Modern Wisdom - #723 - Modern Wisdom Christmas Special - Reflecting On The Wildest Year

Episode Date: December 23, 2023

2023 has been crazy. I'm back on my old couch in Newcastle with Jonny, Yusef & George to catch up on their favourite lessons from the past 12 months plus their best new hacks and plans for 2024. Expect to learn why you need two duvets to improve your sleep when sharing a bed, the new productivity system that everyone now uses except me, what you can learn about using a fitness tracker without actually buying one, which app Yusef uses over 400 times a day, why all 5 of my top songs this year were from the same artist and much more... Sponsors: Get $150 discount on Plunge’s amazing sauna or cold plunge at https://plunge.com (use code MW150) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 5.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get an exclusive discount from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Access Propane's Free Training: https://propanefitness.com/modernwisdom Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ Buy my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.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 everybody, welcome back to the show. It is a modern wisdom Christmas special. 2023 has been wild and I'm back on my old couch in Newcastle with Johnny and Yusef and George Mac to catch up on their favourite lessons from the past 12 months, plus their best new hacks and plans for 2024. Expect to learn why you need two duvets to improve your sleep when sharing a bed, the new productivity system that everyone now uses, except for me, what you can learn about using a fitness tracker without actually buying one, which app you set for uses over 400 times a day, why all five of my top songs this year were from the same artist, and much more. As you'll hear, it is oddly nostalgic to be back where this podcast very first started. The first ever

episode that I worked with video guidein on was in April of 2018 in that same room, similar looking couch but slightly different. And yeah, it's really nice to be home. I hope that you are suitably enjoying the Christmas wind down. And if you do want to go and see us in all of our festive glory, wearing pretty crap Christmas jumpers, to be honest, you can go and watch it on YouTube. But if not, I really hope that you have a fantastic festive period. This is a great time of the year. So just let go a little bit of the need to be productive. Allow yourself to wind down. And if you do need a review process for the new year, you can go to ChrisWillX.com slash review. It's completely free. It's the process that I followed every year, the last four or five years, I think. And you can go and pick that up at ChrisWillX.com slash

review. And that's kind of it. One of my favorite purchases over the last two years has been my cold plunge from the team over at plunge.com. They are the gold standard when it comes to cold therapy. You may have heard Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman talking about the benefits of repeated cold exposure and it is real. You feel so amazing after you've done it and the improvement in your mood is insane. So if you've been thinking that you want to get started doing cold therapy but you cannot be bothered going to the store to get yourself ice every single time you need to do it, This is for you.

Also, they've just released their own sauna, which is ridiculously high quality as well, and we are bouncing between the two doing what's called contrast therapy, which makes you feel even better. So yeah, if you're looking to make a change, if you're looking to get yourself a cold plunge or a sauna for your house, this is the place to go. Best of all, they've got a 30 day money back guarantee, so you can buy it and try it for 29 days, and if you do not like it, they will give you your money back. Go to plunge.com to get your coal plunge and so on today with $150 off

your purchase by using the code MW150, a checkout that's plunge.com and the code MW150, a checkout. Look, when nearly at Christmas, you probably need to get somebody a present, and that person www.mw150.com for taking a little off the top and a new foil blade to go for that smooth finish, wherever your heart desires. It's also got dual LED spotlights so that you can trim in the dark, perhaps, or if you're a particularly crevice person, and it is waterproof, so you can use it in the shower. So, if you're gonna get some on at present for Christmas, this would be a fantastic option,

and it's also a little bit of a hint, you know? Maybe you're a bit hairy than you should be. Here's a gift, come on, get a trim hairy than you should be. Here's a gift. Come on, get a trim. You can get 20% off and free shipping right now by going to manskate.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's 20% off and free shipping at manskate.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. This episode is brought to you by Surfshark VPN. Protect your browsing

online and get access to the entire world's Netflix library for less than the price of a cup of coffee per month. If you use a public Wi-Fi network like a cafeteria or a library or an airport, regularly that internet admin can see all of the data going back and forth between your computer and the internet. your internet service provider is selling your data to companies that target you with ads and phishing websites are trying to steal everything from you at all times. All of this is fixed with a VPN and it is available across unlimited devices.

So it protects your phone, your iPads, your laptop and even your smart TV and it's got a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it for 29 days and if you do not like it, they will give you your money back. Head to surfshark.deals slash modern wisdom for an exclusive discount plus that 30-day money back guarantee that's surfshark.deals slash modern wisdom. But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Johnny, Yusef and George. Welcome to a modern wisdom Christmas special. For those of you who are probably in the 99.5% that have joined within the last two and a bit years,

you won't recognize this location. This is my living room in Newcastle. This is where we did the first ever in-person episodes with Joni and Yusef. And we've got George Mack with us as well, over from Dubai, especially just for this, not for Christmas or to see his parents. Just for this episode, who to thank it. And we're all in for those that can't see, we're all festively adorned in Christmas jumpers. And Yusuf is refusing, even though he's hot,

refusing to take it off because it may have to happen halfway, thanks for the reminder. The microphone for the podcast. You may, because you complain that it feels like a hair shirt, so you need something to protect you underneath. That's a stoic torture device. Really trying to build up my willpower. It's resilient. It's Christmas jump, resilience training.

Anyway, we're going to go through some of our best lessons and life hacks from the last 12 months. For those of you that haven't heard the life hacks episode before, we go round in a little loop and to go through some of the most, best way to make a toasted sandwich, some new app that we've become obsessed by, some new productivity system or a book or something that we've been watching. And as is tradition, Johnny, there it is. Hot potato for you to go first. Is the toasted sandwich one, one you? Because that was mine. Do you remember that one? I feel like it brought up a lot.

Was it a brevel toasted sandwich maker? It was a sleeve, the put bread in to a toasted, to toast it. I mean, it's average, to be honest, but. I remember it more than me. We've done hundreds and hundreds of life hacks over the last time. And that's the one you remember.

That's one that I remember. Anyway, first up, what you got? So mine's a supplement. And it's one that I think you feel very strongly about, I don't know what the other two guys think, clear way specifically the raspberry lemonade flavor mixed with either lemon or orange elements. That's interesting. I would genuinely have that over anything else.

Not a sophisticated blend. It is. It's great. So you're using a post training? Just morning. First thing in the morning. Yeah. 30 grams of protein in some songs. Sometimes two scoops. Two scoops. Sometimes two scoops. Rosemary flavor. Rosemary, lemonade. And what's that? 50, 55 grams. I don't even know. Yeah. Enough. That's good. Yeah. And why why why that? It's just I don't even know. Yeah, enough. That's good. Yeah. And why that is just, I don't know, I mean, I'll get into this later in the episode when we talk about lessons, but I've been big on this year's all about set things to background, make something fun, align the, like what you should do with.

That was nice. Well, I think I was thinking about this the other day that that Homozi clip that I had with him or as explaining my love for pickleball because it's 1000 calories in 90 minutes and all you doing is chasing a ball. Yeah, trying to get the thing. Whereas the guy that sits on the cross trainer for 90 minutes, thinking to himself, I'm so disciplined with David Goggins playing in his ear, the outcome for both of us, the same precisely the same except he's had to develop so much I'm so disciplined when David Goggins is playing in his ear, the outcome for both of us. The same.

Precisely the same except he's had to develop so much more and use so much more willpower. If you take like, I don't know, 2009 me, I'd be still trying to get protein and hydration and lemon and water and salt and all sorts of stuff first as soon as I wake up. But it's like, oh, egg whites and where's that's like a delicious way to wake up. So the principle behind that that I think is that there's no moral virtue in white knuckling everything. So Remy, it's that he talks about that with just automating your saving. If you just have a direct debit that go to a standing order, whatever the international

phrases for that, for savings to just go out as soon as you get paid, you're then not having to think every time I really need to save whatever. You just never see it. It's just, you know, they do that with, is it pension contributions? They realize that they could get people to increase the contribution to their pension easier when they ask them to do it at the time that they've got to pay rise. Because they have, as yet, they'd never realized the gains from that new paycheck. And as a part of that, people didn't feel anchoring by it, largely. Oh, here's new money, but it's a little bit less new money

than you were thinking you were getting, as opposed to old money, now minus some. So is the key there that you've got to forget about it? You've got to be able, because if you save, if you're saving automatically, and you aren't aware of it, that's the win, isn't it? Because you don't notice. Whereas if you think, I've got to pay rise,

you just squander it before it even comes in. And usually people over-correct. It's like, I've done 30 minutes of cardio, I'm going to have a couple of donuts. You've just more than corrected for the calories. It's also automation, right? Yeah. Doing whatever the hard thing is. There's some in that though that you said then of the thing that you like with a pickleball, for example. And it's like a Jockovic versus Andre Agassi. Have you ever heard that thing? So Andre Agassi became world number one, went all the way down to like 120, was doing crazy drugs, like hated tennis,

loads of childhood trauma, but was constantly grinding it away. And then the ass Jockovic, like, what about you, and he goes, I just like hitting the ball. And you can find where you like hitting the ball versus having to go Andre Agassi mode. How it's supposed to be like a... I just like hitting the ball. You can find where you like hitting the ball versus having to go Andre Agassimode. How it's supposed to be the contrast?

So Aaron Alexander, who is my American equivalent of UCF, is literally it. I'd love to know what that means to you. Sorry, I'd love to meet you. If you're very into bodywork, very gay-me, like if I grab his lat unbelievably gay-me, like do you know, like a really, very soft, tender bodywork, very gay me. Like if I grab his lat unbelievably gay me, like, you know, like it's like a really, like, tenderly, yeah, it turns, it turns a bodywork. And we were doing

high side planks, you know, where you've got, you're up on that and then you've got your other hand up as well. It's pretty unstable. Yeah. Oh, I'm stupid. Like this. And he looked over at me and he could say, I was gritting my teeth in the middle of this workout and he just said, what would this be like if it was easier? What would this be like if it was, if it was fucking awesome principle? You're like, all right, like, I don't need to grip as hard to this thing. This time is when you should do that,

you try to max out your deadlift, yeah. But for the most part, what would this thing I'm trying to achieve be like if it was easier? Like if you don't like your morning walk, pick a better route. If you don't like the drink that you have to have first thing in the morning, find another brand or find a different flavor until you find the one that you actually enjoy, if you don't like getting your steps in buy a dog.

Yeah. Well, I don't think many people like normal way protein, just to link it back to my point. I think a lot of people drink way protein with, like, yeah, whereas clear way, delicious. Okay, change your mind. Genuinely delicious. All right, Seth, you're up. So life hack to begin with, I'm excited about this because I've been working with a team of accountants and operational analysts to develop the optimal categorization system

for life hacks. And what they've landed on is basically digital and physical life hacks. So I'm going to begin with a physical one, which I got from my partner, which is if you have... I love how you had to take the glasses off. Like, that's the point. Fucking down to business now. This is a poor thing, serious.

If you eat a lot of berries like me, get yourself a pyrex top of where with a sealable lid and they last days longer. Like they no longer, you know, you would, we like a turgid plump blueberry that's not kind of a bit deflated and crub. You just, it maintains that for five, six days. Because most of the packaging for berries has got little perforations in the top of the seal, right? Is that not there for a reason?

So soon, I mean, I don't know what their reason is, I think it's a story, because like, there's a difference between what? It's revolutionized the berry industry forever. Oh, someone, someone from Kia Ora listening going, OK, how did we think about this? So there's maybe a difference between the way things are stored in a supermarket for display versus at home.

So eggs and things are stored differently. But berries, give it a try. Do you ever get frozen berries? I do, but not quite. It's not that they're quite land as well, do they? Well, I haven't got the snap. Yeah, agreed. I mean, finding the right blueberries is a,

it's difficult, a difficult challenge. I've found that you can go super small and they're tangy and take your face off and you make you go like, and then if you go too big, there's never big and turgid. And turgidity is what I optimize for. It's the triangle, isn't it? So you get to pick two of three.

So there's tays, turgid, and size. And you can only be on one of the vertices of the triangle. Ha, ha, ha, ha. It's a real shame. This is the sort of thing you wake up and think about in the morning. I've got a model for it. Yeah. This is my second take.

Take. All right, my one. So this is an old one, the OG listeners, of which it's literally like points of a percent that will have heard this one before. So all of this is essentially new to everyone. But it's one that I really reinforced again this year and has just continued to pay dividends. I would probably say top five life hacks of all time. Wow. Text your friends when you're thinking about them. Just it continues to pay huge fucking dividends. Why is everyone laughing?

It is their limit. So let's say you think about someone five or six times in a day because it's a self-exciting process, isn't it? Once you think of someone, you're more likely to think of them again that day. Well, yeah. But if you keep texting them that day, they're going to be like,

all right, Chris, like that. This is the usef who at five years old, organized all of his toy trucks in a perfect semicircle by size and then color coming out. It just, to be sure, are we, is it every time that I think about, evidently not, like use a filter of, let's not be a crazy person.

So if there's any programmers or developers listening to this. You've actually clarified a caveat quite importantly, but no, just when you're thinking about someone, just send them a message. Like whatever it is, you know, we'll do it. All the time, like, remember that thing, or even just a link to whatever it is

that we did previously that's resurfaced somewhere, because you think about your friends way more than you're in contact with them, and they never get to benefit from it by sending them a text saying, hey mate, just thinking about you, hope everything everything's good or a memory about what it is that you're doing or whatever it is that's surfaced in your mind. It makes them feel great because it's just nice to be reminded of that. It makes you feel good because you unsalphishly just bestowed some love onto whoever it is and it keeps friendships taking over. If your friends knew how often you

thought of them, friendships would decay much more slowly than they actually do, and by doing this, you actually reduce that gap between the two things. I mean, this is something that you've done as well, right? This year, trying to do better. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You are chronically bad with your phone, which is actually being very good with your phone. Yeah. Yeah, that is the tough balance with the one you've given there of, I try not to be on my phone too much, and then I'll end up in that slough of texting back and forth. But the reason that you try not to be on your phone is not because of texting your phone.

No, texting is actually one of the, if you had to like draw a graph of ROI activities, texting friends on the top. It's the same as why you actually got me back into taking photos at events. I'd mistakenly thought that taking a photo was cringe, because the only reason you take a photo so you could post it on Instagram.

