#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. It is a Christmas special.
For those of you who have only joined the show over the last year or the last few years, you might not recognize this room, and it is my old living room in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where we first started the show, joined by Johnny Nusef from Propane Fitness and George Mack, stopping off en route from Glasgow to Manchester, of course. This is a Life Hacks, Lessons from 2024, and Best New Year's Resolutions episode.
So if you haven't seen these, we'll go around in a circle coming up with whatever we've discovered over the last year, and then the rest of us will rip it apart or say that it's good, and maybe there'll be some ideas for you for what you can implement going into the new year. Also, if you haven't done a New Year's review, the exact template that I use and have crafted very delicately over the last decade or so is available right now for free at chriswillx.com slash review.
That's tradition. Something else which is tradition is you getting hot potato and going first.
Hot potato. A festive potato for you.
Festive potato. Jonathan Watson, what have you got for us is it life hacks first it is so my life hack is a ninja creamy so happy you said that really i've got i thought you have you i've got one you've just been thinking about getting one i think hasn't got one yet it's what's a ninja creamy do you know what one is it's educate me it's um it basically what

i use it for is making ice cream from a protein shake it's brilliant so like skimmed milk what do you what do you use it for the same thing or berries i imagine you have berries in yours uh actually no uh mine has been low sugar high protein ice cream made with the exact protein powder that i want right so pretty much the same thing that you're doing yeah do you put topping in it uh so i've encountered a problem with that which is when you you have to make up the mixture and then put it in the freezer for it to freeze the issue is the viscosity of the liquid when you put it in the freezer versus the viscosity of the liquid when it becomes ice cream is different so if you put chocolate chips in they all just sink to the bottom and create a layer what's your solution well you put them on after you've so you you creamy it and then you you what sorry i'm just writing instruction you do what i don't see George. It doesn't look like you're making notes.
It looks like you're trying to make fun of me, George. Go on.
You cream it. Cream it.
And then once it's creamy, there's a mix-in button. Oh! Have you not encountered that? If I'm being completely honest, it's not me that uses it.
Oh, God. What a bougie problem.
So this is to distribute the chocolate chips throughout the height of the ice cream, rather than all at the bottom like a screwball, or all at the top like a... Like a topping.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but it is a topping.
So you make it first, and then once it's turned into ice cream... You add the shit that you want to mix.
A little bit of topping and then press mix in or,

I think it's called mix in, or mix again.

Okay.

What is the best recipes that you've come up with?

I think white chocolate and raspberry.

Whey.

From?

Perform.

It's like P.

Just focus, carry on.

It's like P and then the number four RM or something like that. How many scoops? Two.
Always two. With? Skim milk.
How much? 350 ml. 400 ml is what you want to use because that takes you up to the limit, the limit line.
It's just not quite, the ratio is not quite right. Sometimes a banana improves the texture.
texture interesting have you been able to get the sort of gelatinous stickiness that you want that's something that i've struggled do you like it to be more sticky or less a little sticky a little more sticky i think that's about how long it's frozen for xanthan gum i've heard i don't want to get involved with that stuff i feel like that's a whole other variable to manage yeah it's how much xanthan gum well you just experiment wouldn't you but think how long it's going to want to get involved with that stuff. I feel like that's a whole other variable to manage.
Yeah.

It's how much xanthan gum.

Well, you'd just experiment, wouldn't you?

But think how long it's going to take to get that right.

That's true.

Because you've got something that works sort of 80% now. Exactly.

Okay.

So white chocolate performed.

White chocolate and raspberry whey.

Yep.

With raspberries and white chocolate chips as the topping mixed in.

So good.

It's like 40 grams of protein.

A little bit more if you include the milk like 400 calories it's brilliant and you see one of those off in one go yeah dessert lunch until you're not running it usually usually like last meal of the day that's pretty dialed so good that's very good i'm a big ninja i mean ninja are just between the air fryers all of the air fryers they've got they've got this air fryer crispy thing now which is a glass tray at the bottom so you can see how it sort of crisps and you can make lasagnas you know where you have that sort of the filtering on the top oh i've not got an air fryer do you have an air fryer imagine that seems like yeah I should get one, shall I you have one george yes but i never used it you really value culinary appliances that allow you to eat low calorie foods and make them nice so i think an air fryer would be high value do you know what i think i value more than that slow cooker something that allows me to see whatever it produces as one serving ideally in a container so what i think what i like about it i can't have more or less than it i just eat the whole thing and i don't have to worry about like how many scoops of this should i have do you not eat the whole thing yeah okay that's that's chris's way of life eat the whole thing so it's a saurine kilo of yogurt uh i think an air fryer for you, I mean, this isn't even one of mine,

but I think an air fryer for you

would be nothing short of life-changing.

What would I use it for?

Do you ever eat steak at home?

Yeah, but not like regularly though.

But would you-

I have an Indra creamy every day.

Okay, would you eat steak at home

if you could have from frozen

amazing steak in 20 minutes?

Is that your best suggestion, a steak?

It's fucking unbelievable for steak, yeah. Yeah.
This is a Peterson hack. As a woman who eats a lot of steak, she knows how to cook a steak.
If that's all you're eating. Yeah, which I am.
So it's important. All right.
I like that. Ninja Creamy.
So you're not having creamies. That's a past.
That's a previous Chris thing. Correct.
Got it. But what have you got this is ernie actually is it fuck i misgendered him thank you george so i've i've chosen this suit to introduce the most kind of serious point of the podcast but i've been doing a lot of walking and journaling and reflecting and i've actually been tuning an ai model using a few kind of different database structures to identify the optimal categorization method for life hacks and you're doing it again what i've come down to is physical and digital so you said this the exact same thing actually last year it was a team of operational analysts and yeah but i think we're getting closer to the same conclusion yeah same it was great what a relief increase the compute and still hit the same wall so the physical life hack is to use things that annoy you like mild irritations throughout the day as gratitude triggers so you wake up in the morning 7 a.m you hear a siren going past you like bloody hell like i'm sure five minutes more sleep and that's a gratitude trigger for that could have been me in the ambulance or like you could be even the driver of the ambulance still pretty rubbish having to drive an ambulance at seven in the morning or you could be in the back of the ambulance it's like okay there's a little switch you encounter someone who's a bit of a dick to you at the checkout in a shop or whatever and you go they're being a dick because they're miserable at their job they're having a bad time i can go home and eat my sushi and pot of mango or whatever they they have to be on shift.
So just having that little flip has been really valuable. I've been trying to think of something that you couldn't do that with, but I'm struggling.
I'm sure there's loads, yeah. But I guess it's how flexible do you want to be? What are you trying to have empathy for the other person? Or are you trying to sort of do inversion on yourself what are you prioritizing both are good effects of that aren't they i think it's it's like a nice side effect to have just be be more happy yeah it's pretty pro-social i like that okay uh this is one from george's uh birthday this year Miami, uh, which Dickie Bush decided to do.

And it's Uber Black XL. So Uber Black XL, I don't know whether, I don't know how available it is

in the UK, but especially in America and probably in the biggest cities in the UK,

you can order, you know, a seven person Escalade with a driver that's always dressed quite nice

and formally. And it's basically you having a private driver, but you just order it know a seven person escalade with a driver that's always dressed quite nice and formally and it's basically you having a private driver but you just order it on uber and it's about maybe two to three times the cost of a normal uber so it's you know special occasions only for the most part but the way that you feel when you get into it when you get out of it is lovely and the experience is easily three times nicer than being in the back of someone's kiae.
Especially in America, this is a big America problem because it's less expensive, it's less more expensive in America and the depths that your normal Uber X can descend to in America as you learned firsthand this year, it's like the back of some Nissan Altima, the 30-year-old, you're sticking to the seat. It can go really low.
So if you've had a tough day and you want to treat yourself, a journey home in a blue Uber Black XL is nice if you're out on a date and you sort of want to make something feel a little bit nicer. Big fan.
Why do you think the standard of cars in America is generally higher higher is it more of a it's lower is it that the is it bimodal because i've like you're saying that the some ubers go very low correct in america the uk doesn't seem i think americans generally have lower standards for what they keep their cars to if anybody's got a small dink in the uk it's almost immediately taken i've got a small dink you're always complaining about it as well i know it's terrible but you take it to the like chop or whatever and you get it fixed most people would uh indeed i need to get my dink fixed actually yeah i'll come back with an xl make it bigger black xl uh i think i think it's a i mean you you've you've been a a big proponent of that as well like using uber black excel yeah yeah i think um this is a highbrow in in dubai for example all the ubers are essentially lexuses they're all beautiful it's only when i was in the uk or the us experiencing uber do you realize sometimes you could be going 70 miles an hour and it's more dangerous to be out the car than in the car right yeah because in dubai i feel like i was always like a mercedes veto person in a suit so but is that that's just a dubai thing yeah right yeah i've had some shockers when i in one i had in munich where he just went rogue when Was trying to go to the petrol station, was going like different stop-offs, was texting. And then when I said, hey, can you not text on your phone? He just threw his phone against the window and then just started speeding faster and faster.
Wow. And I thought, you should have paid the 20%.
Was it you where someone was trading? What was it? He was trying to show you a video. Yeah.
So we were in one uber and we're on a huge highway and i'm at the back and i just go what's he doing on his phone because sometimes he may be doing a whatsapp or anything like that and i look and he was there was like trading charts on and he was shorting the japanese yen nice like mid driving mid drive And I said, what are you doing? So yeah, you may face them shorting the Japanese yen nice like mid driving mid drive and i said what what are you doing um so yeah you may face them shorting the japanese yen i had an uber driver in croatia who had like a like mini seizures while driving and i couldn't work out whether it was like just something that happened to him all the time or whether it was serious but he was like having a seizure and like pressing the accelerator as he was seeing so we we were like, we were coming up towards traffic and the car would like lunge and then brake, but he just didn't acknowledge it at all. He's the opposite of the, of the guy that we had in Iceland.
So driving back the final, the final coach out of the blue lagoon in Iceland, because the alternative was to stay there for nine and a half thousand pounds for the night and some hurricane level winds were coming in and we managed to make it onto this bus and we're at the back of the bus and it's tilting up onto what feels like just its side wheels because of the strength of the breeze coming along johnny's solution which was fucking genius actually at the time was i'm gonna go up to the front and look at the bus driver and if he's not concerned we shouldn't be concerned hands at the bottom of the wheel because for him it's just retracted him it's just wednesday afternoon another day another day graph it was the worst storm that iceland had seen in several years as well i think just that year that guy is a source of inspiration to he's jocko as jocko was a bus driver all right you're up i'm coming in hard so like lily phillips jesus christ um the kale algorithm so this is a custom built life hack which i can put in the comment section but me and chris have had these debates for years that whether the platforms will ever change so you have control over your own algorithm and i've been convinced it's going to happen but i kind of sat there waiting for years for it to happen and particularly my i don't know where your weakness is where your achilles heel is in terms of digital platforms. Mine is YouTube

by far. And the most frustrating thing is YouTube is the library of Alexandra.
You have all the

world's knowledge. And if like Marcus Aurelius, Julius Caesar would trade everything to have

access, not only to the best library, but then it turned into this magical video format where you

can watch anything, teach yourself anything. And every day I would turn up to that library

I'm sorry. not only to the best library, but then it turned into this magical video format where you can watch anything, teach yourself anything.

