Modern Wisdom - #565 - 16 Lessons From 2022 - Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson & Jocko Willink

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

It's the end of 2022 and to celebrate I thought I'd run through some of the best lessons I've picked up over the last 12 months. This year has had over 10,000 minutes of episodes produced so there was a lot to choose from but I ended up settling on 16 insights from some of my favourite conversations, articles and books, both inside and outside of the podcast. Expect to learn why Jocko Willink thinks that most people overcomplicate motivation, what Joe Rogan taught me about difficult and valuable things, why Douglas Murray makes a mean manhattan cocktail, how Jordan Peterson highlighted the price you pay for inaction, how Rob Henderson predicts the news cycle with amazing accuracy, how Rick from Rick & Morty can help you be more confident and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code: MW10) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get £150 discount on Eight Sleep products at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) 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

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is me. It is the end of 2022 and I thought to celebrate that I would run through some of the best lessons that I've picked up over the last 12 months. This year's had over 10,000 minutes of episodes produced, so there was a lot to choose from, but I ended up settling on 16 insights from some of my favourite conversations, articles and books both inside and outside of the podcast. Expect to learn why Jocke Willink thinks that most people overcomplicate motivation,

what Joe Rogan taught me about difficult and valuable things, why Douglas Murray makes a mean Manhattan cocktail, how Jordan Peterson highlighted the price you pay for an action, how Rob Henderson predicts the news cycle with amazing accuracy. Why Rick from Rick and Morty can help you to be more confident? And much more. I really like doing this little roundup thing. I haven't done it before, but I'm definitely gonna make a tradition of it.

It's very good to kind of reflect on the coolest insights and the ones that really stick out to me every single year. So I'm gonna do this again. Also on the three-minute Monday newsletter, I'm going to do a list of the top 10 most played on audio platforms episodes of 2022. So if you want to get access to that, head to chriswillx.com slash books. And you can sign up to my mailing list and get the modern wisdom reading list for free. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome me. What's happening people, welcome back to the show. It is the end of 2022 and I thought it would be just right for me to do a roundup of some of my favourite lessons and insights that I've learned from the podcast and the newsletter

and life in general over the last year. The last 12 months has been particularly insane. A year ago, I wasn't living in America. I didn't have a visa to even be here. And the show was a quarter to a fifth of the size that it is now. So the last 150 episodes and 100 million plays or whatever it is. I have learned some interesting and cool stuff. And I figured that it would be a nice way for me to round out my year's learnings and then maybe remind

you of some stuff that you've forgotten or perhaps tell you about some things that you missed. So thank you for all of your support over the last 12 months. I really, really do appreciate it. It's been the craziest ride and I can't wait to see what next year's got in store. But let's get into it. First up, Rogan's value difficulty conflation. So I did Rogan in August time. And he had this little exchange that I kind of missed at the time, and then I went back and listened to the episode. And it was so good.

He said, look at the car he's driving, look at the watch he's wearing, look at the girl he's with. That's unattainable to many people, so it seems like it's valuable, but then you attained it, and then you realized, oh, this is not valuable, this is just difficult to get, and there's a difference, there's a big difference. What's valuable is something that fulfills you intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and lovingly. So what I learned from this was most smart people realize that there is value in stepping

outside of their comfort zone and doing something that's difficult were told that worthwhile things are difficult to attain because if they weren't difficult to attain they probably wouldn't be worthwhile because everybody could attain them. But this is how non-valuable but difficult things get slipped into our desires without us noticing. So attaining something worthwhile is often going to be difficult, but just because it's difficult doesn't mean that it's worthwhile. So we use the

difficulty or the challenge of attaining something as a proxy for the value that it has. It just helped me remember that taking your desires from other people, that sort of mimetic thing where you see somebody else who has gone through an awful lot to try and achieve a particular goal, and you think, wow, that's something that's super worthwhile. It's like, well, what if you don't care about having a big house or a flash Rolex or a new car? What if you don't care about the net worth of the people who you're friends with or about whether you've got the most followers on Instagram, just because it's hard for somebody to achieve that thing

does not mean that it is worthwhile. And it's that confusion of the two that really made a lot of sense. And this was Rogen responding to kind of my early years, I suppose through my 20s, where I'd done something that everybody else presumed, or I thought was going to be worthwhile because everybody else held it in high esteem. So yeah, that was a really interesting little insight from him.

And then I came up with the name. So Rogan's value difficulty conflation. There will be a lot of brochines today. That is like a warning. There should be a little brochine to alarm counter up there. All right, next one. Jordan Peterson. So this is from the first episode that I did with him nearly two years ago now. So this is start of 2021. And I totally missed it when he said it. And someone reposted a clip. And it just reminded me how good this little section is. So contemplate the price you pay for an action.

You're already in a little hell. You know perfectly well, it's going to get worse. The thing about inaction is the upline to it. Do not make the assumption that inaction has no price. So this is really, really interesting. If you're stuck with a difficult decision, it can be very easy to push it off. So a change of job or an awkward conversation

or finally approaching somebody that you fancy or something like that. In these situations, it's easy to assume that doing nothing is the same as an impartial strategy. If you do not do a thing, you're not moving the situation forward and not back, but doing nothing is still doing something, and Gwinda Bogels says, a problem postponed is a problem extended. So this anxiety cost thing,

which I spoke to Peterson about, continues to stack up as you spend more and more hours thinking about the undone task or objective or whatever it is that you still haven't gone to go and do. As you thought loop your way through not moving forward in the real world and just vacillating about it inside of your own mind, you end up in purgatory, right? It's this liminal space and nothing is actually being gained here. So sometimes you need to carefully consider more options and get more information, but Alex Homozi said on the episode I did with him, it doesn't take time to make decisions. It takes information to make decisions. If you have the information to make the decision, you should make it.