So I'd associated taking photos of things that you enjoyed with being a cringe Instagram poster. But it's actually, I can take a photo and not post it anywhere, and it's my memory for me. So I had to like chop that bit off. Very important distinction. Yeah. I have a recurring reminder at different cadences for friends to check in on them, given the call, et cetera. So it's like, a video tag. A movie, yeah, geotags. If I'm in certain cities, it pings up with like, oh, I'm in London, get in touch with Ali, get in touch with whoever.

So I'm immediately pitching UCF by actioning this hack, and I'm going to get a text from like UCF's VA, saying UCF's in the back, thinking about UCF's, something like that very soon. At a very strict cadence as well. Yeah, very strict cadence, always at 9pm at night. I think I still need to reply to a message from you from like June. There we go. Do it, do it live on the podcast. Yeah, we'll do it.

Should we do it now? I wrestle with the worry that as soon as you messes someone, if they reply straight away, now that could be 20 minutes back and forth. Do you know what I mean? Do you not like your friends? No, I do. But I think that you've opened up a head bottomless task.

Yeah, similar to yourself, I might ask you a text Chris. And you're good at it, you'll reply, and then that's it. We've had our exchange, but some people are like, I email you. Oh, there's post-cointured fellow talks. Yeah, I was just doing my task, man. Well, I don't know. I've got a final question for you on this, because I know Johnny is very easy going on this. If someone knows that you have an internal system for every time someone, every time you think of someone, you have to text them. Does that...

Every time, sure. But does that ruin the magic? I don't think so. Should it seem spontaneous? Because I have a reminder for all my friends, birthdays and so on. And some people are like, oh, well, that's not the same. You know, you're not just doing it out of your own. Whereas Johnny's like, oh, no, I think that's great because you've had the foresight. So I think your one of having reminders is less emergent.

My one is when you think of a friend text them. There's no point in there is there any deceit, right? I was just thinking about you, hope that everything's well. Like you've said what's happening. Your one is, I may see. Well, it depends on why it's like, Hey mate, my reminder just came up telling me to message you. Do you say that?

Well, yeah, good point. So if you say that, the magic's gone. Precisely. So your one, it's knowing how you do the magic trick, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm now just gonna check my phone every day and if you've not messaged me, I haven't thought of you. Well, maybe I think if you so much, though, I can't do it.

It's more than one today. Right. George, you can't. one see it my one is Sprone me He said no private jokes. Yeah, that's not private everyone seen you're actually a some BBC So and up with the LM5 to references my one is gonna So enough for the Alan Fierty references, my one is gonna, threefold one, I think it's gonna add years on to men's lives, reduce the divorce rate, and it also killed my fear

of dying alone. So I had very low bar, to get it. Yeah, I had this simultaneous fear that for ages, I wouldn't be able to share a bed with anybody because I would constantly get woken up throughout the night. And it's like, what point in the dating process do you bring that up of like, we're going to have separate beds? So I just assumed that it wouldn't work out. And there was this image on Reddit for people who haven't seen it. Dean Webb, and he had it. Where a boyfriend and girlfriend track their sleep

for like over a year. And both of them, the top two are very similar. So fasted in bed, three hours before bed, is a 16% improvement in sleep, getting in bed before 11 PM, both of them, that was the two most beneficial factors. And then for her, a beneficial factor was sharing bed with partner. And then you go all the way down his list

through all the good ones, all the way past alcohol, all the way past like everything bad you can think of, the single biggest thing, a minus 25% score, was sharing bed with a partner. However, for her, it was plus 7%. So he's been benefits from it. Meanwhile, he's like, and for context girls, her menstruating was minus 15%. So he'll been at it from it. Meanwhile, he's danked. And for context, girls, her menstruating was minus 15%.

So he needs to double that. Him, she had him sharing bed with the part with her was way worse than her menstruating. Is there a hackea Georgia? Yes, I know. I already know what's coming. Absolutely not. You did not get this movie. The fact you don't have a shape. You may not get into this movie. It's my channel.

You're screwed. It's my channel. Can I ask a random, do you sleep better or worse when a partner's in the bed? Way worse. What about yourself? What about yourself? I don't feel like my date is good enough to answer that question.

I'd say it doesn't affect me. Okay. Whenever I do the outliers, not with a partner in the bed, it's like in a hotel traveling. Yeah. And that's worse anyway. Okay, see, there's not enough data. I mean, the evolutionary explanation would be, a lot of the outlets. Not with a partner in the bed. It's like in a hotel traveling. Yeah. And that's worse anyway.

Okay, so there's, yeah, there's not enough there. I mean, the evolutionary explanation would be, you naturally, men tend to sleep near the door anyway on average for these relationships. You're then thinking, if somebody breaks it, and whenever she moves the duvet, your adrenaline goes up and her adrenaline goes down because she's like, oh, he's there.

Double duvet is the life hack. Two duvets, Scandinavian style. I tried it and it's, it is the best thing. I've had a bad experience. Okay, so we need to really dig into this. You sleep in a king, super king, super king. Super king, which is actually only in real size, two singles side by side.

I mean, it might be, that feels smaller. It's not a king. Right, okay, I think a king is that feels smaller. It's not a big thing. It's a king. Right. I think a king is actually two singles. Right. See, but anyway, it's super king. So how would you do it?

He has a super king bed. Yeah. I have two super king doofes. So do you get two double doofes? Yeah, I size wise you can play around with that. What are you absolutely? We're just two, this is your actual. But I don't know what size.

Yeah, but it's like saying on my iPhone, I don't know the exact iPhone case for your iPhone, right? However, just, yeah, I've never had an iPhone. So what was your first life actually? What head for the level of autism that we were going to get to like... Don't time me up in legal easy. What size bed do you have again? Super King.

I just get two super King-do-those. But then it's good. That's ridiculous. Oh, he's speaking, do you think? It's going to to do those but then it's good. That's ridiculous Speaking do things it's gonna be on the floor. It's fine. It's gonna be like a So much baggy do this. We'll go king them go king but we're kings getting caught up in the details What this details details tell me with the details I really think I really think that this needs, I mean, we can put this out to millions and millions of people.

I would go as far as to say, probably two double do-vees if you have a superkick. If you have a superkick. What we need is a PDF. Okay, I get that. And you supplies would be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Supplemental appendices. Yeah, please.

All the guys who sleep with a girlfriend or wife have to go listen to this episode and then sell it to someone, don't they? That's true. I think George said because of my cortisol. So on that, we need to do this. And then say, how big are the dovays? I forgot to do the follow-up, which was then when they tracked the double duvet, it was the single biggest positive thing for him. Oh, do you have two dovays? seems to suggest that she's trying to do this. Do you have two do this? I've been in the process of negotiating this since for the Ting George and him.

And turning out at a PDF. Why? What's being the issue with negotiation? Just that she thinks it's a bit anti-social. Anti-social. Anti-social. Yeah, but I think two singles will do, because we're in a king. And if a king is truly two single beds, that's the perfect.

I think you're going to want a little bit more. I think you're going to have a queen. I if a king is truly two single beds, that's the perfect. I think you're gonna want, I think you're gonna want a little bit more. I think you're gonna want a queen. I think you're gonna want two queens. Two doubles. Two doubles on a normal king is gonna be a lot. Is a double not smaller than,

is a queen's gonna want a double? The amount of bandwidth given to this. That's why I need to tell you. It's important. Yeah, there'll be a PDF at some point. We need a matrix in a PDF. Yeah, I mean, this is another thing. It's how do you sell it to the partner?

Mm-hmm. Because it's on the same page. On the screen shot, it's right here, doesn't it? My answer has just been buying the extra do-ve, and then just going in the do-ve. This is the way we sleep now. Yeah, it's not that easy to walk in with the do-ve. Yeah, and it's the native.

I've discovered it by accident, because I read that data, didn't do it. And then stayed in a hotel, where there was like a blanket, actually, like a do-vide extra. And it was magical. I went from waking up five to six times a night to not do it. They were using a... I think. Or...

Yeah, they were on aura. That is in the way. It's of a custom journal entry. And let's split test this. Then you do that. Then you do that. No, you just use something that isn't something, yeah. Like, I'm just writing on something. Yeah, that's something.

Yeah, it's a ski. All right, so lessons. First one from you. Oh my God, I thought we were doing life hacks. I was ready for one loop of life hacks, one loop of lessons. Keep it variety. Oh, good, okay.

Just before we actually started with that, do you remember, I knew exactly where I was at a set of traffic lights when I texted both of you this years ago, I wanted to do something, I think it was called like lesson hacks or like life lessons, it was life lessons. And I was like, why don't we do a series of life lessons as well as life hacks, which is kind of what we're going to go through here. And I seem to remember you saying something along the lines of like, that's a big shout to presume that we're sufficiently interesting to actually bestow lessons on anybody.

And so I bailed out of doing that, but a couple of years later, all of the listical style episodes that I do, like the Homozi style one, the ones that me and George do if it's a list of mental models, all of that, that is the progeny of originally what I was thinking about doing from life lessons. And I think it probably wasn't time at the time, but I reckon now we've ascended to be, I thought that was, you're the most requested guest on the podcast as well.

So, according to my brain. No, you want to listen to me on the podcast the most. I would listen to you talking life lessons all day. You get to talk to me on the podcast the most. I would listen to you talking life last. You get to talk to me all the time. Oh, it's getting hard. I'm, so my first lesson is actually from Eucris. Okay. Really recently. And it's linked to what George has just said.

So if anyone's listened to life hacks from the very beginning. I've been on a real journey with tracking devices, Fitbit or a whoop borrowed your orro ring years ago. Didn't like it that much. It was you you summed up, I think, what the whole point of all these things is, which was you said something like, it's not about how recovered you are, or what you score is, it's just how much sleep you get. And I think the point that what I've learned from all that stuff this year, because as we'll get onto it, we've had a fairly jarring year, where I've realized if I don't prioritize the recovery side,

I'm so focused on the activity side, the training side, the step side, but I never, like the sleep in the recovery, like I always pushed to one side. But having something to just remind you every day, like, you should have a nap later. Like, you're taking the piss. Like if you keep doing this, it's going to get worse and worse and worse. So having a recovery tracker or something external to prompt you to, like, you are not prioritizing this.

And if you don't prioritize it, it's a problem. It's going to scuffle you. Yeah, yeah, you're going to, I mean, this, I'm aware that I'm both a whoop and eight sleep partner. So this is maybe not great for my partnership with them. I can give you the only takeaway that everybody that has one of those learns, you're sleeping less than you think you are. Yeah, yeah, you're sleeping less than me. Like it's just whoop constantly. You're sleeping less than you think you are. Like, and this is going to help. And you think you are. Yeah, your sleeping less than you, like it's just, whoa, constantly. You're sleeping less than you think you are. Like, I'm sleeping less than you think you are. That should be the tagline.

Yeah, honestly, and all that you get from tracking your sleep is, fuck, I was in bed, I was sure that I was in bed for eight hours, turns out it was actually sort of 715, and of that 715, my efficiency was 85%, which means I got 6,030 minutes of sleep last night and I thought I got eight hours. It's just that, over and over and over and over again. Well, you need to be in bed for nine hours, don't you?

To get eight. Yeah, absolutely. And now you're gonna have double duvet. I think about what? It's what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to be here. Oh, yeah. It's such a good quote on that, which I think I forgot who said it,

but there's no such fingers being overworked, there's just underrest. So true. So true. Yeah, I'm yet to find a time where I've been overworked. If just underrested. Yes, just underrested. Yeah.

If I get a good night's sleep and train, there's pretty much no amount of work. You've been serious. Have you finished that? No, no, I'm just plowing through the internet. Just decided, there's an obvious mistake had there. Just for like, just trying to make eye contact to do it the same time.

Oh, because, do you guys, what are you guys to? You use a whip. Do you just, do you just wing it with sleep? I mix it up. I've used a, we've used aura. It depends on like different periods if I want to test things. But I can't change the channel. The one thing that can happen is begin to have like a reverse placebo

where if I have a bad night's sleep and then I check it, I feel like I've had an even worse night's sleep. I think for the whooop users, completely disregarding a recovery score is a good idea. So that was a quote. You said, you literally said to me, we were walking to eggslot in London. And you said, it's not how recovered you are

at how much sleep you got. 100%. And it's just, I know it's so simple, but I'm so focused on like, it's am, but today. So I thought eight and a half hours of sleep. Bro, I slept through my flight, sorry, I stayed awake through my flight from Austin back to the UK, which means that eight hours had lasted me for two days,

not good, dying all day yesterday. I got tracked on a whoop 11 hours of sleep last night, so that's probably like 11 and a half with a little bit of awakeness, but I'm only at 40% recovered. Like, hey, get fucked, right? I had 11 hours of sleep last night. I feel great today, regardless of where my HIV

and my resting heart rate is at. And then there's a self-fulfilling prophecy that if you're told that you've slept badly, you start telling yourself the story that, oh, maybe, and then you perform worse. And there's studies that confirm that, that if people are told falsely that they've slept badly, they perform worse on cognitive tests, then if they just can not keep all the data.

So that is not a sleepboat. So I think the way you've done it gone about it is great, because you've identified what is the keystone needle mover, which is total sleep time. But there's a lot, tracking devices have a lot of redundant data. Excellent. They do have a lot of redundant data. And so my medical training is very much drilled into me that you don't test what you're not looking for, because if you just do a panel of blood tests on someone who's asymptomatic and something's out of whack, what do you do? You've now got a thing that you have to deal with and you don't have a context for being able to put it into the context of the symptoms that they're dealing with.

