#1037 - Life Hacks: A Christmas Special (2025)

Speaker 1 Merry Christmas, everybody, for the people who joined the podcast within the last five years, the last few million, three million subscribers.

Speaker 1 This is my living room in Newcastle. And this is Johnny, and this is George.

Speaker 1 And that's Youssef, and he's in Malaysia. And this is a Christmas episode.
We've got one day to turn this around. So Merry Christmas.
It's Christmas Day.

Speaker 1 Enjoy the turkey and the pigs and blankets. And we are going to do some lessons and life hacks and fails from the last 12 months.
It's kind of a Christmas tradition, I suppose.

Speaker 1 And also another part of the tradition is that you go first, Johnny. So

Speaker 1 give us a life hack.

Speaker 1 All right. My life hack, which might not be allowed.
We'll see if it gets past the Chris rule, has already been a life hack. Okay.
Is that all right? One of the best ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 The reason it's a life hack is I was speaking to a few friends about this and neither of them had heard of it. And I was like, you know, I thought Chris is probably building the tension here.
I know.

Speaker 1 Well, it's the Waking Up app by Sam Harris.

Speaker 1 Okay. Why is that bad? He's been sponsored.
It's not. Have you been paid off by Big Sam?

Speaker 1 Big Meditations come to you. I think.
Well, do you guys meditate? Yes. No.
Yes. I think it is the

Speaker 1 well, so the hack specifically is download the app using the cut. No.
download the app and listen to the fundamentals

Speaker 1 like theory series. And it's like five audios with Sam explaining why you should meditate.
And I think that is the thing. So I've meditated every day this year.
It's the first time it's ever happened.

Speaker 1 And it was that audio series. But that's not a meditation.
That's just buy-in. Yeah.
So the app is also, I think it makes it, it's just like a daily audio you can follow. They're different every day.

Speaker 1 Okay. It's like daily programming.
That's a programming for meditation. But this was important because it got you to buy into doing yeah.
So there's like an analogy he uses in it, which is

Speaker 1 this, this isn't word for word, but something like everyone's in a in a dream about being a human being.

Speaker 1 And it's like the dream is you're in a prison cell and everyone's trying to make the prison cell nicer by like buying things and moving them around and changing where the windows are. And that's life.

Speaker 1 And meditating allows you to just wake up from the dream.

Speaker 1 And it's a completely different way of viewing kind of everybody's absorbed in their thoughts and their feelings and just being run by their mind. And meditating is just waking up from the dream.

Speaker 1 But that series completely changed how I feel about meditating. But this, you're not saying this is someone who hadn't meditated a lot before.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You've done thousands of sessions of meditation previously.
Yeah. But I think the difference is it's kind of like

Speaker 1 the switch where you go from like going to the gym because like you think you should to it just becomes like part of your personality, part of what you do.

Speaker 1 And that identity change for me was that series. Do you feel that, Youssef?

Speaker 2 Yeah, the identity shift is big as well.

Speaker 2 The quote of watch your thoughts because they become your words. Watch your words because they become your actions.

Speaker 2 Watch your actions because they become your habits, become your beliefs, your perception, your identity.

Speaker 2 So like starting at that means that the downstream habits are much easier to stick to. I also love the rearranging the furniture in the prison cell analogy.

Speaker 1 So how long are you doing these sessions for?

Speaker 1 I'll do like, so the standard one is like 10 minutes long. And I'll do that as the minimum.
And then if it's going well, I'll keep going.

Speaker 1 If it's like, you know, those days, especially ones where it like makes you have your eyes open.

Speaker 1 They're hard. They're particularly difficult.
Because you're sitting there like

Speaker 1 those are difficult to do. But if it's, I think the easiest way to make it

Speaker 1 an effortless habit is not trying to do 30 minutes or 40 minutes, just have a minimum. And then so how is getting out of the prison cell going?

Speaker 1 Good question. I have glimpses where I'm like, oh, this is just a dream of being in a prison cell.
What does that mean? The difficult... Well,

Speaker 1 what does it mean? It's the... identifying with your thoughts versus it's the experience of a self.

Speaker 1 I feel like this is for the first life act, this is going. I also don't feel like I'm qualified to talk about this.

Speaker 1 That's what this shows. That's why I referred to the, um, referred to the, the app, because I think Sam is qualified to talk about it.

Speaker 1 But it's a, it changes your perspective and your relationship with yourself and with now, with the present moment.

Speaker 2 The happiness trap doesn't even need to

Speaker 2 be that metaphysical. It's just like, usually we, we are motivated to do something to close a gap between desire and outcome.

Speaker 2 And we do that, and our brain goes and just releases a bit of some neurochemical that makes us happy for a moment.

Speaker 2 And then that neurochemical depletes, and then we think that we have to go and achieve the thing in order to give ourselves permission to release the little again into our brains.

Speaker 2 And it's just that cycle.

Speaker 2 Whereas, if you realize that it's your brain that's releasing that stuff and you can just do it on tap, then you've short-circuited the whole process and you're not having to chase

Speaker 2 something out there.

Speaker 1 Such a good point. There was a resurface clip of the first Huberman episode that I did from mid-2022 that I saw the other day.
And he's got this line in it where he says it's all internal.

Speaker 1 Everything in life is all internal. You finish a marathon in first place, and you've been working your entire life to do it.
And you run across the finish line.

Speaker 1 And that sensation, no one else comes along and drips dopamine down the back of your brainstem. Like, this is just you generating all of this.
Now,

Speaker 1 obviously, we're designed to respond to what happens in the real world. Like that's the entire way that we're sort of adaptively evolved.

Speaker 1 But it does suggest that, well, if you can get closer to the root of where all of this stuff's coming from, which is just internally,

Speaker 1 you can probably at least make it easier to achieve what it is that you want without having to fight into a headwind all the time.

Speaker 1 Even the real worlds are farce because you have 10 times the number of neurons going from your brain to your eye than you do from your eye to your brain.

Speaker 1 So your eye is actually taking more information from your brain than the other way around. So it's constant, your brain's constantly creating a prediction of reality.

Speaker 1 So the best example is, you know, when you're kind of walking downstairs, and this happens to me way too often, where you think there's another stair and you're at the end and you kind of feel the stare.

Speaker 1 And then your foot goes down. And for a second, you feel it's there.
And then you go, oh, shit, and then you fall.

Speaker 1 But your brain kind of simulated the reality. So your brain's constantly making these prediction models that don't actually exist.

Speaker 1 And then when you have an error or you have a failure, that's when it constantly corrects. So like when you think something's lemonade, but actually it's water.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Exactly.

Speaker 1 Do you want to?

Speaker 1 But you know, that there's that moment at the moment of like, something horrible's happening. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Something horrible, sir. Something horrible's happening.
Yeah, right. I know, it's fine.
It's just water. It's just just water.
All right. That's a good one.
Waking up at the end of the day.

Speaker 1 It's a meta hack, isn't it? It's the thing that, like, change your relationship with now. And everything has to be done.

Speaker 1 What's the intro course thing called again? It's called the Fundamentals. So in Waking Up, there's theory, practice.
There's like lectures to listen to. There's all the Alam Watt series.

Speaker 1 But there's an initial intro series called The Fundamentals by Sam, where he's basically trying to convince you to meditate. And it's like five audios.
They're all about 10 minutes long.

Speaker 1 Awesome. Wow.
It's like that time when you

Speaker 1 made me read the beginning, all of the beginning of the six-minute diary. Yes.
Yes. And you insisted.
And I was like, oh, okay.

Speaker 1 But reading it is what got me to use it every day. Of course.
Reading that intro. Very good.
Have you heard of jhana meditation? Here we go.

Speaker 1 Here we go. This is a fun one of,

Speaker 1 because I think what happens to a lot of people is they go via the mindfulness route, which is what a lot of people get onboarded to. But you realize, oh, that's just a way.

Speaker 1 So there's lots of different ways. It's like thinking about exercise and only looking at running.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 Which is basically what's kind of happened in that space.

Speaker 1 But the jhana meditation idea is when you essentially keep, rather than focus on your breath, you focus on something that brings you great joy.

Speaker 1 And it goes, the best description I've heard of it is it's like a panic attack, but for joy. And then you pulse and pulse and pulse.

Speaker 1 You'd think of your child, for example, think about that, think about that, think about that. And it's a much sometimes a quicker way than trying to delete all thoughts.

Speaker 1 What's your thoughts on jhana, Seth?

Speaker 1 The

Speaker 2 two things that George is talking about there, so at the Vipassana retreat that I did, it's 10 days of floodlight meditation where you're scanning with as open focus as possible and trying to dial up the fidelity of your sensation so that you can like start picking up like 10 micro sensations per second.

Speaker 2 That's used in a retreat setting because

Speaker 2 I've heard it described as like rubbing bits of flint together. It's like it needs a lot of time and momentum to get going and then it builds the fire.

Speaker 2 Whereas jhana meditation is a a lot more like hyper-focused. It's kind of like the laser beam versus the floodlight.

Speaker 2 I've not achieved jhana. I know George

Speaker 2 is just chilling in jhana right now, but yeah, it's it's super compelling.

Speaker 2 There's a movement.

Speaker 2 Can you remember the name of it, George? I think it's the guy who said it's a panic attack for joy. He's like a tech founder who was really stressed and now runs jhana retreats in the states.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I know who it is, but I've forgotten the chap's name off the top of my head.

Speaker 2 There's a few.

Speaker 2 He's got a good description of it. And then Michael Burby as well has all of his retreats on YouTube.

Speaker 2 So you can follow along.

Speaker 1 All right, Seth, you're up. What have you got?

Speaker 1 So I have a life hack.

Speaker 2 However, I think I need your guys' help

Speaker 2 because I'm struggling to have some kind of categorization system in order to place the life hack in. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 Go on.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 if you have any suggestions on how I might categorize the aforementioned life hacks, that would be.

Speaker 1 Do you feel like some of them are like physical and some are digital?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 This is a joke. This is a joke.

Speaker 1 For the people who are in the last 95% of subscribers, this is a joke that has been done 30 or 40 times. Probably it's like a decade old.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's getting there. Okay.
First one. Here we go.

Speaker 2 This is like you mentioned, Chris, about the curve of the large proportion of people who are actually just tuned in now and are just like, what? These guys are mental.

Speaker 2 So my hack is use Uber for flights.

Speaker 1 Use Uber for flights.

Speaker 2 Honestly, I cannot believe how easy it is. So In the five minutes between landing the plane, getting reception and standing up and leaving i booked my next flight to vietnam on uber

Speaker 2 on mobile it's like it already has your details and you just go boop done and it gives you uber credits like 10 for every flight booked so the benefit of this hack is that you're not having to go through like random airlines and sky scanner or google flights or any of that stuff it just gives you the best price with the easiest booking experience.

Speaker 2 And they don't charge a markup. I don't know what the business model is for that part of Uber unless it's just like lost leader, but brilliant.

Speaker 2 So I'm never going back to booking flights any other way.

Speaker 1 I'm just doing it now. I'm doing it now on my phone.
Uber travel. I mean, Uber, when you actually look at it, the number of different things that Uber can do is pretty insane.

Speaker 1 You can get them to collect parcels for you. You can get them to

Speaker 1 drop off different stuff.

Speaker 1 I did not know that they did flights. What's the difference between this and Skyscanner? Because I'm a big Skyscanner stan.

Speaker 2 As far as I understand, Sky Scanner, you still have to get redirected to the

Speaker 2 airline. And then you have to fill in all your details like four times and your passport number and all this stuff.
So like

Speaker 2 currently I'm in Malaysia, but I've gone via like Singapore and I'm going Brisbane, Sydney, Vietnam, Bali, like through lots of little airports and stuff.

Speaker 2 And these shitty little airlines that have websites that barely work and you're just like trying multiple times to book it like i spent 40 minutes trying to book something on like batic airlines couldn't get it working uber 37 quid

Speaker 1 like took five minutes wow free price freeze

Speaker 1 oh yeah so they they freeze the price and they let you change the dates flexibly as well for like so the cost of the price is the cost of freezing it is just 18 pounds stay safe from price increases while you plan your trip.

Speaker 1 This is really good.

Speaker 1 This is really, really, really fucking good.

Speaker 2 Top tier, I've had it. They also have a thing where

Speaker 2 if you book a flight now and the price drops in between now and the flight happening, you get the difference.

Speaker 1 Wow. Big hack.
This is this, this is, you've really come out of the gate swinging here. Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 Well, to see this. This is proof, my opinion.
This

Speaker 1 worked. Well, yeah, unfortunately, Sam Harris isn't involved in this one.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 I'm going to go off the back of this one just because it makes the most sense. Flighty.

Speaker 1 Have you heard of Flighty? No. Oh, my days.
Okay, so I learned this.

Speaker 2 A new Flighty Premium, Chris.

Speaker 1 Of course. You fucking Flighty Premium.
Talking to a Flighty veteran here. So Flighty is a flight tracking app.

Speaker 1 And what it does is it automatically links in with your calendar, your email inbox. When you book a flight and the confirmation comes through, it automatically loads everything in.

Speaker 1 And it tells you gate changes, delays, where your luggage is going to, what terminal you leave from, what time you're boarding.

Speaker 1 It can give you a history of the last time that the flight, all of the last 30 days of the flight, how much it's been delayed, for what reason.

Speaker 1 If there's any adjustments that get made, it'll tell you immediately as well.

Speaker 1 while you're in the air it'll track your journey and then bring you back into land it tracks all of your previous stuff it is it's outside so you never need to once you start using flyty you will never check another

Speaker 1 airport board again because it's all there and it gets updated before the board because the board usually takes a little bit of time but this just comes through from whatever the central hub that's giving all this information out is and uh it's just it's seamless the number of times that i have not missed flights Especially when you've got connections and it's outstanding so flighty I think premiums maybe 30 bucks a year 10 bucks

Speaker 1 Super cheap you can also add friends so you can see when your friends are flying where they're flying if they're delayed as well So you can track all of your friends flights also

Speaker 1 And it automatically links in and then it gives you reports at the end of the year how long you've spent being delayed and stuff. There's some like cool additional things.

