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

Author: Chris Williamson
Duration: 01:43:58

Episode Shownotes

I'm back on my old couch in Newcastle with Jonny, Yusef & George to catch up on what they've learned, their best hacks and new year's resolutions for 2025. Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100

books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_01
What's happening, people? Welcome back to the show. It is a Christmas special.

00:00:04 Speaker_01
I'm back on my old couch in Newcastle-upon-Tyne with Johnny and Yousef and George to catch up on what they've learned and their best hacks and New Year's resolutions for 2025.

00:00:16 Speaker_01
I kind of wanted to actually collect some of the highest value New Year's resolutions that we've all ever done. I kind of

00:00:23 Speaker_01
Figured when you do New Year's resolutions, you're sort of coming up with them on your own and sort of trying to deconstruct what you think that you want.

00:00:28 Speaker_01
There's not really any reason you can't just steal other people's, especially if they say, I still do this 10 years later. This resolution that I did in 2015 has stuck with me the whole time. And yeah, there's some good stuff in here.

00:00:41 Speaker_01
And it's so nice to be back with the boys. Obviously, Christmas time is a bit of a reflective period, so I hope this really spurs you on to come up with some good ideas for your own annual review and the planning process as you enter the new year.

00:00:55 Speaker_01
Try and take a little bit of time, if you can, this week to down-regulate, unplug, obviously, after having listened to this episode. But there's no episode on Thursday, so you can take that day off.

00:01:05 Speaker_01
Anyway, but now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Johnny, Youssef, and George. 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.

00:01:34 Speaker_01
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 Neusef from Propane Fitness and George Mack, stopping off en route from Glasgow to Manchester, of course.

00:01:50 Speaker_01
This is a Life Hacks, Lessons from 2024, and Best New Year's Resolutions episode.

00:01:57 Speaker_01
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.

00:02:09 Speaker_01
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 chriswillex.com. That's tradition.

00:02:23 Speaker_01
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?

00:02:33 Speaker_03
It is. So my life hack is a ninja creamy. So happy you said that. Really? I've got one. Have you? I've got one. Yousef's been thinking about getting one. I think hasn't got one yet. What's a Ninja Creamy? Do you know what one is? No. Educate me.

00:02:55 Speaker_03
What I use it for is making ice cream from a protein shake. It's brilliant. So like skimmed milk, what do you use it for? The same thing or berries? I imagine you have berries in yours.

00:03:10 Speaker_01
Actually, no. Mine has been low-sugar, high-protein ice cream made with the exact protein powder that I want. So pretty much the same thing that you're doing.

00:03:22 Speaker_03
Yeah. Do you put topping in it?

00:03:25 Speaker_01
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.

00:03:33 Speaker_01
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.

00:03:43 Speaker_01
What's your solution?

00:03:44 Speaker_03
Well, you put them on after you've, so you, you, you creamy it and then you, you, you what? Sorry, I'm just writing instructions, you do what? I don't see a pen, George. It doesn't look like you're making notes.

00:03:55 Speaker_03
It looks like you're trying to make fun of me, George. You're creamiest. And then once it's creamy, there's a mix-in button.

00:04:04 Speaker_01
Have you not encountered that? If I'm being completely honest, it's not me that uses it.

00:04:13 Speaker_00
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

00:04:23 Speaker_03
Like a topping, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but it is a topping. So you make it first, and then you, once it's turned into ice cream, you add the shit that you want to make.

00:04:31 Speaker_03
A little bit of topping, and then press mix in, or, I think it's called mix in, or mix again.

00:04:35 Speaker_01
Okay. What is the best recipes that you've come up with?

00:04:41 Speaker_03
I think white chocolate and raspberry. Way. From? Perform. It's like, P. I was just focused, carry on. It's like P and then the number 4 RM or something like that. How many scoops? Two. Always two. With? Skim milk. How much? 350 ml.

00:05:03 Speaker_03
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. Interesting.

00:05:15 Speaker_01
Have you been able to get the sort of gelatinous stickiness that you want? That's something that Do you like it to be more sticky or less sticky? Little sticky. Little more sticky. I think that's about how long it's frozen for.