And it adds to the bandwidth as well, doesn't it? If you test loads of things all at once, if you have a smart meter, for example, and it tells you, this is how much energy I'm using now, and this is how much it's costing me, well, is that really going to change my behavior? Or have I just added to the open loops in my head if something that isn't helping? I like that, I like it. Yeah, so I suppose the summary is put less attention on tracking like

the other side of the equation because you probably do that, well, depends who's listening, just the problem with these things. But if you're the sort of person who wears a hoop band, you're probably handling the activity side. And you probably ignore, you're like, I'm green recovered, but I got six hours of sleep. And actually the biggest change is just volume of sleep. Focus on sleep. Right. Seth, lessons, lessons. Lessons. So as Johnny said, we've had quite a turbulent year. What do you tell us about

that? So both, I guess the main thing is that from this time last year to now, the team has gone from two people to 19 people, which along with that comes a lot of operational complexity, a whole bunch of skill sets that Johnny and I just didn't have that we have to suddenly develop. We set up propane about 10 years ago, well, 14 years ago, and we're very much like skit-soid, introvert type characters that just like to be at our desks doing our own thing, and we barely even communicate with each other. We're just like in the whole... You're annoying.

Well, I'm sorry. ...um, so we're just kind of in the whole doing our thing, and suddenly it's like, oh, there's a team, and we have to learn to let go of a lot of the processes that normally we'd be handling ourselves. So the lesson has been that when you're especially running a business, it's like an accelerated version of this. And I know you've been thrown into this is that it's, as James Clears says, it's a vessel for self improvement disguised as a money making enterprise. The's the biggest driver of your personal growth because it comes in and just twisty nipples and finds all of the spots that you've got your trigger points and it will force you to level up and to learn those skill sets and to grow.

Well, it's external to you. All personal growth has always done at your own pace, but the business isn't. So it forces you along. It's road running versus running on a treadmill. Yeah, you're getting steamrolled, and it's like a heat seeking missile as well, because it finds all of the things that would get you emotionally triggered or wound up. So a difficult client or getting working late nights or getting stressed about a potential, I don't know, a legal case or whatever it is.

A few more agreeable or disagreeable learning. And I just point people. Fear that it'll go away, fear that it'll fail, feel you have people down, fear of how people think of you. They're all 10 out of 10 aren't they? The business is a vehicle for personal growth disguised as a wealth making machine. That's fucking brilliant. Is that in atomic avid?

Don't think it is. Not sure. No, one of his tweets I think. That's fucking brilliant. Is that in a time of cabbets? Don't think it is. Not sure. One of his tweets, I think, is that one of the biggest hacks I've found for that is documentation. So let's say if you write quite a lot about anxiety and all the stuff when you get that fourth employee and you've doubled the head count,

and if you could now go back at 19 and review those thoughts of like how worried you was and anxious you was, and you go, oh, and you can see the evidence of you now going, I'm now almost five X that. It makes it a lot easier to then play that again, go and look how anxious I was then, and I figured it out. It's constant evidence, whereas in business,

there's no like Instagram account for it. So like trying to create as much documentation is. That's so great. And especially between you two guys as well, to be able to share it is. Oh yeah, we look back and think. Remember that thing that we thought was a massive problem? You know what would be, you know,

it would be a really good way to do this. A Slack, a private Slack channel that's just got you to in. Where you can just bring dump shit to each other. Like, dude, I'm feeling a little bit whatever, whatever about today. And that's all that goes in there. And that would be the journal between it. Especially if you've got a business partner,

you're going to be tougher for the solo pre-nurs. I remember it's in my day one, so day one for me is serious shit, right? It's like, there's been periods of three years where nothing's gone in, there's been periods of six weeks where I've documented three times. Day one is for like fucking hell, like something really dramatic has happened.

I remember, it's still fucking in there. There's this one where the MC for room two upstairs in the R&B room of Voodoo, Saturdays at Riverside, told me that he was leaving to go to a competing club night in Sunderland, and I felt that that was salient enough to put in my fucking day one, right? That was the beginning of the thing that was going to be the snowball effect that would cause,

that first off, like, Asian sock wasn't gonna come anymore because he was their favorite MC and then after Asian sock went, obviously, all of the other dominoes were gonna tumble and I was gonna be homeless alone on a street and I was gonna get gluten intolerance and live on a fridge. Gluten intolerance. But that's perfectly appropriate because at the time you were just reacting to the circumstances

as you found them and it was a hot button for you. Like that's the thing that tapped into this golden thread of like, I'm going to be under a bridge, I'm going to get gluten intolerance, I'm going to have all these, it's like, so that was like a real hot button then and it is, you say it's great to come back to that and be like, just, yeah. If you've seen day one has this feature of the on this day feature. Yes. Yeah. I don't have enough, I don't have an event. So I try and use it. I just after I meditate, I just write what's on my mind. And if you just put always what there's pretty much always, if you do it enough, it's an on this day,

on this day, eight years ago, 10 years ago, 12 years ago, and you just like, God, there's so many like recurrent things.. I have to bank both of those comments for my next round because you guys are front running. One of my other lessons is so again, like one of the worst life hack episodes is when two different people arrived and had done the same life hack and then you got knocked off. You said we got all of your fucking new fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck All right, so my first one, it's cool that we've got this sort of human centipede of ideas coming on here. This is from you, which is max content razor. Would you consume your own content if not, don't post it? And that inspired post content clarity, which is your content diet should be spirulina

for the soul, not fast food, fear and migdala. And what I realized was that when you're consuming anything on the internet, it's almost all where it tends toward limbic hijack, because if it didn't, you would watch something else which was more limbically hijacking. You know what I mean? So during the moment of consuming pretty much anything, this podcast included, you are a bad judge of whether or not that piece of content is good for you or not because it's just compelling. But what you can do is have a sort of pillow talk post-cuttle review of how did that particular session of YouTube watching or TikTok scrolling or Instagram browsing make me feel and was there anything in there that is better or worse?

And if there's stuff that continues to come in as worse, it's like unfollow, not interested in this channel, don't recommend to me again. Does all of the social medias have a way of down voting as well as up voting channels? And you can get rid of them, you can hide them from your feed, you can do all the rest of the stuff. And if you hide something from your feed,

it's tantamount to that entire worldview or that creator just die. It's exactly the same. So, unfollowings great, isn't it? Like, there are people who just, they always come up on your feed and they annoy you. And I mean, you unfollow them, it's like,

oh, even muting, you know, if you can't, if there's some, you know, interpersonal reason why you can't get away with the unfollow, just muting accounts that you don't like. I had this, when I always struggled with Instagram, delete it, download it, go back and

forth with it. And I had this realization one day about this three, four question of like, did this educate me? No, okay, move on to the next question. Did this entertain me or make me laugh? So it's like an Alan Partridge thing or a funny meme, it stays on. If no, moves on to the next list of, do I want to see this person in the next six months? If no, mute. And that, it takes about 12 hours of pruning.

Like, I like a day and a half of pruning, just whenever you're on, and immediately the newsfeed is infinitely better. That is the one thing about the people complain about the four U-agrivalums that they're filter bubbles, but you can also create a wonderful filter bubble. If all you do is like photos of docs, you will just have a feed of docs. Well, we're training the algorithms on what we actually want, but the problem is that what we want in the moment is not what we want to want after the moment. Retrospectively, we wish that we were watching more of X or Y or Z. One interesting thing I think that's happening with YouTubers, I think they have time-based recommendations. So at different times of the day, different things get recommended

to me based on my viewing habits. So I tend to listen to World War II documentaries, which Shane Gillis calls early on set Republican. I think interested in history documentaries is like, yo, if your man starts watching World War II documentaries, keep it up to work. It is a gateway drug. It's early on set, Republican. But I do that, but it only recommends them to me at night. First thing in the morning, it's not middle of the day. It's always 10 minute to 15 minute videos

that I can watch with my lunch. So again, just train the algorithm. But yeah, and then for the content creators or fledgling content creators out there, this is something that I'm battling with at the moment. There are ways to play the algorithm and there are ways to add value and there are things that you want to do. And between within those three prongs is some balance of what you have to do.

You have to play within the limits of the algorithm or else you're just going to be shouting into the ether. But you don't want to be completely controlled by it because that's just audience capture. There is ways of having impact, but you can sacrifice, reach, and what you want to do. And then that's also, that's kind of a more virtuous version, but still kind of audience capture. And then there's what you want to do, which can be like just total solipsism, like self-masterpity, congratulatory glory, but that's also not playing the game. So somewhere in all of them is where you want to be, but not leaning too far to just what does the audience want and what will get lots of plays,

because if you wouldn't consume it, what the fuck are you doing? Now realize this at the live shows that I was doing this tour, I would happily go for a beer with any of the people that arrived, and I know for a fucking fact that there are tons of podcastes who couldn't say the same. Like they're not making an audience of people that are like them or people that are cool or people that are interesting.

And every single person that came up to me, I was like, fucking, like a happily like, train with this person, I go for a coffee with this person or whatever, they're all interesting, they're all killing it, they're all in good shape, they're all like cool or whatever in some form or another. And yeah, would you consume your own content if not don't post it?

It's just, it slices through all of the bullshit. Do you think there's a, do you think the people who listen to your podcast are you, but like a previous version of? I think like you have to make content for what would five years ago Chris listen to, or a little watch, rather, because I assume what you wanna watch now,

it's different. It's probably a little bit different, right? So yeah, but I also think that if you were posting what you 10 years ago needed, it wouldn't be a few steps ahead of where you won. So you can still frame things in the learnings that you've had. You know, all of us have been shaped by your time, it a big four accounting firm, your time as a doctor, your time in a bunch of different agencies are moving to London to go do this thing. So you talk where you're at, but you frame it with where you've been. And I think that that helps people to get along the steps.

This is an Ali Abdel thing where he said, you don't want to teach people who are 10 steps behind you because you can't remember the problems that you had 10 steps ago. You want to teach people that are sort of three or four steps behind you because it gives them the path. It allows you to still be within that purview.

But this is, you know, a reason for tracking the journey, again, as we said about taking photos, about noting things down, because if you don't track the journey, all of those learnings are just lost, and you can't remember the things that were only salient to you five years ago as revolutionary because now they're taken for granted.

You see that with like, wealth gurus? So that Grant Cardone saying, oh yeah, when you're buying companies, you really need to remember that this is a, and it's like for a regular person off the street, or talking about how you're going to rent your fourth holiday home in Andorra, like it's stuff that's so far removed from... And it's like aggraving life. Yeah, because you're like, well, what do I do with that? Yeah. Do you think, well, what do I do with that?

Yeah. Yeah. Do you think that a possible pressure valve, because I see a lot of YouTubers that will have a second channel for that kind of monologue? Uncensored, unfiltered, whatever. Do you think that's just for them to scratch the itch of content they want to create where they don't want to post on the main channel? The interesting, well, there's lots of second channels that are also dog shit.

Like, they still don't add value. I heard this term a little while ago, I probably need you guys to help spin this up. Growth hacking relatability or speedrunning authenticity. And a lot of people try to do that. It's like, what are the ways that I can make myself seem more authentic or relatable than I am? But it's one of these things that's just, it's like the speed of light. It's like, you are as authentic as you are authentic and trying to growth hack authenticity,

resulting you seeming even less authentic. The brain rose effect, right? Like fucking shadow boxing under a bridge with degenerate skateboarders, looking for a bear market in a bush. Like, oh god. It is.

Me and George, can I tell them the story about that day we did VR? Oh yeah, go. Right, okay. So, what were we here for? What were we in town for? Arc? No. I can't remember.

We came to London. We've been back and forth so many times. We came to London for some event and we had a day and I had some mushrooms with me, some magic mushroom capsules. So me and George decided to do two. We double bubble, bang banged, the world's two most advanced virtual reality experiences. Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds at dot dot dot in London and then the Tower of London virtual reality experience.

We did those back to back on mushrooms. So if you think that mushrooms is crazy, mushrooms in VR with a full, like cast of actors around you for two hours, twice in the same day was just fucking mind blowing. It's enough to induce a psychotic break, isn't it? Well, I think the dosage was pretty optimal. It was like a 0.7, 0.8 kind of like just nice little fluffy thing, but it made everything seem so much more real. Did you plan to do both?

Well, this is the actual one in your eye. I saw, I meet up with Chris today and I go and say, what do you do to do? I go like, what, maybe you just want a quick work, and he goes, what's the mushroom? So we can go to the VR world. I guess I flip, I go, what do you do? I go like, what, maybe you just want a quick work. And he goes, what's the mushroom? So we can go to a VR world. I guess I flip a coin there, right? So similarly.

Yeah. Yeah, it was fucking brilliant. It was good day. One a day. Right, Europe. My one. So related to the chat so far, so the content razor that we spoke about then is very midwit.

It's very, what is the simple answer that works? And the big thing for me this year has been the midwit meme. I'm quite obsessive about the midwit meme because I'm a midwit. I've diagnosed myself as a midwit, I'm a recovering midwit. I think you have to say it publicly to start recovering from it. And I did something that was quite midwit, but I think it ends up working, which is like trying to figure out an algorithm that moves you to the guy on the left, to the stupid guy on the left. Because if you try and be the genius on the right, that's what the midwit does, whereas what you want to do is simplify it down of rather than a complex content strategy of scheduling at 2.30 pm every single day,

and this editing strategy from Alex Hormoz is, no, would I consume this? So the midwit algorithm is basically, it's what we spoke about in the first episode, but I've kind of completely neglected it, which is just basic inversion. So the biggest takeaway from me is, so let's say I've got like three examples here. So one is writing, one is writing, the other is e-commerce or like an internet business,

and the other one is happiness. So for like writing, like the obvious midwit thing would be to consume the best writers of all time and find out their specific morning routines and try to reverse it backwards. Versus with inversion, you just say, if you were to make sure you was a terrible writer, what would you do?

Well, the first thing you'd do is you wouldn't write, right? The second thing you would do is you would write inconsistently, if you ever did. The third thing is actually what you said then, which is you'd write about things you didn't like to write about. I think this is a form. You would do things that make you feel like you're making progress toward writing. Yes, that's not writing. That's not writing, exactly.

All of a sudden, via just inverting, you found out what the guy on the left would say. It'd be like, write, write consistently, and right what you like. And then even internet businesses, where I see this a lot where people have these complex, dynamic flows to this chatbot that then moves them through this A, B cycle versus if you went, okay, you wanted to guarantee an internet business would fail. What would you do? Well, one you'd have the world's worst margins. So you'd have to make like, what, like, 0.1% margin. We'll give you the worst margins possible. The second thing is there's like no repeat purchase.

