Modern Wisdom - #500 - Special: 18 Lessons From 500 Episodes

Episode Date: July 16, 2022

To celebrate 500 episodes on Modern Wisdom, I broke down some of my favourite lessons, insights and quotes from the last 4 and a half years. Expect to learn why having no role models can be an advantage, how discipline eats motivation for breakfast, why you should be training for the difficult, why success in pursuit of happiness can be self-defeating, why fame makes you weak, how an obsession with productivity is just immortality by another name, what I learned about negativity biases from Margaret Thatcher, the importance of letting go of successful habits for new ones and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get £250 discount on Eight Sleep products at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: 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

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is me. To celebrate 500 episodes on Modern Wisdom, I have broken down some of my favorite lessons, insights, and quotes from the last four and a half years. It's insane to think that this is how long the project's been going on for. And thank you to everybody that listens. You are my absolute favourites, everyone that tunes in every week that shares the episodes that helps the

show grow. 500 episodes is completely wild. So thank you for supporting me and being a part of it. Today, expect to learn why having no role models can be in advantage, how discipline eats motivation for breakfast, why you should be training for the difficult, why success in pursuit of happiness can be self-defeating, why fame makes you weak, how an obsession with productivity is just immortality by another name. What I learned about negativity biases

from Margaret Thatcher, the importance of letting go of successful habits for new ones, and much more. This Thursday, Jocker Willink,ink live or not live, pre-recorded and going to be published two and a half hours with one of the scariest men I've ever met in my life and it is a very very cool episode, fantastic to spend a bit of time with him and get to dig into a very different type of person to the one that I usually have on the show. So yes, make sure you're subscribed so that you don't miss that. But now, please welcome the wise and very wonderful me. One of your friends, welcome back to the show, it is episode 500, which is definitely

a number that I didn't think that we would be getting to. The last few, all of the last year and a half has been insane, but the last six months has been particularly ridiculous. So I wanted to say thank you to everybody that supports the show and supports me. It's an incredibly small operation. It's me and video guideine and assistant Ben, and then some people that we rely on to do other stuff. And that's pretty much it. And I think this year will maybe put out somewhere in the region of 300 videos on YouTube, 150 episodes. And the support that we get from you guys and the encouragement and the involvement in really smart discussions is, it's phenomenal.

The messages that I get gasmed up more than any amount of plays or buttons and plaques from YouTube, but ever could. So yeah, thank you. Today, I'm going to go through a selection of some of the best lessons that I've picked up from the last few years. Some of them in new ones since the last time that I did one of these. And some of them are ones that I forgot about last time. And I'm just deciding to add in now. Some of them I've learned from the show and others have

just been things that I've picked up from listening to other bits or research or just life in general. If you are signed up to the newsletter, some of these might be familiar. And if you're not signed up to the newsletter and you like what we do here at Modern Wisdom, go to chriswalex.com slash books. And you can sign up, get free reading list with 100 books that I think that you would love. And you'll get signed up to the newsletter as well. Let's get into it. First one, this is actually a lesson from Jocco Willink that isn't even out yet. So this is an exclusive because this episode doesn't go out until next week, but this is Discipline Eat Motivation for Breakfast. So I was listening

to Jocco on Sam Harris, and Sam was talking about the fact that you can't fake bravery as an emotion because you can fake being angry or you can fake being upset or whatever, but if you fake being brave when you're terrified, that is what bravery is. Doing the thing in spite of terror literally is bravery or courage, and I suggested to Jocco that perhaps there's something similar to do with motivation that people overcomplicate motivation because they believe there's some sort of optimal mental state that they're supposed to be in when they feel like they're going to do it or they want to do it or whatever.

But you can't really fake motivation. No matter how motivated you feel, if you don't go and do the thing, that wasn't motivation. And on the other side, if you don't feel motivated at all, and yet you do go and do the thing, that is motivation. And Jaco agreed and he said, that's why I prefer discipline to motivation. Motivation is fleeting, it comes and goes. Discipline is always there. You don't need to want to go to the gym or meditate or walk

your dog, have a difficult conversation with your partner, you simply need to do the thing. And by doing the thing, you shortcut the need for motivation entirely. I mean, that's almost everybody that I know that is incredibly motivated or that people would see as being motivated. When you actually look quite closely, it's probably not, it's discipline, masquerading as motivation. And motivation can come and you can use it. You've had the right mix of songs on a morning or the right pharmacological blend of caffeine and CBD

or whatever else it is that you use. That's great. Take advantage of it if you want to get some extra wind in your sales, but the point is that what you're relying on should be something which is more replicable that's more under your control. Motivation is super, super fleeting, like Jocko says. I just really love that.

Discipline eats motivation for breakfast and the fact is that you can use it when it's there, but if it's not, you don't need to worry because you know that you've got something to rely on. That's where learning about discomfort, leaning into it, becoming accustomed to doing things even when you don't want to do them helps so much because if you only do things when you want to do them, you're going to put yourself at the mercy of the world. Next one. This is Gwinda Bogle, who I absolutely adore. And if you don't follow him on Twitter,

you should go and follow him, because he's outstanding, he's substacts amazing as well. Observed ideological beliefs are shows of fealty. An absurd ideological belief is actually a form of tribal signaling. It signals that one's ideology is more important to them than reason itself, than truth, sanity, and reality.

To one's allies, this is an oath of unwavering loyalty. To ones enemies, this is a threat display. It's not always about what's true. It's often about how does this make me look to my tribal compatriots and to my enemies. So this is one of the most interesting things that's made me realize about how the internet works and Twitter that a lot of the time people aren't saying a thing because they believe in a thing, it's

like wearing a badge of honor, it's an identifier to the rest of their group, it is a threat display to the people that they don't agree with, and the more extreme and the more ridiculous some of these beliefs are, when you look at them with a rational perspective, you say, how could somebody believe this thing? Well, you're presuming that the reason that they're saying that they believe it is because they actually believe it. If you go one step removed and you think maybe what they're doing is they're saying this

because they want everybody else to realize that they believe it and such, it identifies them within a particular in-group or out-group, everything kind of changes. It becomes a lot more about signaling, it becomes a lot more about just seeing what the internet interprets your actions as being or what another group interprets your actions as being. And it kind of explains why people can hold such ridiculous ideological beliefs simply because it's tribal signaling. Next one, this is Zach Talander, my new roommate.