A lot of people belabor a decision because they're not gaining more information to make it. Time is not a requirement for decision making information is. If you have the information to support that this is a good or bad decision and you still have fear, then this is the fear of the unknown hypothetical which is not knowable. We don't know what is going to happen, but we have evidence that would support this decision that makes sense. If we still don't want to make it, then that is not logical. So you have to contemplate the price that you pay for in action, and a lot of the time what you're waiting for is not actually contributing to you

being able to make the decision any more easily. If postponing a problem extends it, and if there is a price that you pay for in action, and if time doesn't help you make decisions, information does, and you are not getting more information as you wait, all that you're doing is postponing that problem, and you are not making a decision. You are continuing to push that out. So any large decision, any difficult decision that you feel like, I don't know, you're

not sure whether or not you're going to pull the pin on this thing. So you sit back, you wait, you wait, and you wait, and time just continues to pass. And you presume that this is an impartial, independent strategy. But that's not the case. That's not the way that this works. Unfortunately, and it's a nice reminder of the urgency of doing anything, I think. Parkinson's law, work expands to fill the time given for it. If you have no deadline for the decision

that you're going to make, you're just gonna continue pushing it off and off and off and reminding yourself that there is a price that you pay for in action is a nice way to kind of add a little bit of urgency into everything you do. Next up, Roy Baumeister. So Roy was like pretty bass. It was like Roy based Meister when he came on. I was very, very impressed with him

and he wrote this great book about sex, like sociosexuality. He came on and we had a great conversation about it. He has this really, really interesting take about the relationship between women's demands of men and what men will do in order to get laid. So he said, men will do what women demand of them in order to get laid. Women set the standards for sex and men meet them. Although this may be considered an unflattering characterization, we have found no evidence to contradict

the basic general principle that men will do whatever is required in order to obtain sex and perhaps not a great deal more. One of us characterise this in a previous work as if women would stop sleeping with jerks, men would stop being jerks. If in order to obtain sex, men must become pillars of the community, or lie, or a mass riches by fair means or foul, or be romantic or funny, then many men will do precisely that. If men need to simply be in the right place at the right time at 3 a.m. in a nightclub,

then they will meet these standards appropriately. Women are not at fault for listlessness in men, but they're not totally unrelated to it either. This went down quite badly on Instagram, as you might be able to imagine, but I think that there's a lot of truth in this. It is not men who set these standards and criteria that they have to meet for sex, right? Women are the gatekeepers to sex, fundamentally, in men are the protagonists. Sometimes this is reversed. I'm not sure if it's quite still the same situation

where women are the gatekeepers to sex and men are the gatekeepers to relationships. I think that that dynamic is moving at least a little bit. But for the most part, it's the woman that says, yes, I know about who she is or is not going to go to bed with. And having a situation where a lower price that is being demanded of men in order for them to achieve sex. You know, they take it back 200 years. The year that Darwin was born, I think it's like 1830 or something like that. The average number of people registering for divorce in the UK was four per year. That's not 100, that's not 1000, that's four. Four people per year were registering for divorce in the UK in the mid 1800s. That means that the price that you need to pay in order to

get divorced is significantly higher. Divorce was much rarer. Also, if the price that you need to pay in order to be able to get access to sex is that you need to court a woman for a good while and speak to her father. Like, think about why it is that the asking the father for the daughter's hand in marriage thing was even there. I'm guessing there'll be some like interesting cultural reason for it. But also, you can think about it from a just social psychology perspective. It is presumably one of the most difficult, disagreeable people in this woman's entire life.

And the guy is going to him as a final hurdle that they've got to get over. It's like, look, do you consider me to be so little or an appropriate, appropriately low level of a piece of shit so that I can marry your daughter, given the fact that divorce is going to be relatively rare many hundred years ago. Why is that there? It's there to be the final quality control check because it's a big deal. And if there was no sex outside of marriage, yes, there was like brothels and whatnot, but for the most part, it would have been significantly less common for people to have sex outside of marriage.

Men will do all of the different things that they need to because they want to get late. Now if the price that they're being asked is dropping and dropping and dropping, now you don't have to ask for the father's hand in marriage, now you don't need to be married at all, now you don't need to have a good job, now you don't need to have a good standing in the community, now you just need to be in the right place at the right time. That is the standard that men will meet for sex. Again, the listlessness that you see amongst men is like very multifactorial, right?

It's coming from all manner of different places, both self-generated by men. It's contributed to by culture. But I don't think that you can say that women don't contribute to this at all. I think that that would be, like, it is them that set the price for sex, right, and men are meeting or not meeting it appropriately. All right, next one. Ryan Holiday, I know he's very unpopular among certain circles, but I fundamentally

disagree with the viewpoint that because you disagree with someone on one perspective that they've taken that you should throw out everything else that they say. And he has got his book, Discipline is Destiny from this year. I thought was fantastic. And this quote really, really nailed it for me. So talking about the thing and doing the thing, vie for the same resources, allocate your energy appropriately, talking about the thing and doing the thing, vie for the same resources, allocate your energy appropriately. Talking about the thing and doing the thing via for the same resources, allocate your energy appropriately. So there actually is, I think human speaks about this. The same system that gives you reward mechanisms and makes you feel good for completing a task can actually be manipulated. It can be triggered by simply talking about the task as well.

So you have been dreaming for a very long time that you want to finally start a business and make it out on your own. So you begin to speak to your friends about it. And you kind of get this sense of satisfaction and progression when you speak to your friends about the business that you're going to start. And that actually encourages you to not start the business because the sense of satisfaction that you get can push off the requirement for you to make action in order to feel satisfaction. Now that being said, there is another element here that if you start to talk to people about something you're going to do, they're going to begin to push you and there is a sense of identity continuation that you need to do, right?

So someone, you tell someone, I'm gonna start a business pretty soon and then they say, I thought you were starting that business. Whoever you got up to with that, you're, oh, shit, like I actually need to start doing something because there is external pressure. So there is sort of a couple of different elements going on in this dynamic, but for sure,

if you find yourself not making progress in a particular area of your life and you have got external accountability, it would be a really good idea to look at. Am I talking about this an awful lot? Am I giving myself a great sense of satisfaction from discussing this? My housemate Zach is exactly the same. He actually holds back on talking about stuff because he is concerned that it is going to downregulate his motivation to go and do it. And it's not a bad solution for that.