So there's such little LTV and also the average order of our use tiny. And then there'd be like a zero principle which would be like, you're selling shit sandwiches. You're selling something that nobody wants. So if'd be selling shit with no margin, no repeat points. Make it really hard to buy, make the site, website page, or speed reading. That'd be later down the list, but it just right now just shit sandwiches with no margin, no repeat customer. Thing is shit sandwiches got a bit of a niche. There's probably niche. Like the Nazi milk.

There we go. Did we talk about that? No, no, no, what's that? Oh, it was, correct me if this rings a bell or you get it. So is a woman doing photo shoots with Nazi memorabilia all around her and she's got her feet in some milk and she's bathing in milk and then bottles it up and sells it online as Nazi milk. And quite a decent markup on that.

But again, niche appeal, you think, well, didn't Bell Delphine sell her bathwater? Oh, I don't know. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. But those are both things that people want, actually wanted to buy. Anyway, shit. In some way, moving it to somebody,

we have to see that's of Nazi milk. This is on gas sponsor. And then happiness is another one where people are doing such like complex strategies for that and going to Peru and taking eye out, which again there's the time in a place for, but if you had to make somebody miserable, terrible sleep, terrible diet and exercise and terrible people and midwit, the way to find out what the guy on the left would be is just to invert things around and avoid the top three or four. So what is it not? What is the opposite of success?

Exactly. And avoid those things. Avoid those things. What would someone that was going to run a terrible online fitness bit? Well, like if you wanted to try and make the worst online fitness business you could, what would be the three things to try to do?

Don't do them. Yes. And most sorry, just a point, but most smart people will get caught upon the 16th smart thing for success and not always those things, including myself. We have a phrase which is just stay stupid with the advice. So like as soon as you start trying to make something complicated, like what would the stupid person do?

They wouldn't understand the complexity. The difficulty is, I think, convincing yourself that the stupid advice is actually, because there's examples of things where it seems simple, but it actually is the wrong thing to do. What like? And you're gonna ask me, okay. So, going and training chest every day, for example, I wanna get in good shape, I'm just gonna train chest every day.

What do I like to do? I like training chest. I'll just do a peck deck every day. That's simple advice, but it's probably not the best. There's a level of being informed that you need to, you need to like get just over the, it's probably not the best. There's a level of being informed that you need to get just over it. It's like a white belt mentality. The white belt actually does know.

All of the shit that you learn when you first start boxing, it's like, here is how to throw a good jab. Guess what you're going to throw most of during your entire boxing career, jabs. But then when you get to Blue Belt Syndrome, a purple belt syndrome, the equivalent in boxing, and you're like, yeah, well, it's all about my back off handut. Like that's really where I'm at. It's like, no, no, get fucked.

This is the way to figure it out, isn't it? You look at what are you a black belt in now? And then think back, what was I trying to do when I was a white belt? And I've just come all the way back to basics. And I'm just doing the basics consistently well. Mm-hmm. You've so far, one one which was someone asked you so recently like what's a What's his recommendation for pre-workout nutrition? And he was like our like Coffee in some like honey on toast or something and he's like that sits on both sides The coffee and the honey on toast. It's the first thing you try before you do your first-time session And then you go through all the like Psycho is

through all the like, such a full psycho. It's a, yeah, a pretty, like an algae bottle. I'm gonna train later. I'll have some honey on toast and a coffee. I don't know. Yeah.

So it's trying to find the, but it's still informed enough that it's useful. What's mental about this is that the first ever episode that we endured did in your old, old, old, old offices at social chain, where we did inversion. How do you make, it's hard to work out how to be happy, but it's easy to work out how to make a happy person miserable. This is one of the most painful things that I've had to realize, which is many of the questions that I struggle with now exist

in podcasts. I recorded at some point over the last six years. Getting front run again. at some point over the last six years. Getting front run again. Do you know what, we're clearly, we're clearly having a very similar 2023. So. Yeah, I mean, it's been, I think, maybe you just get disquieted by less stuff than us. Like, your psychologically more stable,

I think, than both of us. This is the trend I'm noticing that, like, here we are coming up with these half formed ideas and then George is like, well, I've actually got an algorithm for that in a full process that I've thought about. There is some to be said though about making content, forgetting that you made it and then it coming back to you. So like I said, so David Senderer from founders recently tagged me in something where it was there's two kinds of people on the internet, one that doesn't understand the scale of the internet

and the other, the other people that know they don't understand the scale of the internet. And he then quoted me and I was like, I didn't realize I said that, but I go, that's good. That's good. So there's two. So there's two. So back and found it, I did say.

Right, so there's two ways that this happens as well. The first one is you get quoted by someone saying a thing that you forgot that you'd said. That's level one. Level infinity is you get quoted by someone saying a thing that you forgot that you'd said. That's level one. Level infinity is you get quoted by people who attribute quotes to you that you never said because it seems like it fits. So I've taught you all of you guys about this before, but Churchill and Drift is the name of the phenomenon whereby unattributed quotes get attributed to Churchill more and more over time.

And it's like what you want is to develop like Williamsonian drift. Like you want to insert yourself into a niche whereby it's people that go, don't know who said that. That sounds like a Chris Williamson thing. Like you've got to be very careful with the other Chris Williamson kayak. Like the anti-SMI. Yeah.

Well, you know, this is also where it would be useful to have a Andrew Tate-esque army of Vietnamese repurposes just starting to post quotes with, like, unattributed, but, like, supposedly attributed to Chris Williams and to create the trend. That's how you begin that soon, army. That's great. I really like that one. Is there anything else on inversion? That's it. Just think of the top three to five things, flip it around, and you've figured out how to be the guy on the left, and you will forget those things time and time again.

All right, Johnny, be the guy on the left. Am I on hack or lesson? Hack, please. Tick tick. Here we go. Here we go. I'm personally invested in this one. So this is now an ad read for Tick Tick for me. Forget the fact that there's a few million people. In other news. Don't say that anymore. Sorry. That's all right. Don't worry.

Is it not just news? I think we've done Chris Dirti for Tick Tick, aren't we? Well, fucking left me out to dry. You still want me to come? You hung me out to dry. Would you like to tell a number of questions to dry. Would you like to tell? I used to tell a number of things. Yes, would you like to tell the story of what you did to me?

Well, I mean, I thought at the time, Chris, I was doing the right thing. Okay, I mean, when did it get in? If only you'd just listen to my advice. To use a back into 2016. The problem is this, and we love you very much. But a lot of use of software recommendations come from a niche bean mentality.

Yeah. They come from a very dry roasted bean mentality. So it's quite, I'm what you would call an early adopter. You are an early adopter. You're the early adopters early adopters. But you're early adopters. You're early adopter, everything, which means some of it sticks and some of it doesn't.

The reason it's called bean is, instead of like Microsoft Word, you used software called Bean. Which, do you still use it? No, it was some really lightweight open source text editor. Just to check. Have you got YouTube premium yet? I don't need it. So, you know what was the question I asked? No, have you still got the Argentinian version for like 70p a month or something? Correct, through a VPN. But that's it.

You spend how much money per year on YouTube ads? Can we just say the Argentinian YouTube premium? Let's just not skim over that, because that is beaning if I ever saw one. That is Nirian Dry roasted. That's mean. Oh. Oh, it's, don't you worry, have BB.

Have BB is okay. So all that is to say that when, when you self says, I've got this bit of software, I think it's good. You just let it, you let it simmer for at least 90 days. Fair enough. And then ask him again, um, Tiktok is one of those things. It's a calendar to do list, habit tracker, anything else? Pomodoro timer.

Pomodoro timer does stats, all these sorts of things. But the thing it's given me is, which is a little bit going against use of an I've had a debate a long time about how you treat a calendar. You support all of his tasks in his calendar. And I just put events in my calendar and then deleteetes them and then deletes them all to first them. But I recommended on me focused you five years ago, four years and you've been using it since I've been locked in. I've been grandfathered in. I even took Peter Ackie's course on it and then I brought Peter Ackie's on the show

Separately, you know what I respect about you Chris is that like when you say okay, I'm gonna take on this recommendation You really yeah, you do it. You are one of the least flaky men I've ever met well, you saw me doing Achilles rehab when we first went to Dubai Monopoly doing that like here That would have been here. It would make this where I was laid with my foot up. Not seriously boring. We went to Dubai and George is laid by a pool, like, reading, like, throwing monga quotes

at me. And I'm over there doing five-second eccentric, like, single-legged, soleus raises. When you did the McGill Big Three, like you used to go to CrossFit. Thousands of hours. Everyone else is doing the ward. Thousands of hours. You were just in the corner.

Thousands of hours I've done Bird Dog and Side Plank and McGill Curl Up. Do you regret it? Not at all. Not at all. I now have a spine that function works. So the thing, I remember you saying to me like, I'm doing my weekly review and I hate it and I hate it, and I hate it. And I just kept saying,

just do a Chris, it's good for you. Tic-tic makes that easier. So I basically just, everything, nothing, the hack is, nothing leaves the inbox without a date attached to it. But it's not necessarily a date, you'll do the thing. And then all you have to do is look at the today view on tick tick. And you go down at the start of the day,

I look at this a batched box at the top. I either drag it to a time slot, I'm gonna do it that day, or I review it, cancel it, delete it, delegate it. Do you have group view on tick tick? Can you send it to like each other? You can email things to his inbox and he can email things to my inbox. You can't view each other's, you can't share lists.

Right, okay, that's pretty good. So if you're working on a project together, you could delegate tasks. You yourself's convulsing, can you see it? Yeah. You haven't even used it because you've just got so much to say. We have a shared list. Well, yeah, but you're a good example of separating planning from execution. So you have the planning time and then you turn up

on the day and you just work through the time. It's something I changed my mind on this year, big time. I thought it was terrible. Tried it, didn't like it, got rid of it, went back to omnifocus. But you just then moved to things three. Don't make a brief read. I accepted everything. It's like weep, I've tried the whole gam But the gamut. Don't forget, I was about to switch to things three. I'm so... And I made fun of you, Dimon. I'm such satellite delay from you. I'm Douglas Murray in the Gaza Strip,

like waiting for Pears Morgan, like, we've just got pocket loss, haven't we? Yes, yes, the bank of Pears, I've got you. Like, that's me in a fucking flak, yeah. We'll get you on tick tick. Right, I want you both promised me that one of you will sit down and transfer with your different flows.

I've got a full guide on YouTube that was pretty much like, I've already watched it. I've already watched it. I watched it already. I watched the full thing. I had a curve. Of course. Well, I wanted to get the best in before you sit down and personally coach me through it.

And I feel like, to be honest, I feel like it should be you. I could, you cursed me with three years of the most advanced task manager in history. Yeah, it is. It's just like recompense. You know what I mean? You're right. I put you right in the deep end. You have just loves and you only hookers. What is? They've just launched the new one. I don't care. It's quite interesting with like social networks or apps that are bad for you. They're quite quickly get a moat like there's Instagram Facebook. Oh, he's gone. There we go. He's gone. he's bailed out. Well, if you have to be at least partly Christmas, so there you go.

You have like Instagram TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and only recently as TikTok really come along. But with productivity apps, there's so, it's such decentralization and so much churn from product to product people leave. But I do like what you said then about the life hack. I do think that's the problem I often have with life hacks is if a friend has just started one, you need that cooling off period. Because that's the time when you're going to be allowed is, but if you come back in 90,

that's the meta life hack today, which is wait at least 90 days for all lifehacks. I sent you that thing the other day that was Paul Bloom quote tweeting someone else, where it was like, I've just learned about the recency bias and I have to say out of all of them it's my favorite. Very good. When someone says something to you, you set a reminder in tick tick. There you go. 90 days. Alright, Saf, you're up. So the most enduring life hack you guys will be no stranger to this, but I feel like since we've, this is a new audience seeing this, it's

got to be Alfred. Oh wow, yeah, okay. So Alfred is one of the OG life hacks and I have got to be one of the heaviest users. So I've checked my stats. I've used it 400,000 times. Oh my god. 400 times a day. I am 100 times a day. I invoke Alfred 400 times a day. It is like it is him. It's a $20 piece of software like Spotlight that genuinely I would pay four figures for happily. Probably. If they have more good bodies, Alfred, they've made a paper on Klaner. That's it. They could have me over a barrel. So Alfred developers, please don't. I remember when you changed laptops. You said the thing you were most concerned about. You were offering references.

Alfred references, yeah. It is a bastard. I had to go through it with you. It feels like walking through a tree called using a computer that doesn't have Alfred. And I've worked in the NHS and that's like... So... I come from a conversion rate optimization background. Okay, so Alfred is the hack. Let's say that no one people that are listening don't know. So they describe it as spotlight on steroids.

So it's what spotlight? Spotlight is the little magnifying glass button on your keyboard on the back. Space if you're watching this on the camera. Space opens up any web page or file or app or whatever, but Alfred has a load of extensibility as well. So you can I can control all of my lights my Bluetooth clipboard history, paste in text expansions. So if you start typing your mobile number, text that you often send quite a lot like hello, thank you for your inquiry blah blah blah, best wishes, all that kind of stuff.

You just have it at the tip of your fingers, and it is saved. What do you use the most? The clipboard history. Same, yeah. That's what, that's the clipboard manager. Huge. Anyone that doesn't have a clipboard manager

that spends a modicum amount, any more time on their MacBook or the laptop, it's MacBook only as well, isn't it? It's so racist, I love it. Well, it's so bigoted. It's MacBook only as well, isn't it? It's so racist, I love it. It's so bigoted. I love that though as well, because if you're using a Windows computer, you've got bigger problems.

Yeah, let me learn you. Let me learn you about this. The clipboard manager is insane. So for the most part, you can only copy the last thing, that you can only paste the last thing you copied, whereas you can set it up to basically infinity, but it's like, if think for me it's the last 300 or 500 or something things, which means that you can go through a document or a web page and find all of the different things that you need to copy, and then go on to where you need to paste them and paste all of the different things that you need to paste full clipboard manager, you can even do conditional formatting when it comes to the snippets, which is their text expansion. So I have an invite message.