Speaker 1 But largely, never check another advertise another airport board for what gate am I leaving from? Where's my luggage gone to? What time do I need to get there?

Speaker 1 It's got a little island, a tracking island, and it also pops up on your home screen. So

Speaker 1 it's fantastically designed. Everybody that's started using it, I just can't believe it.
So you get the gate information before anyone else does.

Speaker 1 Basically, that's the big, the big thing is gate information plus a live island that sort of tracks everything.

Speaker 1 But you just never have to think again, and it's all automatically linked in with your emails.

Speaker 2 It's Has it changed how early you get to the airport?

Speaker 1 Not particularly,

Speaker 1 even for international now, I'm typically getting to an airport about an hour before I leave.

Speaker 1 That has been a high-risk strategy, but in America, you've got TSA and CLIA and things that can fast-track you through security.

Speaker 2 What's the spread of airport arrival times in this room?

Speaker 1 I usually arrive about an hour before I'm going to depart. So usually about half an hour before boarding.

Speaker 1 What are we? Mine's like 90 minutes. Okay.

Speaker 1 Yeah. For me, it depends where I am.
If I'm in the US, a lot earlier. If I'm in the UK, a lot later.

Speaker 1 I feel like if you arrive at King Castle airport, you could arrive 15 minutes before. Go straight through.
If it's Heathrow, you need to get a bit more time.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I just always love because everyone's got like one YOLO mate who just turns up like 15 minutes before and chances it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, unfortunately, America has much more flux between the size of the queues. The UK is usually pretty consistent unless you're at Heathrow.

Speaker 1 Whereas in Austin, sometimes the entire terminal has just been filled with people,

Speaker 1 hundreds of yards of people, and then other times there's no one.

Speaker 1 So I don't know whether that's because the airport needs a bit of work. George, what have you got for us? I don't think we've spoken about airlines enough.

Speaker 1 My one, I'll go in in with something different, which is chess clocks. Oh, God.

Speaker 1 Oh, God.

Speaker 1 No, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 Yep, I know where he's going to go with it. So it's one of the ideas I got from

Speaker 1 the writer Tim Urban, who obviously did the amazing TED talk on procrastination, and then ironically spent like six years procrastinating on his book.

Speaker 1 And he said the biggest lesson from it was when it comes to deep work, which I've got another point I'll come on to in a second, but particularly when it comes to deep work,

Speaker 1 if you can get four hours done in a day, I think you're in the top 1%.

Speaker 1 But a lot of people think, oh, I work eight hours a day, I work 10 hours a day. And he found that when it came to writing the book, he would go to write it.

Speaker 1 And then other little bits of work would come up. There'd be a Slack message here.
There'd be an internet scroll here.

Speaker 1 So the chess clock methodology is you've essentially set it up where you have 16 hours in the day. Okay.
And your goal is to get four hours on one side of the chess clock.

Speaker 1 And whenever you're doing anything that isn't the thing, you have to hit it over. So if you go to go to the bathroom, hit it over.
Go for a walk, hit it over. Somebody comes in, hit it over.

Speaker 1 So there's always an immediate price to bullshit or to distraction.

Speaker 1 And you realize, oh, wow, first off, when you do four hours, like properly four hours, that is a lot of time. And then a lot of the time you'll be there at 12 p.m.

Speaker 1 going, wow, like there's just all this kind of free time for the rest of the day. If you don't have a chess clock, like the other simple approach is to just literally set an alarm for four hours.

Speaker 1 And then at any time you stop, you have to pause it. So there's just always, it hacks the

Speaker 1 kind of brain's circuitry that there's always some form of punishment. for distraction, whereas previously there isn't.

Speaker 1 And the amount of times you can convince yourself you're doing something that isn't the actual thing is

Speaker 1 significant that some i can see that working for like an external problem like someone comes in someone rings you email whatever but i think the main barrier to deep work is like an internal

Speaker 1 so you're doing something and then you're thinking oh i just need to do this and then you open open a different window pause the clock but it's the pro the problem for most people i don't think is Like I'm aware I'm distracted now, but I'll just be distracted.

Speaker 1 I don't think people are aware that they're being distracted. Do you not?

Speaker 1 I think, well, this is the thing about the clock is that it's kind of there ticking and you have to be a little bit more honest.

Speaker 1 And even then, I'll be aware of, is this a clockworky pause or is this actually a justifiable use of time? So just having that there and that punishment there is pretty significant.

Speaker 1 What are your most common debates about whether it is or is not a clockworthy pause?

Speaker 1 Filling up a glass of water can be on there.

Speaker 1 Just like, or girlfriends come in, you know what I mean? It's like little things like that, but I'll tend to pause the clock. Yeah,

Speaker 1 so if you're like, if you're writing and you're like, oh, I need to

Speaker 1 go somewhere to get this reference for this thing, and

Speaker 1 that would be fine. But then, if I, let's say, for example, I need to go to a tweet to find this specific thing, that's fine.

Speaker 1 But if I then go on the news feed and start scrolling, clock has to change that. So that's where it works.
This is why the clock works really effectively. Whereas other techniques, it wouldn't work.

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 2 this is great, George.

Speaker 2 The other thing that it separates out is

Speaker 2 if people think, oh, it's a speed thing or it's an efficiency thing, I need to be able to work faster or write faster or whatever, versus it's just a not spending enough time on task thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's a big point. That

Speaker 1 you don't need to probably be more efficient or more effective or better or whatever. You just haven't realized how little time you're spending doing the thing you're supposed to be doing.

Speaker 1 I yeah, this isn't a hack, but it's related to this. I have an app on my laptop that

Speaker 1 is like a blocker. That every time I go to like open email, it goes

Speaker 1 cold turkey. It's not cold turkey, it's similar to that.
But it, especially if there's someone else in the room and they hear how often it goes,

Speaker 1 and then you tell them why it's going, uh-uh. You just seem like a baby.

Speaker 1 It's like anytime I try to open email, iMessage, WhatsApp,

Speaker 1 and you just makes it feel so stupid.

Speaker 1 All right, Johnny.

Speaker 1 Are we on lessons? Yep. Whatever you want.
Whatever I want. Take whatever you want.
All right. Well, I'll give it, I'll do a hack that's similar to what we've just been speaking about, which is

Speaker 1 brick for iPhone. You guys seen that? It's a near field communication thing that you've got to tap to unlock your phone.

Speaker 1 Tried it?

Speaker 2 I never knew what NFC stands for, Chris.

Speaker 1 That's a lovely little

Speaker 1 hack.

Speaker 1 I didn't expect you to describe it like that it's a very very it's accurate yeah it's very detailed you've got to tap a tap a thing to get your phone to work yeah so you you sketch you set like a schedule on your phone like we've all tried all these like app blocking things that you can just ultimately delete the app you have to like go to where the thing is in the house

Speaker 1 press unbrick and then tap the nfc

Speaker 1 device it's just been the most effective thing so as you can i've had a year of like block trying to block myself from having to press the chest cloth um and it's been the most effective thing because having to like

Speaker 1 stand up go into another room press um brick go

Speaker 1 and then look at instagram just not gonna happen because i'm still using opal from two years ago when you suggested wrestle i just it's just not quite as like because you can get around that right yeah and there's nothing more i think humiliating than getting around opal i've seen people do that in front of others yeah let me just show you this thing on youtube oh wait no hang on can you wait for 27 seconds please

Speaker 2 pause session did you ever get the the box johnny no i think it was a jordan

Speaker 1 jordan original wasn't it that's putting your phone in a george and kimberley have got a timed box yeah that you locked both your phones in for a weekend

Speaker 1 yeah we did it on a um a Saturday, put the phones away in the box for the entire day.

Speaker 1 It was fun. You get incredibly bored.

Speaker 1 And I just replaced it with a moleskin notepad. Great.

Speaker 1 He walks around with a fucking notepad. Not to like.

Speaker 1 He thinks he's Ernest Hemingway. But that is one of the best hacks.
I didn't even have this one written down, which is on the phone topic,

Speaker 1 getting a moleskin pocket notepad so it can go in your pocket. Because what's interesting is this thing here,

Speaker 1 This thing right here, this device, it's always whispering to you. Even now, it's saying, scroll, go on this, go on that.
Yeah, go on the Gmail and make the sound right.

Speaker 1 Not George, not if it's bricked. Not if it's bricked.
But even then it whispers, you can't access it, but it's still whispering. It's still telling you to do it.
It's whispering.

Speaker 1 Because you have the association, you have the Pavlovian conditioning with this device.

Speaker 1 What's interesting, as soon as you have the moleskin notepad that you walk around with, is that you then stack that. That then begins to whisper to you.

Speaker 1 So when you take it out and you go for a walk, it's whispering, oh, check page three, that thing that you wrote down the other day.

Speaker 1 So having a moleskin notepad is what you have to sit with your thoughts. You could do, but I'm going for a walk and then I can capture my thoughts.

Speaker 1 So, I can sit with my thoughts and then I can capture the best ones. Can you think about a potential, just top of your head,

Speaker 1 potential problem with going from digital to analog?

Speaker 1 Uh,

Speaker 1 you could have written this down in your phone. Obviously, lots of issues, phone's very distracting, all the rest of it.
Can you think of perhaps an issue of

Speaker 1 having a single hard copy of your most most important thoughts. I suppose losing it.
Well, yeah, I mean, because it's interesting you say that.

Speaker 1 That's a very sort of fortuitous prediction.

Speaker 1 Because we went to Dean's Italian, and as you were extolling the virtues of your moleskin notepad, you left it at Dean's Italian and they binned it.

Speaker 1 So he lost all of his biggest thoughts.

Speaker 1 Hold on.

Speaker 1 So, how does that feel? I saw Chrissy's counter move coming about two weeks ago.

Speaker 1 I purposely held off, and I'll explain why. That wasn't a moleskin notepad.

Speaker 1 That was like a real shit notepad. So, I think the waiters just binned it because it was nothing.
That's why I upgraded now to a moleskin notepad. Because if you see a moleskin notepad, nobody knows.

Speaker 1 No, it's not a moleskin notepad. Because of this reason, because if you get a regular made of moleskin, actually, it's a brand, isn't it? Yeah, I don't know.
It's a brand. Right.
So, your argument is.

Speaker 2 I'm really hoping that George is bringing out like a. This is why I have a carbon copy.

Speaker 1 This is James Smith taking down the creatine industry, isn't it? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So you're hoping that waiters understand the value of a Moleskin notebook versus.

Speaker 1 I'm afraid to tell you. I don't think they do.
I don't think they do either. Okay.
But the point. I think the point of these sorts of things is,

Speaker 1 I remember like you bought a light phone, didn't you? Years ago. There was like that movement of buy like a Nokia 3210 and live your life off that.

Speaker 1 But then you need Google Maps and you need Uber and you need to send someone a message or you need to ring someone.

Speaker 1 Having those features is useful if your phone's in a box you can't use your notepad to book an uber but if you just remove the things that whisper to you and to to get them

Speaker 1 active again you have to get up and go into the other room friction it's like just increasing friction foods in in the in the house that to prevent you from i do i do remember i had a a lock box thing timed lock box not too dissimilar to yours but it had a plastic see-through cover and there was little holes cut out of it so you could actually use the phone.

Speaker 1 You could swipe through different things on the phone and kind of use it. Right.
But yeah, didn't you tell me that if you lock your phone in the box, you have to ring customer service.

Speaker 1 If you can't get it out, you basically smash it with a hammer or ring customer service. Ring customer service because you can accidentally put it on for 30 days rather than 30 hours.

Speaker 1 I'm sure somebody's done.

Speaker 1 It's like the case.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Mike smashed his with a hammer.

Speaker 1 Really? So

Speaker 1 it's just in his

Speaker 1 room with thing, isn't it? There's like a family and they all put their phones in the box and the kid ends up like smashing the box.

Speaker 1 It's like coded bias or something. All right.
So brick. Brick.
All right. An NFC device.

Speaker 1 It's opal with a opal with a physical thing in it. All right.
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Speaker 1 That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. Seth, what you got?

Speaker 2 Back around to me.

Speaker 2 I really underestimated

Speaker 2 the potency of the attribution error and cognitive dissonance.

Speaker 2 So what I mean by that is, keep me right on this, Chris, because I feel like this is your absolute wheelhouse, that we over-attribute other people's behavior to their character.

Speaker 2 but we under attribute it to situational factors. But then for ourselves, we over-attribute over-attribute situational factors and we under-attribute our character.

Speaker 2 Because it's too painful for us to just be like, oh, just because I'm just a shit person, rather than like, oh, it was because the bus was late and because whatever.

Speaker 2 But easy to be like, oh, they were just a dick. And it can't have been that they were sleep deprived or looking after their toddler or whatever else.

Speaker 1 The classic one is: I cut that guy off because I'm late for work. He cut me off because he's a bad driver.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. Great example.
So, the broader lesson that I'm seeing here is

Speaker 2 that people are a lot more emotionally driven than

Speaker 2 I think I've really given it credit for. Like outside of our extremely autistic bubble,

Speaker 2 there is

Speaker 2 so much more cognitive dissonance that drives people's behavior and thoughts and actions. And so, you know, this thing of like people buy with emotion and they justify with logic.

Speaker 1 It's

Speaker 2 not just buying behavior, it's everything.

Speaker 2 And the moment you start spotting this, you see it everywhere. So

Speaker 2 everyone listening must have had an experience where you're speaking to someone who has a particular

Speaker 2 stance or gripe or position or something. Could be on politics, could be on a relationship issue, whatever.

Speaker 2 And the more you start to kind of get into it, you realize that they're just rotating their complaint

Speaker 2 or like they're moving goalposts, but still being pissed off about something until you're like ah actually like the pissed off comes first and then the justification comes later

Speaker 2 um so it's that people don't actually want to get to this kind of rational objective truth um they just want to feel safe and they just want to hug and just want to be heard um

Speaker 2 and so

Speaker 2 I don't know who said this, but it's a quote of we only see what we want to see, we only hear what we want to hear. And our belief system is like a mirror that only shows us what we believe.

Speaker 2 So the lens or the glasses that we see the world through tell us more about the color of the lens than they do about the world out there.