I don't know. I really, really enjoyed that quote though. Talking about the thing and doing the thing via for the same resources, allocate your energy appropriately. It also encourages you to just focus on executing, right? It's like, look, I need to focus on doing the thing. Talking about the thing is never going to be as important as doing the thing ever. And it is so much easier to strategize

than is to execute. There's that, I think it's from LinkedIn that says, strategy and strategizing are in the 10 most common bio words in all of LinkedIn and execute or execute aren't in the top one thousand. So a kind of funny example, but it's obvious that people focus on strategizing because it's easy than executing and it's seductive and it triggers all of those dopamine pathways as well. All right, next one. It's not about brainwashing or indoctrination. The goal of propaganda

is to control what you think other people think. This is a Rob Henderson one. It's not about brainwashing or indoctrination. The goal of propaganda is to control what you think other people think. Now that's really interesting because what we're doing when it comes to forging our own opinions a lot of the time is observing what other people around us think. And we don't really want to go against them all that much, especially if it's people that we resonate with or we admire or we identify with. And the way that news now is distributed is that there is a news channel for each different cohort of people. So, you know, the New York Times is for this group and the New York Post is for that group and the Guardian and BBC and so on and so forth.

Each different news organization has a self-identifying group of people that follow it and read what it says. So it means that if they can convince you that all of the other people who also consume that particular type of media think the thing that they are telling you about, you are significantly more likely to believe in it. And that's dangerous because you can observe an article on its own merits and be critical, skeptical, cynical, appropriately of that one piece of content. But when it then turns to you trying to ignore the influence of other people and whether they believe in it or not, that's really difficult

because we are inbuilt social creatures who have influenced from others. We don't want to be on the outside. If you lived in a hundred person tribe, you don't want to be one out of one hundred that doesn't agree with whatever vision the leader has, right? And I still think that there's some mapping that goes on where we see the Thought leaders of the world, the media organizations of the world as that proxy for that leader. They still take up that role even if they rightly shouldn't and even if we're able to step in and have that sort of skepticism and

cynicism ourselves when it gets distributed out and it's like no no no no it like you don't need to listen to us everybody thinks this that's dangerous and Rob also has this other great thing that I learned I learned from him called the Hendersonian news cycle. I came up with the name, so don't blame him for it. All news stories follow the same process. So step one, it's not really happening. So inflation isn't happening and likely won't.

Here are seven charts showing this. Step two, yeah, it's happening, but it isn't a big deal. For instance, at times like these inflation isn't all bad. Step three, it's a good thing, actually. For instance, why the inflation we're seeing is now a good thing. And step four, people freaking out about it are the real problem. Americans need to learn to live more like Europeans. So each of these are actual titles, tracking the progression of inflation

and its denial, basically, by the mainstream media over time. And that little cycle that moves from denial into down, like a down-tuning of how important it is, into a reversal of whether it's a good or a bad thing, and then finally into blame of the people who are identifying that it's a problem. I mean, you can map that Hendersonian new cycle onto absolutely everything. So, yeah, keep your eyes out for that. All right, next one.

Gwinder's theory of bespoke bullshit. Many people don't have an opinion until they ask for it. At which point they cobbled together a viewpoint from WIM and half remembered hearsay before deciding that this two minute old makeshift opinion will be their new hill to die on. Fucking brilliant, so good, and makes a lot of sense around why seemingly unsophisticated viewpoints by people that you're kind of skeptical or critical about the depth of thought that they've put into it, why they're so passionate about that particular viewpoint. And you go, well, hang in a second. Like if you're an introspective person

who is generally trying to rationally assess their views on a regular basis, you will often speak with like caveats, right? You will try and talk in a way that is, it hedges, it doesn't speak in absolutes because maybe you don't know. And then when you see somebody out in the wild who is absolutely 100% passionate and certain

about whatever it is they're talking about, you go, well, they must have done their research, the only way that I could get myself to a place where I am that certain about anything would be if I was completely bullet proof after all of the research, I know everything, front to back, I got all of the examples of the counter arguments

that the opponents would say about it, everything. I'm totally boxed off. That sort of leads to a position where it becomes easy for us to believe that other people's views are more sophisticated than they are, or that they've done the work and the rigor, the requisite rigor in order to have that level of certainty around whatever it is that they're saying. And it can really give people a sense of, it can give others a degree of reputability

of their particular viewpoint, right? It makes us believe that this person has done all of the requisite research in order to arrive at a place where they are that certain about something they know, the other side's arguments, they know that they've done every single bit of research front to back left to right, they know all of this stuff inside out. And this comes to something I've loved for a long time, which is strong opinions loosely held, not loose opinions strongly held. If you don't really know what you're talking about and yet you're going to die in order to save it, that's a stupid position, right?

That's just outright bullshit, which is what Gwendoff's highlighting here. So yeah, strong opinions loosely held. You should be open to changing your mind almost at all times. There's this other great quote that I'm going to butcher, which was, if you can't state what information would cause you to change your mind about a particular topic, then you do not have a rational view. You have a religious ideology belief. If there is no evidence that could convince you otherwise, of whatever your particular stance on one thing is, that's no longer, that is literally like you bowing down to some sacred text. You need to be open to having your mind changed by things. That's the strong opinions that lose the held, not lose the opinions strongly held. Okay, so next up was an insight around dealing with critics and others' judgment.

So this year, I suppose it's been kind of unique for me, the same as every year has been over since the beginning of the show where the amount of exposure has been, I don't know, like 20 times more than it was in previous years. I found myself becoming more ambiently aware and slightly anxious of all of the eyeballs that are on you. No one really seems to complain or bring that up as a price that you pay because you go, well, look, like you're putting content out there and you're, it's you that chooses to be the person saying these things. Like how can you start to complain about them people watching you and you feeling like this ambient eyeball on you, this huge ambient eyeball, like it's, it's just the price

that you pay and you knew that that was the case. That's true, but it didn't stop me from feeling some sense of like surveillance that was kind of going on. So a good bit of what I've been trying to learn about this year is dealing with that sense of other people's judgment and criticism and whatnot. This quote came up, which is brilliant, and it said, stop worrying so much about other people liking you. Most people don't even like themselves.