00:05:25 Speaker_00
Xanthan gum. I've heard. I don't want to get involved with that stuff.

00:05:28 Speaker_03
I feel like that's a whole other variable to manage. Because how much xanthan gum?

00:05:34 Speaker_01
Well you'd just experiment, wouldn't you?

00:05:35 Speaker_03
But think how long it's going to take to get that right.

00:05:38 Speaker_01
That's true. Because you've got something that works sort of 80% now. Exactly. Okay, so white chocolate performed.

00:05:43 Speaker_03
White chocolate and raspberry whey with raspberries and white chocolate chips as the topping, mixed in. So good. It's like 40 grams of protein, with a little bit more if you include the milk. and like 400 calories. It's brilliant.

00:05:58 Speaker_01
And you eat one of those off in one go? Yeah. Wow. Dessert? Lunch? I can tell you're not running anything. Usually like last meal of the day. That's pretty dialed. So good. That's very good. I'm a big ninja.

00:06:08 Speaker_01
I mean, ninja are just between the air fryers, all of the different air fryers they've got. They've got this air fryer crispy thing now, which is a glass tray at the bottom.

00:06:18 Speaker_01
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. I've not got an air fryer.

00:06:29 Speaker_03
Do you have an air fryer, I imagine? That seems like... Yeah, I should get one, should I? Do you have one, George? Yes, but I never used it.

00:06:37 Speaker_00
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.

00:06:45 Speaker_03
Do you know what I think I value more than that? 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 is I can't have more or less than it, I just eat the whole thing.

00:06:59 Speaker_03
And I don't have to worry about like, oh, how many scoops of this should I have? Do you not eat the whole thing? Okay.

00:07:04 Speaker_00
That's that's Chris's way of life. Eat the whole thing. So it's a soiree in a kilo of yogurt.

00:07:10 Speaker_01
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.

00:07:16 Speaker_03
What would I use it for?

00:07:18 Speaker_01
Do you ever eat steak at home?

00:07:20 Speaker_03
Yeah, but not like regularly though.

00:07:23 Speaker_01
I have a Ninja 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, steak? It's fucking unbelievable for steak, yeah. This is a Peterson hack.

00:07:37 Speaker_01
There's 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. Alright, I like that. Ninja Creamy.

00:07:47 Speaker_03
So you're not having creamies? That's a past, that's a previous Chris thing.

00:07:51 Speaker_01
Correct.

00:07:52 Speaker_03
Got it.

00:07:53 Speaker_01
But what have you got?

00:07:54 Speaker_00
This is Ernie actually. Is it? Fuck, I misgendered him. Thank you George. So 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.

00:08:09 Speaker_00
I've actually been tuning an AI model using a few different database structures to identify the optimal categorization method for life hacks. What I've come down to is physical and digital. So You said the exact same thing.

00:08:30 Speaker_00
Actually, last year it was a team of operational analysts. I think we're getting closer to the same conclusion. What a relief.

00:08:38 Speaker_02
Increase the compute and still hit the same wall.

00:08:43 Speaker_00
So the physical life hack is to use things that annoy you, like mild irritations throughout the day, as gratitude triggers.

00:08:52 Speaker_00
So you wake up in the morning, 7am, you hear a siren going past, you're like, oh bloody hell, I just want five minutes more sleep. That's a gratitude trigger for, that could have been me in the ambulance.

00:09:05 Speaker_00
Or 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.

00:09:16 Speaker_00
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.

00:09:30 Speaker_00
They have to be on shift. So just having that little flip has been really valuable.

00:09:37 Speaker_03
I've been trying to think of something that you couldn't do that with, but I'm struggling.

00:09:41 Speaker_00
I'm sure there's loads, yeah, but I guess it's how flexible do you want to be.

00:09:45 Speaker_01
Mason Well, are you trying to have empathy for the other person, or are you trying to sort of do inversion on yourself? What are you prioritising?