And every day I would turn up to that library

and I'd get distracted by fights

and fentanyl in the car park, right?

That was my YouTube experience.

Oh, Logan Paul's done what?

Coffeezilla's going to expose him for what shit point?

Click, click.

And I remember once I went on the, and this is is a if you want to stare into the abyss and have the abyss stare back into you go youtube.com and press history and just scroll through some of the things that you've watched and i went through quickly like the last maybe 100 videos i've watched and about 80 of them were them were regrettable in hindsight. So I had the best library of all time, and I was watching absolute shite.
So what was interesting though, I looked at the videos I did enjoy and the videos that I didn't enjoy in hindsight, and you could have built this whole complex algorithm, but there was one simple thing that the videos I did enjoy and didn't enjoy had between them.

And it was over 30 minutes long. Any video that seemed to be over 30 minutes long, for the most part, I enjoyed in hindsight.
And any video under 30 minutes long, I, for the most part, didn't enjoy. And I think there's something about the monkey brain that if you see a 15 minute expose on Logan Paul's new NFT debacle, it's like, oh, I can do that.
But if it's a two and a half hour one, it's a bit harder. A bit more discerning.
It's a bit harder to justify. So is the conclusion to watch like a 45 minute fentanyl in the car park? Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
I waste more time. So the conclusion.
Dash cam compilations from Russia i did i tried that but the problem is you go on youtube.com thumbnail title you just don't have the willpower um like

imagine if you had a social media feed right and they just showed you porn like constantly you

would end up watching a lot more porn as a result so it's not necessarily about discipline it's about

preventing that coming on in the first place.

So what I built was,

I built a script that removes any videos under 30 minutes.

And it's now the full KL algorithm.

And I've gone from about 80% of my YouTube time,

I regret,

to 80% of my YouTube time is now enjoyable.

What's the script running on?

So you want to download a Chrome extension

called Tapper Monkey. And then...
Oh, I ahead i've got a couple of things i want to challenge you on about this but so you then i built the code using claude or chat gpt and i can share the code with people you put it in and it's permanently there now so i no longer see any video under 30 minutes long and you go on my my feed now and it's just like gletcher stand-up comedian cool documentary does that not mean though that you waste more time because the regret is about the video but there's no regret about how long you spent watching the video no because well there's a i'm sure if you looked at your youtube time right there's a difference in quality of things that you watch yeah but usually i'm doing it instead of doing something else so it's rare that i like find myself on my phone and then 30 minutes later i'm like oh i'm so glad i watched that but that might be because of this exact thing but that assumes that the thing that i was i wasn't doing because of youtube wasn't more important that's fair there's always some kind of opportunity cost trade-off. But for me, so this is particularly on desktop, and I would use YouTube end of the day as an alternative to TV.
And that's where versus, yeah, I agree. The kind of two minute quick scroll is different.
That's the cocaine algorithm. Yeah.
Yeah. There's a couple of ways you can get one step upstream of that.
So there's a native thing on YouTube where you disable the, it might be watch history or one of these features where it means that when you log onto YouTube, it's just a blank screen. You just have the search bar.
You've done that on the profane one. And now I never procrastinate with YouTube.
Like it just doesn't, because you have to then actively like, oh, what am I going to search for? Rather than having stuff like pushed onto you. The problem with that though is there's still value i find in the algorithm serving randomness okay so you want you want the upside of the yes i want the upside of the randomness and the optionality without logan paul in that case you're trying to like fine tune it the other thing that you can do is and i think we talked about this last year using readwise or reader to establish that past Georgeorge is the only one who can determine what current george is going to watch so you're not allowed to consume any media unless it's on your to read list or to watch list and you've made that decision ahead of time so that you've made the decision when you're in a position of strength not when you're like oh i'm not kidding it's 9 p.m and i just want to just to find a potential problem with that a lot of the time you know how in three months i'm gonna have all of this white space on my calendar i'll agree to that i really want to watch this thing i'm sure that me tomorrow will want to watch it i'm not convinced that me yesterday is the best yes adjudicator of actually what i want to watch so the problem there is you end up with like a huge queue of stuff and then you are none of which you think is interesting but because you now don't have to pay the price you tomorrow has to consume it you kick the can down it's like it's irrelevant thing looking in the fridge and you're like i've got we've got no food in the house at all and actually like there's loads of food but it's like lettuce and a bit of not stuff you want and yeah you basically want an algorithm that's working nearer towards what your goals are and your long-term intents are but it's not just purely like boring educational shit like if there's like long-form comedy on there like long-form comedy podcasts i enjoy those way more but there's something about the the shortness of it and i think having that pre-built in to remove it my sister little life hack to this um is also an email if anybody has um but just set up a filter that if it has unsubscribe in the email, it goes to a separate inbox.
And then you scroll through that and you've reduced about 80% of your email clutter. So just putting those systems in place is useful.
Gmail has that automatically, doesn't it? Gmail has that automatically with the promotions. It does.
Loads of them still slip through, yeah. All right, Johnny, you're up.
this is linked to what you were saying chris about um waking up at night the so there's two two hacks in one one is um audible on a so i mask one airpod 30 minute timer on audible audiobook it's life hack one life hack two is audible have like similar to a netflix original like an audible original some of them are in dolby atmos so it's like a film being read out which is the most immersive thing i've ever heard how immersive can it be with one airpods in well because the other one's other one's pressed do you find that you turn that you you can just go full like monk mode and stay there because i'm a even if you roll over though even if even if you roll over it's just one ipod it's fine you're asleep it doesn't matter the third life hack is red rising the red rising series but the uh immersive audio version phenomenal so good so fucking fancy so That to Fall fall asleep it's a series by pierce brown pierce brown um really sci-fi sci-fi series the most addictive set of novels but they've redone it as a movie in your mind and uh yeah helps get to sleep dolby atmos full audio cast you know they're not just saying what's going on back and forth to each other they're fully acting it out the sound effect yeah beautifully soundscaped it's awesome it's brilliant i'm glad i'm glad you like so that to fall asleep and if you wake up at night like stick an airpod in i'm just because you just immediately especially with racing thoughts just immediately in another world manta eye masks make a bluetooth eye mask do they that is built for you to for to sleep on i have a pair of headphones called like phillips something that like called sleep snoozees or some shit they're just not very good but they're just not airpods are they yeah just one airpod in like because you can have you can have your head against the pillow with the side of the airpod in still doesn't wake you up i worry a little bit about like what it's doing to me it's the sort of thing I think you stuff would worry me about if i spoke to him about it too much but it's non-ionizing radiation like is that airpod talking to the airpod that's over there and like cooking my brain in the process and there was a chenobel ear yeah yeah i mean it's already going through i mean i've only got one in so is that okay who knows is it okay am i less concerned about bluetooth earphones as far as like emf exposure i think there are other things somebody shared an airpod thing where it was like the communication between one airpod and another is yeah through your head yeah but i think like but as medical advice you're saying that's fine the problem is it's you've got to pick your baffles haven't you it's like air quality water quality plastic exposures you know receipts like receipts so for me it's like don't microwave plastic and don't be an idiot drive with your seatbelt on drive with your seatbelt on and get any dinks in your car yeah sorted first straight away i like that just to add another one on there from life hacks four years ago uh you can bulk buy your audible every year can you so you don't need to monthly. You can pay yearly, annual, and you'll get all of your credits up front, and it's cheaper.
That's brilliant. Was that a life hack? I should really pay more attention.
We've just done a lot. I mean, I reckon we've done a thousand life hacks.
That's like top tier, though. You'll save probably 30 or 40%, and you get all of your credits immediately.
So you don't have to wait until next month. If you've got a bunch of books or you're on holiday and you want to download four, you've got all of your credits for the next 12 months ready to go.
Does Red Rising stop being good? Because there's like, there's several books, right? I'm on book six or seven now. I can't remember which one it is.
I'm still still going. Everyone that I know.
Same story behind. Yep.
Same protagonist. Wow.
And everyone that I know that's got onto it is hot. I think it crossed a point of like, when they're in the mind at the beginning, I'm like, it's a little bit dull.
As soon as you get out. And then he's out and he's like, oh my God, this is, you can see how it's just this world.
It's huge. Book two and book three are just obsessive.
So Red Rising, you should go and download it even if you don't graphic audio whatever it's called yes there's a good rule of thumb fiction before bed is amazing it's kind of like my mind thing right yeah out of your own head you're not thinking about your problems good very good all right seth there's the heuristic of what can i remove you know automate, then delegate. But there's also what am I already doing or using that I could be using better? So a few examples would be like, I'm already spending the time meditating in the mornings.
Like how can I make that time more effective? Or I'm already sleeping seven hours a night. How can I improve the quality of that? I'm already, you know, everyone everyone's seen someone exercising in the gym like every time you go to the gym and they're there and they're just kind of like and they're like texting and just swinging their arms around not really doing anything you're like they're taking all of the steps to get the result but wasting the actual critical time in there but this also applies to um the decision of like do i add something or do i just make what i'm already doing better take get more use out of that squeeze the lemon so rather than adding in like a a red light box and additional supplements and all this kind of stuff it's like well what am i doing already we often get clients that ask us like oh what's a good bit of software for this or what's a good software for this and you're like well what are you already using and you like 80% of the time the software stack that they're already using does the thing that they're looking for but they're just looking for the next thing and so I'm always on about tick tick but like the deeper I go with more I'm like, oh, actually like there's no point looking for any other app to solve any of these other problems.
Because if you just really like dive into TickTick and now my, my referral, my referrals are so much that I've got an account until like 2067 or something. So now i'm just like lifetime believer of tick tick um so yeah like and as i've applied this in the last few weeks whenever i've like found myself trying to solve a problem i always take a pause and go hang on what in what we already have what software already paying for what tools we already have can do the thing have you example? So this is a niche one, but we were looking for a way to convert Twitter threads or X threads into carousels.
And I was looking at new bits of software and actually like we already use Hypefury for scheduling tweets and they have a built-in thing for this. But I think it's just the natural habit of like wow what's the shiny new thing something