And that was important for me as I've tried to sort of deprogram this self-consciousness over the last few years. Because I always thought, and I think this is part of being an only child, that other humans had some sort of brilliantly balanced existence, and that any opinion of me was created through this perfectly accurate and fair assessment and that they were normal and correct and I was in relation somehow deficient right and the problem is that we only ever see a tiny little sliver of other people's motivations and thought processes right We only ever get to see what they choose to say and then what we see them say, and then that's compressed

down into whatever the tiny bit rate of what they send over the internet on a Twitter tweet or what they speak out of their mouth. But we observe our own vacillations and uncertainty and foibles and self-doubt from a front row seat. It's 10,000 times a second. We observe our own brain go through the odd machinations as it tumbles back and forth between whatever failure is that we haven't. The self-doubt and what not really come through with that. Whereas most people don't show that. Most other people just seem like normal, well put together human beings, and it makes everybody else look slick and rational while we look like wavering idiots.

And it's been my belief, especially as I've started to spend more time around people that are unbelievably competent and have stories around people that are even more competent. Most people, most of the time, don't have any idea what they're doing. Like adulthood is like being pushed down a set of steps at the age of 18

and just trying to control yourself and stop yourself from falling all the way until you die. Like nobody's got it sorted, nobody's got it worked out. One of my friends who's a millionaire and spends time with billionaires told me it's idiots all the way up. You can go as high as you want in any organization, in any political party, in any group in the entire world. The people at the top, they don't have an idea about what they're doing either. It is idiots all the way up. And I think remembering that remembering that the self-doubt that you feel in yourself and the promises that you make, the deals that I'm going to get up at whatever time, I'm going to get up at 7 a.m. tomorrow

morning and then you hit snooze three times and you go, oh my god, this proves that I'm the piece of shit that I've always thought I was. Other people are doing that as well, the only difference is that you don't get to see it. And that was the fallibility, I think, of people who are unbelievably competent is something that's like really, really important to see. It's one of the reasons I'm trying as best I can to be open and honest when I fall flat on my face on the show because if other people can see this progression over time of someone who seems to be doing well in their chosen pursuit, the show is growing and I'm becoming more competent at it and growth and money in plays and all that stuff.

But if I'm still waving the flag for like, I'm a fucking idiot. I make mistakes on a second basis, I'm a fucking idiot. Like I make mistakes on a secondally basis, I break promises to myself, that should hopefully humanize any idea of progress and progression and achievement and attainment and anything along that path as being way less mystical and sort of perfect than it actually is. It's not. It's idiots all the way up. There was this other quote that said we would care far less about what other people thought of us if we realized how rarely they did. Because not only do most people not have any idea what they're doing,

they're also so wrapped up in their own existence that they have no time to consider ours. And one of my friends at the party said, when was the last time that you remember somebody spilling their drink or knocking some food down themselves? Like I literally can't remember. And yet, if you did it to yourself, you go, oh my god, you know, this just proves that I'm the clumsy idiot. Everybody's thinking about it. I'm never going to get to live this down. But the fact that there's this asymmetry that you can't remember it and yet think that everybody else will be able to, if you're the one that does it, is the most liberating thing that you can think and remember, I think, about social life.

Almost no one cares about you and almost no one will remember you after you leave the room. So there's no point in being self-conscious. And then the final quote that brought all of this together from Rick and Morty, which is Rick Sanchez, your booze mean nothing. I've seen what makes you cheer. Most people live in default unassessed lives, completely the mercy of their programming

and following whatever desires society told them to like. If you could see the inner texture of the people who don't like you's existence, I think you'd probably feel more pity than anger. Basically, most critics are miserable idiots, and you're doing fine. That's it. There's also actually another quote

that someone just some random person on Twitter sent to you the day that said, people with low self-esteem will always find a way to be miserable. I thought that was kind of interesting because there is a particular predisposition or like a rhythm, a tenor, a tone that is consistently put out by certain individuals online. And you go, what is it? What's about that particular person's world

view that is causing them to behave in that way? And if you look, for instance, the people that will comment on the YouTube or whatever, and if you press on the person, I don't know whether you can do this as a view, you might actually be able to do this yourself, but I can certainly do it on the back end. If I press on the person's profile, let's say that they put a, I don't know, like kind of an unhinged

or like an angry or seemingly unrelated or a disproportionate response. I'm impressed on them and I can see everything that they've ever commented on the channel. So many times, it is the exact same tone. You can go, well, that's personality, that's what personality is. Well, yeah, but if it's always miserable,

is that, is that personality be fucking miserable? Is that really what they're defined by? They're defined by misery on the internet. I'm not sure, but people with low self esteem will always find a way to be miserable. It's a really interesting insight because you go, well, they will reverse engineer any situation in order to be able to create reality,

to mold it into a situation that justifies their predisposition, their predisposition of being miserable. Yes, there are people that have low self-esteem for a myriad of other reasons, but I do think that that for the normies out there who haven't had tons of past trauma, like there are people out there who are simply just miserable because they don't want the world to be any different. And they are consistently that way, and you can see it if you click on their comments on YouTube. All right, so then I did Jocco halfway through the year, right? And that was wild, because I did Huberman,

and I did Jocco in the space of six days, six weeks a week and a bit, right? So we've got Huber human out here in Austin, and I'm learning every different type of neuroscience and going through all of this stuff about biohacking. And I'm like, right, stop, switch. Let's go to trying to learn to be a hard-basted seal. And one of the episodes that I listened to in preparation

for Jocco was this thing he did with Sam Harris. And it was four, five years ago, it was when Jocco first burst onto the scene. It was really, really interesting. This insight about bravery and he says, you can't fake bravery as an emotion. You can fake being angry or upset or whatever. But if you fake bravery when you're terrified, that's bravery. Doing the thing in spite of being terrified is what bravery is. And I think that there's a parallel here with motivation, which was a lot of the conversation I had with Jocco. Jocco is the discipline kills motivation,

discipline eats motivation for breakfast, right? So a lot of people overcomplicate motivation, because they believe that motivation is some necessary precursor to doing the thing. So it's an optimal mental state when you finally feel ready to do it, or like you want to do it, or something. But you can't fake motivation. Like no matter how motivated you feel, if you don't do the thing, you weren't sufficiently motivated. And even if you don't feel motivated at all, and you do do the thing, then that is motivation. So it's impossible to fake. It is completely impossible to fake motivation if you judge it by, did I get the work done? If you judge it by this super wishy washy ethereal state, it's like, I really want to just feel empowered and energized about something like, yeah, they're great.