You are training for the difficult. So this is Karyakos Grizzly, who is, if you don't know, I think he might be Greek. He is an incredibly large man that lifts very heavy things and has become kind of a super meme, I guess, on the internet. And what Zack's talking about here is Karyakos was once asked why he trains. And he trains incredibly heavy. It's a very unorthodox way of training. And he was asked why it is that he trains so hard and he said that he was training for the difficult and Zach dragged this out a little bit and said that he thinks creativity stems from difficulty. So if you search for difficulty in life in the processes that you're doing, then the creativity will find you. And the thing that I really

resonated with was the difficult is going to come in life. No matter what it is that you're trying to do, no matter how optimized you've got your day and your life, the difficult is going to arrive. You want to be able to greet it like an old friend. You want to invite it through the door and then lean into it because you know that this is exactly why you've been training.

You don't want the difficult to come in and for you to not be prepared. It's the same as the motivation versus discipline thing. You want to be able to have something steadfast that you can rely on. And if you're training it a five and life can sometimes come in at a 10, you're not going to be sufficiently prepared. Now, there's some stuff to do with creativity in here about the fact that overclocking how hard it is that you train allows you to see things that other people don't see. So Zac uses this example of Jack

white from the white stripes, might be getting this wrong, but this guy who is a keyboardist, singer and guitarist, he often makes his sets more difficult than he needs to when he's on stage, so he doesn't have guitar picks on his mic stand, he actually has to run to the back of the stage to get them and pick them up. He doesn't have his different instruments nearby, he has to sprint around the stage. He has other restrictions that he places on himself and he's writing songs on when he's trying. I don't think he allows himself to get new guitar strings and stuff like that. The reason being that the increase in difficulty forces him to have an extra degree of creativity. It allows him to see things that other people don't see

because the stimulus that's coming in is another one. Here's something that I didn't write down actually that relates to this and it's a Jack Butcher one. This is so important. Jack is a guy that created visualized value. So if you've ever seen those white on black images that are kind of everywhere on the internet, the moment Naval tends to share them a lot.

And it's sort of a geometric pattern and a particular type of font. And I asked him about where his creativity comes from. And he gave this really interesting answer. He's a graphic designer by trade. His background is in graphic design. So you would think you'd be very seduced by fonts and colors and making things look pretty.

And what he ended up doing was constraining all of the things that he usually would rely on as a graphic designer. So it was one color, white and black. It was one font that he'd pre-decided. It was one particular type of drawing style, this sort of geometric pattern. It looks like space invaders from the 80s. And the reason that he did that was that by constraining the degrees of freedom that he has in certain areas of creativity that he decided in advance didn't make a difference. What it forced him to do was get his creativity really dialed in and maximized in the area that he thought did make a difference. So that was his messaging. How insightful is the visual representation of the quote

that I'm talking about? How well can I display something? What's my selection of the concepts that I'm going to put out there? How good is that? And that, to me, is such a useful way to... It's like an essentialist's mindset when it comes to content creation

or really doing anything that you're producing. Where can I restrict the degrees of freedom so that I don't need to make this decision again? And where can I focus on the highest point of contribution that is actually going to make a difference? So the first with the channel, we have one color for the font. We have one color for the clips. We have one font style that we use.

We have one layout that we particularly use. There's a reduced number of degrees of freedom, which allows us to focus on the stuff that matters. What does it look like? What does it say? What's the titleing? What's the design? What's the image that we go for? And it just makes things easier. And also, obviously, downstream from this, you end up with a signature style, which is pretty cool. You know, having branding, branding that looks like something recognizable is pretty important. And that's super easy to do by restricting the degrees of freedom and then allows you to have more bandwidth to be able to focus on the stuff which genuinely makes a difference.

Alright, next up, achieving happiness through success is self-defeating. So this is a Alex Hormosi tweet that he came up with originally, and then I repurposed it into something that I've been thinking about for ages. If you haven't checked out Alex's stuff, I highly recommend you go and follow him on Instagram, he's phenomenal, he's a super smart, insightful guy.

It's also an episode that we did within which you can watch somewhere up here. So one of the most common tensions that I talk about and I see is this balance that people have between a desire for success and a desire to feel like we're enough. So success is strange because presumably we want success because we think that a more successful life will bring us more happiness and more meaning and more fulfilment. But the problem is that we sacrifice the thing that we want, which is happiness, for the thing which is supposed to get it, success.

We sacrifice the thing we want, happiness, for the thing which is supposed to get it, which is success. So failure can make you miserable, but I don't know that success can make you happy. And high performers often have this dynamic where they're as a young child, their parents want them to do well, so they encourage their child to do well by praising them when they succeed and then criticizing them when they fail. And then what the child learns is that praise and admiration is contingent on succeeding. So the as they go into an adult, this lesson turns into I am only worthy of love and acceptance and belonging, if I succeed. And they're prepared to outwork and outhustle and outgrind,

pretty much everybody else, because they're driven not just toward a life that they want, but they're running away from a life that they fear. And success and progress, it dissolves, emeliorates those feelings of insufficiency that they have. So success and progress have been prioritized above everything else. And I don't deny that a lot of high performers probably do love the work that they do.

And a lot of them will be driven by this well-balanced and simple desire to maximize their time on this planet. But if I was to play a bet, I think that the majority of high performers are driven by fears of insufficiency rather than a holistic desire to be better, and I think that people that are high achievers on average are more miserable than the average person. So what does it mean that the people we most admire are the ones with the least desirable internal states. If the pursuit of success is

in an effort to make us happy, and in the pursuit of success we make ourselves miserable, why not just shortcut the entire process and be happy? I don't know if that's possible because external accolades, they genuinely actually count for a lot. We need to have some degree of external material success that makes us feel validated and respected and satiate our desire for status and stuff. But I don't think the external success will fill an internal void. So this is the insufficiency adaptation that I've brought science. So if your drive comes from a fear of insufficiency and you continue to disprove those fears with success in the real world and yet the feeling of insufficiency persists, what makes you think

that the answer to this problem is more success. There's no clean answer here, obviously. The world is messy and we're hopelessly irrational, but you don't need to let go of all success goals. You do need to spend some time working out whether there's a shorter route to the life that you want by removing obstacles rather than just pressing harder on the accelerator. So I mean, that quote, I can't remember what it was originally about. It might have been to do with money, I think, but we sacrifice the thing we want for the thing which is supposed to get it happiness for success.