new to solve this problem as opposed to looking where you already are what's your what's your one of um you don't need new lessons you need to relearn your old ones yeah i mean most of the stuff that you already that most of the answers to problems you have now you already know and you probably learned five years ago so the ironically we were talking about this just before the episode and last year on this episode, that life is a spiral curriculum and the back on your, yeah, you look on your journals from when you were like 19 and even you think it was your 19, like idiot self was still telling you the same thing. It's the same problems, isn't it? Same problems over and over.
The day one feature of like today, a year ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, and you're writing about the same fucking problem. Well, you're the same person.
That's why. Like the common thread between all of that is you and lots of stuff changes on the surface, but fundamentally the same challenges that you have, the same emotions that come up, the same worries and concerns you do.
You go, oh my God, so much has changed in life. You know, I'm a dad now, I'm in a different country now, a different career now, whatever it might be.
And you go, you're still the same person. So- Experiencing the same things.
uh all all right my next one one that we've done a long long time ago but continues to pay huge dividends clip the curtains together in hotel rooms using the trouser hanger i challenge anybody to take me on with that you get into a hotel room and these curtains for no reason i've got you know a three inch or a two inch gap between them and you've tried to sort of do that weird thing where you push them and see and then they sort of settle and they settle a bit better sometimes and you're like oh is that good should i leave it and you go i'm gonna go again you do it and it's further apart you're like fuck uh set of trouser hangers from the uh wardrobe pin it at the top if you you've got two trouser hangers, one, two, and then three, four at the bottom, pitch black, beautiful. Why not just wear an eye mask? You could, but sometimes even with an eye mask, you're rolling around, it comes off a little.
It's just, I think you should always optimize for environment first and then other stuff second. Technically, the light receptors on the skin will also turn.
I think about all the will also the back of your knee can actually wake up so that's that and then i guess the other one which is related to sleep i spent a lot of time on the road again this year a lot of time in hotels um good pillow bad bed good night's sleep bad pillow good bed bad night's sleep basically the pillow is the most important thing pillow is the most important thing. Sure, I've seen that in Confucius.
Pillow's the most important thing because it's the most sort of obvious experience of you interacting with the bed is whether or not it's this sort of... Don't you know what those ones that...
Yeah. I mean, you're semi-dial.
My fucking sleeping or drowning here. And yeah, that's's it pin the curtains together in a hotel bedroom and optimize for uh better pillows and the way you can do that what you want to do is find what pillow do you like and then how available is it on amazon prime worldwide and then if you can find one that you like that's available available like that, and it isn't an insane price, you can add, you know, 25 pounds or whatever onto a stay, but improve your sleep quality by maybe 30 minutes or an hour a night by just ordering a pillow to the hotel.
You get in, you're like, ah, fuck, it's one of the ones. Get the order done next day, get a good night's sleep.
There's a Kelly Sturette thing, like a piece of advice from years ago ago where if you lie on the mattress and you bend one leg the mattress is the wrong like level of turgidity so like if you you that's like you're going into extension so you bend you bend one leg to get out of extension yeah and i think that's if the mattress is too hard that that's the thing so with the pillow versus mattress thing i could sleep with no pillow but if the mattress is bad i wake up and i'm like tight your kelly starrett hack with pillows has changed my life as well wow it won't even be a life using the towel roll i think it's from a it'll be from like a 2017 life hacks or something it's back when it was like phone video kelly starrett on youtube is it the towel roll thing that's and it's it's lying like it's it's like tucking your shoulder back and then the towel sits here and then you everything's i followed that but i just put another pillow in between the two top arms so the pillows are crossed no so one's behind my head and then i turn over to like spoon pregnancy pillow but it's not for the legs because i found that if i had one too hot it just disrupt if you've got you've got this Brazilian jujitsu, you know, like sweep the legs and then pull it up and over. If anyone that uses a pregnancy pillow consistently, very impressive, but you can't move side to side.
So normal pillow. G, what you got? My one relates to, you mentioned then being on the road.
Big thing for myself this year again, have an office i'm often working from hotels coffee shops and things like that and the combination of the boyata portable laptop stand with the apple magic keyboard and the apple magic mouse so a few points on this number one this is a bit tony robbins but my kind of contrarian take on the world right now if i sit in that peter teal interview one of my contrarian takes that i give is is that it's very on brand very good solid um the contrarian take right now is if you had to picture a depressed person's body language in your head what do they look like slouched over real contrarian yeah slouched over hunched where's their eyes down and people are spending eight to ten hours a day like that whether it's on their laptop or on their phone so the boyata stand means that the laptop's raised like perfectly in front of you like that your shoulders are back on the mouse and you go once you go to that you can't go back look at everybody else you go how are you spending two hours in this depressed posture it's like we've spoken about this previously that i think a non-sig or a significant amount of people being uh miserable is just being in resting serious face versus resting smile face i thought about that and resting serious body yes so i i presented at the international posture summit here we go and uh come right up next to me in the orinal there come on don't you know you've seen this uh no been lily phillips well so this is uh there is a study that shows that your posture impacts how much you believe your own thoughts which is interesting so like not so much mood and you know power pose and testosterone cortisol ratio has kind of been difficult to to re um reproduce in the results but believing your own thoughts so if you're sat up burrata stand what does he call it boyata boyata cheese in it burrata yeah i've got a couple of delicious so yeah but my my um take with that is you've seen the um is it jonathan height who did the whole anxious mind he says since 2008 anxiety has gone through the roof and it lines up with social media obviously that's i think had a factor but that's well discussed however it also lines up with everyone's head being down their eyes being down and shoulders hunched over posture pilled yeah no i'm a i'm a big fan of it i will say you're the height that you have it at and the closeness that you have your laptop to yourself i would come down the stairs when we were both living in the colton house in austin and you don't see a person what you see what you see is this massive macbook like this and because it's spread out as well it's covering his entire body and then this just a set of airpod pro max is poking out the top you know george is behind there somewhere it's terrible for day game if want to, if you want to pick up girls at the coffee shop, you can't do any keynote escalation. It's good for network.
The amount of people go, he must be hardcore. What does he do? He's loved it.
Meanwhile, he's reading David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity with ChatGPT opening game. For the 52nd time.
Fuck. All right.
Should we do a lesson? Bring it a lesson oh my god yes fine are we out of hacks

now no we can go back okay so i've got two micro hacks but we can do one more round of trying to come in well more round of i can do another hack let's do another round of hacks i know that i had another hack chambered ready to go fire it but now it's made me question my hack the hack i've picked don't worry i am worrying though i'm gonna say walking pad have we done that before walking pad walking pad it's like a both just like yeah exactly so you need a standing desk and then it's a treadmill that's like you can't run on i mean i've never tried but it says don't run on it. So I figure like probably best to listen.

Is that why you stopped running?

Exactly.

Yeah.

But just that as a way of, you just do like two hours of work while on that.

You forget that you're on it.

And I think it's like 2,000 steps every, like maybe 4,000 steps an hour.

Can't be 4,000 an hour.

Why?

Oh no, no, it could be.

Yeah, you know, at that pace.

Yeah, probably about 4,000 an hour. Because you thought that was too many.
I originally, but now I've repurposed. Realize you're wrong.
Yeah, I am. Walking pad.
And what kind of pace? Because do you ever get to a pace where you're going too fast and you can't go straight quickly? Yeah. The classic type A problem.
Then you're like, all I'm doing now is walking. Looking at my screen.
Yeah. Trying not to just slightly miss the walking pad and walk

into the computer what what types of work a sorry what speed have you found useful and then what

types of work have you found 3.5 3.5 and that miles kilometers it's just what it says on the

screen you've both got the same one right i think we might have this similar one we have the same

one right but your legs are longer.

Doesn't matter.

I would imagine you walk quicker than these two.

Does that matter?

We're talking about preferences here.

But it actually means they're walking a little bit more quickly. The question was, what speed have you found?

You all like the same speed.

Don't ask me my preference and then tell me that I'm wrong.

You're going to litigate me out of it again.

Tie me up. So yeah, 3..5 next question on what type of work uh so you would think it needs to be like email or but it can be anything it i think it just helps you just drop into whatever you're doing but there's that thing about uh when you're on a show when you're on a phone call that's getting intense you stand up and start walking around because we're meant to locomote while we think i'm i'm picturing you alan partridge style with like a bluetooth headset on short shorts going 100k it's going to sky i once heard a story of um you know so aria manuel that's you can't see it it's not that bad um ari emmanuel who ari gold was based off on entourage so they own the ufc w wwe he's like the apex lawyer um in america for entertainment and he's heavily dyslexic so he just spends all day on the phone rather than doing anything that would uh use dysia, I guess.
And I knew somebody who was in the office walking past his room and he's on a full incline treadmill with like speaker on just saying, fuck him, fuck him for another a million. Fuck him for another million.
We're not moving until we fuck him for another million. That's the gateway drug, isn't it? He's gradually.
That's where you're going to be, 12 months time. Oh, the R-L-L-A-N-C-A.