00:09:54 Speaker_00
Steele Both are good effects of that, aren't they? I think it's like a nice side effect to have, just be more happy.

00:10:03 Speaker_01
Mason It's pretty pro-social. I like that. This is one from George's birthday this year in Miami, which Dickie Bush decided to do, and it's Uber Black XL.

00:10:19 Speaker_01
So, Uber Black XL, 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

00:10:36 Speaker_01
You just order 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.

00:10:48 Speaker_01
And the experience is easily three times nicer than being in the back of someone's Kia Forte, especially in America. This is a big America problem because it's less expensive. It's less more expensive in America.

00:11:00 Speaker_01
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.

00:11:15 Speaker_01
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.

00:11:29 Speaker_00
Why do you think the standard of cars in America is generally higher? Is it more of a status symbol?

00:11:36 Speaker_01
It's lower.

00:11:37 Speaker_00
Is it bimodal? Because you're saying that some Ubers go really low.

00:11:42 Speaker_01
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 to... I've got a small dink.

00:11:55 Speaker_00
You're always complaining about it as well. I know. It's terrible.

00:11:59 Speaker_01
But you take it to the shop or whatever and you get it fixed. Most people would.

00:12:03 Speaker_00
I need to get my dink fixed actually.

00:12:05 Speaker_01
Come up with an XL, make it bigger. Black XL. I think it's a... I mean you've been a big proponent of that as well, like using uber black XL. Yeah, I think...

00:12:22 Speaker_02
This is a highbrow podcast. In Dubai, for example, all the Ubers are essentially Lexuses. They're all beautiful.

00:12:26 Speaker_02
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.

00:12:37 Speaker_03
Right. Yeah, because in Dubai, I feel like I was always like a Mercedes Vito person in a suit. But that's just a Dubai thing. Yeah. Right.

00:12:47 Speaker_02
I've had some shockers. One I had in Munich where he just went rogue. Was trying to go to the petrol station, was going like different stop offs, was texting. And then when I had, I said, hey, can you not text on your phone?

00:13:02 Speaker_02
He just threw his phone against the window and then just started speeding faster and faster. And I thought, should have paid the 20%.

00:13:09 Speaker_01
Was it you where someone was trading?

00:13:11 Speaker_02
Was he trying to show you a video? Yeah. So we were in one Uber. I'm on a huge highway and I'm at the back and I just go, what's he doing on his phone? Cause sometimes he may be doing a WhatsApp or anything like that.

00:13:23 Speaker_02
And I look and he was, there was like trading charts on and he was shorting the Japanese yen, like mid drive. And I said, what, what are you doing? Um, so yeah, you may face them shorting the Japanese yen.

00:13:38 Speaker_03
I had an Uber driver in Croatia who had mini seizures while driving, and I couldn't work out whether it was just something that happened to him all the time or whether it was serious, but he was having a seizure and pressing the accelerator as he was having the seizure.

00:13:53 Speaker_03
So we were coming up towards traffic and the car would lunge and then brake, but he just didn't acknowledge it.

00:14:00 Speaker_01
at all. He's the opposite of the guy that we had in Iceland so driving back 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

00:14:15 Speaker_01
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.

00:14:28 Speaker_01
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.

00:14:38 Speaker_00
And he went... Hands at the bottom of the wheel.

00:14:43 Speaker_03
Because for him it's just Wednesday afternoon.

00:14:45 Speaker_01
Another day at Graf.

00:14:47 Speaker_00
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.

00:14:56 Speaker_01
His jockey was a bus driver. Alright, I'm coming in hard.

00:15:02 Speaker_02
Like Lily Phillips. Jesus Christ. The kale algorithm. So this is a custom built life hack, which I can put in the comments section.

00:15:13 Speaker_02
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.

00:15:25 Speaker_02
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.

00:15:43 Speaker_02
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, learn, teach yourself anything.

00:15:54 Speaker_02
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 coin? Click, click.

00:16:10 Speaker_02
And I remember once I went on the, and this 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.

