable that I had to exit the conversation. I just didn't know that the, that TikTok is some kind of

siaops. From China, what to down regulate, whatever. And so it wouldn't surprise me. Well, I mean, whilst we are spending eight hours a day on TikTok, China is restricting their under 18s to only be able to play video games between eight and 9 p.m. three days a week. Yeah, they're up to something. It feels like they know something we don't.

Yeah. I've heard, I think we've discussed Frank Yang before, he's a guy that used to be, like he was a fitness YouTuber, got really into meditation, like really way off the deep end, but he's been like loads of retreats, does multipliers meditation today,

and I've heard him talk about breaking. He has completed it. He heard him talk about breaking. He has completed it. He heard him talk about breaking bad habits, I tried to adjust his behavior and how he tried for years to stop random arbitrary things and that he always felt like that was just changing what was on the screen, like it's changing the channel but it's still a TV with it, with it, does something playing and actually have to change the screen itself or like become the screen. I'm guessing that meditation was its solution for that.

Yeah, so, but that, that feels to me like the, if there's like the master reset of like I want to stop looking at my phone, how do I handle that? So I, well, surely becoming aware of the process of picking my phone up is the way to do it. But that's like a fat multi-thousand dollar process. Yeah. Creating a life where you often go and do something fun that makes you not look at your phone might be a quicker solution at least in a way. Yeah, I'll listen to to do it alongside. Okay, so we said that we were also going to get a life hack, a favorite life hack or two that we'd had from the year and go through those. Did you get, did you both choose one or two? Yes, I was geared up for a final

reflection of the year. Oh, it is. So this is one that I've learned from Johnny, because Johnny is an absolute slut with opting into people's marketing funnels and all that kind of thing. Hot, sticky email sequences all over my face. And the lesson from that is actually, this is really valuable, that if you observe how you buy things, that teaches you how to sell. Because quite often we work with personal trainers to move online and help them with their online marketing. And quite often you'll see people make their first attempt at marketing and you're like, whoa, weird. Why are they suddenly gone from being a normal person to just suddenly really weird and it's because

they think it's this like different special skill and special voice that you have to put on and or list a and actually if you just the notice how you buy things and what it is that causes you to buy or what causes you to opt into someone's funnel and then at some point to be like, oh right, that's it, I'm buying it like And noticing those moments, then you're like, oh, well, it's very clear now, because you see the internal problems forming and then looking for a solution and finding who is able to solve that problem for you and then you buy. So yeah, the opting into marketing funnels and email out a list and things can be valuable in itself. That's slightly different though, right? Because what Johnny's doing there is seeing how other people do things,

that's not necessarily based on why he buys. But I think that that's like an amazing solution for somebody that wants to sell something. You are the business. The business is going to need to reflect your personality at least in part because that's what's going to make it unique. So why not, if you're the person that you're selling to or you're the person that's writing it, why not try and think about what triggers you to buy? Yeah, and you're right, it's a slightly different habit, I suppose.

Other people out there might not want to sign up to 10 email sequences a week just so that you can see if there's any good funnel hacking secrets in that. I kind of believe that you should participate in the system that you want to benefit from. So I allow every app to track me. No, our blockers, I allow every app to track, opt into everything by, by, by from other coaches. I just think the more I give the system, more it'll get back to me. That's you've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it.

You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it.

You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. You've got to prove it. and that, it's like, what's your job again? Coach, okay, so Eric Helms pointed this out to us. He was like, put your hand up if you have a coach and like some people did and he was like,

okay, so the people that don't, what you're a certain there is that what you do as a job has no value. It's like, ah, fuck. Yeah. Right, right, right, right, then let's fucking let's go on let's go on life hacks, let's go life hacks. Johnny, I've had a problem. What's the problem? So I keep on my life hacks and normally focus less and normally you can see the

things that have been ticked, however recently, because I have so many things in my only focus, they have to be archived. And so I can't work out how to access the archive. I do however have, I'm not sure what I've mentioned this, but I have one that's top of mind and I can say, how about that? Have I mentioned moments on the waking up app before? No. Yes.