A sister to your one is I found when I was in America, because of the time zones reversed, I'd wake up at 6am and you've already got so many bits of work that you have to do. you have such a high cortisol state going on my phone incline treadmill and then just working for

the first 30 minutes replying to messages and emails meant that the core of work that you have to do so you have such a high cortisol state going on my phone incline

treadmill and then just working for the first 30 minutes replying to messages and emails meant that the cortisol in the morning is then getting counterbalanced by used the incline treadmill yeah i knew a guy who you've met him actually who would do cardio and just have tiktok on like autoplay because he said it made 45 minutes just does work which is probably terrible only allowing social

only allowing social media usage

when you're doing incline cardio is actually that's not bad but but like purposefully doing social media usage because you're an incline cardio it feels like you end up fitter but also a bit like yeah it's weak do you find because steve jobs famously used to only do walking meetings or a lot of walking meetings have you found doing it for meetings useful or do you not want to be that guy i mean johnny used to try and record podcasts whilst going on so i was going to say that it's not really the audience to say like well i think i did better podcasting because chris is quite good at podcasting but i think it's you produce a better podcast while walking apart from the sound apart from the sound but who cares about the sound yeah meetings are the only thing i would struggle with for some reason i think because you just feel like you know i'm that guy walking on the meeting very much depends what sort of a meeting it is as well you know like if it's if it's you just okay you like recap me on this way it's you know it's kind of sort of standard stuff okay like here we go i'll have a little plod and if it's a really serious meeting and you're the only one walking and you're the one being really serious like the art of like perfectly level walking so you only your legs are moving but you're just squat jog i think you'd have a little bit of shift uh what brand did you go for don't know but i do know it's out of stock but if you go on that's two great things if you go on amazon but they cancel each other out don't they it doesn't matter if you go on amazon and search walking pad walking about any of them they range from i think you try to find like a bean one didn't you for like 50 60 quid up to like 300 quid 200 300 quid get you a good one all right saf you're up great product promo there well i don't know don't know what it is and they can raise well yeah 50 quid maybe so this is also to springboard off your and your hack which is just to only do voice notes while i'm walking so it's just to get me out the house because i know that if i got a desk pad it would enable my screen time and i'd be doing it more and so dickie bush who um twice now chris mentioned him before uh there we go double dickie so he just said don't do any work that at your desk that could be done walking and that includes like emails voice notes and to to be honest like most writing now with gpt you can just dump a bunch of words into an audio file and i mean if you get a walking pad it's all work isn't it it's all work but then you're just at your desk you're still walking time so what is it that you're looking for to get outside to get outside or have environment change and you can now walk with airpods in talking to yourself and people no longer think you're a nutter it's great because they think you might be on a call yeah that's not bad good all right um which one am i going to choose next last year i said year, I'm going to say Beartooth, and it's going to make you very happy that I finally come around to listening to Beartooth. Really phenomenal.
Most recent album, they just put out the London blog, the song at the end that we had and the tune that was threaded throughout. Shout out to Caleb, the front man who sent me the stems from the track.
So he sent me the track broken up into its individual component parts so he could really really dial that in that was very kind of him to do and uh i just that they were my top play track of this year i felt like important that's alive alive you hit attention yep of course so good bit mincy compared but it's all right no good that whole album's that whole album's fantastic it only came out in october and i think they still managed to get into my spotify wrapped so place of uh i'll do i'll do another one given that that one was just music uh mitchum deodorant so luke got me onto this last year and uh there is no deodorant that's anywhere near as good.

This isn't just like the smell of it is fantastic.

The price of it's great.

The quality doesn't leave any white marks.

And everyone's sort of looking for what's the best sort of deodorant.

I'm not fucking medieval peasant.

I don't use roll on deodorant, but spray Mitchum.

And they also have in every boots of UK airports, they'll have the travel size. so you can actually take a 50 mil travel throw that in your bag pretty sick mitchum and bear tooth so what's good about it smells good doesn't leave any white marks and you don't sweat it just seems to be all the boxes it's yeah and as of yet most of them have a lingering smell like dove dove deodorant you can smell somebody wearing it from like fucking a few miles away and i don't like that it's like it basically odorless but does the job so unbeatable naughty naughty speaking of naughty my one is not naughty it's a prompt for ai so either chat gpt claude whatever your that's actually a lifehawk within itself is to be an absolute llm whole yeah if you can um is the following prompt so do you know the elon musk quote it's around how to learn it's essentially this idea that you want to view knowledge as a semantic tree so you start at the roots then you then you go up to the trunk, then you have the branches, then you have the secondary branches, then you have the leaves.
Whereas often the way we'll approach things is, oh, I want to learn about the heart. I'll just put on this random Andrew Huberman podcast with the specialist about the heart and just kind of hop in.
But you don't have any of the roots or anything there so you never actually retain any information whereas when you treat knowledge as a semantic tree you work all the way up from the base and and then all the way there and a big realization this year was it's kind of a bit of a deutsch concept but essentially this idea that the only thing the only bottleneck that really exists is knowledge um and then you look at okay you have all these great people who are self-taught so you can just teach yourself from nicola tesla to leonardo da vinci you have access to the alphabet so you can understand any concept with words you have access to numeracy which is only 10 digits but you can access you can understand any with numbers. Therefore, the only bottleneck to literally every single thing in your life, skill issue, knowledge.
So placing that into Cord or ChatGPT, and you realize I can learn anything starting from there. So you start with the, you say the specific Elon quote, and you say, teach me about X, but start with the roots and then work all the way up and don't move to the next layer until I say I understand.
And you're constantly just moving up and you realize, oh, I can literally teach myself anything. This is a nice development from your last year's one, which was treat me like a total idiot and start at zero until I say I understand.
Yes. And then go to step one and then step two the step here is to really then you can then just move it into like a mind mapping software and literally just build the tree yourself then you have that semantic tree in your head of all the interweaving parts big mistake that i made when studying medicine was not doing that earlier you have to have like a framework or a skeleton to be able to hang concepts on otherwise you are just learning raw data and it's so difficult there's nothing connected and you're just memorizing like you did at school you're never actually understanding there's like a tipping point yes if you just brute force raw dog enough data eventually you'll start to see the coalescing parts kind of join the dots but it's not a fun way to do it here it's going is there something you've used that for recently um

i started yesterday with longevity so i'm going because that's a topic that i've always wanted to learn about but i just kick the can down the road because i'm like where do i even begin so i started with that um try with any kind of topic that will come up now i will just what you for For the Lm non-monogamous out there what do you use each platform for have you found certain things are better on certain i mean there's a huge asterisk here that this will be outdated by tomorrow because it's constantly literally yesterday they released the new um the new o version um and then you have x now getting the it's like three times the number of super um computer clusters with the grok ai that's going to go live so me right now i vary between claude and chat gpt but i would be shocked if next year i'm saying the exact same thing yeah it seems like google is google's great yeah the new grok one now where you can be on twitter and ask grok to explain things to you Grok has way fewer bottlenecks it's way less politically correct as well it has access to Twitter's live data it's being updated much more quickly but it's also being updated by people who are on Twitter highly dangerous data set there to use lesson Johnny lesson you got lesson i do um so it's a reframe on hard things or a hard thing so i think so something that um i think i've been guilty of is not necessarily thinking like when i achieve this i'll be happy but rather like when i achieve this problem's gone like solve that thing now and actually. And actually, I mean, it's mainly a propane thing.
So like propane's grown a lot over the last two, three years. And you always think like, we'll hit this revenue, we'll hire this person, we'll achieve this thing, no more problems.
But actually all that happens is the new, more thorny, harder problem. And reframing that as like, that is the thing thing where the development that's the development opportunity because the next revenue level the next the next achievement just always just feels exactly the same as the last one doesn't matter the size of it exactly the same but the the who you become as a result of solving the problem at the level you're at that's the that's the gain so the phrase that i remind myself of is for every level is a devil and it's just the current just the current devil you're facing um that's because we've had like a very weird year in business like a very like lots of problems that i think we'd have never um expected and you your immediate response to that is like oh but actually if you reframe that as like that as like, that's where the growth is, that's where the personal growth is, see it differently.
And it becomes almost like, not exciting, but like, it's like, wow, there's something on the other side of this. So that's been my lesson for this year.
Probably the biggest one. I mean, it's really good.
It's not too dissimilar to what we spoke about last year. And I think what all of us are kind of zeroing in on, which is accepting that things are going to be tough,