That's motivation. But if that doesn't end up getting you the end result, if you moving closer toward the thing that you're supposed to do, what's the fucking point of it? And then 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 or 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. Go and do the thing. That's why if you follow me on Twitter,

I've been tweeting, do the thing, or you'll weekly reminder to just do the thing. It's a good sort of kick in the ass that you really should focus on the outcomes, you know, the motivation, all of the vacillating beforehand, all of the listening to rock music and taking heavy amounts of caffeine or whatever it is that you're doing, all of that doesn't matter unless it actually is in service if you're going and doing a thing. And overcomplicating motivation is something that I think is becoming more prevalent rather than less. Okay, so um, start of this year. Uh, I go and do that episode with Peterson out in San Antonio and it was a wild trip because I don't need just got back to Austin, went straight from Austin, essentially to San Antonio.

Like dumped my stuff here, went straight to San Antonio with video guideine, and then from there, flew straight from San Antonio, like from the episode with Peterson, got my bag, went downstairs, got into a car, went to the plane, flew, landed in New York. So I'd started the morning in San Antonio, recorded the podcast, and then by 10pm at night was having dinner in New York, and then by 12pm at night was having dinner in New York and then by 12pm at night I was at Douglas Murray's so I stayed with Douglas for a couple of days and then I went off and started recording the show again in New York and Douglas was Making what was it called a Manhattan? I'd never had a Manhattan before if you haven't had a Manhattan It is a cocktail which exclusively has alcohol in it. There is no, I don't think

there's anything that is a part of the ingredients list that isn't alcoholic. So it's like two in the morning for a few nights in the row and Douglas is just filled with stories. The guys just, I can an endless novel creator of all of the different things that he's done. So I'm just sat there like listening to a live rendition of the best audio book that I could think of. I'm sat swelling a fourth Manhattan that I've had as I'm half cut staring out of one eye. And he was telling me this story about Christopher Hitchens. And he was saying that Douglas was vacillating between two different options that he had in his life. He didn't really know which one he wanted to do, and if he didn't do one of them, the opportunity

cost of missing out was going to kill him, and he asked Hitch about this, and Hitch apparently was smoking some cigar, and you can imagine him in the back room of some British pub or something like that with a Chesterfield couch behind him, like poke the leather holes and that and stuff. And he, he smokes this and he goes, Douglas, in life, we must choose our regrets. I was like, holy fuck, what does it mean? What does it mean that we have to choose our regrets? And I never really considered things in that way. I'd never considered...

I'd always had this assumption, I suppose, that it's somehow possible to get through life without having regrets if you are to make the right decisions. If you got everything right, you wouldn't have any regrets. If you made precisely the right decisions at the right moment, maybe you could totally avoid regrets entirely. And I'd presume that any regret is the side, the byproduct of a suboptimal decision. And I'd never considered that regrets could perhaps be unavoidably baked into the fabric of life. So they're not bugs, they're features, right? So upon reflection, it kind of seems easy. So if you think that opportunity cost, by doing a thing, you can't do another thing, right? It demands that you sacrifice one thing

in order to be able to do another. And you can make the absolute best choice and still regret not doing the other thing. Plus, we don't know what choice was optimal. So even if you have an amazing time, you have the choice between going to the supermarket or going to the gym, right? By going to the supermarket, you can't go to the gym. Even if you know that going to the gym is the right choice, you'll always wonder about what it was like to go to the supermarket. And you don't get to run it again, so you don't actually get to know if it was the right choice. So regrets are unavailable. Now is that right? Okay, that's interesting that you, regrets are baked in and you can't get away from them. But what does it mean that you have to choose your regrets? Well, a lot of the time you're going to incur some pain

no matter what decision it is that you make. So you need to choose, let's say, between a relationship and a new job. New jobs are gonna get you to go away. Relationship requires you to stay at home. Either decision is going to cause regret and given the fact that regrets are unavoidable, right? Because they're features, they're not bugs. Which regret do you want?

Like, this adds so much clarity to big, difficult decisions because rather than working out which decision you could live with, you get to imagine which decision you couldn't bear living without. So which regrets could you put up with having chosen and which could you never forgive yourself for? That is in life we must choose our regrets. And that blew my head off and that was, it goes to the bathroom and there's me like half-cut with one eye open typing this thing down quickly in life, choose regrets. Because I'd be able to remember the story that I managed to, but how do I have not written it down over the top of some cosmopolitan's.

But that's just such an interesting insight that you have to choose your regrets in life. You don't get to go through life without them. And what's that Thomas Sol quote, in there are no solutions only trade-offs, right? That's the same thing, that's the exact same insight. There are no solutions only trade-offs. You don't get to have no regrets. You simply get to choose which regrets you want to have. And given that, you should be a regret optimization machine.

How can I get myself to this stage stage where all of the regrets that I had were the ones that I wanted to have. They were the optimal regrets for me. Like that's what you want to optimize for. Okay, Dr. Russell Kennedy. So this is like a little three-part, a little three-parter to consider the relationship between our mind and our body. And Dr. Russell Kennedy, the guy that wrote anxiety RX, he is an MD, he's a neuroscientist, and he was a psychiatrist as well. This guy was very credentialed, but he had quite a sort of forward thinking view when it came to anxiety. And he had this little quote that said, you can't think your way out of a feeling problem. It's like, that's cool. Like, we do try. You feel angry or you feel sad or you feel whatever

and you try and think your way out of it. Now, even if you come from the purest mindfulness vipassana side of the world, if you're going to meditate your way out of it, you're not thinking, right? You're actually doing the opposite. You're releasing, you're letting go, you're relaxing, and you're allowing. And everything's just falling away. You're not thinking your way out of the feeling problem. And then, Huberman, the first thing that I spoke to him about when he came on the show, was his famous quote that says, you cannot control the mind with the mind. You have to use the body. This isn't strictly true, I think, because meditation is the mind helping the