Speaker 1 I certainly this year, since trying to do more emotions work, have sort of come to the realizer, or the belief that most of the thoughts that we have are bottom up, not top-down.

Speaker 1 You feel a thing, and then you come up with a story that explains why you feel the thing, as opposed to

Speaker 1 you're accurately determining that that story from from your brain downward

Speaker 2 it's very convincing as well because it's what the brain does like it's a sense-making machine isn't it so the body goes oh i'm anxious oh my part's going whatever and then it the brain has to quickly be like oh well that's because this and it just like pulls together random things and thoughts to create this like to weave this narrative and then it holds onto that and it becomes it identifies with it it's such a like such a weird process but it just is happening in the background all the time how have you changed the way that you operate or have you applied this in any way?

Speaker 1 Is it just an insight that's interesting philosophically?

Speaker 2 Just realizing that

Speaker 2 there's no point trying to argue with what someone's saying or trying to convince someone on the head level and instead just like just give them a hug and

Speaker 2 metaphorically and speak to the heart and

Speaker 2 realize that it's the

Speaker 2 that that's the stuff to address first before you get into any of the

Speaker 2 um what someone so rather rather than listening to what someone is saying listen to what they're feeling

Speaker 1 there's also this uh like side argument that people can go down when they touch that which is that oh uh people are irrational they uh they're not logical they're driven by emotions and there's this great uh account chris larkin and he has this great line which is um emotions are logical you're just bad at logic And when you actually get deeper to a layer of, well, why is that anger there?

Speaker 1 Or why is that anxiety there? We almost, we start with logic and then people kind of deny the emotional level.

Speaker 1 But then even beneath that, there's this kind of logic for all of those emotions that exist that we, we don't even get down to the basement and then don't even get to the point where you realize there's a basement in the basement.

Speaker 1 All right. My next one.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 My next one. Seth, that's good.

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Seen one of these before? You've seen one of these. Brand house.

Speaker 1 I have this. So

Speaker 1 everybody needs some form of water receptacle.

Speaker 1 And I've cycled through quite a bit. I've cycled through Yeti.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I've used steel protein shakers, which are good for the protein thing.

Speaker 1 The reason that I like these Awallah bottles, this is that's Mark Zuckerberg's ranch's logo for you there. The reason that I like these ones, they're insulated.

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And I think everyone, yeah, pretty much everybody from the team's got one. And

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And it looks nice. Is it metal? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it feels nice.

Speaker 1 Johnny, if you watch The Office, you know the Christmas special where David Brent's like a salesman and he's going around on the road and he's like doing the water off and he's giving the whole pitch.

Speaker 1 It was literally like that, and I was just expecting you to go at the end. So, who does your tampons?

Speaker 1 Well, nice, you know, who does your hydration. There we go.
I thought you were, I thought everything was Yeti. You moved away from that.
What why are they better than Yeti?

Speaker 1 Uh, the sip spout, the magic straw, or whatever they call it, is really satisfying. It does make me feel a bit like a baby, um, which

Speaker 1 that's okay, though. Yeah, it's okay.
Uh,

Speaker 1 yeti's good they probably have better insulation it'll keep stuff colder for longer maybe

Speaker 1 uh but the sizes of yeti are a little bit more cumbersome you can either go from one that's definitely not big enough to one that's almost certainly too big and the smallest awallow size which is this one is really good and fits in the side of most backpacks and it's that a litre No, I think it's seven, just over 700, which is for a single 700, if you get over a litre, even over close to what a litre,

Speaker 1 you probably don't want to drink the same thing for that long. Maybe you want to cycle it out.
It gets heavy, but 500 mil is nowhere near enough. So it's the optimal size.

Speaker 1 This is currently come back next year when I disagree with myself. When I have a different phone blocking method and you have a different

Speaker 1 but I'll still be recommending waiting. Oh, yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 2 Well, anyway. Well, this was Johnny's razor that we left last year's with, which was, come back to me in six months after you've been using this hack.
It's the 90-day,

Speaker 1 isn't it? Yeah, well, I guess people won't even know about that. We did 20, 30 episodes of life hacks back in the day, which is still like a non-insignificant amount of this entire podcast inventory.

Speaker 1 And one of the most important ones was that after a while, we realized someone would come in all full of beans because this brand new life hack that they were in love with was like, oh,

Speaker 1 I must tell you about a way to get YouTube Premium for free by getting it through the Argentinian VPN service.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 then you have to wait 90 days to find out that you get charged back for fraud online or whatever it might be.

Speaker 1 And never forget, Eric Jorgensen taught us about that one where if you try and cancel your Zoom subscription, they immediately offer you a 30% discount.

Speaker 1 Stuff like that. But there's some second-order consequence.
Oh, yeah, but it's downgraded you. You get ads on your own Zoom calls now or something.

Speaker 1 But yeah, anyway, 90 days. If a friend comes to you, this is a meta life hack.
Friend comes to you and says, meh, you've got to try this new, this fun blocking method.

Speaker 1 And you say, okay, how long have you been doing it? You're two weeks? You go, okay,

Speaker 1 come back to me in another two months and we'll see if you're still using it or if it's broken your life.

Speaker 1 I've had people complain about the Life Hacks episodes because they watched them in order and they would get like four or five episodes in and the thing that they'd been doing.

Speaker 1 You've contradicted yourself. They were like, no, no, never ever do that.
Do this instead. And that's just the cycle.

Speaker 1 But the issue is that the pace at which we drip fed Lifehacks episodes when we started was appropriate. It was every couple of months, every three months or so for four years.

Speaker 1 If you just watch them like binge finishing Game of Thrones, you do speedrun through our development. Yeah.
Yeah. Which is probably quite a different thing.

Speaker 2 Just don't listen in reverse chronological order because you'll mess yourself up.

Speaker 1 Oh, God. That's the right way to do it, though.
Let's start at the end. It'll be the stuff in the first episode is is probably the things we're all still doing.
It is.

Speaker 1 Sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom. All right, George.

Speaker 1 Mine's more of a lesson or a two-part lesson.

Speaker 1 So one of the lessons this year was, so when I originally wrote the essay on high agency, one of the bits of feedback that I got and other people gave me as well is that the concept's not necessarily new, but it gives you...

Speaker 1 gives you a bit of language to refer to a thing.

Speaker 1 And I've had that for a while with that term. And I was like, and then went one level above that.
I was like, hold on.

Speaker 1 I don't have a bit of language to refer to when I need a bit of language to refer to something.

Speaker 1 So I told a friend, Henrik, that, and he gave me from Scott Alexander this, he calls it an idea handle, which is when you create a term or a name for a thing, and then you can kind of pick it up in the world.

Speaker 1 And a big thing for me this year has been like around language, which I'll...

Speaker 1 um even where yousuf is right now which is beautiful like side tangent here in malaysia they don't use plural so rather than say tables they they say table table so you just realize when you study language so much comes back to you but one bit of language I've been kind of playing around with is we've spoken about this before around forgetting things and how much we forget and I found this story

Speaker 1 about a seven-year-old boy called Henry and one day he's out and about playing in his drive in Connecticut and a cyclist doesn't see him and clatters into him knocks him unconscious and he wakes up and the next few days, he starts having a few seizures.

Speaker 1 And by the age of 25, he's having 25 seizures per day. And this is in the 50s.
So he's trying everything to get rid of this condition. So he goes and signs up for experimental brain lobotomy surgery.

Speaker 1 And he wakes up from the operation and he has some good news, some bad news, and some awful news. So the good news is that the brain surgery has basically cured his condition entirely.

Speaker 1 So he he has no more epileptic fits. The bad news is that he won't remember the good news because the awful news is it's destroyed his ability to form new memories.

Speaker 1 So he lives from the age of about 25 to 85 not forming any new memories.

Speaker 1 So every day his psychiatrist would meet him and get to know Henry well over the years and each day he would meet his psychiatrist for the first time.

Speaker 1 But there was this specific bit of detail about Henry which I call Henry's mirror, which is every morning he would wake up, he would look at himself in the mirror and he'd be shocked and perplexed at how old he was.

Speaker 1 Because in his head, he was always 25.

Speaker 1 And I kind of call this idea Henry's mirror, which is the problem with amnesia is not only do you forget, it's that you have amnesia of your amnesia.

Speaker 1 And it's this idea that all of us right now have some bit of Henry's mirror in us. We don't even realize it because by definition, you've forgotten it.
So the classic example I use is, okay.

Speaker 1 Johnny, can you think of a clear sentence of thought from yesterday? Bear in mind you had had 10 to 70,000 on average. Can you think of one? No.
But when you're in these overthinking spirals,

Speaker 1 it feels so real, feels so tangible, and then it just fades away. And all you have is a face that's getting older in the mirror each day.

Speaker 1 It's very apocalyptic.

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Speaker 1 That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom how has this changed the way that you show up if at all

Speaker 1 i think the the big thing i've tried to change more first off when it comes to overthinking trying to realize that as a thought loop's happening trying to stare in that mirror for a second and go well hold on how long How many times has this happened?

Speaker 1 Because this could be the 60,000th time this thought has happened, but I can't remember anything from yesterday, is one thing.

Speaker 1 The second thing is just very basic level, just trying to document more, take more photos, take more videos, journal more, and without realizing it's such a an asset that's going to compound further and further in the future.

Speaker 1 Even like today, to be honest with you, it's fun that we get this for like 20 years from now. We can go, oh, what we were doing that day.
But otherwise, like the average person,

Speaker 1 the memory just

Speaker 1 goes. And then your life just goes.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 If you use day one. Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas. If you use day one for journaling, do you guys use just day one? It's such a day one.

Speaker 1 I do use day one, and I've used it more this year than any other year. It just gives you, every time you go to make a journal entry, it's like on this day, a year ago, two years ago, eight years ago.

Speaker 1 How many entries have you got on day one now? I've been using it for like, I think, 15 years. Wow.
But how frequently are you doing it? I try and do it every day. Really? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Just like contents of mind and a picture. Every day.
What's been the same? So you've got thousands of entries. Yeah.
Holy fuck.

Speaker 1 The main takeaway from all of it is like, it's just the same stuff. It's just the same, the same worries, the same things you're excited about, the same feelings.

Speaker 1 Well, I think 10 years ago, you're like, what's the point? Well, we assume that the Henry's mirror thing is true in as much as all of the problems that we're dealing with now feel fresh to us.

Speaker 1 But when you look across the expanse of time,

Speaker 1 In the same ways you've got the same feat that you did 10 years ago, your psychological construction is made up of the same biases and fundamental fears, which I think, Youssef, to your sort of emotions point is why that's such a powerful way to communicate with people.

Speaker 1 And also,

Speaker 1 it's why I've been trying to dig deeper, sort of even deeper than just talk therapy gets you to, by unpacking, okay, and where are these patterns coming from? And

Speaker 1 what are the emotions I'm unprepared to feel? Because I think that is really the only way to get to the bottom of the etcher sketch and to to fully, fully shake it loose. Well,

Speaker 2 you're right that you're the same, you're obviously the same person that you were 15, 20 years ago.

Speaker 2 But last year we talked about this where you think that your journal, especially in Johnny's case, we've got 15 years of day one journals, is going to be useless in like the very early stages.

Speaker 2 You're like, oh, what does my 19-year-old idiot self know about how I should be conducting my life now? And then you look back on it and it's just exactly the same stuff that you're like, oh, God.

Speaker 2 And it's like, life is a spiral curriculum and it'll keep spanking you with the same lessons until you finally absorb it change what you're doing and then the world around you will stop like hitting you with that same lesson what's that is it uh young uh until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate

Speaker 2 and we we see that often with other people more clearly you know when you see someone who's always running into the same like style of problem and you're like, oh, yeah, it's because they're creating it.

Speaker 1 So one, um,

Speaker 1 one hack for this, it was actually one of mine for today, but whilst it's on the topic, is kind of what I call like this

Speaker 1 time technique. So let's say, for example, you're going through insert difficult moment.

Speaker 1 So let's say, I don't know, you're going through a breakup or you're having, in your case, Johnny, maybe a difficult issue of a member of staff. Or

Speaker 1 what I say about my members of staff. No, you know what I mean.
Like running a business, you're going to have those, don't sue me,

Speaker 1 you're going to have those issues. So, what I kind of recommend, or I've been doing this one for about three or four years, which is I'll think of, okay, so let's say it's a

Speaker 1 work conflict, right? I will then go, okay, can I think of two or three times that are the most similar throughout my entire career like this?

Speaker 1 So I kind of write down those events and write down the date.

Speaker 1 And then I ask, okay, if I could go back in time time now with all the knowledge that I have now, and if I could turn this event into like one of the best things that ever happened to me, what would be the three actions that I would take?

Speaker 1 Like, okay. And then next to the date, I write, okay, well, what would be the worst three things that I could do with all the knowledge that I have now?

Speaker 1 Because you have this detachment from the event and you have like an extra 20 IQ points. And then once you've done that, just scribble out the date.

Speaker 1 and replace it with today's date and pretend it's you from the future that's that's come back.

Speaker 1 And that's such an effective way because when you do, even though we do forget so much of the past, the real stuff that you do remember are the most emotional events.

Speaker 1 And even now you can look back at things five to 10 years ago and have such detachment. Well, the patterns are the same, which means that the solutions will probably still work.

Speaker 1 If you can think of what you would have done previously in a situation that's analogous and now you in the present are facing something similar. Yeah, it is.
I love you, Georgia.

Speaker 2 Because that's what emotions are supposed to do, aren't they? They're supposed to be a navigation tool as feedback for oh, you took a wrong step there. Like,

Speaker 2 here's how to change in the future, but we often don't and then keep experiencing the emotion.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the universe just continues to shout louder until you hear the lesson. And the goal is to get before it's screaming in your face, the goal is to try and jump, jump that a little bit sooner.

Speaker 1 All right, Johnny, what you got, John A. John A.
Uh, I have a lesson which ties in beautifully with this. Wonderful.
Because

Speaker 1 one of the problems with having 15 years of journals is I can I watch, I can see this like journey of me chasing all these little things.

Speaker 1 So like I wanted to bench 100 kilos and then I wanted abs and then I wanted a 2-1 degree and I wanted a job and then I wanted propane to do well and I wanted certain revenue levels and it's always just this next thing.