Interesting. So I think I may have said it to you, sir, but I don't think I've life hacked it formally. Oh, to the formal submission, formal submission, formal life hacks. So Sam Harris is waking up, which I think we must have mentioned before. Two cool things about it. One, I think this is something I said to you ages ago, Chris, but I wish that there was like a one one for meditation, like a daily

session for meditation. Sam Harris has had some hours. Sam Harris's hat. So, Harris's hat has that, which is the first cool thing. The second thing has a something called moments, which is random. If you turn it on, random into the first cool thing. The second thing has a something called moments, which is if you turn it on, it random into the store throughout the day. It prompts you with a push notification to listen to like a one minute audio to just help you improve the general mindfulness in your day. So it might be like spending a minute thinking about death.

For example, a genital sound is incredibly morbid, but actually when you're like stressed about something or like caught up in a task, you're like, actually, you know what, it's not really that important. Very, very useful. And they're always random, so it'll be like at 10 a.m. or just before you go to bed or whatever. And if you just have a commitment yourself, no matter what it is, when it is, I'll just listen to the one minute thing. It's so useful. You get to choose how many moments you have per day, right? I don't think so. I think it's just all on side. In some we trust.

All right. I thought that you got to choose. Well, I've signed up to waking up. I've been using it. My meditation practice being all over this year. So I signed up to waking up. I actually bought one of my mom's Christmas presents was a year's membership to waking up as well So it's just you can choose when you have them opens from so start again. Yeah, I need a Nick turn

And then you can turn it on or turn off and do it 3 a.m. Like wake up right Fucking else I'm eight 3 a.m Cool I'm not a guest. Give them to me. Fucking hell, Sammate. 3am. Cool. Like Johnny's Apple Watch that said, it's 4am. You've been sat down too long. Time to leave the stuff. So I have two of mine of my favorite life hacks of the year. These weren't supposed to be new ones,

but I appreciate the new one. Two of mine are actually Johnny submitted life hacks, which is if there was ever a better way to show that the life hacks system works, it's that I do things and they're the most valuable things and I've taken them from the show. So my two of my favorites from this year were use creating tablets to avoid ever dosing your creatine. Like it's an absolute game changer. Yeah, Joey's doing like French man's kiss. It is it's belissimo. I know that's not French. Yeah, it's just such a hack. Remembering to put creatine two scoops strawberry. Remember to put that in your shake is impossible, but having the tablet, it just goes in with everything out.

Do you forget to take your multivitamin? No, you do not. Do you forget to take your creatine? Yes, you do. Okay, put the tablet. Personally, if you want to do this, the micronized creatine from my protein come in plastic capsules, which are much more comfortable to swallow than the

normal creatine, which is uncoded and kind of like horse, big horse tablet thing. So I thought you were like, you know the problem, Johnny. I was like, you're trying to swallow a biscuit, doesn't it? The big old boys were the one gram each. So the first one was creatine creating tablets and the second one is clear away. To think that only a year ago I didn't use clear way is unbelievable. It's the best protein that I've ever found in my entire life by by so far that it thinking about all of the time that we've had like milky.

It's a how how do you even make something milky when it's mixed with water? Like how is that even possible? And now you have this whole new world, which is juice. It's so there we are. Creating tablets and clear way my top two from this year. Jonathan Watson. Thank you very much. Supplements have come such a long way. Like do you remember Casey in caseinate? This was not my cellar casein. That's the new generation too, much nicer. Still tastes like sand, but the casein caseinate was a lump of clay

in your shaker, and you'd shake it, and it would go boom, boom, boom, on the top of the bottom of your thing. I've thrown that up so many times now. It's like when people describe like Malibu and they say, I can't drink Malibu anymore because I had a bad vomiting experience. It's like, no. KCN KCNate is the same for you. We could have put some blueberry extract in it, which would have fixed all of your problems. Garlic and mushroom extract with some Apple fiber or something. Awesome.

Holy goat weed. Right, what's your stuff? What have you got? This actually won't apply to people who have listened this far into the episode, but one of my big difficulties with podcasts is people recommend some to me and I go, oh, great, I'll stick it on the list. But then with the previous apps, I used to use it. It was a linear queue.