mind to relax itself. It's not strictly the mind controlling the mind. And I do think that applying more cognitive effort to a cognitive problem, sometimes doesn't really help, which is highlighted perfectly by George Mack, my friend from four and a half years ago on the show who said, trying to think your way out of overthinking is like trying to sniff your way out of a cocaine addiction. And those three together, you can't think your way out of a feeling problem, you cannot control the mind with the mind, you have to use the body and trying to think your way out

of overthinking is like trying to sniff your way out of a cocaine addiction. You can take them as a whole to basically see the body is a single unit, the body in the mind are one system and trying to separate the two is kind of hopeless and increasingly as guys like cubermont and. russell canady as well release more information about how intrinsically linked our mood and our bodies are uh you do realize like like i i need to i i feel x i feel agitated or frustrated or sad or whatever it is it's like okay i could try and sit here and cognitive like apply cerebral horsepower in an effort to try and push this

away. I could just go for a walk, I could go cold plunge, I could go sauna, I could train, I could see a friend, I could have a conversation, I could journal. The bottom line is that trying to think your way out of thinking problems doesn't really work and trying to think your way out of feeling problems doesn't really work and trying to rely exclusively on cerebral horsepower to fix problems that are occurring in the mind or the body also doesn't really work and trying to rely exclusively on cerebral horsepower to fix problems that are occurring in the mind or the body also doesn't really work. So it has to be this whole kind of holistic, fully ecological view of both yourself and your surroundings and the environment

that you're in and your routines and your habits and so on. And you know, if you listen to this show and you are obviously an unbelievably mindful, very well balanced, insightful person, because they're the only people that listen to this podcast. If that is you, I do want to warn you about the temptation of tumbling into praying at the altar of sort of cerebral horse power too much. You know, we learned some fucking amazing stuff on this podcast. Things that I couldn't have even imagined were things to learn, and it's so fascinating and so insightful, and I can only presume that if it's even 1% as interesting for you guys

as it is for me, then it means that you're going to be blown away by the power of the human mind. What you get to see, especially on this podcast, are some of the best minds in the world's minds on display, you get to see them just cracking the skull open and just allowing this information to fall out of them. But that doesn't mean that that is the ultimate, that relying exclusively on cognitive horse power is the ultimate alter that we should pray at. It's like, let's try and have a more holistic whole body view. And I think that the guys like Hubertman and Dr. Russell Kennedy that are talking about this is a really important counterbalance to people for whom overthinking and an over reliance on that cognition side is maybe their default

or maybe that's their learned behavior. It's just a trend or a phase that they're going through. For some people, they need to think a lot more, right? Know a lot of people that could do with being a little bit more sort of introspective and self-assessing when it comes to what they do. But for a lot of people, it's not. For a lot of people, they actually need to get themselves out of their head.

And one of the best things I've done this year is actually starting to play pickleball of all things. So I know, right, like the most Austin person. Substue in my entire personality has been substue in by Austin, so I've got a cold plunge tub outside and I play pickleball. And I've got cracks with socks on. But, the advantage that I found, and I really wanted this

is a pursuit, I wanted to do something that was, that would take me out of my mind and was exclusively for the enjoyment of the task. So I bought this exercise desk that I've been helping on about all this year. And it's great. But the reason that I use it is because I know that hitting 180 minutes of zone two cardio per week is beneficial to my heart rate variability and it improves longevity in here's the studies and whatever, whatever. Like, yeah, sure enough, I feel better once I finish, but it's not like, it's not amazing. I don't, I don't love it. So even those exercises, and even bodybuilding, and I get to go and train with my boys and it's fun and there's music and we're throwing

down and whatever, but it's not purely for the enjoyment of what I'm doing right there. So I really wanted to find a pursuit that would not only take me out of my mind, right? So just allowing that to have a little bit of time to switch off, but not for not doing it in service of some greater goal, like doing it for the pure enjoyment of it. And imagine if you could dance that that would be kind of like doing dance or you'd be like doing yoga or tai chi or any sort of embodiment practice. And for me right now my embodiment practice would be something like pickleball. I'm assessing what I'm doing in my body but I'm not thinking about it and it's not in service of some greater goal. It's not because

studies have shown that two hours of pickleball a week for your increases gray matter percentage in the brain by 5% and sign apps efficiency or something like I'm not doing it for that reason. I'm doing it because I enjoy pickleball. So yeah, that would be, that's the takeaway, that's how I've applied a bunch of the stuff that the guys have put in there. All right, next one. So this was a quote from why Buddhism is true by Robert Wright, which I read probably three or four years ago,

and then this appeared on my read-wise, read-wise is this sort of app that resurfaces highlights from Kindle. It's pretty cool, if you haven't used it before. And it says, ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the mental discomfort of becoming aware of your reflections or the discomfort of becoming ruled by them. So, this was the fundamental insight I gained and why I've become so interested in evolutionary psychology this year, which is we are at the mercy of our programming for the most part. As Jonathan Haik calls it, we are a rider, a top and elephant, right? And although we think that we're in control, for the most part, the elephant is moving

us forward. And we're kind of, you know of puppets on the end of strings or riders atop of elephants that we don't really get that much control over what's going on. But for every amount, for every percent that you begin to get more aware of what your predispositions are, why they are that way.

Why is it that you have a preference for this particular type of partner or for this particular type of food or for this particular type of partner, or for this particular type of food, or for this particular type of activity? Why are you averse to these different things? Why is it so hard to get up early in the morning? Why is it so hard for women to go to the gym and train when they're in the second half of their ovulatory cycle?