I really, really like that. If you're hoping that your success is going to make you happy and in the pursuit of your success you make your life miserable, what are we doing here? Next one. Where are we? Outgroups are more popular than in groups. So this is from Scott Alexander. The oldest pattern in human history is, here's a problem and here's a bunch of people who are different than us. Let's blame it on them. So I think it was around about the 2012

US election. They were looking at the voting habits of Democrats and Republicans and up until about 2012, when they surveyed them what they found out was that Democrats preferred their party to the conservative party, and the reverse was true as well. But in 2012, there was a flip, and people hated the other party more than they loved their own. So you could see a lot of the votes that have occurred since then as kind of protest votes. It's you voting not for another, not you voting for a same or it's you not voting for an outgroup, not you voting for an ingroup. And that is kind of dangerous. And it's also one of the ways that you can quite easily spot charlatans on the internet or grifters or people who are

disingenuous or at the very least are weaponizing particular types of dynamics to encourage you to behave in a way that you might not actually want to. If all of the time what you're hearing from someone online, I mean, this is almost all of the internet at the moment, is someone pointing a finger at another group of people and saying, they're the problem. This is why we need to stick together so that they don't take over. Hang on. How fragile is it that the reason that you're in group is bound together is over the mutual hatred or distaste of an outgroup?

That doesn't work. It's not going to work very long. It's simply too fragile, right? It's going to fracture and break apart because all it takes is one person within the in-group to identify another person who's on the edge of the in-group to now be the next out-group and they're going to get shaved off and then the next person's going to get shaved off. This is the purity spiral.

It's kind of the ridiculousness, I guess, of the intersectional ideology that... I mean, we did this video not long ago about white gay privilege, that being gay, if your white, is no longer enough to be a part of an oppressed class, that you actually need to have multiple intersecting grievances, right? But the same thing happens on the other side as well. Like you can see this on the right that people point at a group of like these are the people that are coming to take over the whatever. And that should give everybody pause. Do I agree with this person or do I have a sense of affinity with this creator, this rhetoric, this ideology, this group, this movement, whatever, because I genuinely care about them, or is it because my fear,

my innate tribal fear of the outgroup has been weaponized, and I've been limitically hijacked, so that I'm now focused on them. That's a very interesting dynamic, and that Scott Alexander thing is bang on the money. Next one, productivity obsession is immortality by a different name. This is Oliver Birkman who wrote 4,000 weeks, fantastic book. If you're into productivity but have kind of transcended the autistic side of it and are now moving into a more holistic view of productivity. This is fantastic. This quote is, the drive to become more efficient to all costs usually has consciously or otherwise some kind of fantasy endpoint where you're able to do everything.

Everything that you could think of, everything that people could demand of you, everything you feel obliged to do, you could do it. That's really just eternal life by another means. One option is to live forever. Another option is to do an unlimited amount in the time you've got. They both amount to a superhuman approach. That's all of a Birkman from 4,000 weeks. I really like this idea, the fact that a lot of the people who like me get seduced by the idea of productivity are doing it because they feel like getting more done in last time is going to give them a great sense of satisfaction.

And there is no end point that they've actually defined when enough is enough. The same thing happens with money, right, going back to Homozi's tweet earlier on. The same thing happens with money. People don't give themselves a set amount that they're going to be happy when they're able to do it and productivity can be the same. It's like, look, how much work do you want to get out per week? Is it this many hours? Is it this many studies? Is it this many podcasts? Is it this many studies, is it this many podcasts, is it this many videos, is it this many, whatever. And what happens if you manage to ratchet and dial in your productivity system

until you're happy to do that? What happens then? Well, for the most part, what you do is you go, well, look at all of this opportunity that I've opened up now, I can fill it with some more work. And you go, right, okay, that is a never ending way. It's a treadmill that you're going to stay on and it is a way that you will continue

to fill all of your spare time until you can't fill it anymore, which will be when you're dead. So I think a big insight here is you need to set yourself a goal of what wouldn't a productivity end point look like. The same thing is really smart to do. For money, Morgan Housel says, the number one first goal that you need to make sure of when you're setting yourself financial targets is to stop the goalposts from moving. Every time that you earn a little bit more money, you move the goalposts further away

from you and then want to earn more money. That is a never-ending chase to continue to just acquire more stuff, work harder, do whatever. And this doesn't matter whether you want to do your work or not, the goal of life should be to maximize your freedom to do the things that you want all the time. The number one advantage that you have with productivity when you combine that with financial freedom is that you can wake up on a morning and say, I can do whatever I want to do today. And if there are some things I don't necessarily fully want to do, I can get them

done in a small amount of time, so they impact my day in a minor way. There's another element of this that Douglas Murray fell in love with. Productivity dysmorphia. This is anacodriarado and she came up with this idea, which is the same way of body dysmorphia, productivity dysmorphia doesn't allow us to see the fruits of our labor on a daily basis. So you spend all day working and you're pretty productive, maybe you get distracted, maybe you don't, but whatever, you've spent the whole day working and you get to the end of the day and you look back and you feel like you've done nothing. You can't remember what you did. You're very disappointed with your successes and your failures and whatever it is that you

achieved and you're driven the next day to go and do even more. And it's just a a cool way of looking at the fact that we have this warped view of what we do on a daily basis, especially people that acknowledge workers. You look back at the day and you don't have a bucket of widgets, right? This is the stuff that was to do. This is what's being done and this is the stuff that was done. It's not like when your dad was a mechanical engineer and he was cranking stuff, right? And he could show you a car at the end of the day.

Like, you very well could have worked all day on your emails and gone to bed with more and red emails than when you woke up. That's not typically the way that workers to be done, and yet productivity, dysmorphia, all of this combines together to give us a very misaligned view of what we've done on a daily basis. So productivity obsession is immortality by a different name. Pick yourself an end goal in terms of what you would like to be able to achieve from your productivity system, and then productivity disomorphia. Just make sure that you're trying to be as rational as possible when it comes to actually choosing what you're doing and reflecting on the amount of work that you've achieved in a day.

Next one, you cannot control the mind with the mind. So this was the first question that I asked Dandrie Huberman and it's the essence, I think, of his work. Pretty much until he came around, I'd always thought that issues that I had internally, emotional states, lack of ability to focus, lack of ability to focus, lack of ability to sleep, to rest, to switch off, to switch on, all of that, was something that I kind of needed to, I don't know, like, clench my mind around, you know, before you're going to do a big lift and you're doing that. And he highlights the fact that the vast majority of the reasons that your mind is acting the way that it is is because of an external stimulus or at least something that you've done in the body.