My invite for the podcast has got progressively shorter. Now it's, hi there, can you direct me to whoever handles your podcast invites, please? Thanks. And that's I-N-V-3. I-N-V-2 is when I need to show a little bit more, how do you say, like, reputational ankle? Like a sort of... Mmm. Mmm. That, nice little bit. And then skin.

I envy one is I haven't updated that in forever. Is that short shorts? No, it's huge. Oh yeah, it is. Yeah, cool. That's only fans, only fans free member access. Very nice. Yeah, so I've got a full guide on that as well

that kind of to walk through, but just start playing around with it and you'll figure out so many free trial period, I think, with omnifocus. Oh, there's a free version, but then the real juice comes from the $20. It's $20 once off. Like power pack. Yeah. It's like five figures for that. 100%. The delta of price. I think it's you pay five figures for use of setup. Yeah, I think I'll set up to probably worth in the like high four figure range. Yeah Yeah, the area All right, what have I got next I'll go for this one. I'm pretty certain that hold luggage is a psi up meant to keep you poor and late

Wow, I am yet to find a scenario in which hand luggage isn't sufficient. Now you need to get good luggage. That's a huge mediator of this. But I was on tour, me and James Smith. I did 29 days on the road, just hand luggage. Wow. No waiting ever. So the luggage to come out the other end, always with you at all times.

And it causes you to be a little bit more thoughtful with what it is that you're packing, which is important because what you find is if you've got like, dude, hold luggage is massive. 23 kilos, unless you're carrying a ton of conditioner and shampoo. I was going to say, where do you put your treasuries? Your salon and grade shampoo. We once went, the liquids is the... We once went to Iceland, where do you put your treasuries? You're Salon, great shampoo. We once went, liquid is the, we once went to Iceland,

not the super market, the country. We once drove to Edinburgh while you've had men and girthers to fly to Iceland and I tried to transport five kilos of treasurme because I just hadn't thought, I hadn't thought to decant it into something smaller. Wow. You managed to sweet talk the glass region Person could ask he'll do that to transport liquids as well mind blowing sweet talk glass regions into worse Into a national security threat for Iceland. Yeah

Too much treasure me What is this that you brought with you? So cheapest thing there it. So cheapest thing there. It was the cheapest thing there. But yeah, whole luggage is a sigh of, meant to keep you poor and late. And you can get away with hand luggage only quite easily. I have a lot of questions. Hit me.

Liquid. Get travel size containers. And do you run out? Do you buy more when you're traveling? Up to 100, up to 100 mil. No, so I will caveat this. There's a couple of complications. First one is going to be if you use spray antiperspirant, very difficult

to five is 75 mil of that, very difficult. Lots of 105 mils, which is fucking infuriating. Don't use a roll on, not massive fan of a roll on, would rather go for a spray. That's a challenge. Yes, liquids, but large by an anti-person when you when you're when you arrive someone If it depends how many stops you're doing it. This is one trip. Yes. If it's multiple trips No, because that's just you that's intermittent intermittent purchasing so you can get you know like 25 mil spray thing And just get like three or four or five of them and just throw them in. And you must be doing, like you must be washing your clothes right now. I did laundry while I was there, but I don't know about you.

I, the, how would you say like, over-to-n-window of acceptable clothing to me, isn't that broad? I don't have much more than about a whole luggage which is worth of clothes that are like nice and cool to me at any one time. So for me to cycle through that stuff, I would probably be doing it anyway, and I would just have random surplus pieces of clothing that wouldn't get wonk,

so I'm like, I don't like that t-shirt, I really love that t-shirt, so I'll get that one washed and I'll do it again. So probably do that even if I was in hold luggage mode. And then what is the hand luggage recommendation? So before I started spending any amount of money on luggage, I would have said luggage is luggage, it's fucking pointless, like why are you even trying to do it? Then I upgraded and got an away, which is pretty good.

And that has sort of tie down straps that make things like much more organized. And then I started using nomadic before I was a partner with them. So I bought their stuff and then became a partner with them. And it's just magical. Like different sections, magnetic ties so that you can lock things down and push things down, different sections for everything. They have a, it's called a, you got the backpack.

What's your backpack called? Travel pack? They've got two. One's a travel pack and the other's a, I can't fucking count, remember. I'll link it in the show notes below. But it's just, this backpack opens like clamshell from both sides and it's just phenomenal. So, nomatics, website, just has all of this stuff on there

and it's really good. But it just changes the quality of your life, having genuine high quality luggage. Even if you are going to go hold luggage, there's ways that you can lift different things up and, oh man, it's outstanding. Wow. Can it fit a spare doofay? James Smith managed to fit a pillar with him because he travels with his own pillar. What? In his pillar. What?

In Newsy Pillar. No, like normal head pillar. He's bailed out of the pregnancy pillar life. Teoho. A lot of people flying long haul had brought their own pillars. I noticed that. I feel like that's probably going to be a future life. If I was to predict what my life hack next year is going to be, I reckon taking a pillar

with you while you travel. Is it a glower pillar? No, no, no. The fit time is luggage. Fits in hand luggage, bro. Yes, no. The fit time is luggage. Fits in hand luggage, bro. Yes, space. In hand luggage.

Finn pillow. Oh, if it's in pillow, it's a squish, or what you want, is it? Squash down. Anyway, that's my thing. Hold luggage. Bay out of it. Get good hand luggage and backpack and roller and you'll be able to get away with it. Also, one final one. If you are traveling and really struggling to space,

whether it be hand luggage or hold luggage, if you want to just have, like, let's say shoes, shoes take up quite a bit of room, aren't that heavy, and you usually don't have space for them, just go into the airport, go to WH Smiths or something like that, buy a bottle of water, put your shoes in the bag, no one ever complains about you taking retail on from within the airport.

Where were the shoes before? Is this before you go through security? Yeah. Yeah, so like literally you just have to walk into the airport holding those carrying shoes. Yeah, biotal of water, ask for a bag, put it in the bag because if they didn't allow you on with stuff that you purchased from W8 Smiths or W8 Smiths would not put it in the airport. stuff that you purchased from W8 Smiths or W8 Smith would not put it in their pool. My life. Don't fuck yourself airports. Damn.

Hack. So my one, again, it's one I've done for a while. So I put it, it's been, it's not fresh this week. So it's been through the filter past the 90 day filter. Pretty much. I wouldn't be surprised everyone who's listened to you as well as you too in the fitness scene, they've tracked like their lifts, they've tracked their nutrition, they've tracked sleep over the years, but very, very few people have ever tracked like their mental health or mood. So I created this idea,

which I realized is quite a big therapeutic technique, which didn't realize at the time. But essentially, imagine you have your mood, so you have zero here, which is worst day of your life, and then like 10 here, ecstasy pill in the system, serotonin, like maxing off the charts. And let's say you kind of, each day varies between a four to a six. And maybe not a British four or a six, there's a British person like there were stays at four

and there best days at six, but a wide arranging one. So let's say you have a four to a six every single day. As soon as you go outside of that, so if you go sub four for whatever reason, just have a little, like Apple note table, like negative mood here, positive mood there, just drop in the day and what the cause was. And likewise, if you go above a six, just write down,

oh, great morning, slept eight hours, coffees in the system, deep works that whatever it is that's caused it to do the things down, to, great morning, slept eight hours, coffees in the system, D works, whatever it is that's caused it to do this. Right it down, to do this. Right it down, and then at the end of the year, you have like 70 different entries, or even at the end of the month you'll have like five or six different entries that you can just be like, oh, okay, this thing's shown up multiple types. And it's one thing to have like a bad hangover and say, I'm not gonna drink again,

but you then forget come Saturday. But then let's say you look at the data and you hold on, 83% of my bad moods that were enough to register in this table, like was alcohol, and you can then put it in a little Google sheet and just see that thing there, that hits so much harder, and likewise with the positive moods as well.

It's basically whoop for mindset, isn't it, for mood. Can I add a couple of things, that I've tried. I love that idea. This is the new Apple, there's my abysmal step count as well. For 1,000, 1,200 steps. Busy morning.

But slightly pleasant or slightly unpleasant day, for example. So I think this is the journal, or it's one of the recent updates. What are you having to do? So this is part of the new iOS. They have a mood tracker with tags. So you can do that natively within Apple Health. But also for something that's more sophisticated, you can use exist.io. Now that's it, log a mood.

Can we show that to the camera? Neutral, I'm sorry if I do this. Ooh, it's unpleasant. I'm just trying to say, oh, slightly pleasant. But the reason that I still prefer exist.io, it's about $7 a month or something, is that you can pass the data and do a lot of good stuff

with it and figure out what it isn't sound like you. It'll put you in. It'll export to a CSV. Oh, lovely. And it'll, it pulls out correlations. Some of them might be a bit spurious, like on days that it rains, you have sex more or something, but that's probably something.

You see that thing about the correlation between the number of Nicholas Cage films released in a year and the number of people who die from drowning in swimming pools. It's like a really strong correlation. Yeah, I don't know how you explain that. I scream in ice cream cells and murders in it as the sound of one. So have you learned anything from those correlations? Yeah, so I do it for a lot of the tests that we do. So when I'm testing out red light therapy or vagal tone methods or anything like that,

I'll use Exist to track what are the effects on different aspects of your life. Oh, and it connects with your weapon, your Apple health and everything. You may be about a custom private web page that exports to a Google sheet. So you may between Apple Health and Exist.io, you may have found a way to do this. There's a simpler one, which is just inside timer. We've seen that. Yeah, I ask you how you're feeling, and there's like five faces, like very sad. But you need to be able to have why you're feeling that way. There's that as well. But you need to have it in metrics, and then you need to be able to track trends.

You should do that as well. I tried all the custom solutions, but I come back to, again, mid-wit, like the Apple notes, Google sheets, table, and because I can then write, I can get quite specific about what the thing was that day. And then the ability to reflect back on that six months and go, oh, that then triggers the memory of that day and I can go into a lot more detail versus if it's just purely a score and a tag,

it doesn't ring the same. Because sometimes it'll be like a lot of blues or effect as well, it'll be three or four things. But imagine if you had it all connected where it says, when you tweet more frequently, your heart rate is higher, and then you're like, ah, okay. So that's pulling like, whoop data. It pulls everything in, like it connects. Right.

So much. But it really helps. It really helps for, like really upsetting. Well, again, I think it's about identifying the trends and then letting go of the traffic tools. Yeah. Right, Johnny, you're up. Lesson. Lesson. Lesson is looking at things in 10-year windows. So we, as Ysuf mentioned, we've gone from two to 19 employees and the natural assumption would be What did we do in January to make that happen? I actually think it's a decade of work that made that happen and so the lesson is if you assume that if you just

Take enough swings at whatever it is you try to achieve you'll eventually get there and It will likely take a lot longer than you think how get there. And it will likely take a lot longer than you think, how focusing on how you can just be comfortable with the mundane, repetitive nature of it. And you mentioned this in your talk about how, well, when we were sat here, you're doing these episodes of No One Was Listening. So there was no reward, there was no weather wasn't a little bit like the episodes were growing, I guess. But there's a lot of repetition without much success, and then this year, vertical. So if it's going to take another 10 years, how do you make what you're doing now enjoyable, you know, detaching from the outcome?

How Moses got a bit about this where he says, discipline people aren't more patient, they just find something to do in the meantime. Yeah, yeah, it, they just find something to do in the meantime. Yeah, it's like just find something to do in the meantime. If you assume that it's going to take a long time to achieve the thing that it is that you want to do, and presume that it's going to take twice as long as you want it to take, or that you realistically think that it could take, how could you make it bearable that between now and then life just ticks over? So there's two quotes that are like one of them is a Churchill quote supposedly.

The other one is a Gary V concept. The Gary V concept is being very patient macro, but impatient micro. So like allows them to take 10 years but be very impatient this week today, this hour, whatever. And then the Churchill thing is, success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm, which I think is really not to say we're a success, but I think the success for us has happened

because we just didn't lose enthusiasm. But you also did a lot of... It wasn't like you had lots of failures. There wasn't a point where you guys were close to bankruptcy or anything like that. I think behind the scenes lots of failures. Lots of things that we tried. Like the mundane boring failures, which were actually in some ways even worse.

Yeah, because you only lock in a failure when you hear, all right. All right. That's not it. Whereas we just run into lots of like just little nudges like head against the wall, like really try and try this thing and it didn't work. You tried this thing. But this is, I talk about this in the live show, the like unspectacular failures and how

common they are, right, that like tarnish your entire experience of whatever it is that you're doing, because you hear Rocky cutscene montage and he can't lift a log and then he goes back and he still can't lift a log and he goes back and he still can't, and then he does lift a log and you're like goes back and he still can't lift a log, and he goes back and he still can't, and then he does lift a log, and you're like, oh, all of those things with that. And yours is, like, you're not even trying to lift a log, you're just trying to get your Alfred Shortcuts to work, right? Or you're trying to send an invoice through Quickbox,

and it just doesn't want to work. You're like, it's, you know what I mean? It's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like Buh-buh-buh with no easy way out. Yeah, just use the resending fucking quickbooks invoices.

Ivan Dragos got all the Alfred Shortcuts. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's better to touch tall is completely optimized. Three do those. Three do those. Buh-buh. But yeah, I think the lesson's just a seamage going to take you longer than you think

and then focusing on how do I make myself okay with that. Because then everyone wants the, there's a lot of focus on especially in our world and building business world where everyone wants it now. And if you said to those people like, okay, it's going to take 10 years, how are you going to make yourself comfortable with that? It's trying to accept that and come up with a strategy where you still enjoy it, finding something you're doing the meantime. I guess.