Each of the different things, each of the different episodes that's happened this year, to me is one more insight into becoming aware of our mental afflictions. And you can quite easily go through life without viewing that, right? I don't want to appear into my own programming, I don't want to understand how it is that I operate, but you are by definition putting yourself at the mercy of that being your ruler, right? There is no way that you can rule anything that you're not aware of. It's just not going to happen. And given the fact that we are so driven by our programming, becoming aware of it has to be the

first step or en route to becoming less at the mercy of it. So I really love that. Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions or the discomfort of becoming ruled by them. And a similar one from Greg McEwan, which is kind of applied to life design that again, read wise resurface this year, which is great. You have to focus on progress toward a specific thing in the medium term or sacrifice meaningful progress toward everything in the long term. You have to focus on progress toward a specific thing in the medium term or sacrifice meaningful progress toward everything in the long term. You have to focus on progress towards a specific thing in the medium term or sacrifice meaningful progress toward everything in the long term. I said this on Rogan as well where you can be anything

you want but you can't be everything you want. In the modern world given that we have so many options on Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Amazon, whatever app you want, wherever it is that you want to go to, to fly, whatever you want to learn about and read. It creates a blue sky vision, which is very good for creativity, but is sub-optimal when it comes to you thinking about how am I going to design my life. Yes, you can learn about anything you want to on the internet, but you don't have an infinite amount of years that you can spend applying that to your life. And if you try to learn absolutely everything, the Jack of all trades master of non comes through, like it'll kill you. You need to focus on something in the short term or in the medium

term as well. If you don't, you're constantly going to be cycling your wheels. You're constantly going to be distracted by that new shiny thing. And Oliver Berkman from 4,000 weeks had another great insight that you could put in this as well, which is, if you're going to have a committed period of focused work on a small number of projects, which you should always be doing, if you're going to do that, you need to decide in advance what you're going to suck at. Because inevitably, when you do decide to focus on some things, that means that you can't focus on other things. So this is the opportunity cost, opportunity, anxiety, open loop stuff that Douglas Murray learned from Christopher Hitchens

from earlier on. If that's going to happen, inevitably, some things are going to start to slip away. So let's say that next year, in 2023, you really want to focus on your business, right? So I'm going to make as much money as possible. I'm going to grow the business as much as possible or I'm going to get as far along in my career as I can. I'm going to get a new job. That's my thing. If I got to the end of 2023 and I was in a new job or a new career or I was earning

more money, I had the business had grown or whatever, that would be a success to me. You have to concede that your physique and maybe your relationships are going to take a hit. If you genuinely care about the fact that you're going to make progress toward your business goals over the next year, if in 2023 you want to grow your business, you have to concede the fact that your body is going to get worse. And if and when it does, you need to be prepared for that. And that's why it's so important to decide in advance what you're going to suck at.

Because when that does happen, a lot of the time, if you're a growth-minded person that's a type A go getter, like you probably are, you're going to feel pain because you go, fuck, I'm supposed to be able to get everything. Competent people aren't supposed to let things slip away from them. I'll start going to the gym a little bit more because I don't want to feel out of shape. But you decided in advance that this was the thing that you're going to suck at like look I understand that because there is a limited amount of time that I can spend and I have a limited amount of bandwidth and effort that I can put into 2023 in order to be successful at one thing, I need to sacrifice some other things. And when those sacrifices come up and things start to slip away, that's fine. Like that is by design what's supposed to happen. You could even see it as an indication that yes, I am focusing on other things. Is it going to be great if you get to the end of

2023 and you're an extra three percent body fat? No. But is it going to be worth great if you get to the end of 2023 and you're an extra 3% body fat. No, but is it going to be worth it if you achieve your goals? Yes, you need to decide in advance what you're going to suck at. Alright, next one. This was really, really good. So I had this conversation with James Smith about his new book, Confidence, which was brilliant and you should go and check it out. However, there was a quote that went up by Alex Hummer, he the date after we recorded it, which was so perfect. And I would have been really great to discuss with James. So anyway, I've got it here. You don't become confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror, but by having a stack of undeniable proof that you are, who you say you are, out work yourself out, which is just

so bang on the money and it summarizes my experience with confidence over the last five years, I think. Going from where I was is somebody that was hopelessly unconfident with sort of relatively low self-esteem and genuinely being himself and speaking that forward. The only way that that could have improved is by building a mountain in layers of paint, which is how Rogan says it happens. It's just a layer of paint each single time, every iteration, every single time that you face a challenge and then you overcome it. You need an undeniable stack of proof, especially if you're the sort of person who is thinking about confidence, right? If you're one of these super outgoing people

for whom confidence just seems to arrive at you relatively easily, this isn't a question for you, like you just lean into it and nail it. However, out work yourself out by having an undeniable stack of proof that you are, who you say you are, almost allows you to lead from action as opposed to lead from belief. And there's two questions that I think that were interesting when it came to confidence. So the first one being, am I trying to be more confident than my competence level? So the first one happens on your journey earlier in your journey, and the second one happens a little bit later. So first challenge is relatively simple to fix, right. All that you need to do is create more successful iterations of whatever it is

that you're trying to do. So if you create that stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are, then it's your job to, or if you don't have that, right, if you don't have a stack of undeniable proof, then you're not asking for self-belief, you're asking for delusion. Like if you have little proof that you can do a thing and are complaining about the fact that you can't believe in yourself doing the thing, what do you want? You want fantasy, you don't want confidence. Confidence without competence is a delusion. Depending on your predisposition to confidence, however, this can kind of lag behind, right? So if you're someone that is chronically underconfident, it will take longer for you to

create that undeniable stack of proof. And, you know, it could be two or five years, or it could be 500 podcast episodes, it could be whatever. However, in my experience, the second, the confidence through competence thing, it usually takes about two to three times longer than you think it should to arrive, especially if we're talking about the kind of people that I think we will, but that just requires staying patient and continuing to iterate. The second challenge is the more nuanced one, the more difficult one. And it's due to imposter adaptation, which again, broscience alarm, that's the tendency of a lack of self belief to persist even as you continue to disprove it with success in the real world. So no matter how many times you

succeed, no matter how many times you were hugely unsure if you were ever going to be capable of succeeding, and you do, you still don't seem to be able to arrive at a place of genuine faith in your own abilities. Your confidence is yet to catch up to your competence. So remember that in the first one, you are asking for more confidence than you had competence.