00:16:26 Speaker_02
And I went through quickly, like the last maybe 100 videos I've watched, and about 80% of them were regrettable in hindsight. So I had the best library of all time, and I was watching absolute shite.

00:16:40 Speaker_02
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.

00:16:55 Speaker_02
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.

00:17:07 Speaker_02
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. It's a bit harder to justify.

00:17:25 Speaker_00
So is the conclusion to watch like 45 minute fentanyl in the car park?

00:17:27 Speaker_02
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no

00:17:45 Speaker_02
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.

00:18:00 Speaker_02
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.

00:18:19 Speaker_00
I've got a couple of things I want to challenge you on about this.

00:18:23 Speaker_02
I built the code using Claude or ChatGPT and I can share the code with people.

00:18:27 Speaker_02
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 feed now and it's just like Gletcher, stand-up comedian, cool documentary.

00:18:39 Speaker_03
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.

00:18:49 Speaker_02
No, because, well, there's a di- I'm sure if you looked at your YouTube time, right, there's a difference in quality of things that you watch.

00:18:55 Speaker_03
Yeah, but usually, I'm doing it instead of doing something else. So it's rare that I 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.

00:19:07 Speaker_03
But that assumes that the thing that I wasn't doing because of YouTube wasn't more important.

00:19:11 Speaker_02
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.

00:19:20 Speaker_02
And that's where it versus, yeah, I agree, the kind of two minute quick scroll is different. That's the cocaine algorithm.

00:19:26 Speaker_00
Yeah, yeah. There's a couple of ways you can get one step upstream of that.

00:19:30 Speaker_00
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.

00:19:44 Speaker_00
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.

00:19:51 Speaker_02
The problem with that though is there's still value, I find, in the algorithm serving you randomness and optionality. Okay, so you want the upside of the... Yes, I want the upside of the randomness and the optionality without Logan Paul.

00:20:02 Speaker_00
In that case, you're trying to fine-tune it.

00:20:05 Speaker_00
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 George is the only one who can determine what current George is going to watch.

00:20:17 Speaker_00
So you're not allowed to consume any media unless it's on your to-read list or to-watch list.

00:20:23 Speaker_00
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 knackered and it's 9pm 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 going to have all of this white space on my calendar, I'll agree to that.

00:20:39 Speaker_01
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 adjudicator of actually what I want to watch.

00:20:47 Speaker_00
So the problem there is you end up with a huge queue of stuff.

00:20:49 Speaker_01
None of which you think is interesting, but because you now don't have to pay the price, you tomorrow have to consume it, you kick the can down the hall, you watch the relevant things.

00:20:58 Speaker_00
You're looking in the fridge and you're like, I've got no food in the house at all. And actually there's loads of food, but it's like lettuce and a bit of tomato.

00:21:05 Speaker_02
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.

00:21:14 Speaker_02
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 shortness of it.

00:21:21 Speaker_02
And I think having that pre-built in to remove it, my sister, little life hack to this, is also on email if anybody has

00:21:30 Speaker_02
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.

00:21:43 Speaker_03
Gmail has that automatically, doesn't it? Gmail has that automatically with the promotions. It does, loads of them still slip through, yeah.

00:21:52 Speaker_01
Alright, Johnny, you're up.

00:22:08 Speaker_03
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.

00:22:20 Speaker_03
So it's like a film being read out, which is the most immersive thing I've ever heard.

00:22:25 Speaker_01
How immersive can it be with one air pod in?

00:22:27 Speaker_03
Well, because the other one's pressed.

00:22:28 Speaker_02
Do you find that you turn, that you can just

00:22:32 Speaker_03
go full monk mode and stay there because I'm a... Even if you roll over though, even if you roll over it's just one airpod, it's fine, you're asleep, it doesn't matter.

00:22:43 Speaker_03
The third life hack is Red Rising, the Red Rising series, but the immersive audio version. Phenomenal.

00:22:50 Speaker_01
So good. So fucking fantastic.

00:22:52 Speaker_03
So that to fall asleep, it's a series by Pierce Brown.