You gave me instant nausea when you mentioned that earlier. If it's the idea of, you mentioned this, you get to the top of the ladder and you realize the ladder's, but it gets the wrong wall. Oh right. Yeah. So with the 10 year,

are you now planning out things on a 10 year time horizon? Or how is it kind of tactical? It's just it's just look at rather than thinking like what's the goal this month this year? Think like okay, whatever we're we need to keep doing whatever we're doing for longer than we're planning to do. Instead of setting up something that feels unsustainable, how do I make it feel sustainable? So emergent success is something that I've been thinking about a lot. So we had like Jocka Wellink said this before we started the podcast. I don't even think that we were recording when he said this, but he said, I asked him about plans, long-term

plans, but it might be in the episode, I can't remember. And he said, five years ago, I'd never written a book, hadn't launched a supplement company, didn't have a podcast, and was basically a grant out of the army. If I'd had any plan, all of the optionality and exponential success just blew it out of the water. So I think having long-term plans might work for some people in relatively predictable industries or sort of predictable processes. But for me, I've almost largely dispensed with plans

that are longer than a year. I can guess where we're going to be over the next 12 months-ish, but most of it's just emergence. So, free the view. So we had a business goal at the start of the year. We met that in the first quarter. How have you- The business, the best kind. Yeah, but so, like, so, the planned pointless. One of the guys used to coach me for powerlifting, shifted Mike to Sherry. I don't, you have none of them on the podcast. No, but you told me. So he shifted like long complicated periodization

to just, why don't we just write a week of training and then we'll just do that week of training until it stops working. And then eventually. Well, it's planning out a year, or five years, gives people a sense of control, but it's completely. But you're still just reacting to circumstances

and things change and it's happening. I think it's so dependent on the industry you're in. So like being a doctor, I imagine it's quite an easy thing to do a five-year plan. Oh, yeah, because the whole path is laid out exactly. I want to become a Neuros, a pediatric Neuros, but you probably got a 15-year plan just laid out for you there. But I particularly entrepreneurship or something that's very dynamic and kind of related to technology that's constantly changing. Exponentials, it's going to throw your shit out of the water. There's no way that you're going to be able to hold on. There are things and opportunities that are going to be

laid in front of you that you literally don't even know exist right now. If you're trying to be a neurosurgeon, pediatric neurosurgeon, there isn't going to be some area of pediatric neurosurgeonry that you're as yet unaware of that's going to be able to be achieved within the space of six months. But if it's anything with a ton of optionality in, all of this shit could happen immediately. Europe, Seth. I've been seeing a therapist for just under two years now, and it's been a fantastic decision. So, I think there's a lot of resistance that people have to do in that, because there's kind of an implicit assumption that if you see a therapist that you're somehow broken or traumatized, and I think that keeps a lot of people away from growing and you know

and it's become, I've noticed it's become rebranded a lot in the corporate world as like performance coaching or whatever but it's just, it is just therapy just rebranded under a new name. What it basically is, and a true therapist is actually just a mirror to you so that they don't really, they're not forthcoming with advice, they're not, they don't kind of nudge you too much, you turn up and they just hold up the mirror and show you how much of a twat you're being in your daily decisions. And I very much think it's like turbo journaling. The difference is when you journal, you are writing within your own echo chamber and your journal doesn't call you out for being a

twat, whereas a therapist will call you out on your bullshit. So that's been really valuable, and I would very much recommend, like for the sake of 50 to 100 quid per session, well worth it. I've been a therapy as well. In Austin, I found a friend who did an awful lot of therapy for a very long time and is superbly fucked up. I figured if his therapist can deal with him, she can definitely deal with me. It's like, I'm way less messed up than he is. At least that's what I thought. It's been really, really great.

Yet the mirror thing, what ends up happening, a lot of time you're spent just thinking about your childhood, and you just don't give yourself the room any, even marginally busy person, just doesn't have the room to think about like that conversation you once had with your history teacher. I had Dr. Paul Conti on the show. He did that four episode series with Heuberman

a few months ago. Yeah, unconscious mind, trauma, all that stuff. Dude, I'm living in Austin, Texas. So the concept of people being sat in a sauna, whining on about their ancestral trauma, or like about how this thing from before affected them, and all the rest of it has really kind of put the wibblies up me about just not wanting to...

Yeah, all right, mate, like jog on, like this isn't the Goggins jockele-pilled side of me just doesn't want to hear it. But Dr. Paul Conti's re-framed my perspective on that, that there are things that you don't think about that are part of your unconscious programming, that your body takes completely for granted and just sort of grandfather's in as part of the landscape or the texture of your mind to the way that you see the world. It's just this unconscious assumption that you take as truth or fact and it's not and it wasn't before you had it and you've whitewashed your entire life to believe that this is the way it's always been and it isn't. And that shapes

all of your micro decisions and the filter that you see, the world and all of that, as you say, because of one way that you chose to interpret something early on. So, I guess the, I'd see journaling, pulsation, therapy, they're all on the same spectrum. It's just that one of them's kind of assisted. Like, it's almost like you're using steroids to journal and you're getting more out of it.

So like a forced guided prompted journaling. Yeah, exactly. The questions that prompted the like, I hadn't talked about that before. And there's that external accountability, isn't there? You then, because you can choose not to journal one day or you can choose not to write stuff out in depth, but if someone's like, I'm not going to speak to them. Tell me more about that. Yeah. So on that note, and I guess this comes around to what you were saying before, I consolidated about 12 years of journals.

So from day one, I was a lot more, I used day one a lot more heavily than you did by the sound of it. And I went through, it took me two or three months of a lot of time every day to consolidate all of the lessons and journal entries and everything, turn them into a visual map, identify the emergent themes. This was before I- A chat GPT could have done this a minute. I know, it could have, but actually, I think doing it

manually was quite useful. It's like revising, yeah. You don't need someone else to summarize your notes for you, you need to summarize your notes. You need to remember it. So I, and I mapped it out and it was phenomenal to see it just laid out in a very big spatial, categorized way of like, okay, this is what 12 years of journaling has taught me. And the ridiculous thing about it is that 21-year-old you know all the stuff that

you need to be doing now, but you just keep cycling through those same lessons. And it's like 21 year old version who is shouting, like, just do this thing. And then a couple of weeks later, you know, you've had like the child, both, I'm easier about it. And you go, that's fine. And then it keeps coming back round. And I think until you integrate and do those lessons, the same thing's going to keep bouncing back into your consciousness until you process it. One of the worst things to realize, we often get asked, all of us will, what would you 10 years ago wish that you'd known that you know now? And you look back and you think, oh, well, there's this and this and this and this and this and this is the way I see the world.

Are these one of my patterns? Almost always, those things, when I answer those questions, are still things that me in 10 years' time will be wishing that me right now new it's midway once again we're looking for the higher optimization the next this is my new one no no more sophisticated nice like no you are still you and your patterns are still your patterns and maybe this is where the unconscious work comes in maybe some of the you know dr poll conti style like unveiling the unconscious would break that and you might genuinely have new or novel challenges that you need to change, but given the fact that you are still you, the things that you're that you were fighting with 10 years ago are almost certainly the same things you're fighting with now. When did we do the things you would tell your 18 year old self-porkest? Oh, fucking hell.

I bet we should we should all go back and listen to that for just take almost certainly it'll be the same shit. I think it was by Bitcoin a D531. It was by Bitcoin do 531. That was a by Bitcoin do 531. Maybe not the worst advice. If you had in fact, if you had if you can count 531 as a single word, that would be four words that you could just like text your last self by Bitcoin do 531. I found a tool when I was like 18 that you can email yourself in 10 years time. Yeah, the future me.org. Yeah, something like that. And I got the email the other day and it was like, hi, it used to. Wow. I'm 18 years old. Yeah. What did he say? By Bitcoin. You were still. You were still. You're still Muslim then yeah very deep deep in the Muslim yeah

Did you I might have actually I might have set one for another 10 years Honestly, I can't remember what I said, but it was really it was quite emotional to see what I sent one to myself in a year a couple of months ago Nice looking forward to getting it All right, are we on lessons? We are in lessons, aren't we? Yeah, we are in lessons all right So this is technically one from last year and it was inspired by a conversation. I had with Jay Comfries He said These are the golden years He can't wait until you've got no stress or worry in your life before you decide to be happy because guess what, you will always have stress and worry and anxiety and problems

and issues to deal with. So you have to decide now that happiness is something you're going to have and it's that little throwaway line at the beginning which I use as a mantra, these are the golden years. It's a great heuristic to always think that when you look back, these times right now will be the ones that you cherish and to approach them with requisite joy. Only in retrospect can we see how beautiful the present actually was. Problems are a feature of life, not a bug. There will never come a time when you have no problems. What? Did you think that one day you're just going to wake up and cease having problems, like completing a video game and leveling up to a map where there's nothing there? That's never going

to happen. Your problems will change, but having problems is going nowhere. Whatever negativity is consuming your thoughts probably won't matter in three months' time. In three months, you won't remember the negative texture of your mind or the boring, repetitive things you thought, or maybe even what you were worried about, but the time that you spent worrying will have passed. So you're sacrificing your joy and presence in the moment for a problem which you won't even be able to recall in the future. Immortality would be the only life

in which such flippancy with the days that you live for is acceptable. In your talk, you say everybody has this mantra of, after this week, things will calm down. It's the diet starts Monday, and Naval talks about that is like, you assume that because your calendar has white space in three months time, that I'm going to be full of excitement and willingness to just book in coffees with all these people that I haven't been doing for a long time

and I'll be able to start these new hobbies and start fishing and I'll be full of jubilant and willingness to try new things. It's like, no, it's just you haven't filled up your calendar yet with the normal mundane stuff. So from a time management perspective and from a happiness perspective, that's been a real. Yeah, if you wouldn't say yes to this proposed meeting for tomorrow, don't say yes to it for three months' time because it'll be exactly the same. It's going to be the exact same. You just have to presume that things are going to remain the same in terms of workload. And yeah, I think just these are the golden years, as like, don't, and this is kind of, I guess,

a little bit of a counter to some of the more Goggins, Jocco, Homozi pills, like Homozi Maxine philosophies, which are, you know, you can grit your teeth and now is the time to go go to war and like all of that stuff, but so many of the best outcomes that we've all got in life is when we found the intersection of something which is valuable and that we enjoy to do because it makes everything easy and in the meantime that's actually going to be fun. Like what's the fucking soul point? Yes, like if you're going to sacrifice your enjoyment in the moment for success in the future, so that when you finally have

enough success in the future, you can enjoy yourself. Like, well, the bar stores upside down, given that most of all destination acquisitions can constitute journeys, like optimized for the journey not the destination. The whole mozy thing of the, and he calls it, the grandfather frame, we heard that one. You haven't heard that one. I'd depends what it is on earth. So it was it's like a ten minute YouTube video he has and I listened to it

while like while on holiday actually and he talks about how he tries to look at life now, how 80 year old him would see currently and you suddenly get an appreciation for like, I can like get up and go to the kitchen and like my back doesn't hurt my knees don't hurt. I don't have arthritis, spending time with my wife who just got married.

Like this is a wonderful time of life. You like look at now and look at it focuses the things on, focuses his attention on things that you take for granted. But when you're 80, won't be there anymore. And I think that's like, everyone talks about like feel gratitude and keep, like write down things you're grateful for each morning.

But that single video was the biggest of like, oh fuck yeah, like all this stuff. Like I had to spend time doing a podcast. When I'm 80, I'll be sat there and on my own. Like looking back on now, thinking, God, that was so good. So much fun. Yeah, these are the golden years.

I think it's just such a good reframe. Just assume that now is the best that your life is ever going to be and in retrospect, you're going to wish that you could be back here now. It's that whole, when I was 20, I wanted to be a millionaire, and now I'm a millionaire, I just want to be 20. Yeah, it's like what Warren Buffett is rich, but he would trade places with every

like 18 year old. Yeah, time billionaires is what they call it. It's hard to make a profound statement with these glasses on it really. You'd be surprised. I think it would be good. I really think it works. All right. So one of my favorite ones from this year,

which I think by definition, it won't change because it's the Jeff Bezos'ism of asking what's not going to change. Everyone's obsessed with, I like, what's gonna happen with AI and what's gonna happen in this industry, like how are things gonna change? Gotta take this off.

But few people ask what's not going to change. So he uses it for Amazon where it's like, oh, is this tech going to come in? Is this competitor going to come in? And he goes, all that could happen, but even the smartest people for that history have a very, very difficult time predicting the future. But if he goes, well, what's not going to change?

You like creates these fake scenario of, no customer's going to say, can I have slower delivery times? Can it cost more? Can you have fewer choices available Amazon? And they're going to go, okay, those are the things to focus on. And looking at every industry or every sector that you give a piss about really. And just saying what isn't going to change. And then just focusing on those. It's the bloke at the electrical tower, or the telecom's tower, who's just got the lever. Like, he's not going anywhere.

Unless electricity gets subverted by a new thing. That's not gonna change. 100%. Even like for the podcast, right, you could, there's loads of new things that you can try to spotify in YouTube and things like that, but what is not going to change 10 years from now? People want to listen to a combination of guests that they already know and love, people

that they never heard of, and topics that they are interested in now, topics that they didn't know that they were interested in in the future, and they want to listen to it in an acceptable quality of audio and video. Like, that's podcasting in a nutshell. So, yeah, optimizing for those things. And it's the point of that to get distracted less. Yes. To focus on the few things that matter. Okay. So you put your attention on the core stuff and let the changes and the technology or whatever comes out. I mean, you can still play around with the technology,

you can still do that, but when people get so caught up, like for example, if he was getting so caught up in a new technology, but then the delivery speed was getting slower and slower, or people were getting faster, or the prices were getting higher and higher, it's reminding of, oh, there's an infinite dashboard of metrics for me to focus on here.

What are the ones I should focus on? He lives that as well. Like he's now just building infrastructure on infrastructure, isn't he? Like multi-generational. This is Amazon Web Systems, and now he's moving on to bigger things from the Lex episode. Yeah.

Right, Johnny, you're up. Hack. Hack. This is a recent one. What I told you about recently, Opal PhoneApp. For one as well. Enjoying it. I'm careful about my

recent e-bias. I've only been with it for like a 90-day window. I ignore this. Okay. Well, or, yeah, ignore this. No, but it's kind of, of all that, I've tried a lot of different like screen time, iPhone, app blocking stuff. I think this one makes it the simplest. And it's cool how you can have like your friends on there. I think that's the best thing about it. So you can, there's just like a, it kind

of taps into the like, I'd call it to be top of the leaderboard. I saw that you did four hours and fifteen minutes the other day. You go, immediately thought, I've got an extra three hours today. Yeah. Did you get one hour or something? Like one hour or twenty? Yeah, a couple of times. You see, I saw that and I was like, I feel like I do okay with my phone. I saw that and I was like, God, I've got.