but not necessarily white knuckling our way through it and not assuming that there's any additional nobility in white knuckling it and trying to increase the difficulty or sort of the hustle pawning your way through things. It's like, look, if there's a way that I can make this simpler or easier.
Find the gummy. Yeah, exactly.
How can you have a creatine gummy for every different thing? And, yeah, I think assuming that one day you're going to wake up and there'll be no problems is... I remember the...
I think it was Mark Zuckerberg on... Maybe on Rogan, where he was, like, describing his morning.
Has anyone heard this? So, like, Mark Zuckerberg's morning was, like, he wakes up and he goes and surfs because like when he looks at his phone it's really all really shit bad news and i was like well like because like that's my morning and it's like his bad news will be far worse how many unreads have you got currently on telegram i don't know the other day it was 46 000 i think you're on more no i think the other day it was like one two three four for me and i screenshotted it particularly satisfying on uh this lesson there's a uh a beautiful have you ever heard of the book called the gap and the gain benjamin yeah so there's one line in that that stuck with me and i still think about and it's kind of a semi life hack related to this, which is forget your current problem, whatever it is, just go back to a, maybe even a more severe problem in the past. Um, whether it's girlfriend cheated on you, um, fired from job insert problem, whatever it is.
Right. And you go back and go with the benefit of hindsight.
Now, what would have been the worst interpretation of that problem? It's like, okay, girlfriend cheated on me. I'm a loser.
I'm going to binge a load of food. I'm going to write a load of angry Facebook statuses about her.
Didn't work. That's the kind of worst interpretation of that problem.
And you go, okay, well, what was the damn detachment? What would have been the best interpretation of that? It's like, okay, I'm going to book this personal trainer for three months. I'm going to book this trip with my friends that I was putting off because I was supposed to go on holiday with her, etc., etc., etc.
And you look at that now in the cold light of day and which one do you wish that you chose? It's so obvious. So you do that for the past problem and then you just go, okay, now I'm a current problem.
What, what's the current worst interpretation of this? What's the current best interpretation of this? Which one do you want to choose? What would you tomorrow want you today? Yes. And then literally do that exercise and just refuse to get up until you've hypnotized yourself that it's the best thing to ever happen to you.
Mark Andreessenreason was on the show the other week and he gave me this quote from sean parker that said running a startup is like eating glass you just start to like the taste of your own blood and uh i think that's the acceptance that after a long enough amount of time problems are always going to be there you're not going to get to a point where there aren't any problems as the ceo or founder of a business your only job is to work on the hardest problems, the problems that nobody else can fix. And they always stop with you and there will always be pressure.
Okay. The more advanced you are in any field, in any pursuit, the problems are worse, aren't they? Or more complicated, more painful.
Yes. And it's just easier to be at the basic level of everything.
Yeah. So if you're going to pursue the journey of like, well, I want to achieve highest level in anything it's like well the final level going from level nine to level 10 is going to have the worst problem attached to it so that's the price is that the price that you're prepared to pay i think there's some truth to that but i think that's also the benefit of hindsight you now look back at level one problems is so obvious because you're now a level nine person yeah but then as soon as you get to level 29 you'll look back at level nine in the same but that's because of the of the person you become by solving each problem so that that's a much more succinct way of saying what i was saying is that like it's only it's the it's the person you are on the other side of the problem of like wow that was so basic like two years ago i was worrying about this thing that's really easy now yeah because if that challenge came back up to you again now you're no worries.
Yeah, that's very interesting. That's cool.
I like that. Good one.
We didn't coordinate this, but you've described the irony of the human condition, that we will always hit this spiral curriculum and still run into the same problems. And with our clients, we have the same thing.
So we help coaches to move online and they often think that if i can just fix my lead generation then my life will be sorted and it'll

be absolutely you know i've completed it and then all that happens is like very quickly from working

with us you know we fix fix that problem it's not actually that hard a problem to solve but then

they end up with a sales bottleneck and then they fix that and they end up with a fulfillment

bottleneck and then they fix that and end up with an operational bottleneck and they're like oh

actually like life isn't just sunshine and rainbows after this one thing that i can solve

Thank you. that and they end up with a fulfillment bottleneck and then they fix that and end up with an operational bottleneck and they're like oh actually like life isn't just sunshine and rainbows after this one thing that i can solve so for me very similar lesson which was we are the ones that define success in our lives and yet for some reason we have a desire we close the gap somehow by fulfilling the desire and then we move the goal posts and then we keep doing doing that and we're like oh why am i perpetually dissatisfied and hearing your podcast with andrew wilkinson the billionaire who's just like his main conclusion from becoming a billionaire is i'm still the same like miserable dissatisfied person i've ever been but with more money and it's like it takes somebody who's actually like smashed that particular stream to be like, ah, maybe the answers aren't hiding behind more money or whatever.
And so ultimately, we defer gratification or we feel like we're suffering the most in the thing that we're most deficient in. So whether it's money or time or friendships or whatever, that's like the thing which is like the the alligator at the boat and whoever has something like that it's like the drowning man

wanting air they feel like that is the thing which if they solve it life would be complete

so like incel forums they're obsessed with like if i could just get a girlfriend then i'd be

totally fine and the weird thing about all of this i think when i kind of reflect on this is that this the domains of life that we have sorted and most of us like watching this you know you if you're watching this hopefully you're healthy you have access to being outside you're not in prison you you know you have central heating like all this stuff like physical health and time and family and son and all that stuff is just fully available in abundance but we just go i know but i need another two grand or i need another whatever and so um the i guess the lesson is to stop moving the goalposts or if you do recognize that it's just a game that we're playing but you can still recognize that you are happy right now and all that suffering of the gap is just caused by the mind so felix dennis has a book called how to get rich which is he's he's made it really like distasteful in the way that it's branded and stuff and he's sat there like like a maniacal like monocle and uh you know the kind of um because he's trying to paint this picture that you are um you set that as the goal and he says i'm writing this at the age of 83 and if you're reading this book i would swap places with you in a heartbeat because you have the one thing that i don't which is is time. And I've made my $300 million or whatever to then go and sit in a wood cabin and write poetry.
And I could have done that at 30. Yeah.
I had that realization. It's kind of like a nice meme, but you're already a billionaire just in a illiquid asset, which is your health, because any billionaire, and there'll be a lot out there there right now or centimillionaires that are on their deathbed would give everything for your health therefore yes you can't uh liquidize it yet maybe you will be in the future but illiquid wealth you're already a billionaire which is a wild thought the insight around the thing that you desire most is the thing that you assume will fix all of your problems uh i came up with this idea the other day of unteachable lessons and i think one of the unteachable lessons is money and fame won't fix all of the problems that you have in life because for the total addressable market for more fame and more money is basically everybody and andrew wilkinson is a billionaire coming on it's so done it's so done that when he even comes on there's a bit of me that thinks we can't go down that road because i know of the antibody response system on the internet i also know that it just doesn't it seems to not land and maybe it wouldn't have landed with me and it probably still doesn't land never does it's it's as frankl says it's one of the three insatiable desires money sex and power and you can keep chasing them so i mean wilkinson was talking about his mate who was like a multi-billionaire and was like oh but jeff he's like really rich though isn't he and he was like but what can jeff afford that you can't you're like oh super yacht right okay so yeah well that was it you was it who was it that taught us that lesson about how when you ask people what they want their uh annual income to be it's always the hill yeah yeah do you want to tell that story can you remember it yeah essentially whenever you ask somebody what would be your kind of goal income where you stop and relax a bit more it's basically always 2.5 to 3x where you are right now and then as soon as you hit that it just rebates yeah it's so funny that thing going around social media where they ask someone like you can i'll give you 10 million but you can't wake up tomorrow would you accept or like would you want 10 million everyone goes yes yes but then you can have 10 million but you don't wake up in the morning do you still want the 10 million and everyone goes oh no as you're saying well waking up tomorrow is worth more than 10 million and people go but if you really think about that it is like oh right so the most valuable thing is the thing that i take for granted every single day which is i suppose that it's the youth it's like the future that you have ahead of you but you ignore that but a lot of that's a lot of that as well is framing because you can't cash the future in right now.
Like the fact that nothing is promised beyond just this moment right now. And sure, your felt sense of it as you're older, maybe you can do less.
There's less you can do with this moment right now. But tomorrow at 80 and tomorrow right now are the exact same amount of time.
So beyond the health impact of it, there is no difference. The only thing is, remember when you used to go back to school? On Mondayay for me it's a good example on a monday for me i go to bed on a sunday night i reliably have good sleep and i'm fired up for a monday because it feels like the whole week is ahead of me but i get to sort of a friday or a saturday and i have this sort of retrospective energy to me where i'm thinking about the week and then it gets to monday morning again and i'm sort of excited and it almost feels like that but with age it's like there's no real reason if you can do the full non-dual fucking attachment thing there's no reason why a day now and a day in 20 years time is worth any more or any less in fact you should what we do it at all time frames don't we because i'm sure in our 20s we were like oh but the 30s and then the 40s it's the same at some point it's going to flip right at some point it's going to be like oh if you're not careful about it that you're going to get older and start thinking wistfully about what was behind not hopefully about what's to come is it not multiplied by like physical ability by a big margin like enjoying anything is magnified when you can walk there's no pain there's no you're fully mobile all right my first one uh that was fucking awesome that was a good one

too um uh this again from your birthday uh outcomes matter more than inputs uh you've been on this for quite a while it's not too dissimilar to i look for efficiency over i look for effectiveness over efficiency um but outcomes matter more than inputs a lot of the time especially as you get sort of further into black belt territory on the productivity bro optimization world, you do this sort of weird rain dance, this sort of productivity rain dance of lots of things that maybe you needed them previously, or maybe they never served you, or maybe they did serve you, but they don't serve you now. but you keep doing them you have these sort of odd uh attachments to ways of working and things

that you do or members of staff or systems or processes or whatever it is. And what's that quote about people working so hard and achieving so little? Who's that? Andy Grove.
Andy Grove. There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.
so is this is this like don't conflate suffering with productivity or is it more like don't get

attached to old systems that it's so hard and achieving so little so is this is this like don't conflate suffering with

productivity or is it more like don't get attached to old systems that it's got you to where you are the suffering thing is is probably a part of it but this is probably even more zoomed out than that which is a lot of the time people focus on how hard i've worked during the day regardless of whether it was suffering or not it's what i did all of this stuff look at all of the effort that I put in he goes what did you do on the back end of that because we've all had jobs projects things that we needed to finish and the very thing that you're putting off is the most important thing that you're supposed to do and you go dude i worked all day you go track what you did today you cleaned the kitchen you had this huge email to write and you clean you spent 45 minutes cleaning the fucking kitchen why do you do that well i worked really hard today it's like yes yes yes but what were you trying to achieve and it's also i think just a reminder that effectiveness is really the only thing that matters you can continue to put your foot harder and harder and harder on the accelerator but if you've also got your foot on the brake or if you're driving in the wrong direction it kind of doesn't matter so outcomes matter more than inputs as in a lot of the time because you're the feedback loop on when am i going to get the output is usually a little bit down the line maybe it's going to be tomorrow maybe it's going to be next year maybe it's going to be in five years time or whatever the only thing that you can uh bounce off is inputs how much work did i do today and then

for instance you wake up on a morning and you're you've slept in by three hours and immediately

feel like a piece of shit you think i'm a piece of shit because i slept in you're right okay

that you're looking at such a brief window like the entirety of your life but i'm in the lower

quartile of the window regularity uh the entirety of your life and you've taken this one moment and be like because of that one thing that i did it's like what if that allows you to get way more out of this week what if this allows you to get closer to your goals much more quickly or what if this is just something that your body needs so that you can be happier and there's one way to guarantee that you won't get the best out of this week is if you just beat yourself up for it. There's a fun idea here, which is just only setting on your to-do list, the biggest thing that you have to do.
And sometimes it might be like 10 minutes long. It might be send an email or fire this person or put this job ad live and then just give yourself the rest of the day off i did that for a few weeks and it was fucking weird you feel brilliant you feel yeah but you also still have it to your point that kind of protestant guilt that i need to be working and why you're not working even though i've achieved more than i would do by doing the most important thing there's then just this sense of anxious i need to be busy I need to be busy so that's the first one and then the second one is um yeah if you don't know what the most important thing is you've identified what the most important thing is it's figuring out what the most important thing so it's a beautiful loop is it like a really old tim ferris article about this about like how he stays productive it's called like productivity tips for depressive people like me or something like that but it's there's loads of quotes in it like doing something well doesn't make it important which i think about all the time doing something well doesn't does not make it that's it that's it i mean like being being busy is a form of like indiscriminate action and procrastination like busy people just don't know what to focus on.
Your calendar is a better indication

of your wealth

than your bank account.