And so if you skip the episode, you can't go back to wait to pick up where you left off. So I've started using Spotify now for podcasts. And the My Episodes feature is great because you, the search feature on Spotify is second to none. You can search for episode or show, and it comes up on the thing and then you can just say one button, bang it into my episodes. Then you have a queue that you can kind of tap us. So it keeps your spot in all the episodes you've been listening to. So you don't have to abandon an episode forever if you want to nudge something up the queue

and come back to it or if you're like, oh, you know what, I'm not really in the mood to listen to an existential crisis interview today, but I want to hear the latest life hacks from Prep Infitters in one wisdom. Then, you know, it's like, then you can kind of dip in and out. So... Spotify for podcasts. Brilliant. Dude, I... It's fucking great. great. I'm still not fully over from Apple Podcasts, but that's more habitual than it is platform limiting now. I've not used the Apple Podcasts up in years, but I see people on the forums just furious about it being like, how come this still isn't bug still isn't fixed and still sort of... Trying to go deeper as well, they're putting subscribe so you can have through Apple pay,

you can gate subscriber only content for paid members. And so you've got like an internal way to create whatever a Patreon and stuff like that. You think why not improve the search function? Apple. But anyone that is listening, especially if you're on Spotify, but even if you've got Spotify on your phone, open Spotify, go to Mon and Wisdom and give us five stars, please,

because they've just enabled reviews on Spotify for podcasts. So if you can go and give us five stars, you don't even have to write anything. There's not even a space to write something. So just go and give us five stars, because for a have to write anything. There's not even a space to write something. So just go and give us five stars because for a very long time, I've worked quite hard to build up the Apple podcasts reviews. And now I have a new platform that I need to try and dominate. So go do that right now.

So that is a separate ecosystem for reviews then. They don't link with the feed or with no, no, no, it's just on. It's on. It's like how many subscribers. If you got on YouTube, that doesn't correlate with how many subscribers you've got on Spotify or whatever. Yeah, totally separate. We probably have never mentioned this as a life hack, but Spotify in general, Spotify premium, I think is worth every penny.

Like I think I would pay 10 times the amount to retain my access to Spotify. Dude, YouTube premium, YouTube premium is as much as it was. It was back in Stanis. It... It was Bank of Stan, it's a VPN and you get it for 17p. Yeah, that's Argentinian. It's 1890. It's as big of a change. So here's the thing, right? This is whatever it was, the negative pilot. You really only know about the gains that you've made in life. When you see someone else that doesn't have those gains

or when you revert back that doesn't have those gains or when you revert back to a lower resolution version of life that has you without that. When you go onto someone's Spotify on their phone and you realize that they don't have premium. So I was in a gym. But it's not because, dun dun dun dun. Hey, it's Billy Eilish, you're listening to the top hits. Yeah. Danny was really happy with the house that he found in Gospers. up hits. Danny was really happy with the house that he found in Gospher. And he was like, Yeah,

the volume of the song. So we were fucking in, in the, on it, Jim, the other day, and the coach that had the music on was, was getting fucking pined with like, clavio ads, partway through. Clavio believes that you need to own your customer data. And he like, right, that, that is how it feels to me when I watch someone on YouTube, press on a video and then them have to skip two ads of seven seconds in length, disgusting.

So if I evaluate my principle, which is participating in the system that you want to benefit from. So if I run YouTube ads, why are you running Spotify ads then? I mean, I've just never even explored it. If you started running Spotify ads, would you feel that you have to cancel this for a premium? Good question. Good question. Not sure.

I would be in an impasse. I would not want to do. Maybe do like one month on one month off or something like that. I'd be in an impasse. I wouldn't know what to do. Maybe do like one month on one month off or something like that. I'll periodize it. That's the solution. Yeah. Gentlemen. Come on.

What are you saying? Well, I didn't do my thing about the program. Oh, so tell us your thing about the program. Come on. Hit us. It's okay. It's okay. Well, you either of you've probably seen,

have either of you ever seen, don't look up on Netflix. I actually have. Wow. You're fucking kidding me. Yes. How have you seen it? And I haven't seen it.

I'm so current. I just, oh, yeah. That and Craig David. Yes, it's on it. Craig David, it was wait and ruin it. I've heard so as someone that hasn't seen it, what I've heard is that it's a comment against the sort of woke progressive crazy climate activism world and that people are feeling very satisfied by watching it. And it's also fun and funny.