So just reminded me that, look, if my mind is a little bit messy, if my thoughts are muddled, if my sleep isn't too good, rather than trying to think my way out of the problem, I should probably just go back to, am I eating right, sleeping right, getting enough water, training, getting sunlight exposure. Okay, then what are the things I'm eating? What's my supplementation look like? Like, have I spent enough time with friends? All of that stuff. None of this really involves trying to think your way out of the problem. You cannot control the mind with the mind. You have to control it with the body. It's so much more empowering, right? Because all of our internal processes are pretty opaque to us. Even the best meditators in the world,

they can't see their own minds. They have a clearer window into them, but this, you go to the gym, you lift some weight, you know that you've done it. There's nothing anywhere near as concrete when it comes to the mental processes that you've got going on. So, yeah, you cannot control the mind with the mind. Great one. Next up, fame ain't what it used to be. This is a blog post that I talk about all the time from Kylesian Roader and it's called What Do You Want to Want. This insight is probably my favorite one from the lot and he said, do you want to be someone or do something? The two aren't mutually exclusive of course, but there are a lot less cohesive than you might think.

Fame ain't what it used to be. Traditionally people became famous because they achieved something great, maybe even heroic. Because fame was such a powerful signal, we all started wanting it. Who wouldn't? But this was the downfall of fame. People stopped wanting to do something and started wanting to be someone, regardless of why. The goal is not to deserve fame, just to be famous. The goal is not to deserve fame, just to be famous. Once upon a time, famous bestowed on those who earned it, such as the heroic general who risked his life in battle, or the famous doctor who restored sight to the poor and afflicted, it was heroic deeds that made one famous. Today, fame is only granted to those who seek it, and that's from the

new philosopher magazine. So fame was, it's been separated from what it was supposed to indicate. It used to be a trustworthy signal of honor or courage or creativity or hard work or anything else. Why is it that we chase it now so much more? It's because modern fame is the promise of obligation-free status, right? It gives you the opportunity to take advantage of all of the brilliant things of fame without any of the hard bits of having to earn the right to be famous. If you could shortcut the work bit and just get the reward bit, then why wouldn't you? And obviously this gets fed into by the rapid ascension that we see of people becoming famous. Like if you can be famous for drinking juice while skateboarding down the street on TikTok or being

picked out of obscurity to go into reality TV, why wouldn't you try and game that system? You know, why wouldn't you look at someone? It's kind of like a lottery or the Hunger Games. It's pretty much like that. If you don't like the idea of working hard at doing something, or even not that you don't like the idea, simply that you see other people who have been given this obligation free status, why wouldn't you lean into it? Well, hang on, he didn't work for his fame. I believe that I work harder than him, so maybe I can get some of that free fame, and I'll down my work back as well.

And one of the reasons why this is so dangerous is because when someone becomes inflated with fame, everybody else has it in our power to deflate him. Other people's heads are a wretched place to become the home of a man's true happiness. That's Arthur Schopenhauer. And basically, to become famous is to volunteer to be a scapegoat, because you're going to be treated like a king until you screw up or people

get tired of you, and then you sacrifice at the altar. You give the public someone to hate altogether. And when you put this kind of power into the hands of people around us, our entire sense of self becomes an abstraction, right? We have to check Twitter engagement in order to measure our self worth instead of the action that we took, like abstracting what, how you feel about yourself and putting it in the hands of other people. But just generally, that's a bad idea. Roll it forward into a modern era with social media and tribal signaling and shows of field tea and absurd ideological beliefs like Gwenda mentioned earlier on that it is such

a risky position to be in. You're checking Twitter engagement to measure self-worth instead of the action that you took. This has always been my problem with one of the reasons why I think that bodybuilding shows are so you have to have such a particular type of mindset to be able to go into that competition and come out of it feeling healthy because your entire success within that is an abstraction, right? You could objectively be bigger, leaner with more conditioning and better proportions or whatever than the person stood next to you, but it's so subjective.

The success criteria for winning a bodybuilding show is so subjective. It's not powerlifting. That's 300 kilos. Can you pick it up? Yes. Did he? No, right. You win. It's nowhere near as cut and dry. And that's one of the reasons because bodybuilding is kind of like a microcosm of what we're talking about here. Our sense of self worth is abstracted into other people's heads. And then we measure our sense of self worth by checking their reaction, not by looking at the actions that we took. And again, like I said before, like, fame can make you happy if what brought you fame also brings you happiness. What that means is that if the fame were to diminish, you

would still be happy. A lot of the time people are doing things that they're only happy to do as long as they continue to receive fame for it. So a great question to ask yourself here is if you're considering a career that you think might be born a little bit out of status is, look, if I got zero status for this, if I got absolutely no fame, would I continue to do it? I mean, that's a pretty good marker that the thing that you're doing is internally generated and not something that you need to worry about. But there's a quote from John Boyd that is this fighter pilot, super disagreeable fighter pilot who used to have art. He was in the

50s, 60s, 70s, like the golden era of fighter pilot and he used to put cigars out on his superior ties. Like this crazy, real angry, swearing American dude. And he says, to be somebody or to do something in life there is often a roll call. That's when you will have to make a decision to be or to do which way will you go. It's the same thing again. Like, you want to be somebody or you want to do something, and that's not to say that by doing something you can't be somebody, but being somebody without having done anything, that's the reason that people have a particular sense of distaste for like dynasty wealth and trust fund kids.

We don't, there is something, especially in a meritocracy, inherently uncomfortable about people that do that. So yeah, do you want to be somebody or do you want to do something? Next one the negativity bias is no longer serving us. So this is Roy Baumeister who was on the show a couple of weeks ago And this had nothing to do with anything that we spoke about which was the social psychology of sexual interactions This is from a different book of his and he said life has to win every day death only has to win once his, and he said, life has to win every day. Death only has to win once. So the negativity bias, which you may be familiar with, is the fact that bad things seem to affect us more than good things, right? So you can get the hundred compliments and one criticism, and you

will happen to remember the one criticism more than the compliments, unless you've done a ton of mindfulness. When emotions of equal intensity occur, things of a more negative nature have a greater effect on a psychological state than neutral or positive things. Something very positive will generally have less of an impact on a person's behavior and cognition than something equally emotional but negative. And the best example of this that I got was Michael Malice,

told me about this, he's a fan of Margaret Thachar and has been doing a ton of research about her era recently. Now, tell me about the Brighton Hotel bombing which happened on October 12, 1984. Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet ministers were targeted by the IRA to come for a conservative party conference. A long delay time bomb was planted in the hotel by Patrick McGee before the Prime Minister Thatcher and her cabinet arrived at the hotel.