Speaker 1 You can see it happening through the journal entries and you realize realize

Speaker 1 it changes nothing. Like in those same entries, there's still

Speaker 1 worries, problems, the same worries, the same problems. And you watch you through time achieve these things, and you're still worried about the same stuff.
And that creates this feeling of like,

Speaker 1 what is the point of despondency? Anything.

Speaker 1 But the thing that you realize woven into all of it is the thing that's changing the whole time is the like the traits that are that are

Speaker 1 you and how your character is changing because chasing those things that are difficult require like delayed gratification they require like dealing with difficult difficult emotions they require like

Speaker 1 all of the skills that you have to build and all of the traits you have to build to build a business to a certain level or to die for the leanest human being whatever it might be you you change so it's this idea that like the goals i don't think they really compound they kind of do but they like the dopamine you get from that doesn't compound but the traits that you get from chasing the hard things is the compounding

Speaker 1 and that immediate that realization immediately flipped back to like it's absolutely worth like listing out loads of really big difficult goals and chasing them because the i don't think there's any faster way

Speaker 1 to change who you are to improve your and i think it's something that like being a my daughter's now of an age where like she's she's gone from being a baby to being like a little person and i'm like oh god like there's a proper like responsibility here to be the example.

Speaker 1 And I think the best way to become the example is to chase the difficult things that require the traits to come as part of the journey.

Speaker 1 I love

Speaker 2 your takeaway from that, Johnny, because some people would be really nihilistic about that. They'd be like, oh, well, there's no point chasing anything up.

Speaker 1 That's the first feeling. The first feeling is like, oh, what's the point?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Whereas you're like, actually,

Speaker 2 this is a way to play the game without having to be fully sucked into the game.

Speaker 1 Well, you still need to be conned by the game into believing that the game is what you want to play. Like, this wouldn't work.

Speaker 1 You would not be able to get yourself to do the hard thing if you didn't think that the other side of the goal of the hard thing was

Speaker 1 completion, satisfaction, self-actualization, rest. But I think people think, oh, when I get a million turnover, I'll be happy.

Speaker 1 That's not true. But when you get a a million turnover, the person...
The person that you've become. Yeah.
And so you just change the thing. The goal is kind of like the side quest to the thing.

Speaker 1 But that's why I said the goal is the thin end of the wedge. The goal is what gets you through the door.
Yep.

Speaker 1 Because you're not thinking, I can't wait to feel dissatisfied in this goal, but happy about the person I've become.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like you achieve the goal, you get the little, like, it's the James Smith thing, like Warwins feels, it feels exactly the same. Yep.
Then you're dissatisfied. But you've changed.

Speaker 1 The thing is, you can't, you don't know that at the time.

Speaker 1 And the only way you can know that is those, is like being able to see what you two years ago, how you two years ago dealt with a challenge or dealt with. I think this is why progress feels so good

Speaker 1 and losing ground feels so bad.

Speaker 1 That this is great for you, somebody who's been on a relatively linear journey of getting better, more mindful, more peaceful, more successful, more capable, more resilient, whatever.

Speaker 1 But if the thing happens in the opposite direction, whether you've achieved your goals or not, even maybe worse if you've achieved achieved your goals. You say, I got the thing I thought I wanted.

Speaker 1 It turns out that just as you,

Speaker 1 I was a bit disappointed with how much that didn't satisfy me. Oh, fuck.
And I'm now a worse person in some sort of a way. You know, you're a boxer who gets the Olympic

Speaker 1 gold medal, gets fucking...

Speaker 1 head injury

Speaker 1 and now has to deal with that. Also, I'm unhappy about the fact that the the gold medal didn't make me as happy as I thought it would.
And I'm now worse off.

Speaker 2 Well, and Henry's Mirror, like you've wasted time in the process.

Speaker 2 Is that just you're now 85 just because of the brain injury?

Speaker 1 Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The point being that the saving grace you have around goals being more unsatisfying than people think they're going to be is that you have transformed yourself into something which is more evergreen than the goal and the brief drip of dopamine, which is all internal anyway, than that is.

Speaker 1 You've got something more than that. And hooray.
But imagine if you didn't get the progress.

Speaker 1 So I'd argue that aside from becoming like severely injured or disabled or something in the process, dealing with the hard things is where the trait changes happen.

Speaker 1 So you can go through the thing that feels like I'm going backwards.

Speaker 1 And at the time, yes, you're like objectively going backwards by the measure, by the revenue level, the body fat, whatever, the strength level. But the traits are still improving.

Speaker 1 Because I think anything extremely. What about if you ran out of motivation? What about if you dumped all of your enthusiasm into something that it turned out wasn't right?

Speaker 1 That's assuming that that's the end point.

Speaker 1 That might just be halfway.

Speaker 1 Your position here is that given a long enough time horizon, you're going to track and trend up and to the right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like if you look at look at your journey to here as an example, like you sat on this sofa how many, five years ago, six, eight, eight years ago. Eight years ago.

Speaker 1 Like, if you watch the recordings back,

Speaker 1 you seem completely different. Really? And everybody would be like, oh, well, Chris is, you know, what a fantastic existence Chris must have, like being this famous podcaster.

Speaker 1 But that's really the side quest to the development as a result of it. It's a good point.
I mean, what was the first one that we filmed? Love Island. Love Island.

Speaker 1 What's it really like to live on Love Island? Episode 17.

Speaker 1 14. Episode 14.
So,

Speaker 1 yeah, we were sat on a different couch, but the same living room. Yeah.

Speaker 1 In

Speaker 1 May, April or May of 2018.

Speaker 1 Different couch. Definitely a different couch.
Yeah, I remember you getting this. It's a leather couch.

Speaker 1 And yeah, you're right. You're right.

Speaker 1 I want to be in a different country. I want to not have to stay awake till three in the morning running nightclubs.
I want people that I respect to know me and respect my work. I want...

Speaker 1 and then you go, okay, at each of those junctures, they were satisfying, but the satisfaction was short-lived. What was longer-lived were the person that you became.

Speaker 1 So, do you think if you'd picked, so the goal you had was, I know it wasn't like explicitly the goal at the time, but the goal was like, I'm going to build the top 10 podcasts in the world.

Speaker 1 No, it was not just. No, yeah, just to give a big asterisk there.

Speaker 1 We, we were on a beach during COVID. Um,

Speaker 1 and it's sort of been two and a half years into the podcast. Yeah, not an insignificant amount of time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and Chris just said, if we're talking about goals and where he wants to take things, he goes,

Speaker 1 kind of pauses for a second. He goes, I think, I think 100,000 subscribers.
I think as soon as I get that, I'll just chill out. I'll be happy then.

Speaker 1 I remember.

Speaker 1 His whole production staff's enjoying it. You've got 100,000 now.
I remember when I was

Speaker 1 in my first year of university. And I remember buying a tub of protein and looking at it and thinking, after this one, I think I'll be done.

Speaker 1 Do you think

Speaker 1 I was 18 and weighed about 76 kilos? But it was that, it was no, sorry, 69, I was 69 kilos. Fucking hell.
I remember when I hit 70 kilos and I was 20 years old and I was like, I am fucking huge.

Speaker 1 I think if you'd picked an easier goal, your development would have been totally different. But this is a big, this is a big hormosyism where he says,

Speaker 1 the person that you become along the way, like, how can you say that you're a man who can do hard things if you never did hard things? And then Jimmy Carr repurposed it even better. And it's

Speaker 1 yeah, this insight, I think, is it is a saving grace to a lot of people who feel that their goals are hollow.

Speaker 1 So I think that's a wonderful lesson, like a really, really lovely lesson. All right, Yusuf, what you got? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Think of how many bags of protein you've eaten since then, Chris.

Speaker 2 So you did the same with balloons as well, didn't you?

Speaker 1 Where like a thousand subscribers, you and Dean had a like cake and balloons and the party each each subscriber level has got bigger and less grand in its celebration yeah did we even do number of balloons

Speaker 1 less for four million subs we didn't do we did something for a billion players we did we did something for a billion plays but yeah for four million subs i don't think it even registered well it did we like ah well get we we need to get a piece of artwork and do that we did for the eighth in the world eighth in the world i had a what was supposed to be a red velvet cake but it wasn't it was a carrot cake masquerading as a red velvet cake and it it was awful it was horrible yeah i tried i tried to eat it in utah it didn't go well it's crazy to think

Speaker 1 yeah it's crazy to think for like a hundred thousand you did this mega party and then for four million you probably just sent a bicep emoji on slack that's it yeah probably the porn hub the porn hub emoji yeah on slack

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Speaker 2 So just to piggyback off Johnny's there, because I really like the takeaway of like the person that you become, I think there's another thing that you can draw from that too.

Speaker 1 So I fully agree, but

Speaker 2 you were talking about like chewing on the menu. So mistaking the menu for the meal and

Speaker 2 ascribing that as the to to your happiness.

Speaker 2 And we're the ones that always move the goalposts for our happiness every time we hit a particular milestone and we renegotiate the contract with our brain so that we end up in this trap where, you know, your brain releasing a little boobs of of some neurotransmitter, but you raise the bar of, oh, but it has to be, I have to achieve an even higher bar to to get the same little blurt of dopamine um

Speaker 2 and a lot of it's because we almost feel like it's too simple to just enjoy the basic pleasures of life that are immediately available of health and relationships and nature and the sun and friends and things that um

Speaker 2 you would like if they were taken away from you you would actually want to exchange everything for that so there's a there's a book by a media giant who wrote, and he came up, he was like the head of PC World magazine and a bunch of conglomerates

Speaker 2 called,

Speaker 2 it's called Felix Dennis,

Speaker 2 How to Get Rich. And it's like a tongue-in-cheek book about like, he's like, I'm sat here at the age of 84

Speaker 2 writing this book to you, dear reader, who's

Speaker 2 probably in your 20s or 30s. And

Speaker 2 despite the billions that I've amassed, I would swap places with you in an instant because you have the one thing that I don't, which is time. And I would still have the better end of the deal.

Speaker 2 So it's almost like that the things that we're chasing,

Speaker 2 like most people listening to this podcast are probably in the top like 20% of global wealth anyway.

Speaker 2 And yet we think that if we get to the top 19% or the top 18% or whatever, that something's going to change.

Speaker 2 I saw Ferris shared this quote from Marianne Celdez the other day.

Speaker 2 The hardest thing to to teach a student and to believe consistently is that there is nothing out there to go and get.

Speaker 2 There is no part, career, opportunity for which you should be searching and scrounging and coveting.

Speaker 2 All of the preparation is within.

Speaker 2 And if you keep yourself mentally and physically fit and you remain generous with yourself and others and stay deeply in your study about your craft, whatever is yours will then arrive.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 with that in mind, it's like there are basic pleasures that are always available.

Speaker 2 And when when they're gone, like health, for example, in a challenge, we've all of us have gone through some health challenge in the last like 10 years where we've suddenly been like, oh, wow, actually,

Speaker 2 I could really do with a bit more of that again.

Speaker 2 So instead, it's like, enjoy those pleasures and then organize your life such that you can enjoy the passage of time as you move towards your goal. And then you've got the best of both worlds.

Speaker 1 I think this is,

Speaker 1 it might sound to, it's probably almost certainly certainly would have sounded to us eight years ago when we started the pod

Speaker 1 opulent maybe entitled

Speaker 1 detached from reality in some sort of way why

Speaker 1 just get stronger bigger more rich more popular whatever um why are you needing to make everything so abstract but this leads into my favorite my favorite lesson from the entire year which is that unteachable lessons are unteachable and this has been the best essay I wrote it in January and then dropped it on Rogan a couple of weeks after that.

Speaker 1 And it's still just, it's a fundamental truism that

Speaker 1 there are a particular category of insights about life that you cannot learn without experiencing. And money won't make you happy.
Fame won't fix your self-worth. You don't love that pretty girl.

Speaker 1 She's just hot and difficult to get. You should see your parents more.
You should work less. You should spend more time in a hammock.
You should enjoy a holiday without having your phone.

Speaker 1 You'll never care about anything that you're thinking of apart from when you're thinking about it. Like all of these lessons over and over.
The next follower count won't matter. The reason that

Speaker 1 people proclaim them with such like grandiose ceremony when they get there is that they can't believe that that was the case, despite the fact that generations of parents and media and literature and archetype and myth and songs and art have told us, here are the pitfalls to look out for.

Speaker 1 And it's this weird kind of like cute narcissism that we all have where we think that might be true for them, but not for me. My particular,

Speaker 1 like, oh, shut up, granddad.

Speaker 2 Like, I'll figure it out myself. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 My unique constitution would allow me to dance through this minefield of very well-laden, very well-described tripwires, and I won't trip on any of them.

Speaker 1 So, I'm working on the next build of this Unteachable Lessons thing because I think it's so good.

Speaker 1 One of the, so first off, I guess you are, if you chase something that you were warned was hollow to arrive there and find out that the warning was correct,

Speaker 1 you were in good company. That's the first lesson of the Unteachable Lessons thing.
But the second one is that they are unteachable.

Speaker 1 So the self-castigation of I should have known what I didn't know before I knew it. Like I should have seen this thing coming or whatever.

Speaker 1 That is simply not the way. The unteachable lessons are self-reinforcing.
They are unteachable, which means you have to do them in order to be able to understand them.

Speaker 1 And I think this is what maybe a good bit of us are reckoning with now, that unteachable lessons don't really matter all that much until you're at the stage where you've learned that the lesson should have been realized in advance and you knew about it.

Speaker 1 And then you get this guilt and you get the shame around, oh, fucking hell. How could I not have seen? Did the guys not tell me? Did they not say that the four million subs wasn't the answer?

Speaker 1 That the so on and

Speaker 1 I think what I realized was unteachable lessons is cool to point at, but doesn't actually give anybody any sense of, all it does is mark the way to the edge of the cliff that they are going to jump off of.

Speaker 1 And on your way down, you'll realize that you're in okay company. So maybe you feel a bit less lonely.
But the next one is

Speaker 1 you can't realize this stuff

Speaker 1 before you've experienced it. And because of that, you shouldn't be whipping yourself into like pain and

Speaker 1 saying, what an idiot. I shouldn't have done this.
It's a justification for self-compassion that...