Yeah.

And then write out,

the practical thing

is write out

all of your to-dos.

Pick like the top three

that make you most scared.

Then pick one of them

and just do it

for three hours.

And that's,

that's how he says productive.

Or effective.

Wrestling with theirs.

Would it be

only to do this then?

Fighting an axe.

Legally representing

Lily Phillips. Jesus.
It's always the thing that makes you... I wanted to be a new to-do list? Fighting an axe.
Legally representing Lily Phillips.

Jesus.

It's always the thing that makes you...

I wanted to be a guy 100.

If you look on your to-do list

and pick the thing,

you're like, oh.

So the asterisks I give to that,

you know, you mentioned then

the one that will,

and then do three hours on that.

The key thing there is even,

you know, Elon Musk's algorithm

of like question every assumption

and then simplify, simplify, simplify.

Even that I would drop off, do three hours because it might, the biggest thing might just be, I need to break up with this person or I need to do. So just do that thing.
All I need to do is book. Parkinson's law, the breakup out in three hours long.
Right. So we've got.
Or I need to book this flight to this location and it might, or I need to set up this banking. But've got three hours blocked out you're definitely gonna get it done aren't you true that's i think that's the point is like fence off like don't try to be this like i'll just do 10 minutes later i'll do like the most important thing to do today is that thing that's all you're doing until lunch until it's finished but it's no one ever does it and people write too many things on their to-do list don't get them done and push them over to tomorrow show me to you're kind of related to this one it's uh it's a good it's a very cool one so funny how all of the hacks and all of the lessons end up we haven't coordinated this before no we don't talk about doing it before this is like a life hack slash lesson they're both both related um and i call it um turning bullshit into reality and i'll do the exercise with you guys now this if only if i only did this every day whenever i've done it i've gone that's a great day so we start with bullshit what are your values do you have any that come to mind and and if you don't have like i've fought through like my, that bullshit.
Any values that you just immediately come to mind of things that you'd like to do more of? Johnny, there's no wrong answer. Physical challenge.
Physical challenge. Yusuf.
Pass. Just come on.
Come on. Come on.
Just give me something that you value, like that you... Organize personal gratitude.
I don't know. Yeah, gratitude.
Gratitude. Okay, cool.
Adventure. Adventure.
Okay. So you create an Apple note and you put that value at the top now you have to creatively brainstorm 10 ways you can do that so for example physical challenge it could be run but like run 5k right run 5k um it could what was yours again the gratitude trigger gratitude it could be write a thank you letter to abc and yours was adventure adventure um it could be message to group chat to arrange this holiday that we've been putting off okay so just write down 10 and then just go through do go through do go through do and you've taken this kind of esoteric bullshit value that you've always wanted to have to next action into from neurons to atoms that's very cool the reason i struggle with the values thing is that i think you've got to be very cautious about what you say are your core values so you can mix those up like yeah but so reading patrick lancione recently and he said a lot of companies will go like oh yeah we'll do our values statement and they say our country values honesty and integrity you're like okay but but unless you value honesty above the market baseline you don't actually value honesty that's not one of your core values because everyone should value honesty by baseline so he's like the only time you should say you have a company value is if you are actually like above the market trend ultimately the the only thing that matters with values is did you do the thing because even if you didn't think of the values but you did the thing then you actually valued it more than saying i have values so even there that's unless you whip yourself into doing a thing that you didn't want to do and then after the fact you did the reason why this exercise i think is actually useful is because what ends up happening when you do it is it's a load of things that have been rattling around your subconscious in the shower or before you go to bed that begin to percolate someday.
And as you guys know, as you mentioned earlier, as you move up levels, levels, levels, the thing that seems to happen is you get way more urgent, but not still important, but not super important stuff. Whereas this is time to moving from like just being reactive each day to being proactive.
Like for example, the gratitude one, when would you really go, I'm going to write this thank you letter. You might've been putting off this thank you letter for four years that would take you 10 minutes to do, but with this, and then when you actually reflect on the year, it's one of the few things that you actually remember.
You've also brought yourself in alignment with the person that you want to be as well, which is quite a nice side effect too.

Exactly. And then if you can just move that to another note, you just keep storing that I am that person.
Nice. Should we do some resolutions? uh i basically had this idea that uh coming up with resolutions for yourself a lot of the time

whatever it is by march some ungodly percentage of people have already stopped doing the thing they said was the most important thing at the start of the year. A good part of that is maybe habit change or behavior change is difficult to do, but maybe a bigger part of it is, well, they chose the wrong things.
Like the stuff that I've chosen that stuck with me for the rest of my life. And I figured,

I don't think I've ever seen anyone do this before,

but what are the highest ROI resolutions

or new habits or behavior change things

that you've done, simple things,

given that this is going out on Christmas Eve,

and people are going to be thinking about it.

This might actually be a nice little finger food buffet

that people could go,

actually, the boys said that this one really stuck. So I'm going with that so have you got any i do i for the last i didn't do it last year i did like three years in a row of a version of 75 hard anyone ever done that before adapted 75 hard just because like when you look at actually 75 hard out the box there are things in it that i think are too hard too hard too hard no just there for i think maybe slightly destructive in some ways and also i just don't want to do which ones did you find so like training twice a day every day i don't i just don't think there's any i don't think that i think there's ways to to pursue that sort of goal without those things um it's like drinking a gallon of water like stone the adulterers it seems like an arbitrary yeah i realize it's there because it's hard but i think the thing like holy war like yeah not for me the the thing that's hard about it is you have to do the things that like the habits you set to do for 75 days in a row and if you miss a day you go back to the beginning and i think as a like just trying to do that you realize how hard that is and how many like little bullshit reasons come up and how you have to kind of like go out of your way a lot of the time to tick off the box i think it's a good lesson can you regale us of our friend who set himself a target of having a banana every day yeah i mean yeah so our friend ben um one of his things was have a banana i think because he'd read it was something to do like good for bowel health um and it got to like 11 o'clock at night he was staying in cambridge didn't have a banana so was driving around cambridge trying to find a banana he's also like meditated so one of his things when we were doing it was meditate an hour a day he's meditated at a wedding before like gone out i'm sorry was he the group sorry he went out and sat in the car sat in the car meditating in the car just to tick the box i don't it's not something to like sustain for the rest of your life but i think you learn you learn something about yourself when you're doing it well one of the problems of it is that it doesn't agree with a varied lifestyle exactly 75 hard is brilliant for the first sort of autistic two and a half months of the year but as soon as you get into our wedding season yeah so good luck mate yeah we have to go find you know me and the boys flew to australia you're on a plane for 17 and a bit hours but where's the banana it's well you couldn't plan the banana in advance it's more that you just you don't view any like personal habit change or behavior change is difficult if you've been able to stick to something for 75 days without interruption any other change you want to make is easy so it's the meta lesson yeah not the individual it's got nothing to do with the as long as you don't pick like ridiculously easy things so you would it's you would basically say that a good resolution is to do some version of 75 hard but adapt it into stuff that you really really value yeah and it can be anything like anything you're trying to do but keep putting off or something you're inconsistent with just commit to it also doesn't have to be 75 days but like committing to a period of time of i'm not going to miss a day i'm going to like move heaven and earth to not miss a day and you you get to then you're like oh like what an achievement anything else would be easy stuff yeah there's so many adulterers and sodomites that need stoning and if you just commit where's that from oh it's you know what it is it's the like a wispy memory from the guy who I think you spoke to, Chris, who lived the Old Testament for a year.
What? Jesus Christ. I thought I would have heard about that.
I don't think Chris spoke to him. I think it's just something you've read.
Old Testament or New Testament. This is a guy who just...
Yeah, so he set himself different challenges each year. He lived inside of a whale.
Built a big... Did he build an ark? So he had to grow his hair and throw pebbles at sodomites and adulterers.
He basically tried to live the life of that verbatim for a year. And then his other challenge was read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.
And he said it really pissed off his wife, because... Is this ringing a bell? No, he wasn't on the show.
Did you know that the Byzantine period, and she's like, ah, stop it with your trivia. But, yeah, anyway.
He didn't interview somebody who did like, early on. It was, yeah, very early.
They did maybe something each month for a year, a different thing each month for a year. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
But it wasn't the Old Testament. Nothing to do with that.
No, he didn't build an arc and try and get two by two. Hi, it's good.
Welcome back to the show. This episode, we have a man who's licking pebbles at an M&S.
Bummers. What a derailment.
Old wisdom. The process that we use for goal setting each year is stolen from garrett j white who probably stole it from someone else and so on he's got a lawsuit yeah big style wow interesting so it's splitting your year into quarters and then splitting that into four domains of your life body being balance and business balance, and business, or health, wealth, love, and happiness, but I quite like the alliteration.
And you then basically look at, okay, what's my three-year vision? Directionally, where do I want to go? What's my one-year target for that? Divide that into quarters. What does each 12-week sprint look like in each of those domains? And then how can I do a weekly action or a daily action to hit a weekly checkpoint to hit that quarterly target in each domain? And it's designed so that you're not like blasting it, grinding your face off with stuff.
You're just turning up and just hitting a single each day so that you move towards your goal and you're fully aligned. You don't end up out of balance with like overweighting one domain of your life.
So the idea is to kind of counteract people who just like double down on their business and they end up like overweight and spiritually disconnected and divorced and all this stuff, but they, they got the million. And so that framework has been really helpful for me.
Um, it also gives me one thing to focus on in each domain. The other big thing that's had the most impact, I think, is single-tasking.
For years, I drunk the Kool-Aid that I can multitask, and that because I've got Alfred installed and keyboard shortcuts, whatever, I can just flip between windows and and tabs and it feels more productive because your brain's like oh great there's loads of like things happening but the quality of that work the attention residue all that stuff isn't worth it and so like you said about deciding what's the key thing this morning and just blast three hours on it blinkers on noise cancelling headphones whatever and just do that one thing um and then to create a loop a feedback loop with that you have something that is a visual or a tactile reminder of this is what i'm working on right now and it sounds like overkill but i think our brains are so like scatty that we need to just be fully hemmed in and forced to focus on that one thing. So whether it's a post-it note stuck on your monitor or like a floating bar that you have pinned on the top of your desktop, whatever it is saying, you are doing this right now.
And then you feel like an absolute dingus if you go off task because everything's screaming like, no, no, no. The only reason you're here.
The only reason you're here is to do that that's cool i like that so i had two um i guess you brought up sobriety which is one of those ones that's so sort of taken for granted now that i've forgotten about it no that that used to be quite contrarian when you first started it i remember yeah yeah yeah it was fucking crazy give it five years old testament will be writing yeah you're getting stoned wow um okay so my two highest roi resolutions that i've done they've stuck with me uh number one sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom and number two go for a walk first thing in the morning like i've always wondered about the phone thing is it something specifically to do with the phone being in the bedroom or is it just next to your bed is it like the fact that it's near you and it's emitting yeah radio waves uh no no no it's just being so far away that you can't use it on a night time and that it's not the first thing that you do in the morning it's basically intermittent fasting for your phone with environment design uh but you just take the charger for your phone you put it outside of your fucking bedroom's like, I can't believe how many people still have, it is sapping days of sleep out of you every year, days and days and days, even if you've got the best relationship with your phone in the world, because if you can't sleep, there is always the most compelling device in human history, only within arm's reach. And even if it's over the other side of the room, the problem that I would encounter is I'm like, know like it's just there go oh i'm gonna get up i'm gonna go downstairs into the kitchen i'm gonna unplug it from the place that it lives where it sleeps overnight and then also when you wake up on the morning it's not there for you to see what were you saying about mark zuckerberg or whoever it is you know all of us we open our phone and there's just bad thing there's terrible thing issues well that or it's problem alexander's library like say oh well there is alexander's library on the other side of this room with infinite yeah whether it's good whether it's framed well or badly the what's your one task now go to fucking sleep so go to sleep uh and then the morning walk thing just you know this was something that i'd started doing probably from some shit i'd learned from us researching things forever ago and uh i just noticed that if i woke up and i was feeling a little nervous or sort of anxious energy or whatever, whatever I was feeling in the morning, by the time that I'd done a 15-minute walk, by the time I came back, it just felt less strong and less important.
And there's all manner of Huberman explanations about whatever it is, the ventral dorsal stream and you're locomoting through while you're doing lateral eye movement, which down-regulates the way blah, blah like i like the midwit the guy on the left says morning walk makes me feel nice and uh those two things i think you know the two that i've done in every different hotel every different place that i've stayed every different country that i've gone to those are two things that i really really try and rely on the phone outside of the room when you're on the road is difficult it's like plug it in in the bathroom and then like go into the bedroom but uh morning walk phone outside of the bedroom has been two of the highest roi do you still do no caffeine first thing uh yeah yeah so i'm avoiding that your point about huberman is great that he's been able to pacify the midwits by providing... Legitimating scientifically.