Although Thachar narrowly escaped the blast, five people were killed, including a conservative member of Parliament and 31 were injured. After the event, the IRA released a statement. Mrs Thachar will narrowly realise that Britain cannot occupy our country and torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it. Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always. Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always. And this is the fundamental asymmetry of all anxiety. The reason that we fear change and new things because, yeah, sure, the new thing might make life a bit better, which would be good, but it also might

make us a lot more dead, which would be very bad. That quote, round that, we only have to get lucky ones, who have to be lucky every day, is fantastic. And given the fact that we're finite creatures surrounded by infinite complexity, the fears and worries and concerns that we have while painful and completely illogical are there for a reason. But the problem is that the reason is a few million years old. Human existence has never been as safe as it is now. So whatever problem it is that you're facing, it's probably not going to be an issue and that you're going to

deal with that issue even if it happens. You're here. You're listening to this right now. What does that say? It suggests that all of the challenges and the neuroses and the problems and the overthinking and the sleepless nights and all that stuff kind of didn't make much of a difference because whatever it is that you came up against you dealt with it, now you could say, well, maybe all of the overthinking in neuroses contributed to me getting through the thing. And without that, I wouldn't have been able to do it. Like, what are we talking about here? Like, the lions are not at the door when you need to have an awkward conversation with your

boss tomorrow. The response that we have internally to a lot of the things that we deal with is completely disproportionate to the impact of the thing that we're concerned about. And that's what this story and the sequence of things, the fact that life has to win every day, death only has to win once. Well, death's pretty hard to find now in the first world. Death is really, really difficult. You know, we've nerfed society. The entire world is created in a desperate attempt for death to be as far away from us as possible.

And yet we respond to stressful situations with that mortal fear. It's not needed, right? You've got here, whatever it is that you've gone through, it's been okay, therefore you should have at least a good amount of faith that whatever comes up against you in the future, you should also be okay with.

Where are we next? What got you here won't get you there. So this is something I've reflected on a bit more since the show's grown and it's to do with where I spend my time and a little bit of brushing up against having a Puritan work ethic. So I like to work hard and I always considered that working harder and doing more that's quite a British thing, I think, is the solution. And one of the problems that he realizes that another whole Mozi quote, he says, beginners over

value thinking and undervalued doing advanced people do the opposite, beginners over value thinking and undervalued doing advanced people do the opposite. Reason for that is that when you first start out at something, for the most part, you're doing all of it, right? Your HR, your marketing, your mother, your cook, your cleaner, all of those things. And then over time, what happens is your lifestyle starts to change and maybe becomes a little bit more comfortable, or perhaps the business or the project or the family or whatever it is that you're doing grows.

And that permits you to be able to start thinking about different things. And yet, because you've ingrained this particular style of work where you're completely obsessive and overworking and all of that, you try to map a previously useful mode into this new position that you're in. But what you don't realize is that's causing you to bounce off the limiter, right? There's only so many hours in the day. If you decide

that you're going to do absolutely everything by hand, you're not going to delegate control, you're not going to relinquish anything, you're not going to have faith in other people that they can get the job or the babysitting or the cooking or the cleaning or whatever done. If you don't do that, you are limiting your ability to ascend to the next level. And what got you here won't get you there is me reminding myself that the strategies that made me successful or gave me any particular type of advantage in the first place aren't necessarily the ones that I need to hold onto. The principles behind them of maybe being detail oriented or perhaps being prepared to do the work or understanding the fundamentals of whatever industry or lifestyle or situation

it is that you're coming up against, understanding those and scaling those, those are great. But saying that you're going to be the person that's always going to make sure that the client has, you're the first person, the client's going to be the person that's always going to make sure that the client has it, you're the first person, the client's going to ring. You go, well, if you've got a thousand clients in whatever company it is, that you simply cannot do that. Well I was the guy that the client spoke to all along in the first place, yeah, but the situation's changed.

You're the owner or you're the guy that's the training manager or the sales or whatever you can't do the thing that you used to do and does this quote again out of a Kyle's blog post that he did and he says in the early stages of training in aspiring Confucian gentleman needs to memorize entire shelves of our cake texts learn the precise angle at which bow, and learn the lengths of the steps with which he is to enter a room, his sitting mat must always be perfectly straight. All of this rigour in restraint, however, is ultimately aimed at producing a cultivated, but nonetheless genuine form of spontaneity. Indeed, the process of training is not considered complete, until the individual has passed completely beyond

the need for thought or effort. So you could talk about system two to system one from Daniel Kahneman here. You could talk about doing and thinking, you could talk about cognition and intuition. The point is that everything's deliberate and effortful when you begin and after a while you're supposed to tap into some degree of mastery, you're supposed to spread that out and aggregate it and widen your view and just see things with a little bit more ease and grace. And yet if you're totally myopic about stuff, you're not going to be able to see that. So yeah, what got you here won't get you there.

Next one, romantic desirability has almost no predictive power for a long term relationship happiness. So this is Seth long-term relationship happiness. So this is Seth Stevens-Davidowitz. And his book Don't Trust Your Gut is fantastic. So he looked at the research work of a lady called Samantha Joel. She teamed up with 85 of the world's most renowned scientists, combining data from 43 studies, mining hundreds of variables collected from more than 10,000 couples and utilizing state-of-the-art machine learning models in an effort to help people pick better

romantic partners. And these machine models basically were completely unable to have any predictive power over whether couples were going to be a happy long term, especially using traditional or what would be typically thought of as desirable traits in a partner. So, height, income, the job, conventional attractiveness, and sexual tastes, basically all of the things that people optimize for in online dating, it turned out that they had the lowest correlation

when predicting long-term relationship happiness. All of the things, right? Like, you can literally set, I think it's bumble or hinge, you can set a height filter. Height has zero predictive power when it comes to long-term relationship happiness. And yet it's one of the things that you can look at on the front end, income, job, these are the sort of things that get listed on your dating profile or you ask someone like, what's your name, what do you do? It's one of the first things that comes up.

Conventional attractiveness, again, it's something that's not only displayed on online dating, but also if you meet somebody in the real world, sexual tastes, you know, for the most part, that's going to be something that people will encounter before they get into a long-term relationship with someone. None of those have any predictive power. It's basically a rounding error. There's nothing. So you might say, well, what qualities did have the most predictive power? And these were psychological stability, growth mindset, satisfaction with life, conscientiousness, and a secure attachment style. So I mean, no one is listing any of that on their dating profile. And yet it's the most important stuff when it comes to long-term relationship happiness.