Speaker 1 way smarter, way richer, way more accomplished, more worldly people who had more advantages than you

Speaker 1 knew more and did the exact same thing. Bigger for longer till the end of their life.
They died trying to do it. And okay, like

Speaker 1 you dedicated however many weeks, months, years, decades to this career, relationship, pursuit, goal, dream, whatever it might be to find out that what was at the end of the rainbow wasn't a part of gold.

Speaker 1 You're in good company. Well, it's not programming.

Speaker 2 You can't just take it on faith. Otherwise, you'll be sat there with FOMO.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's the Naval thing. It's far easier to achieve your material desires than to renounce them.
I think it's like the best reason to achieve them. To clear them off.
100%. It's way easier.

Speaker 1 And this sounds like a thing to say, but

Speaker 1 demonetize.

Speaker 1 It's literally easier to buy a Ferrari than it is to rid yourself of the desire to get a Ferrari. Yep.

Speaker 1 That doesn't speak to how easy it is to get a Ferrari. It speaks to how difficult it is to be able to rid yourself of of the desire for a Ferrari if you really want to come in

Speaker 1 being able to get the Ferrari in the first place, isn't it? Yeah. But yeah, I think like a really bad credit rating.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, true. Bitches.

Speaker 1 I think if by

Speaker 1 gaining a certain amount of money, you remove your desire to get more money. Fantastic.

Speaker 1 The quickest route to getting rid of the desire is to achieve it. Yeah.
Yeah. 100%.

Speaker 1 What if I got next? You know, one we've discussed before, actually, actually,

Speaker 1 not on the show.

Speaker 1 So you spoke then about giving up desires.

Speaker 1 Another problem is envy or jealousy. And

Speaker 1 one of the things I've tried to do rather than give up envy or jealousy is have a bit more of a stricter criteria of when I'm willing to be envy or jealous.

Speaker 1 So what I kind of developed is this idea I call call of duty versus war. So call of duty is kind of what I project Johnny's life to be like, right?

Speaker 1 Like maybe some of the highlights that I hear and the wins and all of that stuff. And then the war is, okay, when I've actually been with you for a week and lived your life.

Speaker 1 If I'm envious of the war, then that's fine. But if I'm envious of this Call of Duty 1% highlight reel that doesn't exist, then that's a problem.
So I'll use, I mean, I use two examples.

Speaker 1 I mean, one of them is

Speaker 1 a business guy we both know, super, super, super successful. And

Speaker 1 he's got everything, beautiful family amazing business

Speaker 1 crushing it year on year and he's got to the scale now where we're talking a huge mega business as with him you could easily feel envious he goes yeah I've got um I think it was 2,000 lawsuits this month

Speaker 1 when your business gets to that scale you're constantly dealing with litigation from so many different angles wasn't he dealing with this personally as well I don't yeah there was like jumped in on some email while you were yeah and he's he I mean he's one of my favorite people in the world but I go oh wow like if I want to be envious, I've got to go to the war.

Speaker 1 I've got to be, oh, I also want the 2,000 emails a month. And likewise, I mean, me and you were on the road trip.

Speaker 1 And I think it's probably good for the viewers because I think a lot of people could look at you and go, good looking guy,

Speaker 1 super successful, rich, knows loads of people. And that's the kind of Call of Duty model.
Me and Chris are on a road trip in America. And we're going to put the tunes on.
and blare through the roads.

Speaker 1 And then Sky, your podcast ads manager, calls up. And obviously, I think the way people assume the ads work for the show is probably, oh, Chris just gets a load of free stuff and money, right?

Speaker 1 That's what I think they think. Whereas you kind of then get to sit there with the war and it's Sky going, yeah, they're just not happy with that Instagram story.

Speaker 1 It's Chris going, I've filmed that one four times now. Why are they not happy with it? And I go, oh, okay.
My model before was the Call of Duty and now I'm seeing the war.

Speaker 1 So unless I've seen the war, I'm not envious. And if I see the war and I like it, I'm willing to be Napoleon.

Speaker 1 I think when Mark Zuckerberg was on Joe Rogan, he describes like his morning, and it's like he wakes up and he doesn't look at his phone because when he looks at his phone, there's just loads of people.

Speaker 1 Oh, Rosie. Yeah.
And then spinning over.

Speaker 1 Oh, God, like that never goes away. Like, it doesn't matter how big the business is.
Just gets more. Well, the emails are just worse.

Speaker 1 It's the emails that like 15 people below you didn't have the answer to. Well, that's another Sam Harrisism where

Speaker 1 there will never come a day when you don't have any problems. Or did you think that you were going to wake up one day?

Speaker 1 and there'd be no problems, like getting to a video game level where there's no more enemies to fight. No, your problems will will change, but having problems will never go away.

Speaker 1 The line from your idea about Call of Duty versus War is nailed by James Clear here. How many people love the idea of a thing, but not the reality?

Speaker 1 It doesn't make sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it. If you don't want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire.

Speaker 1 To crave the results but not the process is to guarantee disappointment. Beautiful.

Speaker 1 Beautiful. Nailed it.

Speaker 1 Popper has this idea. He's like one of the founding fathers of modern science.
That essentially life is problem solving.

Speaker 1 And then David Deutsch built upon his ideas, which is, he has a few things, but one, all problems, unless they defy the laws of physics, are fundamentally solvable. But, so that's the optimistic note.

Speaker 1 But there's a big caveat there, which is as soon as you solve a problem, it leads to another problem. So solutions are infinite, but problems are also infinite.

Speaker 1 So let's say we solved the problem of fire. Okay.

Speaker 1 Now we have the problem of smoke. Okay.
We've solved the problem of smoke, we've got a chimney, okay. Now we've got a dirty chimney, okay.

Speaker 1 We're gonna solve that problem by getting some children in to clean it. Oh no, we've got the problem of child labor, and it's just da da da da da da da.

Speaker 1 And it's both the beginning of infinity, both of problems and solutions. So life is problem solving.

Speaker 1 Very good. Johnny, what you got?

Speaker 1 I have another lesson, which is

Speaker 1 it's a dad-based lesson about being a dad.

Speaker 1 Have you seen American Beauty? Seen the film American Beauty? No. No.
Tom Cruise.

Speaker 1 No. Oh.

Speaker 1 Shows that I haven't seen it.

Speaker 1 That's me verifying that I haven't seen American Beauty. Kevin Spacey.
I'd recommend watching. It's really good.

Speaker 1 There's a scene in it where

Speaker 1 there's a guy watching. He's just sat mesmerized, watching a bag blowing in the wind.
And he ends up in tears because

Speaker 1 he can't believe the amount of beauty. in the bag floating in the wind.

Speaker 1 And I've always been really jealous of that scene because because there's a guy that's just absolutely mesmerized with something completely normal and ordinary.

Speaker 1 And everyone's like going around chasing the new thing, the novel experience, the new like location, possession, whatever.

Speaker 1 The thing that I've noticed that I wasn't expecting about being a dad is

Speaker 1 watching...

Speaker 1 Watching your child see something for the first time completely reintroduces you to life, like little things before they just became part of the background, part of the scenery.

Speaker 1 So, like, the first time they watch a dog bark, the first time they see a bird flying, the first time they hear a noise, you're just transported for that split second into, like, oh God, yeah, like that is, that's crazy, that thing.

Speaker 1 And it's, it's a complete, it, it, it's a, I think, like, you guys probably had this, like, one of the challenges of like, you get older and you feel like time goes faster and faster and faster, and it's just the same experiences on repeat.

Speaker 1 It's a really nice like pinpoint back to like, oh yeah, like

Speaker 1 that cup's colder than I was expecting it to be. Oh yeah, the moisture feels really weird.
And 10 minutes goes by.

Speaker 1 So that's been a really cool, something I wasn't expecting to happen, but it's been a really cool experience this year.

Speaker 2 That is so lovely. You're so lovely.
It's been great seeing that in you as well, Johnny.

Speaker 2 Over the year, I've honestly, I've like seen your heart open and like almost unlock this like aspect, your personality that

Speaker 2 your daughter's brought out in you.

Speaker 1 Thanks, man. What is it that's going on with us?

Speaker 1 Right? Because you've had a kid,

Speaker 1 but none of us have. A moleskin notepad.
You were on a moleskin notepad, but none of us are. I just get this sense.

Speaker 1 I don't know whether anybody else that's listening feels it, but 2025 was a very feely year generally. I think for a lot of people that were around me, it was like a big emotions

Speaker 1 year.

Speaker 1 I think our lessons and realizations each time we do this end up being weirdly similar.

Speaker 1 Definitely, we're on a trajectory that's sort of moving at a similar kind of pace. You see that when you have a load of girls around one another, the menstruation cycles sync up.

Speaker 1 So it's the gar hacks sync up. Yeah.
Yeah. Even remotely.

Speaker 1 Interesting. Yeah,

Speaker 1 that's cool, man. I mean, look, the opportunity to revisit something old for the first time is just super cool.

Speaker 1 And obviously, because you're marrying this with a deep meditation practice that's consistent, you're getting at this from multiple angles.

Speaker 1 It's funny because you started the story then about the film. I started staring at the carpet and I was in this gaze for the carpet for like five seconds.

Speaker 1 Because one of my favorite stories that I read this year was from Morgan Housel's book. I don't know the name of the chap, but

Speaker 1 he's blind

Speaker 1 from basically birth to about 45. And he has this experimental eye surgery and he can see for the first time.

Speaker 1 And he's after the surgery, just at the opticians just staring at the carpet for like an hour. And he's just fascinated by the details of the carpet.

Speaker 1 And I realize I walk past carpet all the time and don't think about it. Yeah.
So.

Speaker 1 Wouldn't it be crazy to be alive for a long time, but experiencing something for the first time? Because you see those

Speaker 1 where you see those videos of

Speaker 1 babies that hear for the first time, but they're usually three or four or something. And you go, well, you know, how much life would you have experienced up until that point?

Speaker 1 But if you're someone who has a sense of self and maybe a partner and

Speaker 1 position in society and all the rest of it, and then you get reintroduced this, you know, cosmic dose of novelty

Speaker 1 and wonder into a system that already is pretty well put together.

Speaker 1 I think I told you about this ages ago, the elderly clout hypothesis. We talk about the perils of fame too young, but never the perils of fame too old.

Speaker 1 Like what happens if you're 60 and you become the most famous psychologist in the world, say, well, you know, Jordan Peterson had to navigate that. You get plucked out of obscurity.

Speaker 1 You think you know who you are. You think you know your place in society.
And now that you've been ripped from your moorings and you've got to try and work out who the fuck am I in this new world.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And that, like, I think we all, we've all experienced that when we downloaded Alfred for the first time.

Speaker 2 Like, everything we knew about the way we interface with technology suddenly just like, oh, God, I've been driving with the brakes on. I've been seeing in black and white all my life.

Speaker 1 There is a bit of me that thinks because the growth of the show is so like fucking exponential,

Speaker 1 so many amazing low-hanging fruit insights to me feel cheap to do because they've been done maybe multiple times before.

Speaker 1 But because of the exposure that people have had to it, even within the same stream of content, which is Modern Wisdom and me,

Speaker 1 we probably do need to go back. I think there should be like a required reading.
Like mute the show.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we've got to go through the OGs. You're right, because otherwise we're going to break the Alfred server.

Speaker 1 Headspace, calm, and then arrived at waking up. Trackpad speed.
Ron Wad. You need to sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom.

Speaker 1 This is one of the problems. Some of the hacks that we believed in, the companies are defunct now.
I'm pretty sure you can't get like sponsors.

Speaker 1 The Protein Works, I think, actually went into administration. And

Speaker 1 they're in the show notes at some point.

Speaker 1 Well, it was Ron Wad, then you were on Ron Wad. I was a Ron Wad model.
Do you do stretching now?

Speaker 1 I do none. I don't do much stretching now.
George does loads. Do you?

Speaker 1 A little bit. Stretching all the time.
Yousef, what you got?

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Speaker 2 Similar to Johnny as well, our periods have synced up.

Speaker 2 I have taken a bit of a journey from head to heart over the year, too.

Speaker 2 And like massive amounts of

Speaker 2 gratitude for being able to like spend your guys' birthdays together, like to travel with you all, and like

Speaker 2 all of that stuff, like really, just really seeing an appreciation for it.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 2 almost like Johnny was saying about his daughter, where if you were transported, I think Hall Mersey talks about this, where it's like, if you were transported from, you know, your 90s into today and you're like, oh, I've suddenly got another,

Speaker 2 I'm suddenly 30 again. I've got another X years to live.
It's like you'd see it with a whole new level of gratitude. But

Speaker 2 my big one is me becoming post-truth.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 this is the beginning of a half right-wing pivot from Yusuf here, isn't it?

Speaker 1 Here we go.

Speaker 2 The mirror only smiles when you smile

Speaker 2 has been my mantra for the year.

Speaker 2 And it's just as concrete as it sounds. Like you're sat staring in the mirror.
miserable and going, oh, I don't like what's in the reflection. I need to try and change that thing in the reflection.

Speaker 2 And the mirror represents the world around you. Whereas actually, like you can never change the reflection.

Speaker 2 All you can do is bring the positive energy to it and then everything else reflects it back to you. So it's just moving from

Speaker 2 left brain, overly empirical, have to get to some objective truth out there in order to give myself the permission to say that this is true or adopt a belief or adopt whatever.

Speaker 2 You know, actually, no, like you, you can, you choose your beliefs. Like we choose them anyway.

Speaker 2 So it's not as if like you're you're suddenly becoming woo-woo by doing that um it's just being conscious about it and then bringing what whatever energy you want to see reflected back into the world and um in doing that it's just been it's like opening up a different gear in my mind so

Speaker 2 um that's been a big shift in just how i'm choosing to see reality

Speaker 1 Very feelsy. We're all very feelsy, which I love.

Speaker 1 Do you know what it makes me think? It makes me think that the

Speaker 1 intuition that I had for most of the last 12 months was right.