Yeah, for people to just follow the guy on the left stuff.

Yes.

We have this joke that...

So, Huberman did a...

And I do love Huberman,

but he did a five-part podcast with Matthew Walker on sleep,

and I think it was like 20 hours long.

And I joke that I'd be willing to bet

nobody who listens to that

sleeps as good as my mate Quinny, who's just like, just shut your eyes, lad. You know what I mean? Like, who just doesn't overthink it.
He deliberately doesn't optimize it because he's like, if I mess with it, then I'm going to sleep worse if it's not. Sleep is one of those perfect examples of, one of the reasons a lot of people have insomnia is trying to overthink sleep.
There was a famous study where they took two groups one that were paid to go to

sleep as fast as they can and the other group that wasn't paid anything and the group that wasn't paid anything fell to sleep three times as faster as the other group so outside of all the sleep science the number one part of the semantic tree is don't put too much stress on yourself because that you want to sleep.

Don't take money for it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, but it's an interesting realization that you need especially now this super rational hyper evidence-based world where experts are only the people that are allowed to comment on stuff that you need someone to justify something that you already did that already made you feel good you had it shouldn't be the case that i need andrew human to explain to me why the thing i do and like and is good and effective for me is something that i should do and like and is good and effective for me so that's why i brought up caffeine because i i'm not sure on like my personal experience of that i'm not sure i feel much of a difference by not having the caffeine or having caffeine first yeah and i'm sure the science will tell me differently but i think that's a good example you're like a heavyweight boxer that can just take slugs with caffeine you're just like no i think i just i have like the appropriate amount and then i stop lots lots just don't get silly with it not before not after midday good rule gee so i i do have one but to go like meta new year's resolutions to to begin with, the first thing is to kind of question the question. So I found this stat when I was researching New Year's resolutions last year, and it's said or it said that 91% of New Year's resolutions fail.
So quick little thought experiment for you, Christopher, right? let's say um you come to me and you go off i need to get this flight to paris wizz air's gone i don't really chris i've got this um airline it's got a 91 failure rate are you gonna get on it no or let's say yousef i know what you're like you've been out on the town you've been out with mr old. You've met a lovely lady.
You go back to the room. You go, fuck, I've got no condoms.
And you knock on my door and I go, oh, yeah, yeah, take this one. And it just says on the seal, 91% failure rate.
Would you do it? No. So if something has a 91% failure rate, you have to look at it before I think you do it.
So then you look at things like Alcoholics Anonymous. Can I to work.
Can I just question something? Go on. I think the failure in those examples is, it's like saying 91% of people fail to make the flight on time.
Yeah. Or 91% of people can't get the condom on.
So you've gone meta about my meta. So can I go meta about, no, no, no.
We will end up in infinite labs like Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson. What do you mean by truth, Johnny? What do you mean by condom truth johnny exactly so basically i would first look at things that actually work so i'd look at alcoholics anonymous um where you have a group so you have kind of social shame um you have a recurring theme you have basically new year's resolutions operate like a the psychological version of north korea versus you kind of want to move towards singapore a system that actually works um versus a horrific failure rate so even small things of okay whatever the thing is like i'll sometimes do this whenever i have a deadline that i'm being a bitch about is i'll just message my mate harry and say hey i'm going to bet this uncomfortable amount of money but i will do the thing and as a result i will do the thing.
There's the scene in Fight Club where Tyler Durden goes into this random shop and he finds this Asian guy behind the counter, takes him outside, gun to his head and says, tell me what you want it to be, Raymond. Raymond.
Raymond. And he's like shaking, unsure.
And he goes, I want it to be a veterinarian. And he goes, I'll come back here in in 30 days and if you're not a veterinarian you'll be dead you can bet that he he didn't have a 91 failure rate so i think first off questioning the question which is pretty hardcore but then the real soft call nice thing that i would recommend is um journaling all of that is said journaling is don't bother with so this one is less about it is essentially you don't appreciate writing a journal now it's kind of like investing in the smp you go i could be doing all these activities but a journal five years hence the value of that is so significant um it's like even now if i go on a flight and i can go through exactly how i thought 10 years ago or what i was doing because you forget so much and going back to your point earlier it's just the same problems over and over again i had a friend of mine um who i think had his journal stolen and because he left it in his suitcase that got stolen i go how much was that worth to you he's like probably like 15 or 15 or 20 of everything i have it's so valuable jim o'shaughnessy, who's one of the smartest guys I know, older gentleman, he's about 60.
And he was telling me about journals he has from when he was like 21 and the value that that has to him. Have I told you about this, George? I took a journal every day from the age of 13 to 19.
Wow. On a Microsoft Word document.
And then one day I opened it, file corrupted. Just like, oh well.
Did you never back it up? No, up no i was like well that's the end of that and just stopped not backing up that up is the least you thing ever or is that is that where it starts this was when i was transitioning windows to mac so it was in that however i've still got the file so i could maybe uncorrupt it now with modern modern technology but i'll be able to like whether it's you do this very well you take a lot of photos videos I don't do that I'm trying to do it more but more photos more videos more journals because the value of it is so significant 10, 20, 30 years day one day one no you can use you can leave audio messages you can photos, videos she's big Apple notes for everything one size fits all this guy on the left Apple notes it's frictionless one size Should we do, what have you got left? Should we do one more round of life hacks? What have we got? I've got a lesson and a fail. Okay.
I have a lesson. Are we doing fails? We can do.
Let's do another lesson and then we'll see where we come in at. Okay.
You got another lesson? Yeah. Beautiful.
So I'll take the potato. You're up, potato.
Are you potatoing potato and me. Yeah.
You look to him, but you're a potato and me.

It's all on you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Trying to find the microplate equivalent in happiness.

What's a micro?

Microplate.

It's a plate that's less than 2.5 kilos usually.

So it's like half a kilo, 0.25 of a kilo.