00:22:56 Speaker_01
Pierce Brown. Sci-fi series, the most addictive set of novels, but they've redone it as a movie in your mind. And yeah, helps you 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.

00:23:11 Speaker_01
They're fully acting it out. The sound effects, beautifully soundscaped. It's awesome. It's brilliant. I'm glad, I'm glad you like it.

00:23:17 Speaker_03
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, you're just immediately in another world.

00:23:26 Speaker_01
Manta eye masks make a Bluetooth eye mask. Do they? That is built for you to sleep on.

00:23:34 Speaker_03
I have a pair of headphones called like Philips, something they're like called SleepPods.

00:23:39 Speaker_01
Snoozeys or some shit.

00:23:40 Speaker_03
They're just not very good.

00:23:41 Speaker_01
Well, they're just not AirPods, are they?

00:23:42 Speaker_03
Yeah, just one AirPod in, because 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.

00:23:53 Speaker_03
It's the sort of thing I think Yusuf would worry me about if I spoke to him about it too much. Oh, about its non-ionizing radiation? Like, is that airpod talking to the airpod that's over there and like, cooking my brain in the process?

00:24:02 Speaker_01
And it was a Chernobyl air, yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's already going through... I mean... But I've only got one in. So is that okay? Who knows? Is it okay?

00:24:10 Speaker_00
I'm less concerned about Bluetooth earphones. As far as like EMF exposure, I think there are other things.

00:24:15 Speaker_03
Somebody shared an AirPod thing where it was like the communication between one AirPod and another.

00:24:20 Speaker_00
It's like you're sending multiple signals through your head. Yeah, but I think like... But as medical advice, you're saying that's fine? The problem is you've got to pick your battles, haven't you?

00:24:28 Speaker_00
It's like air quality, water quality, plastic exposures, you know... Receipts. Receipts. So for me, it's like don't microwave plastic and don't be an idiot.

00:24:37 Speaker_01
Drive with your seatbelt on.

00:24:39 Speaker_00
Drive with your seatbelt on and get any dinks in your car sorted as quickly as you can.

00:24:42 Speaker_01
Straight away. I like that. Just to add another one on there from Lifehacks four years ago. You can bulk buy your Audible every year. Can you? So you don't need to pay monthly.

00:24:52 Speaker_01
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 Lifehack?

00:25:02 Speaker_03
I should really pay more attention.

00:25:04 Speaker_01
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.

00:25:14 Speaker_01
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?

00:25:25 Speaker_01
Because there's like several books, right? I'm on book. Six or seven now, I can't remember which one it is, and I'm still going. Everyone that I know that I've got on. Same storyline? Yep, same protagonist. Wow.

00:25:36 Speaker_01
And everyone that I know that's got on to it is hot.

00:25:40 Speaker_03
I think it crossed a point of like, when they're in the mine at the beginning, I'm like, this is 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.

00:25:49 Speaker_03
Book two and book three are just obsessive.

00:25:51 Speaker_01
So, Red Rising. You should go and download it, even if you don't get the- The graphic, audio, whatever it's called. Yes.

00:25:56 Speaker_02
There's a good rule of thumb, fiction before bed. It's amazing.

00:26:02 Speaker_01
Out of your own head, you're not thinking about your problems. Good. Very good. All right, Seth.

00:26:07 Speaker_00
There's the heuristic of what can I remove, you know, so delete, automate, then delegate. But there's also, what am I already doing or using that I could be using better?

00:26:19 Speaker_00
So a few examples would be, like, I'm already spending the time meditating in the mornings. 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?

00:26:33 Speaker_00
Everyone's seen someone exercising in the gym. Every time you go to the gym and they're there and they're texting and swinging their arms around, not really doing anything.

00:26:43 Speaker_00
They're taking all of the steps to get the result, but wasting the actual critical time in there. this also applies to the decision of, do I add something or do I just make what I'm already doing better, get more use out of that, squeeze the lemon?

00:27:01 Speaker_00
So rather than adding in 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?

00:27:14 Speaker_00
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.