Now, there's a caveat here, which is that you need to one of the pushbacks against this is, well, that's all well and good, but you need the first things, the height, the job, the income, the attractiveness, the sexual taste, compatibility in order to get yourself through the door, to then be able to take advantage, perhaps, of being conscientious and having a secure attachment style and blah, blah, blah. But what it highlights is that there's potentially a completely untapped market of partners that are not at first obvious as someone that you might go out with, especially people of different racial groups, people who have unconventional jobs, people who have varying degrees of income, they don't have predictive power long term, which means that for most people,

sorry, they don't have predictive power long term and yet most people are selecting them, which means that if you go for someone who doesn't have that, that is a completely untapped market, potentially full of people who are psychologically stable with a growth mindset and satisfaction with life and conscientious and stuff like that. So you can optimize for an untapped market of people who genuinely have qualities that will ensure long term relationship happiness or at least contribute to it whilst not going through the things that are kind of all show and no grow. Now, another one of the problems that you can look against here is that when you're online, especially with the advent of online dating, this is kind of all that people see. This is all that they're really bothered about.

They're completely myopic about these particular figures. But the synopsis that they came up with in the study was algorithms can work out what you'll click on but not who you'll click with. So they had unbelievable predictive power. If you put up a bunch of different profiles, they could work out based on height and income and trackliness and stuff like that. They could say this with real accuracy, you're going to swipe right or swipe left on this person and yet they were unable to work out whether that relationship was going to be

happy long term. So I think there's just a really big lesson to take away from that, that if you are dating and if you're looking for people not being completely categorical with the idea that you have going into a date or scouting the market for what it is that you want in a partner. I think that's a very smart way to go about it. And here's another thing, like I remember, man, going on Love Island, one of the most common questions that you got asked was what's your type. And I always used to think it was kind of a dumb question because what they wanted you to say was, here are a very narrow band of physical characteristics and maybe some

emotional ones that sound pithy and I like petite blondes who've got who go to the gym and from Wigan us I don't know right I don't know what they wanted but I feel like it was that but it always made me think it never really resonated with me and people that have got a really locked in type that they go for always just I don't know like do you really know how well do you know yourself do you know yourself well enough to know the person that you don't even know if they exist yet, but to give them some particular list of attributes that you think would vibe with you?

Just how well do you know yourself? Okay, and now you're creating this imaginary person that can be compatible with yourself. I don't know. That's not to say that we can't have preferences and also not to say that we can't learn from previous relationships. You know if you're in a relationship

with an incredibly disagreeable person that that is not good for you or if you're in a relationship with somebody that works all the time or somebody that isn't into fitness or whatever it might be. But what's your type and having a really serious type? And then, if nothing else, after all of this time, the state of the art machine learning models,

looking at 10,000 couples, backs up what I say, right? That basically having a type is completely pointless unless you're talking about secure attachment styles and stuff like that. Next one, this is another Heubam one and this actually came out of the comments on the episode, which is so cool. This is one of the reasons that I'm so proud of modern wisdom and the audience that we've built because it's super wide-ranging, right? When people

ask, when people ask what modern wisdom about, it's a 60-second answer of me going, well, it's interesting because there's porn stars, but there's philosophers, there's psychologists, and then sometimes there's people that are trying to maximize our ability to do space flight. And then there's like this whole other area of health and fitness. And then I've got these two mates from the UK, and we kind of talk about how to make the best toasted sandwich. So yeah, kind of that. And what they wanted to hear was, oh, it's about football or something, but I don't give them a sufficiently good answer.

One of the advantages of that is that it's created an audience which has really, really smart insight and it gets pulled out of left field. So this was really cool. So Huberman was talking about the fact that he has tattoos and yet doesn't show them. And one of the reasons for that is that you can't control the perceptions of other people. The court was be careful you can't control the perceptions of other people. One of the comments really pulled this out and it was really smart. He said, this is such a wise statement. Despite some people being vocal

about the subject they consider outdated, like a negative opinion of tattoos, it takes many years for a shift in the public's eye, despite us wishing it was otherwise. Perhaps then it's in our own best interests to act in accordance to how the world is, rather than how we wish the world was or how we think it ought to be. So good, right? So, like I wish that I'd said that on the podcast. But just great insight about the fact that you are unable to alter the way that your actions are going to be interpreted. Now there's the stoic fork thing here which is, look, you just do the thing that you do and you can control yourself up until the bounds of your body and then after that it's all out into the ether right and you're just relying on that to kick back to you. But another thing is that you go, well, how is the world at the moment

and how should I act given the way that it is? Because an idealistic view or the hope that, oh, maybe you know, maybe you know for an absolute fact that life for all of humanity would be better if this stopped or this started. But it's not, not yet. And if you're doing something like getting tattoos that you can't cover up or like making any serious life decision in the hopes that society is going to catch up to your view of how that should be interpreted, even if the

way that it's, I don't think that I don't think that tattoo should really matter that much. I don't think that it is that big of a deal if someone's got tattoos that shows. I think we're kind of, it seems like we're past that. And yet you can't deny the fact that there are certain areas of the world that are like a newscaster, someone that's doing the nine o'clock news with a neck tattoo, is going to cause a lot of people to think that's a bit strange, that's a little bit o'clock news with a neck tattoo is going to cause a lot of people to think that's a bit strange, that's a little bit off, that doesn't like like a newscaster. Should that be the case? Maybe not, but you can't deny the fact that that's the way that

the world is. So you need to act in accordance with the way that the world is, or at least get yourself close to it, right? This is one of the problems with people who are like super disagreeable heterodox, cynical, lone-ranger-y types, because yeah, I respect the fact that you can more about your approach to something or your desire to do something in a certain way than in the way that it's going to be perceived, and you can say, well, this isn't the way that it's supposed to be, and I'm going to continue to do it until things change. Well, I get that. But the world is going to be able to stay ignorant or stupid a lot longer than you

can stay resilient. And if nothing else, you're not, you're not stopping the, you're not cutting the costs or you are, you are bearing the burden all on yourself in the hopes of what changing the world around you That's the way that campaigns happen. That's the way that stuff goes on. But when it comes to things that aren't Existentially important perhaps like the decision of the way that you present at work. Maybe I feel like acting in accordance with the way that the world is, not the way that you would have it be, is probably smart.