It's pretty robust. It's a different, so yeah, an old time blocking. And they have like preset things like, so I have like an automated one, which is like 7am till midday is like deep work. And then there's one which is like, they do a lunchtime one, they do like a last hour of the day one. I've custom put mine together. It's pretty easy to do. I think I've seen that in action. Your state is changing on I message.

Right. I state once it won't auto. It won't disturb. You don't do not disturb. I don't think so now. No. I think that's a separate thing. Oh, I wonder if you could create a shortcut. So, when your, when Opal triggers a focus block, put you in focus mode, automatically puts you in, do not disturb. I think just making the screen times hard, right? Like it's hard to use a phone properly,

or like without getting distracted. So turning it into a game, making it competitive, I wanna be Chris. How do I be Chris? Like you start thinking, I could leave my phone. I mean, my screen times getting trashed at the minute, but I could leave my phone away during this part of the day. I could not have it with me then. I struggle to think how I'm going to be to be honest. It's impressive. I'm bad. I'm bad. It don't worry. Did you just have a day? Give

it a day. Give me time. Yeah, I've had a couple of good days, but it's also new app effectiveness. Something news come in that's just obliterated my ability to do stuff and I haven't yet found the one. So I'll get you over like a 60 day period, probably almost certainly. Yeah, as of yet, my, you know, like the path of a river, it's like, oh, we're going to divert it round this way. Really good at typing in your tin. Yeah, it just is. Yeah, exactly. So I'm going to burst the bank eventually. But right now, I'm in this beautiful Goldilocks zone.

It gives you little gems each day as well. Have you noticed? I've got loads. Yeah. I've got loads. There you go. The co-excite we are about not using our phone. Opal. Good. Good. Good. Pro. Europe. Reondoris, who I think you met a few weeks ago, yep. Has changed the way that I structure my day with the six alarms principle. So I set multiple alarms throughout the day.

This sounds so stupid saying it aloud, but we've realized over the last few years that you have to treat yourself like a child to be able to get anything done. And I now set alarms at midday, just before shutdown, at shutdown, and then at like bedtime routine. So what they do is just create this kind of bookend or a wall in the day where it's like, okay, this block of time is now over. You're into the next phase, you're into the next phase. And it stops me from just kind of running on and just working late or ignoring my own arbitrary boundaries. And I think when you're self-employed, that becomes so important, especially shifting from what we've done, which is going from full-time employment with a clear

clock on and clock off into an office or into a hospital. And then it's like the time is very clearly defined for you. But suddenly when you're self-employed, there's no boundaries on your time. And you could just, if you have the disposition like us, you would just work infinitely and end up working late and then stealing time from yourself because then you wake up late the next day and you're tired and then you work worse that day and you have to catch up and then so it just avoids all of that with a simple alarm. So why do you have six? I actually have four. Ryan says you can, he says you can pick a number that's not so many that it divides the day into like a ridiculous number of blocks.

But I think it's important just to pick time blocks that make sense for you based on when you want to start working, when you want to stop and work backwards from there. So you start at the end of your day and then alarms to like bookmark that of like where should I be? Yeah. And it stops you from then just being like, oh, I've got quite a bit to do today. I'll just work a bit later because it's like, oh, no, there is a hard deadline to the day now. So it forces you to then filter things more

aggressively and do everything gets Parkinson's Lord. Yeah. Yeah, that's nice. His anti-morning routine as well of just start writing within 90 seconds of opening your eyes. Is- I do that, I've been doing that for a long time. That's really good. It's really good. Yeah, in this book, it looks like I'm gonna be writing this. Flow, pro-ness, flow, row-ness.

Yeah, I like to switch between theater and delta as much as I can, yeah. Don't worry. Oh, and we're gonna go for, all right, fuck it. Sleep token is my next life hack. Ooh, that their album, their band, I guess, halfway between, they're technically referred to now as Cometal.

Cometal. Cometal. It's like metal that you'd have sex with. So like them, loath. Oh, wow. It's called Cometal. Anyway, so Sleep token, a band that have been around for quite a while.

They managed to do it at the start of this year. Five tracks released from their album. Each one of them made it onto Spotify's most trending page. Each release, like every fortnight for three months or something, as a metal band, but calling them a metal band probably doesn't have a disservice. It's got kind of jazz in there, it's got rap, it's got R&B, and it is,

I would say, the most complete album, take me back to Eden, it's the most complete album that I've ever heard in my entire life. And it's just, it's phenomenal. And I was listening to them in the gym earlier on thinking about life hacks for today, and I realized that across the last year, then all my top five songs from Spotify wrapped are all by, on that album, they're all by sleep token, they're all from taking me back to Eden. And listening to music that just makes you so happy and is useful for uplifting your mood,

making you train harder, getting you into a good state, just that. So sleep token, take me back to Eden, fucking, I'm up there. You sent that album to me and I dismissed it twice So I think it takes a couple of times. Oh you give it back and then bailed out and give it a crack Yeah, do you actually in full? Yeah, did you really yeah, just if I think I was expecting something very different? Yeah, it's very different. It's fucking brilliant But yeah, it's very very good strong very good tree

my one so But yeah, it's very, very good. Strong, very good. Gee. My one, so yeah, this is one that everybody knows about, but not to the level, I think I'm going to suggest. So me and ChatGBT have developed quite an interesting relationship, say the least. But basically, what ChatGBT has unlocked, which I don't think most people have realized yet, is you can basically go to level one of every single video game.

So what I mean by that is, I won't lie, there'll be things that people would speak about who are a lot smarter than me, so people discuss the laws of physics. And they'd start talking, I'd be nodding my head, but I didn't actually know what any of that meant. Or like any kind of rudimentary concept that I just zoned out at school. And they immediately, it's like level 37, or it's like, they're talking about level, sorry, season 12 episode four of Friends, the six minute mark,

and I have no context of who any of the characters are. And the ability to go into chat GBT, chat GBT isn't useful for any like dynamic on the edge topics, so like if you were learning tick tock ads, it wouldn't be that great for it. But if you go on there, I'll give you two examples. So like David Deutsch's book, the beginning of Infinity, read it and it's quite dry. I probably just below the IQ threshold where it would

like the IQ market fit for that book. And what I would do is I prompt chat you BT and I go, okay, I want to know the 10 most important concepts from this book, one by one, and do not move on until I say I understand. And I will just sit there, it will, so it prints the first one, and I go, I don't get that word there. And I don't get what you mean by that. And then it prints something else out, and I go, okay, explain like a smart 10 year old. Dada, and you get to the bottom of the basement, you go, ah, I get it.

Whereas in the book, you'll be getting it, getting it, getting it, and then they'll say a concept that you don't fully understand, and then he moves on, and then that concept is like the foundation for all these other stuff, and you just check out, and the ability to use chat GBT for any kind of foundational topic and say. With an airport.

You showed me the other day. You can use the audio version as well, so you can speak back and forth to it. You look at it and you go, I can understand anything. Nothing is too intimidating if I use chat GPT correctly. So there's almost, there's no such thing as not knowing something, it's just not prompting chat GPT to the level and the personalization it can have.

Because I think that's the fundamental thing where the education system breaks is, I think, the Val spoke about it, but you'll be understanding, understanding, understanding, then you're off one day, you come back in and you didn't get that bit of algebra and they keep going on and on and on, but the ability to get any bit of nonfiction foundational text personalized to you and doesn't move on until you understand it is absolutely phenomenal. Massive with that. I did a maths degree and if you, if you zone out for a couple of minutes in a pure

maths proof, you are, yeah, you're fast. So the fact that you can, the air pods thing, I think, is massive. You should, like, so chat GPT have now introduced conversational AI. So you can have an air pod in, go out for a walk and talk to it about explain relativity to me. I hate the tonality that it uses is frightening. Hey, would you like to know more about that? It's the sound so human. It's only going to get more and more human. But the thing I'd say with this is for anybody who listens,

any topic now that you're kind of embarrassed to ask people about, or somebody says something that you don't want to ask because you assume every smart person knows that. Any topic you just say, explain them up 10 most important topics, don't move on until I say I understand and just keep asking why, why, why, explain like a 10-year-old and you just realize you can understand any topic. If you leave it all in the same, if you have one big thread with all the stuff you want to learn, does it?

Can it just quick it? Yes, quick them to it to learn as well. Fundamental problem is, Google had a little bit of that, but with time, Google's only got worse and worse. Somebody said something recently where it's like, if you Google what disease you have, you don't find out what disease you have, you just find out which one has the best SEO.

And that's the fundamental problem. Google, which is always the most serious one, is Google as a product is getting worse and worse every single year and chat GPT is getting better and better. It's just a matter of until it goes. But it is so good for personalized education, particularly for historical or foundational topics, any moment of history, any book that's been around for a long time.

So good. Or even if you're on holiday somewhere, and you go, I'm here, tell me the 10 most important things about this place. It's incredible. That's strong. All right, we've got about 10 minutes left. Should we do one more round of hacks

or one more round of lessons? What do you think? I've got a decent lesson, a weak hack. I'll do less. All right, lessons are this. I think this is originally from the book 10,000 weeks by Oliver Berkman. Defining something I struggle with a lot, defining, or defining a productive day, I had a time. So I had this realization that I very rarely, if ever, leave a training session with unfinished

exercises, I finished the exercises, but I'm not in the gym for stupid amounts of time. I've thought about it and I've planned myself a reasonable number of exercises and I finished them, but I almost always end a day with uncomplete tasks. So I look at my tedious, and then you finish the day feeling unsatisfied, it's fine satisfied. So just slightly underregging. It's as simple as it is, just slightly underregging how many things you're going to do in a day. So create your to-do list for like hungover, tired you, because you can always just borrow stuff from tomorrow. And if you, that's how you do eight things a day every day. Today you, you plan to do six and you borrow two

from tomorrow, you feel mint when you finish the day. But if you plan to do six and you borrow two from tomorrow, you feel mint when you finish today. But if you plan to do ten and you only do eight, you feel terrible. There's a permanent dissatisfaction, I think, that many people, especially me, have with our to-do list, there are more things that you have to do, that you have an infinite number of things to do. And even if you don't have an infinite number of things to do, you definitely have an infinite number, almost an infinite number of more things than you can do today. Which means that there will permanently be,

I've, it's not, it's like, like bailing out, it's like, and that's enough for now, as opposed to, I am finished, and that sense of, I am finished is a degree of satisfaction that I think we should all be trying to achieve more of. I have this, I have this reason to, I'm like, oh well, but that means I'll do all that stuff,

but I won't, I'll get to the end of the to do some, yeah, do some other stuff. Well, it's the calendar white space thinking, oh, well, I've got all this white space. Well, wait a minute. If I'm not filling it all up back to back, ramming myself with tasks, then I'm falling short. But actually, if you do that and you have no buffer time, it just takes a poo that's two minutes too long to completely knock out your entire time. I can't speak to you. I don't. Dude, I remember this when I snapped my Achilles, I had this very precisely planned weekend.

So it was the weekend that a bunch of new tenants were moving into one of my houses, and I needed to get this new TV and drop it off. And all of the IKEA stuff that was in the back of my car so that the guy that would build it was going to be there. He was going to be there the next day, but the TV needed to be collected today. And that meant that I had to go to the Saints Breeze, but I'd already planned because the Saints Breeze was next to the cricket pitch where I was going to be there. He was going to be there the next day, but the TV needed to be collected today. And that meant that I had to go to the Saintsbury's. But I'd already planned because the Saintsbury's was next to the cricket pitch where I was going to play. Didn't account for the fact I wasn't going to be at the cricket pitch.

I was going to be at the fucking Royal Victoria in Firmary, like having a boot put on. And then I realized, I was like, right, Dad, I know that I've just had the most traumatic injury of my entire life thus far. But we now need to leave the RVI and go to St. Breeds to collect this fucking television. I'm also very carefully put together House of Cards is all going to come tumbling down. So yeah, I got a selfie with you in the hospital.

You were in cricket whites. I was still going to be cut out of my fucking cricket. My brand new cricket whites, my mum was, my mum was dead. You sent me a picture of it with How's the Bokey? I was so boggy. You squeezed where you're crilly should be in those. There was no, it was just flesh. I left foot drove home from the RVI.

I snagged my right foot and I left foot drove home because I was like, I can't be bothered going to get my car tomorrow. That's the better hope of... Which is the very issue where you overpress the brake. Left, left, left, left, left foot drove home. Accelerator and brake. This is where Lifehack's episode one, his by an automatic car.

Yeah. Yeah. You're the real winner here. It is, it is. That is an manual. Wow. Yeah, that's impossible. That's game over.

All right, there you go, that's good. I like that. It's just one thing, like tactically, how do you do that? What does that look like on Tick-Tick? So you'll learn in your private one-to-one, but you just, I generally will stack the morning and then leave white space in the afternoon, because the morning stuff always takes longer than you think. And then I almost always end up with a little bit of extra time at the end of the day,

and you can just tick off a few bonus things. And if you leave with nothing, if you finish today with nothing you tick tick feels great. That's nice. So that's like a couple hundred quid a day in happiness I think. Every day. So I've got a mini lesson from you and a mini lesson from you. Mom from me? Well, we've kind of collabed on our lessons today, but you don't have to try and make him feel more impure about your lessons than you are. So I learned a lot from George visiting him a couple of weeks ago, but one of the things that's definitely clear here is that whenever you run into a problem, you derive a principle

from it, you write about it and create some content to kind of solidify that lesson. And you fail fast with figuring out like, how can I stress test this problem? So the midwit thing works very well. And the failing fast, as I experienced this, because George took me foiling, which was excellent. It's like a motorized surfboard. And on the way there, he said, you surf, you're going to fall spectacularly in the water 40 times before you can consistently stand on the foil. So expect that so that you're not just always disappointed with how badly you're doing. And having the bar set there was great because then it meant that I'm not expecting to be good. I can have lots of spectacular falls. And then if you manage to stand on any short, any less than 40, after 40 fails, brilliant. It feels

like a bonus. So what's the metal lesson? The metal lesson is pull out the principles, stress test them and fail fast, I think. Pricing in failure is so good. Pricing in. Pricing in. Pricing in, yeah. Because it turns into a video where it's, when I take the belief for it, I give them technical instructions and I'll listen because it's their first time. But that one thing always rings home. Because otherwise they try and stand up on the first go, fall off and go,

I'm a failure. And then each rep reinforces that versus when you say, you're going to fall off 40 times in a row, they then see each one as a rep, they're up on, done the third one, done the fourth one. Yeah, I was excited to fall the next time, and actually it took way less than 40. Yeah. James Smith has a bit about this in his live talk where he says he was knocking door to door for end power

and realized that every 200 door knocks, he got a sale. And then his sales manager was like, how many more sales do you need for today? He said, two, so how many doors does he take for you to get a sale? And 200, he was like, well, knock on 400 more fucking doors then. And it's just, okay, that's the way to bake it in. It's like just the price of business, basically. 100%. You say you had a second one. The lesson from you is pick a thing and take it seriously.