Speaker 1 This is a big,

Speaker 1 like my

Speaker 1 biases are being confirmed. And

Speaker 1 it's not just you. Yeah, it's not.
It's not.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I think certainly, at least from the show's perspective, a lot of what I've talked about over the last 12 months has been less hardcore hustle and grind Goggins mentality thing.

Speaker 1 I contributed to that. You know, the industry of fuck your feelings, bro, just work harder.
I had, you know, I served my time contributing to that.

Speaker 1 But even fucking Hormozy started to make the pivot this year, where he's thinking, well, maybe I should pay a little bit of attention to what's happening below the neck.

Speaker 1 Maybe I should care a little bit more. And yeah, this you could say, like a good summary is that it's all vibes, ultimately.

Speaker 1 That what you're trying to do is construct some external situation or life or level of success or belief system or whatever externally to make yourself feel something internally.

Speaker 1 But there is a more direct route there.

Speaker 1 Well, the post-truth idea Youssef has

Speaker 1 probably stems from, I don't know, Youssef, but Derek Sivers has this book called Useful But Not True.

Speaker 1 And he has this.

Speaker 1 I haven't read it, but

Speaker 1 you can read it in a couple of hours. So there's, yeah, Sivers has this useful but not true.

Speaker 1 And he starts off with this story of, obviously, for people who don't know, he ends up being a quite a successful entrepreneur, internet programmer, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1 But what a lot of people don't know is when he was 17, he crashed into a lady that was driving and broke her spine and she was paralyzed for the rest of her life.

Speaker 1 And he carries this from like 17 to 34, just like ruminating on it day after day after day, like what he did and like how all his success is meaningless because he's such an awful person.

Speaker 1 And one day he goes, well,

Speaker 1 I'm going to take some agency over it. I'm actually going to go and see her and apologize.
So he turns up at the door.

Speaker 1 She answers the door and he immediately starts sobbing, like in tears and goes, it's me, Derek. I'm so sorry.
I crashed into your car. I paralyzed you.
And she's like, hold on, hold on.

Speaker 1 She goes, come on, walk on in. And she's walking.
So they both like sit down. And he's kind of discovers that he didn't paralyze her.

Speaker 1 Like she like broke a bit of a vertebrae, but she's been fine ever since. And what's interesting is she's been blaming herself for the accident ever since.

Speaker 1 So they both end up crying, realizing that they both had these kind of false memories in their head the entire time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's scary to work out that your worldview is incorrect.

Speaker 1 Which it is. Yeah.
Yeah. And it's emoji.
But in how many other places do you think

Speaker 1 that you've hit a woman?

Speaker 1 How many assumptions do you have about yourself or about the world or about the past that

Speaker 1 aren't that way?

Speaker 1 And this is, I think, one of the problems that you have with going too

Speaker 1 deep into the therapy speak world without having action. And I'm sure if I was to make this would be cool.
If I was to make a prediction for next year,

Speaker 1 I get the sense that

Speaker 1 we will, or at least for me, I predict that I'm probably going to

Speaker 1 keep moving through the emotions thing, but realize it's made me less effective

Speaker 1 and actually try and come back out the other side into more action-oriented stuff, but doing it from a more embodied place.

Speaker 1 Like, okay, I've looked into the abyss and I've stared at the shadow a little bit.

Speaker 1 And now I'm going to try and re-garner the fuck your feelings, bro, just work anyway, but while actually feeling them.

Speaker 2 Well, that's what you were saying while back, Chris, where like, it's not that we're throwing out the idea of being able to do hard work, it's just not conflating the actual pain of the work with the progress.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Do you think that you know, the thing, I think we probably all have this before you like meditate or do any kind of self-improvement stuff is that will this sap my desire to

Speaker 1 work harder? Or do you feel like that's happened? You can get there. I think I can get there.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because I can

Speaker 1 not in terms of not wanting the goals anymore. And perhaps part of this is simply just achieving a lot of the goals.

Speaker 1 But at least a good bit of it for me

Speaker 1 comes out of, well,

Speaker 1 how much of what I was doing was to hide from emotional states that I didn't want to feel. Like, I feel lonely, so I'll work hard.
Or I feel

Speaker 1 frustrated, so I'll work hard. Or I feel insufficient or inferior, so I'll work hard.

Speaker 1 And in that, you hide, you artificially bolster your sense sense of self-worth because you don't feel like without that you're enough so you're chasing enoughness and you're injecting work rate into it and it's doing two things it's pushing you towards something which makes you think well i'm moving in the right direction it doesn't matter if i don't love myself today because tomorrow i'll be better and you have this sort of permanent manana, manana, manana ring of that.

Speaker 1 But the other thing is by being so busy, it drowns out the fleeting thoughts that make you doubt stuff in any case. So a busy calendar is a hedge against existential loneliness.

Speaker 1 And if you just stack your day back to back, I'm moving in the right direction. So the long-term, like, I'm doing the thing thing gets sorted.

Speaker 1 Plus the immediate, I've insulated myself from being able to hear the thing thing is also happening.

Speaker 1 So I think it can, but ultimately, if the reason that you work so hard is so that you can finally feel good about yourself or be happy or have good vibes.

Speaker 1 And if in the process of doing that, you destroy the vibes and you don't make yourself feel good about yourself, if you can just access the vibes directly, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 Like you have actually managed to find a shortcut through the mountain by tunneling straight through the middle of it. And

Speaker 1 it's still wet clay for me. Like all of this stuff is still really, really, really fucking wet clay.
But

Speaker 1 I think it's the right way to go. And I think that a lot of people

Speaker 1 realize this as well. And it's, there is kind of two worlds.
There's the people who are still like looking at the top of the mountain.

Speaker 1 And then some people who have done a little bit of stuff, maybe got to some kind of an altitude, and they're like, Oh, I don't think that I need to go any higher.

Speaker 1 I think I actually need to go down and reassess my route. And the people who are still on the climb just do not understand the perspective that the people who have gone a little bit higher up got.

Speaker 1 And that's fine because eventually they'll get there and it's the unteachable lesson and so on and so forth. But it does lead to

Speaker 1 it, sounds much more

Speaker 1 upward-aiming and

Speaker 1 supportive and noble to be on the climb. And it sounds like privileged and bourgeois to say, you know, man, I'm just like working on my vibes, dude.

Speaker 1 But I get the sense that anyone who's sufficiently mindful is going to end up there in any case. So I think this is a path that everybody's on, just to different stages.

Speaker 2 The best analogy I've heard for this is that it's not about the

Speaker 2 whether work, hard work, laziness, whatever, any, there's no moralizing of the thing itself.

Speaker 2 It's about if you're using feelings of insufficiency to drive your work, then it's like you're using dirty fuel, which will eventually destroy the engine. So it's not hard work is bad.

Speaker 2 It's if the dirty fuel is the thing which is driving you to do it, then that's going to collapse and why you're working hard.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I had like the, it's weird that you said that because I had like, I've been thinking about this a lot of like the feeling that you have achieved a thing you've been chasing a long time, and the like the drive, you kind of feel the drive going away a bit.

Speaker 1 The

Speaker 1 what I what I think the next step is is like you've just completed Call of Duty on hard, and now you need to start again at level one, but on veteran.

Speaker 1 And you kind of know, like, oh, it's this level, that guy's there, and that guy comes out that door and shoot him. So, you're kind of going through that, you pick a different

Speaker 1 thing to chase that's going to be this sounds very technical which it shouldn't be but do you think it's playing call of duty again in a hard level or do you think it's playing a new game

Speaker 1 i think it has to be the same game because that's then you're like navigating the new goal but kind of knowing like oh this happens because i think the problem with like the first goal with the i want to bench 100 kilos is you that is the beginning of the journey of

Speaker 1 this is it it's the tub of way i just need this tub of way i just need a hundred thousand subscribers but when you pick like if chris picked picked 10 million subscribers, he'd be like, all right, well, yeah, here we go again.

Speaker 1 But do you think

Speaker 1 so? To use the 100 kilos one, do you think it's okay now?

Speaker 1 I've got to do 110, 120, or do you think it's, oh, now I want to get my resting heart rate down to this, or I want to get great Pilates or whatever it is?

Speaker 1 It's, so I think like that's the, obviously it can't be the same goal. So the Call of Duty is just an analogy.

Speaker 1 Do you see what I mean?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So the reason it's like, it's picking a new goal that challenges you in a different way, but you know that like this is just the this that's how you get the feel, that's how you get the drive back.

Speaker 1 So it doesn't matter if it's the same thing or a new goal, it's just a bigger thing than previous essentially. But yeah, but it's the um

Speaker 1 it's like because I think when you have those feelings of like, oh, you know, I've just kind of reached this goal and it was just fulfilling this thing.

Speaker 1 And I think that just means like you've arrived at the tail end of that. Like you've that particular arc.
That's the final level.

Speaker 1 Well, you think you think in arcs a lot, I remember one of the insights from Relationships 101 that you had, had, which I think is still true, is

Speaker 1 a lot of people restart the same cycle with a new person, assuming that they're going to get some more longevity out of it. Whereas it's not...
This relationship will be different. Yeah.
No,

Speaker 1 it's largely the same arc from excitement to familiarity. And people think that the familiarity is an indication that they should switch.
to get someone who the excitement lasts with for longer.

Speaker 1 But it's not. That arc is pretty locked in.
And I think that you're true. This is certainly true for me with the live stuff.

Speaker 1 You know, it's sufficiently similar to what I do, but sufficiently different that it's a new territory, a new video game to try and conquer.

Speaker 1 And it feeds into the main.

Speaker 1 But I'm starting from zero. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. So, I mean, I guess

Speaker 1 the tighter and tighter spirals thing Youssef said before is so true as well, because in the micro, or if this is done too frequently, what this looks like is a non-essentialist worldview.

Speaker 1 It looks like you're trying to do lots of things at once, which means that you're not good at anything. It can be anything you want, but not everything.

Speaker 1 But you can be lots of things as long as you periodize when you're focusing on them. I couldn't have done live tour writing, brocasts, all the rest of the move tomorrow.

Speaker 1 I couldn't have done that all at once. But if I chunk them into sufficiently dedicated, sufficiently long durations, we'll probably get away with it.

Speaker 1 All right, we'll do we'll do one more, one more little round.

Speaker 1 Um, and if there's any absolute slammers, just do a couple.

Speaker 1 This is a new one for me, which I haven't written about yet.

Speaker 1 Just because you can lift it doesn't mean you should.

Speaker 1 And this is

Speaker 1 the inverse of the region beta paradox. So

Speaker 1 most people, if things get sufficiently bad, it galvanizes them to... get out of a situation, something that's challenging or painful or difficult.

Speaker 1 But if you have an unusually high tolerance for discomfort and are pretty pretty resilient, then you become like the David Goggins of suffering. Like, fuck the boats.
I'll carry the whole fleet.

Speaker 1 And what happens is you are able to put yourself into a situation where you can sustain discomfort or a wrong path or a challenging position or a job that you shouldn't stay in or a lifestyle that you need to share, or whatever.

Speaker 1 You can continue to push yourself through that because your capacity to hold on and to just keep going is so strong

Speaker 1 that you go way, you find that the basement's got a fucking cellar with a trapdoor in it below the bottom of the line that most people's region beta would have kicked them out the bottom of.

Speaker 1 It's like, oh, this was already bad enough and most people would have been galvanized into action. But for some reason, your capacity to like just keep going

Speaker 1 is so great that you do and you do and you do and you do and you do. And

Speaker 1 it's strange because the things that you get praised for in public are often very damaging in private.

Speaker 1 The resilience that you need to get yourself through work is not the sort of thing that you're supposed to have in your friendships. For instance,

Speaker 1 if a friend continues to misuse you or take advantage of you or isn't there or is just bad, bad influence or whatever it is,

Speaker 1 if that's in work and you're trying to get this particular piece of coding or website to work and fit together, fuck the Zapier integration won't do this thing.

Speaker 1 I'm trying to get this client, I'm going to fly across the world and do all the rest of it, that's fine. But if it's you trying to regularly chase down a friend that's self-destructing,

Speaker 1 there is a limit. There is supposed to be a limit to that.
And yeah, the realization, just because something's heavy doesn't mean that you should lift it.

Speaker 1 And the reverse of that is just because somebody carries a weight well doesn't mean it isn't heavy. So from the outside,

Speaker 1 a lot of the time people that listen to shows like this one and read your guys's stuff and George's stuff,

Speaker 1 they're usually the most put together person in the room, typically. They're the one that their friends turn to for advice because you listen to, you read that psychology stuff, don't you?

Speaker 1 What should I do about my relationship with my mother or whatever it might be? And what that causes is for a lot of people to never ask the question of the person who usually answers

Speaker 1 and go, Hey, how are you doing? Can we check in? Oh, yeah, it's like, no, no, no. Like, I really mean, how are you, what's what's let's turn this around.

Speaker 1 And uh, it takes a, it takes a real

Speaker 1 brave friend, it takes a real sort of impactful friend to push through the competence defense mechanism that everybody has up.

Speaker 1 And yeah, in some ways, that's another curse of competence that people don't see you as someone that needs

Speaker 1 reassurance or

Speaker 1 steps in to check on you. And I think,

Speaker 1 yeah,

Speaker 1 beware of using what you're praised for in public, your resilience in your private life. And just because someone carries the weight well doesn't mean it isn't heavy.
I think

Speaker 2 it's RPE.

Speaker 1 It's RPE for personal life. Yeah, yeah.
It is.

Speaker 1 I think this is kind of the same thing you're talking about, but like if you're a person

Speaker 1 that is like in charge, responsible for things, you're the, you're by default the person that people come to for like advice or what do I do? How does this work?

Speaker 1 I think that straight away makes it harder to be like, I'm struggling.

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 1 I think the feeling that that creates is like, if I admit I'm struggling, they then have no one to to ask like what I'm the guy I'm supposed to be the guy or the girl so I think that that it I've definitely felt that feeling of like when you're supposed to be kind of holding all of the everything together you sort of have to maintain that

Speaker 1 like facade to a degree even if you'd like I don't know what to do if you say that suddenly the whole the whole thing falls

Speaker 1 that's an interesting one because I remember reading um Endurance by Alfred Lansing and he's talking about Shackleton's diary entries versus what everybody else's diary entries are right and Shackleton's diary entries are just racked with self-doubt and uncertainty.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the whole experience is him just swimming in melancholy and fear. But as soon as he puts the diary down, he steps outside and he just, you know, galvanizes this entire group.