So interestingly, I got to the end of it, I was having a shower afterwards. I thought I really need to do more on the climate change front. Really? Seriously. Wow. I'm unable to comment here. I can't say anything. I'm just like fucking

to be honest. I'm also not sure how that was a conclusion. So I think you know, you said if you've seen it, yeah. So throughout it, I imagine you had this underlying sense of slight frustration that no one was taking the people seriously. And they're all saying, like, hello, everybody, have you seen this massive problem? Everyone's going, and I think like what my view of what's this trying to get across is that like, we're in that situation now, it's just less defined and clear. Yes. And only actually towards the end of the program, trying to spoil the Chris, only towards the end of the program, does it become obvious and clear? And then everyone's like, ah, I mean, the same. So why don't we, if that's the case, if we're concerned about climate change,

what the fuck about artificial intelligence? That's one that you literally can't see and is irreversible. So it's the, it could be related to any of them. Yeah. I thought I thought I could be a professional risk at large. Yeah. COVID. I thought that's what they were commenting on initially, because there's a lot of parallels with COVID or with Trump or, but you know, the, you know, the, the, the, the cap is big in the old climate change world, right?

You didn't use it. It's his Oscar or Golden Globe speech a little while ago to just point his finger at people that drive cars or something. He was basically the reason I watched it. I think like you, you just, you just, you know, like, John Hell's fucking pretty big dick as well. Most of the stuff is good. But Leonardo Capro doesn't make very many films. Like it's quite rare that Leonardo Capro likes to film. Yeah, he's not Nicholas K. He's busy.

Yeah, or like a Bruce Willis who's still or Liam Neeson who's just still like pumping him out. The quality is just just dropping and dropping like guys just stop. Just fucking give it up. But yeah, being trapped. Other than the trouble is like,

what do you do about AI? That's the that's the defeat is attitude that everybody has about it. Well, no, I'm OK. So lobby, what we really need is to lobby for oversight. The same way as we have with regards to nuclear weapons, the same ways we have now to do with sin bio, so synthetic biology and bio weapons, you can't sequence the genome of a known pathogen on a tabletop

creator and anything which is slightly dangerous gets sent up for review. So the way that it works is that someone can't just buy a genome sequencer and then fucking recreate, recreate smallpox, right? Download the smallpox genome from the internet and then recreate it. You can't do that because you have oversight from a central body. Now, we need something that's so much more serious than that to do with the research around AI, because the control problem, which is,

how do you make sure that the AI does the thing that you want it to do and not turn you while in paper clips? That needs to be fixed before you have the AI, but the incentives are completely reversed to that. The incentives are, okay, we get the AI, we make it work, and we'll deal with the problems when it arises, because it's winners and losers. The worst thing to do at the time of the AI is that. Precisely.

There's the problem of like, I can't remember who spoke about this, but the idea that like you're building a house, and when you lay the foundations and you build a first layer and you build a first layer, it all looks fine, completely fine, no problems, no one flags it, and then you get like 20 stories up and you're like, oh shit, that thing that we did on level two, everything's going to collapse, and you only realise once you're 20 levels up that the thing that you built. So there would be a some cost fallacy to programmers that realise that they maybe- Well no, it's just too late. So like the approval process that everything gets approved, approved, approved, approved. Oh my God, the thing that seemed fine is now and then it's a big fucking,

it's a big fucking problem and not enough people are talking about it. Anyway, gentlemen, 2021, we've completed it, like literally actually genuinely have completed it. Thank you for joining me this year on some awesome episodes, lots and lots of life hacks, lots coming up as well over the next couple of weeks, guests that everyone can expect, Stephen Pinker, Andrew Huberman, Bridget Fetticey, can't say a couple of other ones because I haven't announced them yet, but they will be very, very, very large, and I'm looking forward to it. But thank you. You will continue to be a staple part of the furniture. People want to check out what it is that you do. Where should they go? propinfitters.com. If you want a calculator for fat loss and stuff, propinfitters.com forward

slash modern wisdom. If you want to build an online business. I love it gentlemen, happy new year, Merry Crembo and thank you to Haspola. you