So that's something that's a monger idea, but this podcast. And the Peterson one. Okay. It's, this podcast is the testament to that. We started our podcast in 2013. We picked a thing among many things. We didn't take it seriously. You did an episode with us in 2015, 2016. You were like, hmm, quite like this. And you were like, I'm going to go balls deep on this. Three episodes a week, well-researched episodes, aiming for good production quality straight away when you did the reps and you enjoyed the process as well. You didn't just do it expecting that, like, oh, I'm on episode four, why hasn't this got more views yet or whatever.

It was just, I'm doing this to master the craft and enjoy the process. And without being able to do that, I'm sure you would have given up way earlier than you did and way earlier than the... It's a lesson curve. All of the pursuits that we're all trying to do, that the person who enjoys walking will walk way further than the person that has to walk. Yeah, exactly. So those are the two meta lessons as much as I can say would apply to everything. What's difficult is giving a prescription without a diagnosis. And I think this is the problem with content in general that without doing that, you're kind of scattered gunning stuff,

you're shotgunning stuff because obviously in medicine to use that analogy, you always have a patient in the room with a symptom, a guiding principle, and you do history, examination, investigation, diagnosis, treatment. And if you shuffle those steps around, you're going to have a really low hit rate. So the broader principles are as good as we can get. And then the fastest way to make faster progress is to work with someone to diagnose what is my bottleneck right now, and how can I then fix that?

All right, I think I'm gonna do one hack and one less and quickly, because I can do that. The hack is Kindle released this year, the largest, most expensive Kindle yet, which is a Kindle scribe, which has got a pen that comes with it, and it's all advertised as, and you can use this, it'll replace your paper, it's kind of trying to compete with the remarkable, it doesn't have the features of a remarkable.

It doesn't have a folio, keyboard, fold out thing, it's not as advanced as that, and how many times are you thinking, do you not really wish that I could like hand write a note right now. They're also trying to say, well, you can hand annotate books, but you can't write on the margins or write on the words. You have to highlight tagging notes. And then within the note, that gives you an area that you can write.

So for the writing area stuff, it's kind of bollocks. It's also, if you haven't a paper-white or an oasis yet and still found yourself wanting more Kindle, it's not enough, that being said, it is probably in terms of screen area, maybe even bigger than an A4 piece of paper. So you fit a ton of text, and I didn't realize how enjoyable reading long pages it text is

rather than moving through pages a lot. Each time that I move a page, there's a non-zero chance that I'm gonna be like, oh, I'm at the top of another page here. And there's something about, it's very enjoyable. For me personally as well, I have a habit of spinning a pen through my fingers and it helps me focus.

If I do something small that distracts a little bit of physical energy from myself, I focus a lot more on whatever I'm thinking about. So the fact it's always got this pen attached can do that. You can change page with the pen by tapping it. You can also highlight very accurately by using the pen, which is something I use, then that gets resurfaced through read-wise. But I'm like a power user when it comes to Kindle.

Send to Kindle is the way that I read articles. I don't read substacks on the computer. I don't read blog posts on the computer. All of that goes through Kindle. And it's just a huge monster piece of kit with a pan attached to it that you can highlight and navigate with. And that's very enjoyable, super bright. Is it like an E inks green or is it like a...

So, it's like a tripod. You can do like the flux setting as well. So for... So, does it do? It's like a tie pad. You can do like the flux setting as well, so for... You can go super warm. Yeah, going super warm. I'm not at the 90 day mark for it yet, so I can't... You want to see my age? But it is, I'm 60% of the way through Elon's new biography.

And I'm not even thought about the charger. I've got like 86% battery. It's in, say what? In say. I'll tell you what's even more in the same way to do it. Turn it to airplane mode. Turn a kindle to airplane mode. And it's just it's an infinite fucking energy machine. It's crazy. And then just a quick lesson, which is from Morgan House, all your expectations to find your happiness more than your circumstances. If you presume that happiness is what you want minus what you have, like a lot of billionaires

broke and that meta-lesson of you can try and dial down your expectations, which is kind of hard, we're all type A people that want to achieve a lot and not leave it on the table, but always just looking for that reframe of, look, why am I even bothered about chasing this particular thing? Is it just because I once saw this guy that I used to go to whatever with or that I used to know from this thing who's just done X or Y or Z or they're on in the say shells or he's got a Ferrari or that like all of that bullshit just comes back to like every time that you decide to bring a desire into your life,

see it as a, it's like a carer payment on happiness. It's like, I'm going to, if I decide to bring this in, I'm withdrawing from an overdraft and I'm going to have to repay that at some point, like really, really carefully scrutinize desires and expectations because they're delays on happiness. A great meme for that is like net reality. Say where you have net profit, like reality minus expectation, net reality. If someone has an incredible reality, but their expectations are greater, they're a minusy bit there. Yeah, that's in terms of it. Something you skimmed over with consuming content mindfully was that you have a read later app, whatever that is, and you're only allowed to read from that app. So it stops you from reactively just reading

an article in one of the 20 tabs you've got open. Instead, it has to go through your established system. Yeah. By doing that as well, the center kindle thing, it makes you very mindful. It's like, do I want this on my Kindle library page? Do I really want this on there? Probably not. And there's always most of to read than time to read it in. So triaging what you have to read. Sent Kindle plus scribe plus pen spinning

plus massive battery time and big screen. Fucking, I have to say I also bought another Oasis. So I now have Kindle next to my bed and I have a Kindle downstairs. I have two Kindle devices. I found that moving them between the two, I would to my bed and I have a Kindle downstairs. I have two Kindle devices. I found that moving them between the two, I would get into bed and I'm like, oh, it's downstairs. Guess what?

I'm not reading now. I'll watch Netflix or whatever. And the same vice versa for a morning routine. I'm like, oh, it's the upstairs. Yeah, I'll just skip reading today. It's like things in places. I think just one final thing on the expectations thing. The Ted talk where paradox of choices

and a very short, yeah, is it his TED talk? Think he talks about the key to happiness as low expectations, and I've always struggled with that, with actioning that, because the happiness, to increase your happiness, if you just decrease your expectations, do you guys have any practical ways of doing that? Be careful about what desires you let into your life. Expectations are always going to be high for what you want, but there's ways that you can tune that up. I could definitely make your expectations higher.

It's the inversion thing. It's like, how do you reduce expectations? All right, how do you increase expectations? I would spend tons of time on the internet looking at people that are doing better than me. I'd see things that I don't want and unquestioningly presume that I want to have those things because they're ahead of me in some form or another Like do you really want a private jet? No, but I look at someone that has one. I go, oh, yeah I should have a private jet and it just gets added into that like if you extend that it's like okay, so my Like the people I spend all my time with should be like the least successful people I should find

Gadsad I mean Gadsad found in his book about happiness is most recent one that you need to have a minimum amount of sex per week in order to be happy, but the best way to be happy about your sex life is to be having a little bit more sex than the friends around you. It's like the thing of you should be more successful than your wife's sister's husband. Yeah, correct. Whatever it is. Yeah. And like as long as you're above that, Krishdy.

So I've got, I'll do a quick life hack and I'll bless through my lesson. or whatever it is. And like as long as you're above that. Eccrischty. Gee. So I'll do a quick life hack and I'll bless through my lesson. So a quick life hack is most of people listening to this probably, or a significant about, but have a knife phone. And the alarm clocks designed by Apple are all like Guantanamo Bay creations from the CIA. They are horrific. And the thought that you'd wake up your sleep.

But I've tried that, like if you go through them all, you press every single one. None of them are like, that's a nice soothing thing you'd wake up your sleep. But I've tried that, like, if you go through them all, you press every single one. None of them are like, that's a nice, soothing thing you'd hear at a spot. They've all got a really high attack. On the sound, haven't they? Exactly. So simple. What you can do if you go on the custom tune store and search by neural beats, it's 79p.

So it is a big investment. It's 79p. I found this and, like, and find the one that relaxes you. And it's such a better way. If you've got to use an alarm. Why are you waking up to your iPhone? What do you mean? Yeah, it's 79p. I found this and like, and find the one that relaxes you. And it's such a better way. If you've got teams not locked. Why are you waking up to your iPhone? What do you mean?

That's the big question. That's probably a question. That's a fucking awful thing. I'm sleeping with your phone. But you're sleeping with your phone. Sleeping with your phone in your bedroom. Yeah, but I used to use an Alexa and then I asked the news. Radio alarm clocks have been around for nearly a hundred years.

There's about three life hack contraventions that you can't imagine. So for us, all of this is very exciting. A lot of people listening to this will be using their iPhone. And that is a hundred years. There's about three life hack contraventions that you're getting. So across all of the straights, a lot of people listening to this will be using their iPhone. And that is a useful one. This is the midwit meme. Don't use the phone. Don't try and repurpose the phone alarm to be more successful.

Get rid of the phone and buy either sunrise alarm clock. You can get one on Amazon for 15 bucks or standard radio alarm clock five five pounds. You know there's one called I think it's called like clocky now that has wheels on it, so it's a alarm clock and then as soon as it sets off it starts driving around, you have to get a few votes. There's one that's a mat, you have to stand on it and solve a mat problem. I'd be such a bad hangar. I don't use a lot. I just wake up. My legs are a bit more like that. You Just go at the same time, it's easy. That's not always, anyway.

Shut up, Johnny. Lessons for so far, I've done a lesson from the little, obviously, throwback to Munga, Bezos. This one comes from the Gallagher brothers, Liam and Noel. Nice. So they have a lyric which hits me every single time. I think it's the best lyric I've ever heard, which is, questions are the answers you might need.

And it hits me hard. So essentially, even when I have people ask me for advice now, or even when I'm thinking myself, or even creating content, just having a recurring question that I come back to is so useful versus having a specific answer. So you avoid the prescription mindset. One of the things is hitchhikers guide to the galaxy.

And if you heard that, and within that they create a super computer which is supposed to give them the answers to life and the universe. And it just spits back 42. And it's like, because you didn't know what the question was. And so many things I come back to, questions now. So have you read Elon's book yet? So I mean, I can tell you it right now. This is what it is.

Okay, it's basically him. He comes up an idea, and then somebody works him a go, that's not possible. And he goes, does it define the laws of physics? And then they're like, well, not technically, we still can't do it. And he goes, why? Why? Why? And then he hits the base level, believing he goes, fix that. And then he goes, why, why, why? And then he hits the base level

belief and he goes, fix that. And then he goes, also, do it by next Tuesday. And it's like to build a rocket. It's that, it's just him going, does it defy the laws of physics? And then he goes, no, I won't done by next Friday. It's just, it's just a question, does it defy the laws of physics? And then deadline, that's, that is the 100 anecdotes, is the book just doing that again and again and again. So does it divide the laws of physics as a question? One of my favorite things right now is I have friends come to me for advice and I'd often used to like get super detailed and give them so much advice and people wouldn't

listen. And I was like, okay, so what I do now is I'm just like, well, what would you advise me if I came to you in the exact same situation? You did, you didled me with this in Dubai. Yeah, it didled me with this in Dubai. Yeah, it didled me with it in an Uber. Yeah, and it works and they come up with something that's so profound and personalized that hits home

versus me trying to give them generic things. And the Tony Robbins, like, what will you do? And I don't know. Well, if you did know, what would it be? That works every time. Unbelievable. Well, it's what we said earlier when we had a quick toilet break that if you have bad breath, you're the only person in the room that doesn't know.

But as soon as somebody else has bad breath, you do know. And it's the ability when you take them out of that frame and have a question, it's given them the answer that they needed all along. And then a few of the favorite questions that I have in the minute, which is where if you meet somebody who's way smarter than you, asking them the question of, well, what question should I be asking you? Is a great one. Another one, which is kind of a test right now in where people often end up in super tribalistic thinking

of this team over here or this team over here. I can tell whether someone's a full on NPC, by whether they can answer this question, which is, who is somebody you admire? And you get into that, like who's your kind of cult hero? And he goes, what do you disagree with them on? Or what's their worst point that they make? And then the inverse too, like,

who's somebody you strongly dislike? And what's a great point that they have? And you'll find people who are really high at critical thinking, or have really thought it through from both sides, can answer that really fast. But a lot of people just, let the thought of them conceding a point to somebody on the opposing team or being able to criticize their guru, the software

just hits a 404 error very fast. I'm not thinking, gentlemen, I really appreciate you coming through. It's been a wild year for you guys and for me and for you as well, although you're less traumatized than we are. So you seem to be able to do it, do a little bit more effectively. It goes without saying everyone that's been tuning in for any of the episodes where you used to see us sitting on this couch. I really appreciate you for tuning in. I hope you have a fantastic Christmas. This is going to go out two days before Christmas, so we can say Merry Christmas to everybody. And yeah, you see the finish on last Christmas. It's going to go out two days before Christmas, so we can say Merry Christmas to everybody. Merry Christmas.

And, uh, yeah. You see, the finish on last Christmas is going to sing the whole thing out. Because that would be a beautiful, it's a really promising, but the last is on. Uh, I appreciate you all having Merry Christmas. We'll catch you soon. Merry Christmas. Bye. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,