Speaker 1 So I do think that in a professional context, and if you are a leader, this is a price leaders pay that nobody else gets to see.

Speaker 1 But this is the reason that you're supposed to have a fucking supportive spouse or good friends who don't work for you or a therapist that you can talk to or whatever, whatever your

Speaker 1 outlet of choice is, but somebody who's there and with whom you can go,

Speaker 1 I don't fucking know what I'm doing. I don't know how to get out of this.

Speaker 1 And I think that's the value of multifaceted social group. Napoleon has this line that a leader is a dealer of hope.
Could be Churchillian Drift, but I'm pretty sure it's Napoleon. Napoleon Drift.

Speaker 1 And My literally takes me onto mine, which is perfect.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 to do a very much like a Christopher Nolan reveal now, I'm going to criticize my previous one. So then you come in here.
It's been a setup all along.

Speaker 1 So the reveal is, I think right now in 2025, 2026, that deep work,

Speaker 1 which is kind of sitting there, focused without any distractions, is extremely useful, but it's currently overpriced. relative to the amount of people that probably listen to your show and do that.

Speaker 1 And what I call deep sparring is significantly underpriced, which is kind of what you discussed then, right?

Speaker 1 That you can't say to people, oh, I'm struggling with this, particularly people that are relying on you. But like, I've realized now there's probably about three to five people in my life

Speaker 1 where we can sit down, go for dinner. I did this on Friday with my friend Harry in London.
We went for dinner, spoke everything through, had our laptops there.

Speaker 1 And he was going through issues he's facing. I was going through issues he was facing and vice versa.
And there's this Nick Camatra line:

Speaker 1 when I advise other people, I gain 20 IQ points, and when I advise myself, I lose 20 IQ points.

Speaker 1 So you essentially gain 40 IQ points because they get to come in and look at all your problems, and they're a super smart person. And then you get to go in and look at their problems.

Speaker 1 And then the next time you come back because you've been together, you're kind of endlessly smarter.

Speaker 1 It's like what we spoke about at the start of the just before we recorded, which is the film Oppenheimer. You needed that deep sparring time in person.

Speaker 1 If Feynman was in South America and Fermi was over there, like it wouldn't happen.

Speaker 1 So there's something that, yeah, that, and what's beautiful about the deep sparring idea is you probably need like three to four hours, a quarter, and then you stack up all that deep work on top of it versus you sitting in your own little cage, ruminating, coming up with the most absurd conspiracies about yourself, and then working on top of that.

Speaker 1 I think it's a huge negative.

Speaker 1 Do you think the other people in the deep sparring need no, like, should they have no context they have to be kind of completely separate um i no i think you probably want somebody who you don't directly work with but you want somebody who you really really respect um like a good rule of thumb i've i've i've tried to take this year which is ignore like all criticism from critics and like listen 100 to all criticism from creative people or people that are doing things um So I think in that regard, Daniel, I mean, you probably could think of four or five people that you could sit down with.

Speaker 1 And the thing is, it's kind of, they call it a live straddling poker, which is when you go in, other people start going in.

Speaker 1 And I think there's some truth to that as well, where if you go in and say, hey, I'm struggling with this, what do you think? If you was to take over my life with a VR headset on, what would you do?

Speaker 1 They come up with gems and then they immediately go, well, I've got this thing. And it's beautiful.
It's licensed to go there.

Speaker 1 I think especially for guys.

Speaker 1 And this is one of the problems upon reflection with a lot of what's happening in the UK, I think, because you kind of have a multiplier multiplier effect of already a British allergy to earnestness and sincerity,

Speaker 1 plus the male allergy to earnestness and sincerity, and they kind of stack on top of each other.

Speaker 1 But if you can find somebody who is prepared to go there and you open the door, that typically is reciprocated. The problem is when you do it with the wrong person.

Speaker 1 And they go,

Speaker 1 what the fuck do you mean, mate?

Speaker 1 I don't get what what you're talking about.

Speaker 2 100%. I was laughing because Harry is the absolute master of that.
He's the antidote because

Speaker 1 he will just

Speaker 2 drop in an absolutely wild take on something

Speaker 2 and just be like,

Speaker 1 prove me wrong.

Speaker 2 And I don't think I can even repeat any of those takes, but yeah, it's the perfect thing.

Speaker 2 You have to have a sparring partner or friends that you can drop absolutely anything with, put it on the table in front of you, and everyone just goes, all right,

Speaker 2 let's dissect this.

Speaker 1 What's interesting as well is if you study history, this is so common. So you had the Lunar Society in the UK during the Industrial Revolution where all these

Speaker 1 like pioneers, so Erasmus Darwin, who was Charles Darwin's grandfather, James Watt and about 10 other leaders of the Industrial Revolution or poetry at the time would meet during a full moon.

Speaker 1 Because this is obviously pre-electricity, James Watt's still working on what he's working on. They know during a full moon, they'd meet in somebody's garden and they would all discuss.

Speaker 1 So the whole foundation of the Western world was built on that. You then have have Benjamin Franklin in the US where he'd have these like junto societies that he would host and he would mingle.

Speaker 1 I was literally reading the other day the book about the start of Uber. So Uber starts because one guy is frustrated that he can't get a taxi.

Speaker 1 So he's doing what I occasionally do while I order from multiple taxi companies at once and the taxi arrives. So he's then banned from all taxi apps.

Speaker 1 And one day he's watching Casino Royale and he sees James Bond with his GPS technology and he goes, hold on, because that's an idea.

Speaker 1 And Travis, who's the other founder of Uber, he hosts these these jam parties at his house since he sold his company so he can just mingle and meet people. And they're playing table tennis.

Speaker 1 And that's where the idea of Uber comes from.

Speaker 1 So this idea of kind of sitting by yourself, I think is just a fallacy that is a very modern thing that deep sparring is so significant throughout history. The lone

Speaker 1 genius theory. for sort of how history gets moved forward is so

Speaker 1 it's so fucking bullshit dude and i guess that would be another another lesson from this year i put it in one of the vlogs that came out recently, which was you can go pretty fucking fast and quite far on your own.

Speaker 1 And even if it's not as trite as like, if you want to go fast, go on your own. If you want to go far, go with other people.

Speaker 1 That, I don't know, you can probably, with enough resilience, if you're the David Goggins of suffering, you can just fucking grit your teeth and make it to 80 and you'd have done fine.

Speaker 1 But it'll be way less fun.

Speaker 1 Like if you want to have fun, do it with other people. So not only are you more effective,

Speaker 1 it's also more fun. And it's easier.

Speaker 1 So you can get, let's say that you can get it done but you would have it be done with more discomfort more self-doubt and yeah you get to celebrate this fucking thing you get to celebrate whatever it is that you're doing with other people there's a great line of um you know the whole glad well concept of 10 000 hours which has been debated but even in that context there if you meet with smart friend and discuss these issues you've now got 20 000 hours because you've got their 10 000 hours then you have 10 people you have a hundred thousand hours you can see where this is going

Speaker 1 true be as friends with as many people as possible

Speaker 1 okay You got any assignments to finish off with? You got anything that you wish that you'd said?

Speaker 1 I have a little hack that I've found useful. Run it.
It's so it's being more practical with gratitude, practical ways to engineer that feeling. Because I've always struggled with that.

Speaker 1 I don't know about you guys. The whole like write three things you're grateful for, but you end up writing the same stuff.

Speaker 1 So one's a question that you can ask daily, and one is a thing that you do one time. The one time is ask ChatGPT or whatever your AI choice is.

Speaker 1 So say, I am 35, I live in this city, this whatever. Describe a Monday 100 years ago

Speaker 1 and the level of you just need to read it once and you're like, oh my God, like heating, not having to eat like spam for dinner, not having to navigate through like a world war. and all these things.

Speaker 1 And you just suddenly see like little things in your day that you can a microwave completely take for granted. You're like, wow.

Speaker 1 You sent me that passage. Is that what you've just got of? No, I was which passage are you going to refer to?

Speaker 1 Where

Speaker 1 water, like I had a shower, I woke up in a comfy bed and I did something else and you compared it to a queen, an emperor and a friend. Just, I mean, I could do a six-hour series on this, right?

Speaker 1 But even just study any part of history and you realize everything's so much worse than it is now. And also everybody's always complaining.

Speaker 1 So you kind of realize no matter how much better it gets, everybody's going to always be complaining. I mean, you study World War II.
It's not even that long ago.

Speaker 1 And you go, hold, most of the people, like we would have been on the front lines. Here's a crazy stat.
The average age of the Luftwaffe that were bombing the UK was 26.

Speaker 1 The average age of the RAF pilots, the reason why this isn't modern's wisdom, is

Speaker 1 the reason why we're not all speaking German, you'd be fine with the blonde hair, blue, eyes,

Speaker 1 is the average age of an RAF pilot, 21. And you know how averages work.
There's going to be a few of us blokes that are bringing that age up.

Speaker 1 And you just kind of go, oh my God, like it's

Speaker 1 never ending

Speaker 1 how much better it's gotten, but how much people will still keep complaining.

Speaker 1 So I have just a little twist on the gratitude thing because I did in that bedroom there, the time capsule from the last decade of my life,

Speaker 1 there is nine or ten

Speaker 1 six-minute diaries and there's six months each.

Speaker 1 So it's a lot of daily writing and the gratitude never got below the neck for me and that sounds great and i'm sure that it you know it's shocking the question i would ask that i would get you ask yourself is does this feel like i'm feeling it or is it just another sort of cognitive thought experiment also this is my second one beautiful so that that's the that's the

Speaker 1 yeah i did that's like the the you know shift the canvas it's like oh all these things that i take for granted how nice that the second question that you can ask yourself every day is, which I think I might have mentioned before, it's just what would, what would 80-year-old me have appreciated about my day today?

Speaker 1 And that's stuff like, I got to walk to the shop and buy a drink and walk back again without nothing hurt. Or like, I'm at this part of my relationship with my partner and we got to do this.

Speaker 1 And we've got all these plans and all these things to be excited about. And we have a holiday coming up and I get to go with whatever.
That's the stuff that I, I feel.

Speaker 1 I think that's the way that, like, I really struggle with right three things you're grateful for. But I find that question, you pick, you pick the stuff you would ignore

Speaker 1 because it's the stuff that when you're 80 just won't be there anymore, that you overlook, which is, that's what 80-year-old you will be grateful for.

Speaker 1 What do you think those biggest things 80-year-old Johnny will be thinking? I think it's the, I think it's the feeling of

Speaker 1 excitement about what's still coming.

Speaker 1 That, like, my daughter's a certain age and getting to see her grow up, like, friendships, watching people achieve things. There's so much to be still be excited for.

Speaker 1 And not to say that doesn't, that goes away when you're 80, but I think you're facing very different,

Speaker 1 a very different 10 years when you're 80 years old.

Speaker 1 Have you heard that quote?

Speaker 2 The quote from A.N. Whitehead: civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking of them.

Speaker 2 So, like, Johnny from 100 years ago doesn't like when Johnny from now doesn't have to go up the mountain and milk the goats and then like wash the clothes in the

Speaker 2 wooden pot and all this kind of stuff

Speaker 2 and therefore can do stuff at much higher orders of operation.

Speaker 2 That famous email from Steve Jobs.

Speaker 2 I grow little of the food I eat and of the little I do grow, I didn't breed or perfect the seeds. I didn't make any of my own clothing.
I speak a language I didn't invent or refine.

Speaker 2 I did not discover the mathematics that I use. I'm protected by freedoms and laws I didn't conceive of or legislate, et cetera, et cetera.
And then it's like, at the end, it's sent from my iPad.

Speaker 2 Like, just a little hat tip of like, we're standing on the shoulders of giants.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's good. The gratitude thing is hard to get right.

Speaker 1 Certainly. Try the Jhana stuff.
Give that a go. The panic attack of happiness.
Yeah, panic attack of joy. See what happens.
It's Michael, the guy from Elliot. I'll put you in touch with him.

Speaker 1 What do you guys think, 80-year-old you will be grateful for?

Speaker 1 for me the obvious one

Speaker 1 i was reading this um chess clock it's called yeah

Speaker 1 alfred yeah

Speaker 1 the i was reading there's this book called ken it's by ken liu um so he does these short stories and there's one called paper menagerie and kind of the ending is um he's reading a letter from his mom after she's died and it's a chinese family and they say, The saddest, the saddest feeling in Chinese culture is to grow of an age where you're ready to take care of your parents and realize they're no longer there.

Speaker 1 So that's probably the one that I think I'd be like, oh wow, my parents are still here.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's cool.

Speaker 1 That's cool.

Speaker 2 I like the song by Ken Liu as well.

Speaker 2 Like, Ken Lu,

Speaker 2 Ken Li Bu Dibu Dao,

Speaker 2 Ken Lu.

Speaker 1 You know that one.

Speaker 1 No, but it's going to be Christmas number one after that rendition. Jesus Christ.
Wow. Okay, Yousef, anything beyond that? I don't know how you're going to top it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so I've got.

Speaker 2 And sorry for derailing your hack there, Johnny.

Speaker 2 I've got some like micro ones, but obviously Johnny and my hacks are so similar that in

Speaker 2 knowing we had this episode coming up, I went through my Obsidian, which has definitely passed the Watson filter, still using it,

Speaker 2 and looked at my George folder and thought, I just need to celebrate a few of the hacks that I've stolen from George and have served me well. So the boardroom exercise,

Speaker 2 which

Speaker 2 is basically your sat at a boardroom in your mind, when your mind is too busy and you go, okay, I've got different versions of myself all around the board. So you might might have like the

Speaker 2 finance accountant version of you with the green cap and the cigar, or you have like the romance version of you with the rose in their teeth and the

Speaker 2 gym version of you or whatever, all these different kind of mini personas. And you just give them all a chance to have their say.
So you're like, everyone else, shut up, you. You've got five minutes.

Speaker 2 Take the floor. voice what you need to say.
And as you work your way around,

Speaker 2 you just clear out the pipes and it's just the quietest quietest that your mind will ever be. So,

Speaker 2 George, thank you for that one.