So when I was doing powerliftinglifting you realize really quickly that like 200 kilos when that's your one rep max that feels the same as 210 feels the same as 220 it's just always your one rep max but what's what makes it engaging is the fact that it's slightly more than you did last week last month last year and i think whenever you go like the steroids equivalent in anything there's just always the debt to pay in hindsight so we in business again like most of our lessons are business wise we grew really fast and you're like fantastic we like really this really steady growth rate and then like 300 and you think phenomenal like next next thing next But actually like going back, I'd have taken a way slower growth rate year in, year out, because that the experience is way better. And finding the like, just take the PB, like just take the extra rep, just take the extra kilo week in, week out.
Because I, for me, I think the only thing that matters is the feeling that you're making some kind of progress. Something's moving in the right direction.
It doesn't actually matter what the absolute number is. And that's because now we're further on, it's harder to find the half a kilo than if we just thought, hang on a minute, this is growing way too quickly.
Let's slow down. I'm going to have to leapfrog ahead of you because it's my lesson and your podcast true yeah uh trajectory is more important than position uh which is a jimmy car ism but that being number 300 in the world but last year being 350 feels better than being number two in the world but last year being number one because you're're so tightly attuned to what is the direction that i'm on not what is my absolute position happiness is relative it's not absolute and uh yeah i spoke to weirdly enough got this theory co-signed by dan bilzerian before he went all anti-semitic and um old testament down old testament dan that's what he calls himself old t dan um he i basically said like he sort of gone to the top of the hedonic mountain so to speak um in some ways do you wish that you'd dragged out that progress a little bit more because it would have allowed you to have had more places to go to that basically every new record you set especially big step changes in terms of success is just a new higher bar for you to now yep so uh what you would say success isn't more uh success isn't a better vantage point to have a view from it's a higher point to fall from uh and it becomes increasingly difficult to get those you know to improve your lifts when you're first going to the gym by 5% is maybe 5 kilos.
But after a couple of years in the gym, it's a significantly larger amount. It's a significantly higher level of pressure.
So, yeah, trajectory more important than position. So, Chris Sparksism as well, direction over speed.
How is it? Yeah, I don't know whether that's quite the same. Trajectory over position.
Trajectory is more important than position in that your growth is more important than your absolute location. Actually, that's housed within direction over speed.
So going from a 220 deadlift to a 225 deadlift versus a 395 to a 400-kilow deadlift, it feels the same. As opposed to...
It's way harder to operate at the higher level. As opposed to like, I want to get stronger.
And also the 400... So James Smith says all wins feel the same.
Yeah. But there's no Uber surcharge for going 395 to 400 versus going 210 to 250.
Any revenue level, any bank account number, it's all... Dopamine is dopamine, isn't it? Yeah.
So the problem is, are you suggesting that you purposefully throttle? Yes. How? It's difficult, but like anytime you notice yourself progressing in something just accept the accept the slower rate because everyone's always trying to make things faster they're always trying to get leaner quicker get bigger quicker make more money faster like that's the world right but just look accept the smaller rate of growth or the smaller rate of progress how do you to chris's point how do you do that now are you intentional of go okay i want 15 this year and then i'm just yeah aim for a steady steady improvement in something rather than going for big targets it obviously it's it's i don't have all the answers george i'm sorry existentially very difficult but like as a concept yeah because it you would take if i offered you 200 growth in something you would probably your immediate response would be like yeah which why in business like gino wickman talks about having growth phases and then consolidation phases where rather than just like because if you spam the growth in scale you're going to end up with like on rickety foundations whereas if you take some time you go actually i'm just going to like focus on internal growth for a while and like solidify the foundations before the next sprint you're going to create a more sustainable you just always have to pay the debt off, don't you? Yeah.
Always. Good insight.
Nice. Seth? Have you ever had a chat with someone who says that they want a goal, and then you start giving them solutions, and they'll keep coming up with rotating reasons and excuses for not doing it? So this is, I think, a novelism, correct me if I'm wrong.
If information was all that was needed, we would all be billionaires with perfect abs. So something I've really learned over the last couple of years is there is somebody's actual goal, and then there is the story that they tell themselves about what they think their goal is and often it's not the same someone's actions versus their words so george got me a book a few years ago called the courage to be disliked and it's basically a summary written by parable about adler um versus freud so adler was one of freud's contemporaries and he's kind of the lesser known, you know, Freud, Jung, Adler, like those kind of original psychologists.
His view is the teleological view rather than the etiological view. So Freud's view is something happened to me when I was a child and it's caused me to behave like this.
So past event produces current behaviour. Adler is the teleological view, which is future goal impacts current behaviour.
So the example given is somebody is always getting rejected by people and they've made themselves repulsive to other people so that they can tell themselves the story that, oh, no one likes me and everyone finds me or whatever. But the goal baked into that, the hidden payoff of that belief is that it keeps them safe because they can reject themselves before other people can reject them.
So they construct a certain identity that allows them to fulfill that goal and meet the payoff. so we we run a program to help people grow their business in a specific niche but quite often you'll see that the more barriers and the more guardrails you put up to make failure absolutely impossible what's happening is you're kind of backing someone into a corner where it's like you're removing the technological friction you're removing the the blueprint friction you're removing the what to do and how to do it in the process until suddenly there's nothing left but you as the bottleneck and so you mentioned this with gpt i'm glad you did which is that now like we have infinite access to the best computational models working at like super phd level and all information at our fingertips and people haven't suddenly become infinitely more productive all it's done is like take away another excuse and another objection to the point where you're like uh like now it really is just me and so someone's willingness to actually show up and do the thing is still always going to be the final frontier.

How would you summarize that lesson overall?

What people tell themselves the goal is isn't always the goal.

So look at actions versus behavior and don't think that you just have an information bottleneck and that'll solve everything.

Yeah, I guess it's weird to think, how can you say that you value a thing if your actions show no indication? Yeah, actions versus words. In that way.
Look at your calendar to find your priorities. Yeah.
It's all shit that we learned fucking ten years ago. Ten years ago.
But now you're like, oh yeah. Lessons or life hack? Lesson, please.
Okay. Have we got more after this or is this the final one? Last one.
Okay, cool. I'll try and get through as much as I can.
So first one is going back to Old Testament for a second is the Socratic method. So one thing I would do.
What do you mean by that, George? There we go. Matter about matter.
What do you mean? What do you mean by truth? You mean by Socr truth you mean by socratic exactly um so one thing that i would typically do um being an idiot is whenever somebody would say something i disagree with i would just stop listening to what they're saying and then just start processing the dunk i'm about to do in my head and then as soon as they stop talking I'm dunking but I'm noticing they're just doing the same thing so now just rather than disagreeing with people just asking questions and not only do you actually not necessarily ruin relationships or have emotional issues with other people you actually also sometimes change their mind quite a lot as well so So like one example, I was in the car and I was with a friend of mine and he was telling me about

how he has his current job and he would like to work remote, but there's not that many remote

jobs out there. So my immediate like dunk on brain goes, hold on, I hire people in these roles all

the time. I can pull up these numbers.
What are you on about? I said, okay. I was like, hmm.
So I said, here's a question. How many kind of in-person jobs do you think there are in your town? He's like, I don't know.
If you just had to guess. He's like, I don't know, 10,000.
Okay. Okay.
And then how many remote jobs do you think there are in the world and he's just paused for a bit and he goes yeah you might be right versus if i would have tried letting them come write the code in their own head and being a seeing behind socrates calls it being a midwife you're helping them give birth to the new idea rather than trying to push it into them is a big thing. And then the other one.
So I've been quite fascinated by doom loops this year. So a doom loop would be I'm feeling anxiety.
Fuck, why am I being anxious? Why are you criticizing yourself for being anxious? And it's just anxiety. You get anxious about your anxiety, which leads to more anxiety and it's boom, boom, boom.
Or why am I so depressed? And so you have the initial stimuli that's kind of, you don't really control. And then it's your reaction to that.
And getting a little bit deeper into meditation this year, there were two things that I found useful. One is to, I call it the Pilkington fork so carl pilkington um who the philosopher

kay pilkington once said he's telling a story to gervais about when he got mugged in the center of town some guys came over to him and like give me your phone and usually there's two ways you react to that it's like punching them or it's like running away yeah sure sure and he goes but i love this phone he goes it's my favorite thing and he starts like being very strange he goes how are you by the way he goes we've met before and just like completely freaks them out that he doesn't know how to react the mugger and he just walks away so using that on my own brain so if i get super um if i get there's a few things one asking my brain what's the next thought you're gonna have and it just stops and then sometimes a random thing will appear and then you go, well, was that me? Because I didn't try and bring that up. So you have this natural detachment as well as when I hear anxiety.
So let's say I'm anxious about an event I've got going up and then I'll start going, fuck am I being anxious? Then I go, ah, I get it. I get why you're anxious.
And it, all of a sudden, because you've not had the cortisol reaction to the cortisol it kind of the pilkington fork occurs and you break out so those are uh those are my two ones awesome yeah i i think i called them second order emotions oh i like that uh that like infinite regressive resentment at your frustration about your bitterness about your anxiety yeah final one because we did it um you guys might like this from a business perspective my friend harry dry phenomenal human being he gave me this nugget which is positioning is arranging information in the customer's head so i do it again positioning is a rain i'm arranging you see i'm arranging you matter again right um positioning is arranging uh information in the customer's head so example would be loom used to be um record your screen say record your screen whereas then they didn't change the product they just changed the positioning how it was structuring the customer's head to removing meetings and it explodes and and separated from the rest of the competition and then i thought okay frame is how you arrange information in your own head and frame itself is positioning is completely underlooked and frame is completely underlooked as well that was brilliant cheers mate you're on fire i feel like my the information's been arranged differently in my head i feel we just need to put so much so much energy we need to go to like the local M&S and just throw stones at people I actually that was exactly what was next it's that and then chicken boys I love you all I appreciate you Merry Christmas I'm sad that we don't get to spend as much time together as we used to no fails no fails why don't we save why don't we save them for next year we can keep everyone coming back, I really do. I'm so happy and so proud of what all of you have done.
It's fucking fire. It's great.
Likewise, Mark. I'm very glad that you're in my life, even though we're apart from each other.
100%. What a year it's been as well.
What a year. Fire.
Ladies and gentlemen, Merry Christmas. I'll see you next time.
Oh! Should we... Peak state.
Oh, oh yeah I actually can't

raise my arms

but

ready

are you going to

take us through this

this isn't my thing

this is yours

okay

and arms overhead