Next one, when you get bored with the process, you negatively change your trajectory, at Shane Parish. So I've had this for ages, of playing around with this quote, and I couldn't really work out what it meant to me. And then I realized that if you start doing something which is supposed to be a love,

which is a hobby or pet project or whatever and then you turn it into a labor. If you monetize it, if you commercialize it, if you make it into something, a lot of the time you can turn that love into a labor and kind of destroy the motivation for it, the desire to do it really overall. I know someone that loves to knit on a weekend, right, or wants to enjoy doing kung fu and decides to sell their knitting or open a kung fu studio. But before long, they're now spending most of their time doing emails back and forth

with sales or dealing with membership requests for their Kung Fu studio. And they're practicing less Kung Fu now than they were when it was a hobby. That's not to say that you can't take something that you're passionate about or a recreation and turn it into a business that you're going to love, I just think that you need to protect the love bit at all costs. That's the important part. The important part is the fact that you love the thing

that you do and maybe having an unbelievably successful business is incompatible with the amount of degradation of love for that pursuit that you would have to put up with. The price that you would have to pay in terms of how much you would now start to hate the thing that you two would be so high that it doesn't make sense for you to get a business out of it or it doesn't make sense for you to grow a business past a particular place. Like let's say that your tolerance for doing Kung Fu teaching Kung Fu in a little

army of Kung Fu teachers that work at your studio, maybe that's enough, right? You could put up with that. But what if you wanted to open up one in the next town over or four in the next cities over? Okay, there's going to become a point where it's now no longer about it being a recreation. It's actually about it being a business. Now you might find out that you love business more than you ever love doing Kung Fu or knitting. And if that's so, then fantastic. But my point being, protect the process that you go through, protect the daily, the way that you show up to do the stuff that you love and know that if you try and turn the thing that you love into a commercial opportunity, you're inevitably going to change the nature of your relationship

with it. It's going to start to feel, it's definitely not going to feel less like work when you make it into work, right? You turn knitting into a job, it's not going to feel less like a job. The very best you can hope for is that you somehow manage to fluke it out and the business runs totally smoothly or you've got an anti that's an op-stirect or something and she can step in and do it all for you. Brilliant. But for the most part, just protect the things that you love. Next up, the reverse role model.

So this was something that I reflected on after having done some therapy with a timeline therapist, Guy Colvinny Schoenen, and we were talking about my past and the place that I'd grown up, which didn't have a whole lot of people that were kind of similar to my mindset. And it meant that I didn't have a massive amount of admirable inspirational figures when I was growing up. There was people that had fantastic elements here and there, admirable inspirational figures when I was growing up.

There was people that had fantastic elements here and there and I could pick parts of things that I wanted, but there was a lot of people that were really like the person I didn't want to be rather than like the person I did. And there was a chip on my shoulder for a while because I felt, I felt like it was unfair that I I hadn't had the, I don't know, the ground grooved in front of me in the way that I should have done so I could have just seen the path, you know, at nine years old because my whatever teacher decided that he was going to take me into his wing or something like that like romantic story.

But I realized that a lot of the time what we're looking to do in life or you can achieve a lot of success in life by avoiding stupidity rather than trying to be smart. Almost all of your success is in life will come from avoiding being stupid rather than trying to be super, super smart. You can get a huge way through existence simply by avoiding ruin. And what you can do is use the people that you don't look up to as warning flags in the ground to direct you away from areas that you don't want to be. Let's say that it is more important to avoid destruction than it is to chase success, right? If that's the case,

the fact that you have a ton of people around you that are pointing in the direction of destruction is fantastic because that's warning flag, warning flag, warning flag. Okay, I'll weave my way through this. I'm not going to have my relationship like this person. I'm not going to pick up a gambling addiction like this person. I'm not going to deal with my finances like that. I'm not going to have a lack of control of my relationship like this person, I'm not going to pick up a gambling addiction like this person, I'm not going to deal with my finances like that, I'm not going to have a lack of control of my emotions, like that person on lack of ability to express myself or whatever it might be, all of that, right?

These are all individual markers in the ground that highlight to you things that you don't want to have happen in your life. That's pretty useful. Is that more useful than a positive role model? I don't know, but I think there's an argument to be made that it's not far off, right? It's definitely definitely up there. So if you're in a place or if you had enough upbringing where you don't feel like you've got the sort of role models that you want, look around and see if there's some idiots that you can use instead because they're kind

of just as useful. Next one, this is James Altichert who was on the show maybe three years ago, quite a while ago now, but he had this, he's like a weird guy, unique fellow, built a ton of businesses, lost all of the money twice, chess, master or grandmaster, perhaps as well, also a trader, also an author, also a blogger, does podcast, interesting dude. And he said, your weirdness is your competitive advantage. And this is from Navarre that no one can beat you at being you. So if you have a unique collection of idiosyncrasies and background and the way that you talk and your past traumas and your life experiences and all of that stuff, that's what's set to your part. As far as I can see, and James put it forward as well, that the weirder you are, the more unique you are, which means the more competitive and interesting you are, because if you fully inhabit all of the

things that you've got, there is no one else that has your collection of life experiences and upbringing and genes and all of that, right? No one. Literally. So by design, the best way to be competitive is to try and funnel everything that you are in as much of an unencumbered way as frictionlessly as possible. That's the best way that I can see to do it and seems to work for James. Brian Green, the moment to moment of almost anything you're doing is a grind. It is only upon completion in reflection where you can see the glory. Brian Green is a physicist, and that sounds like, I don't know, some basketball coach,

or like some David Goggins shit. The moment to moment of almost anything you are doing is a grind. It is only upon completion in reflection where you can see the glory. This is just cool, right? Coming from a guy who writes a lot of papers and does a lot of books, has been involved in academia,

and he's done the grind, he's done the graft, right? You can see this guy, you can imagine him sitting at his desk late at night, you know, he's texted the Mrs saying that he's not going to be home and she's put the kids to bed and she's already asleep and he's still working away over his desk. It's a big mahogany wood thing and he's still slaming away over papers or writing a book or doing whatever. And I think that there is a view because of how romanticized motivation is and also because how we see, fuck, think about how we see the main section of someone's development in a movie. It's a montage, you know, here's the UFC movie about the kid

that gets bullied in school, and then he's bullied in school and he gets bullied one too many times. So he joins a MMA gym. And then in the MMA gym, there's the call to adventure and then he tries to quit and then he decides that he's gonna go and he goes back. And that period in between knows sweet fuck all