Speaker 2 Framing decisions as experiments,

Speaker 2 big one I've learned from him this year:

Speaker 2 rather than deliberating over a decision that is a two-way door, you can just treat it as an experiment, and then it just gets rid of any sense of like, oh, I've got to get this right.

Speaker 2 Final three.

Speaker 1 I'll take them.

Speaker 2 Unless there's any comments or questions on those so far.

Speaker 1 Keep running on it.

Speaker 2 Okay. This is difficult because I've, just for people's reference, I've got no like visual feedback.
So I'm just like talking to myself.

Speaker 1 We're having a great time. We're loving it.

Speaker 2 Hojicha. So if you like coffee, but you're weaning yourself off, you can go decaf, but also hojicha hojicha is roasted matcha.

Speaker 2 It's got that kind of caramelly chocolatey type taste, but with much lower caffeine, same level of theanine as matcha tea.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 becoming more popular, lovely drink, very, very wholesome, especially in the winter time where you can have it cold, iced.

Speaker 1 So hojicha.

Speaker 2 Using voice notes as a trigger to go outside, either listening to or recording voice notes. I've just set myself a rule where I have to be walking around to send or receive a voice note.

Speaker 2 Just stops me from being a slug at my desk and,

Speaker 2 you know, it just gets me up and out.

Speaker 2 The final one's a little bit long, so I might get that first.

Speaker 1 However.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 I'll steamroll through my last few. Take a photo of the room key slip with your room number on it when you check into a hotel.
Good one.

Speaker 1 Just as you get it, just have your phone up, take a photo of it.

Speaker 1 I've been on tour a lot. I've been through,

Speaker 1 oh, God, 50 or 100 hotels maybe in the last couple of years. And

Speaker 1 especially if you're going back to back-to-back, there is no way you can remember your room number. I've been lost.

Speaker 1 I've had to go back down to not lose my room key, but to just be reminded of what room I'm in.

Speaker 1 That's a particularly embarrassing one so just take a photo of the room key uh uber black xl in america they don't do it in the uk uber black xl is so nice if you're in the states it gets a big escalade or a ford explorer or something with a guy in a suit and it's usually maybe twice the price two and a half times the price of a normal uber so probably not good for big journeys but if you're out with some friends if this is a dicky one from your uh birthday in Miami that he used it's just such a nicer experience if you've got four people four people will go in an Uber X, but it'll be pain.

Speaker 1 An Uber XL, you've still got bags of room. We used two Uber XLs as our tour vans, basically, for all of tour with the soundboard and everything else that we needed to take.

Speaker 1 And then the last one is a quote from Franz Kafka in 1912. And it's basically

Speaker 1 a summation of all of the life hacks that we've ever done. It's a distillation of everything that you need to do in your life.

Speaker 1 So Franz Kafka in 1912, dearest, I beg of of you, sleep properly and go for walks.

Speaker 1 I think it's

Speaker 1 so great.

Speaker 1 That's it. It's a single sentence for how you can probably get most things better in your life.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, everything's better with those two things. Sleep properly and go for walks.
Double do that.

Speaker 2 That's the first entry in his, in his day one that he's looking back on 20 years later and be like,

Speaker 1 still haven't slept properly or gone for enough walks.

Speaker 1 You got anything left?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'll speed through. We're doing a little speed round then.

Speaker 1 Number one

Speaker 1 is I told you about my,

Speaker 1 if I become the Chancellor of the Exchequer, how I would increase the GDP by 3% overnight. I would install large whiteboards in everybody's home.

Speaker 1 So I think just having a large whiteboard always there, there's that line, it's Kidlin's law of

Speaker 1 if you could, if you can state a problem clearly, you've already solved it by 50%.

Speaker 1 And my kind of twist on that is when you have a whiteboard, it's actually 70% because it kind of stays there staring back at you and eats part of your subconscious. That's number one.

Speaker 1 Number two, and I want to make sure that I get a bit of context here because it does sound stupid this one. But let me just test the room.

Speaker 1 One thing I discovered during COVID, I would do a lot of text messages, a lot of voice memos, and a lot of scheduled Zoom calls. How often do you just randomly ring a friend?

Speaker 1 I actually do that quite regularly. You do it quite a bit.
Yeah. Never.
Never.

Speaker 1 And I find myself, and I think there's probably a lot of people that listen to the show that do that as well, where it's like, hey, mate, do you want to chat tomorrow at nine?

Speaker 1 And it's that, you know, that meme of there's two guys, one's trying to stab the other. And it's like me and like one schedule call my entire day.
Versus I will just randomly pick up the phone.

Speaker 1 That's been my thing like this year is to just randomly ring people whenever, like a nutcase and just check in on friends. Cause you just stop doing it.

Speaker 1 And I go, I've not actually had a phone call with a friend for 18 months. What's your pickup rate?

Speaker 1 What's the pickup rate on the calls?

Speaker 1 About 30, 40%. Okay.
Yeah. And then when you factor in dial backs, it's like 70 to 80%.

Speaker 1 And you just end up having conversations that you wouldn't have, and it leads to that kind of deep spirituality. That does create a deep, deep anxiety in Johnny, though.

Speaker 1 It's the reason he doesn't text back too quickly.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, that's a separate conversation.
The hack for the hack. Go on.
Double dial.

Speaker 1 What do you mean? Ring him again straight away. Oh, okay.
And then you leave emergency. That makes it feel like emergency.
Yeah. So if I exactly, so they'll answer.
So if I rang you right.

Speaker 1 Right, but it's not an emergency. But But it doesn't matter.
Right. So you've got to assume one of two things.

Speaker 1 I'm either actually not available, in which case the double dial isn't going to work, or I am available, but I'm busy, which means that the second one just pushes through a threshold to a level of severity that is inappropriate for what you're trying to do.

Speaker 1 And Boy Who Crisis Wolf.

Speaker 2 All you've done there is optimize your pickup rate on the first time you call them, but future times they're going to go, oh, that's double dial Johnny.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Meanwhile, his house is on fire.
Yeah. Okay.
So you're worried about Boy Who Cried Wolf? Because. Okay.
And also,

Speaker 1 I think it's...

Speaker 1 It's more a fun conversation, right? That's the whole game there, is to have more fun. Start me off because you autism

Speaker 1 have fun. I don't need to optimize my conversion rate on a chat before.
But you want to speak to more people, I know, surely. Then you just pick them up.
You can call somebody else.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they'll ring back when you call somebody else. Yeah, just go.
I go on the area manual style. I think this has touched a nerve in you guys.

Speaker 1 I feel like if you're going to ring someone, ring them twice. If you're going to ring them, you want to speak to them.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 ring them again. You're sounding very entitled.

Speaker 1 Well, I think it's entitled to ring someone. I'm going to call you so many times after this.

Speaker 1 If you double dial,

Speaker 1 the point is, right? You ring someone because you're trying to get in touch with them. So act like you're trying to get in touch with them.
But this is not like a formal conversation.

Speaker 1 It's very like, what's up? What's going on? Fine.

Speaker 1 You guys are inferring that if I ring twice, it's an emergency, but I'm just trying to speak to you. Which is the purpose of the first call.

Speaker 1 Always

Speaker 1 be closing. Always be calling.

Speaker 1 Anything else?

Speaker 1 Let's do. I mean, Yusuf mentioned they're going to do some fun ones of just creating your own language.

Speaker 1 No one else speaks.

Speaker 1 So we need subtitles on for the rest of this part. But no, just like changing words.
So Yusuf mentioned not using decision, using the word experiment.

Speaker 1 And you realize, oh, when you use that, you're light on yourself. But also the best part about it is you tell everybody else you run an experiment.
You say, hey, I'm going to move to this place.

Speaker 1 Oh, it's a big decision. Everybody kind of reflexively acts like it's a big decision.
It's Kapil Guts, a stand-up comedian, who goes on stage.

Speaker 1 One version of him immediately apologises after the offensive joke. The crowd picks up on it.
The other version just kind of laughs it through and as what you guys are worried about.

Speaker 1 It's not a big decision.

Speaker 1 Have you considered, though, that there might be some decisions that warrant you taking them seriously and also warrant sort of a serious reception?

Speaker 1 And your making light of it may cause your friends to be a bit more blase than is warranted. Perhaps you shouldn't try and base jump for the first time ever off that cliff.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, I know it's fine. I said it was going to be fine.
So he was having a laugh. Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 1 I'll chat to that about my 20 children I've just had. No, I mean,

Speaker 1 I mean, I mean, that's a little bit of a, I always find these, these conversations a bit like, it's like somebody's so far this way, right?

Speaker 1 Somebody's sort of overthinking like what they're going to order from a dinner menu to then like, oh, maybe don't just have three kids with three different women.

Speaker 1 It's like, it's like the, you know, the classic thing of you have a female friend who says, oh, I don't want to go to the gym, I'm going to get too bulky.

Speaker 1 And it's like, I've been trying that for years and I can't do it with 10 times the testosterone.

Speaker 1 So I don't think you've got to worry about somebody going from not being able, this is specifically for people that are struggling with decisions.

Speaker 1 Like the decisions that are reversible, labeling them as experiments is useful.

Speaker 1 Other one is if I say the word problem, what's the kind of emotional reaction that you get?

Speaker 1 Constriction. Constriction.

Speaker 1 Pain, frustration. If I say the word puzzle, excitement, pain, frustration.

Speaker 1 Yes. I'm working on a new one for the news.
I've been thinking about because the news is just. Because of all of the news that you can see.

Speaker 1 Even I'm going to call it the gel man's, because you know, gel man amnesia. Yeah.
Or the currents or the wrongs. Because it's just trusting me.
Do you remember when you tried to? Do you remember...

Speaker 1 Because you've been doing this for as long as I've known. You've been doing this for nearly eight years now.
Remember when you tried to rename the

Speaker 1 untilet bowl hit P

Speaker 1 that drops on the seat? I didn't try and rename that. I tried to give it a name because it didn't have a name.
Okay.

Speaker 1 What was it? Can you remember the name?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's catchy, right? Okay.

Speaker 1 It's fly-dripping rather than fly-tipping.

Speaker 1 It doesn't have a name. Think about it.
I've got an Amex in there with 16 digits on the front. I haven't been able to recall it.
Must have used it 200 times in the last couple of years.

Speaker 1 I can recall fly dripping.

Speaker 1 The fact that my brain has decided to hook itself into the name for piss on a toilet bowl, but not the 16-digit number which is in between me and maybe getting out of a third world jail cell.

Speaker 1 It's also the name for piss on a toilet bowl that three people in the world would recognize.

Speaker 1 Many more now. Many more now.
Many more now.

Speaker 1 So there's just, I mean, probably a good one to finish on is is

Speaker 1 book recommendations, specifically around language. So there's a book called The Etymologicon, which is where I got a lot of this stuff from.
There's a bloke.

Speaker 1 He's amazing.

Speaker 1 So he has this line in here where he's talking about Milton. And this guy invented the following words, right? This is how...
generative this man was.

Speaker 1 Impassive, obtrusive, jubilant, loquacious, unconvincing, satanic, persona, fragrance, beleaguered, sensors, undesirable, disregard, damp, criticise, irresponsible, lovelorn, exhilarating, sectarian, unaccountable, incidental, and cooking.

Speaker 1 He created all those for his words. So fly-dripping.
You've got to keep churning them out there. Have you seen Shakespeare's equivalent? No.

Speaker 1 Insane. The numbers of words is worth it.
The number of words that Shakespeare created, which are part of common parlance now, is wild. But it's weird.
We just accept language as it is.

Speaker 1 A fun one is from that book is where the word, and it's Christmas related, is where the word turkey comes from. So we think it's basically because it's the, it came from Turkey.

Speaker 1 But interestingly, in Turkey, they call it essentially Hindu, referencing to India. So it didn't come from Turkey and it didn't come from India, but it's this whole chain that exists.

Speaker 1 So Turkey did not come from Turkey. I remember in that book, because I've got the paperback of that same book next to my bed after you recommended it.
And shit comes from German words, is it Scheisen?

Speaker 1 But there's a couple of interesting potential explanations for it. One of them being store high in transit.

Speaker 1 So if you had manure and you were taking it on a ship, you wouldn't want it down low where people could smell it. You'd want it in one of the higher storage units, store high in transit.

Speaker 1 It's one of these situations where I guess you get kind of a Chichillian drift explanation that's culpable but wrong

Speaker 1 because posh is port out starboard home. And it was also to do with the sides of the ship that the upper class were going to be put on.
But store high in transit. Mark Forsyth on the show soon.

Speaker 1 Seth, have you got anything before we leave? Or are you going to join us in saying goodbye in Malaysia?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I wish I could be with you guys, but I'm glad to at least have a seat on the laptop.

Speaker 1 You've been sat on a, you look really comfy. You've been on one of the cushions in the corner for the entire the entire episode.
That's it, ladies and gentlemen. Merry Christmas from us here.

Speaker 1 This is cool to be able to do this again every

Speaker 1 winter time back in Newcastle where we first started doing this podcast. Coming up on eight years ago now.

Speaker 1 Have a good period. Eat everything that you can.
Take some time off and do a little bit of reading and review in between now and the new year. I know it's super duper intense, but I think it's a

Speaker 1 if used right, it's a really nice period. I know some people get sad around this time of the year, but it's the shortest day of the year just went, 21st.

Speaker 1 So it's like typical stuff gets dark and then it gets lighter. So

Speaker 1 I hope that our touchy feely life hacks and lessons has kept you appropriately festive. I know all of us except for Yusuf, because he's selfish and in a different country.

Speaker 1 We dressed up appropriately. So anything to say? Or are we done? We're done.
Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas.
Give some love to your family members.

Speaker 1 Or if you're in Malaysia, family member, family member.

Speaker 1 Excellent. Merry Christmas, everyone.
Merry Christmas. Unreal.
Let's go. Woo!

Speaker 1 When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best books, the most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting.

Speaker 1 But there wasn't a list of them. So I scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own.
And then I made a list of 100 of the best books that I've ever found.

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Speaker 1 That's chriswillx.com/slash books.