And in the second one, you're asking your confidence to then catch up. So the first one is delusion and the second one is this imposter adaptation taken from a hedonic adaptation and imposter syndrome blended together. So the truth, I think that everybody that is competent and yet still has that beginner, competent and yet still has that beginner, I am very fragile with my success mindset needs to believe is that there's only so many times that you can disprove your imposter syndrome in the real world and it still persists until you finally admit to yourself that it's got nothing to do about your capabilities and everything to do with a mental rhythm and addiction to feeling like an imposter. If you've crushed every single one of the challenges that's been put

in front of you and you're continuing to grow and improve and you still don't feel confident in yourself, it's no longer about competence, it's all about self-image. So one of the best things that I did was when a good event occurred when there was a big challenge that I tried to overcome and it ended up being successful. I took two to three minutes afterward to really try and sink into that feeling of what it feels like to have completed a challenging task that I was certain was going to wreck me and that I wasn't going to be able to do and come out the other side and go right Fuck I actually did that that was amazing and this is from hardwiring happiness by Rick Hanson where he mentions that you have a the opportunity to Create a rhythm to further engender the type of brain patterns the myelin sheets that get laid down around the myelin.

You can really lock those in more effectively if you just take a little bit of time to think about something good after something good has happened. And it has to work with confidence as well. It absolutely has to because if you a lot of the time, if you've overcome something that was difficult immediately afterwards, you're always If you, a lot of the time, if you've overcome something that was difficult immediately afterwards, you're always peering over the present moment shoulder and a desperate attempt to see what you've got to do next. It's like, bro, God. So glad that I got past that. Right.

What's next? It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, hang on a second, like, fucking allow yourself to sit with that for at least a little while. And if you can just consider how well everything went and really assess whether or not the presumption you had going into it matched with your experience during it. If you were certain that you weren't going to be able to do it, despite the fact that you've got this stack of proof already that you could have done it, but the imposter adaptation meant that you didn't believe that you could have done it.

And now you did, okay, right now is the closest that your competence is ever going to be to being able to disprove your lack of unconfidence, right? Or your lack of confidence. Closest that your competence is ever going to be to saying, you, unconfidence, you should fuck off because what you said to me that I was going to be able to do is miles away from what happened in the real world. And just allowing that situation to just sit and you going to be able to do is miles away from what happened in the real world. And just allowing that situation to just sit. And you don't really need to do much, but just breathing through it, you know, a gentle review, allowing the feelings of emotion and

satisfaction and gratitude and competence to really infuse you. that seems to me to have made a pretty big difference. And it's cool, it's in two minutes, five minutes or whatever, after something good happens, take yourself off to one side or that evening before you go to bed. Fucking hell, when I woke up this morning I thought that everything was gonna turn shit. And at the end of today, I really perform for myself. I should be thankful, I should be grateful, I should feel whole, I should feel competent, I should feel confident. And that is how you start to outwork yourself out. Right? It's not just the things that you do, it's the way that you see them being done. It's not just the achievements that you have, it's your ability to remember and recall them. And yeah, that's been a big help. Another thing actually that I've done

is instantiate that gratitude and stuff into celebrations. So for instance, next week, right now actually today, on the day that this episode goes up, I'm going to be in Las Vegas. So I'm flying out to Las Vegas. And I've got some of my best friends in the entire world flying out. Zach's coming out from Austin and Sky, the guy that does my ads, video guy Dean is flying out. Ben, my assistant is coming over. George Mack is flying from Dubai. Michaela Peterson is flying from Miami. Colton's coming from Nashville. So I've got this big group of people. There are many people that aren't going there because they couldn't or we couldn't get a villa that was big enough. But there's a big group of

people and that's going to be a way for me to round out the end of the year and really aren't going there because they couldn't, oh, we couldn't get a villa that was big enough. But there's a big group of people, and that's going to be a way for me to round out the end of the year and really think about how well everything has gone that I wanted to. It's a celebration. It's like a milestone that is very difficult for your mind to ignore. If you do something that is purpose-built as a shrine to the good

shit that you've got going on, the good things that you've done, it's a really fucking cool solution. And yeah, whether it's hitting sales targets or kids going off to school or anniversaries with partners, the reason that you do those things is that it force feeds you is the reason that you do those things is that it force feeds you gratitude. It's very difficult for you to not feel that degree of gratitude. Another thing that you could do as well is find a community of like-minded individuals that are competent and supportive and positive within whatever domain it is and then speak to them regularly. One of the best things that's happened again this year since being in Austin is being around so many people that are, that I admire within the worlds that I exist in, that I can ask questions of

and can give me feedback on my work. And it's really important to have people that you admire because it means that the insights and opinions that they give you about your work or whatever goals it is that you're trying to achieve are So much more difficult to ignore like what was it? What was that quote earlier on about people with a little self-esteem? Are always going to find a way to be miserable? It's like people with little self-confidence

Are always going to find a way to disprove whatever the world's success is a given them and Having somebody that you admire tell you something like, do you really fucking crushed that or whatever? You know, let's say that you really look up to your parents by the way that they raised you and starting to create a conversation with them about the way that you're raising your children, maybe a really smart thing to do because if you respect their child rearing abilities

and their positive and supportive and so on and so forth, and they said, you know what it is, you're doing a really, really great job with that kid. You're going to be like, wow, you know, someone that I thought was super competent within this world is telling me that I am as well. So yeah, um, all in all, you need to iterate in the first instance in order to be able to accumulate that undeniable stack of proof. And then in the second instance, you need to allow your successes to seep into you and drag that confidence back up to the level of competence that you're at. As I said, proof eats belief for breakfast. You don't need faith in your abilities.

You have evidence. Outwork yourself out. All right, so I'll leave it there. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you for this year. Thank you for all of the support. Thank you for the comments and the shares. We were in the top, top, we were the 99th percent. We were more shared on Spotify this year, the 99 percent of all of the podcasts, which is just like

insane. So thank you. If you've enjoyed what I've spoken about today, that is available on a newsletter that goes out every Monday, and it's free, and there is a reading list that you can get. So if you go to chriswillx.com slash books, you can get my reading list for free. It's 100 of the best, most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read, some reason about why I like them and links to go and buy them, and that adds you to my newsletter where all of this stuff was seen first, scattered throughout this entire year. That's it. Roll on 2023.