about MMA to complete beast and able to take down the high school college bully or whatever, right? That is usually at most a 20 minute monologue compilation with some interactions with this family saying you're working too hard and you shouldn't do this and blah blah blah. That gives an unbelievably romanticized view of the moment to moment of anything that you're doing, of working hard, of doing stuff. And yet, in reflection, what we want to be able to see is that the whole journey, the experience of it and the reflection of it was beautiful, but you don't get that. It's only in reflection that when you look back at all of the hard times and the late nights and the ordering the dominoes

pizza with the team at two in the morning and cracking it out because you needed to get it done for 9 a.m. and we submitted the presentation with five minutes to spare and we nailed it and we got the client and stuff. That's cool. In retrospect, you can't make the 3 a.m. finish and the all-nighter suck any less. The suck is just suck, right? That's it. And realizing that, especially pairing this with leaning into discomfort, training for the difficult with using discipline, not motivation, I really think, I wonder why this has been. I'm not sure why I've had so much stuff today that's about discipline and motivation and things. I'm not feeling why I've had so much stuff today that's about discipline and motivation and things. I'm not feeling particularly unmotivated or undisciplined at the moment, but

it's definitely a theme throughout these. But I think when you combine this together, look, like your normal actions, the day-to-day reality of the stuff that you're doing is just going to be a bit shit for most stuff. And maybe you can make it a bit less shit. But if it's really hard, if it's really worthwhile and if it's something that you really want to achieve, most of the other people would have already achieved it or you would have a ton of competition if it was easy because the easiness would encourage more and more people to go in.

The barrier to entry is the difficulty. The fact that it's not a movie means that there isn't a montage that's going to get this done in 20 minutes time. It's going to take a long, consistent, effortful journey for you to get from where you are, to where you want to be. And then in reflection, you get to see the glory. But in reflection, you shouldn't feel like, oh, looking back, this was really good. Therefore, when the next thing starts, I should see all of the elements of difficulty as an aberration. This is something that shouldn't be. It's like, no, this is what it is. This is how it is.

In reflection, it's going to be good, but at the moment it's going to suck. Next one, accept that all of your heroes are full of shit. Your heroes aren't gods, they're just regular people who probably got good at one thing by neglecting literally everything else. So this was Jason Pargin who wrote, and also blog post, malice disagrees with me vehemently on this. He's adamant that heroes are a lot of the super successful people are able to do multiple things. I disagree a little bit more.

I think that you can get yourself to maybe 90 or 95, the 90th or 95th percentile of a particular pursuit whilst doing other stuff. But as you start to ascend toward the real top of anything, which is typically where heroes are, it's just, you're going to be out competed by somebody that decides to not try and do knitting whilst running a Kung Fu studio, right? The best Kung Fu studio guy is going to live and breathe Kung Fu studio stuff.

The best knitting person is going to live and breathe knitting stuff. So when you try to start combining other stuff, you realize, I feel like it is more likely to be a disadvantage, unless it's somehow synergistic and it's able to help you along the way, but I don't think that it does. And the point here is that all of the people that we admire have made huge sacrifices. They've got rid of pretty much everything else in order to get to the place that they're at now. And then you look up at them as this unbelievably worthy of admiration, human, who they very

well might be. But it's that Tiger Woods story thing again about the price that you have to pay to be the person that you admire is a price that you probably wouldn't want to put your hand in the pocket for. It's so monotonous and boring and simple that it just doesn't display itself. It's not the reality of how you, the reality of what you see your heroes doing or what you imagine them doing and what they're genuinely doing is worlds apart. Your heroes aren't gods, they're just regular people who probably got good at one thing by neglecting literally everything else. Family, diet, rest, social life, health, perhaps,

you know, some of the best business guys on the planet. I don't want their blood pressure. Okay, so is the price of the blood pressure worth the price of the successful company? Well, that's, that's what you need to do. But it's a reminder, except all of your heroes are full of shit. Like, they're just normal people that committed themselves unbelievably hard to one or a couple of things that somehow synergistically work. Um, shall I do one more? Let's do one more. Do one more. The expectation effect. So this is one of the best books that I've read this year from David Robson. And in it, he just explains about how the actions that we have impact our daily existence way more than we think. And the thoughts that we have can impact the way that our bodies operate

as this example that he uses about gluten, where people got brought into a lab and people who hadn't eaten gluten because they expected that they had done, they'd been told that the meal contained gluten, but it didn't. They started breaking out in hives and having diarrhea and having inflammation

and headaches and all this sort of stuff. Well, what's going on there? That they didn't eat any gluten and they might not have been biologically intolerant to gluten, what's because they expected it? And they're able to manifest this sort of stuff. The same thing goes for a study that was done on VO2 max tests about how effective people were at blowing off CO2. There were people that had genetic mutations that meant that their lungs were more efficient, but they were told that they didn't have it and that they would probably perform

poorly. The people who didn't have the mutation but were told that they did outperformed the people who did have the mutation but were told that they didn't, which means that your expectations are literally more powerful than your genes when it comes to this. Same thing goes for longevity, for people's recovery from chronic illness and stuff like that. Their expectations are so powerful and it's because I hate the secret so much. And Ronda Bern is an awful human. I really, it's so close to that sort of woo sending out good vibes. And David thankfully addresses it in the book. And he's like, look, I don't agree with that stuff either. And I'm not a fan of it, which made me like me even more. But there is something to be said for taking as much of an agentic, like high agency, high sovereignty, I have control over this and my destiny approach is

possible. And it kind of explains why optimists tend to live longer. Like if you're optimistic, you're just going to see yourself as being more capable to get over stuff. But again, like we said before, no matter what the challenges are that you've come up against, like everything's fine. You're listening to this podcast, right? All of the issues and the difficulties that you've had, you've managed to get past. So why not expect that you're going to be able to get past this thing again? And yeah, that expectation effect is fantastic. The episode is amazing, and you should go and check it out. It's a fantastic insight. It's very empowering as well.

Like, genuinely does help to make you believe, look, I have control over the things that I even don't think that I necessarily have control over. Like, health outcomes when being diagnosed with something or like my ability to change how efficient I am at blowing off CO2 even if I don't have the right genetic marker for it or something. Well look, I'm gonna leave it there.

I appreciate you all. Thank you. Jocko episode comes out this week. 400K Q&A will come out soon. It may have left that a little bit late. We might be a bit closer to 450 by the time that comes out. But I love you all. That's it. Peace. Soon, me have left that a little bit late. We might be a bit closer to 450 by the time that comes out. But I love you all.

That's it. Peace. you