00:27:26 Speaker_00
And so I'm always on about TikTik, but the deeper I go with it, the more I'm like, actually, there's no point looking for any other app to solve any of these other problems, because if you just really dive into TikTik...and now my referral

00:27:46 Speaker_00
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 TickTick.

00:27:59 Speaker_00
And as I've applied this in the last few weeks, whenever I've found myself trying to solve a problem, I always take a pause and go, hang on, what in what we already have, what software we're already paying for, what tools we already have can do the thing?

00:28:10 Speaker_01
Have you got another example?

00:28:12 Speaker_00
So this is a niche one, but we were looking for a way to convert Twitter threads, or X-threads, into carousels.

00:28:21 Speaker_00
I was looking at new bits of software, and I thought, actually, 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, well, what's the

00:28:32 Speaker_01
Shiny new thing.

00:28:32 Speaker_00
Shiny new thing.

00:28:33 Speaker_01
Something new to solve this problem as opposed to looking where you already are. What's your one of you don't need new lessons? You need to relearn your old ones. Yeah.

00:28:41 Speaker_01
I mean most of the stuff that you already, most of the answers to problems you have now you already know and you probably learned five years ago.

00:28:48 Speaker_00
So ironically we were talking about this just before the episode and last year on this episode that life is a spiral curriculum and that you look back on your beautiful

00:28:58 Speaker_00
Yeah, you look on your journals from when you were like 19, and even who you think was your 19 like idiot self was still telling you the same thing that you need to learn.

00:29:05 Speaker_03
It's the same problems, isn't it? Same problems over and over again. The day one feature of like, today, a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago, and you're writing about the same fucking problem.

00:29:12 Speaker_01
Well, you're the same person, that's why. Like the common thread between all of that is you.

00:29:16 Speaker_01
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.

00:29:25 Speaker_01
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. All right, my next one, one that we've done a long, long time ago, but continues to pay huge dividends.

00:29:39 Speaker_01
Clip the curtains together in hotel rooms using the trouser hanger. I'd challenge anybody. to take me on with that.

00:29:48 Speaker_01
You get into a hotel room, and these curtains, for no reason, have 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?

00:30:03 Speaker_01
Should I leave it? And you go, I'm gonna go again. You do it, and it's further apart, and you're like, fuck! Set of trouser hangers from the wardrobe, pin it at the top. If you've got two trouser hangers, one, two, and then three, four at the bottom,

00:30:17 Speaker_01
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.

00:30:31 Speaker_00
Technically, the light receptors on the skin will also explode.

00:30:35 Speaker_01
The back of your knee can actually wake you up. So that's that. And then I guess the other one, which is related to sleep, I've spent a lot of time on the road again this year, a lot of time in hotels. Good pillow, bad bed, good night's sleep.

00:30:47 Speaker_01
Bad pillow, good bed, bad night's sleep. Basically the pillow is the most important thing. Pillow is 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

00:31:05 Speaker_01
One of those ones that fucking, yeah. My fucking sleeping or drowning here. And yeah, that's it. Pin the curtains together in a hotel bedroom and optimize for better pillows.

00:31:22 Speaker_01
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?

00:31:31 Speaker_01
And then if you can find one that you like that's available like that and it isn't an insane price, you can add, you know, £25 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.

00:31:43 Speaker_01
You're like, ah, fuck, it's one of the ones. Get the order done next day, get a good night's sleep.

00:31:48 Speaker_03
There's a Kelly Starrett thing, a piece of advice from years ago, where if you lie on the mattress and you bend one leg, the mattress is the wrong level of turgidity.

00:32:00 Speaker_03
So if you're going into extension, so you bend one leg to get out of extension, and I think that's if the mattress is too hard. That's the thing.

00:32:09 Speaker_03
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-hedge, tight-knit.

00:32:15 Speaker_00
Your Kelly Starrett hack with pillows has changed my life as well. Wow.

00:32:20 Speaker_03
It won't even be a life hack. Using the towel roll.

00:32:22 Speaker_00
I think it's from a, it'll be from like a 2017 Life Hacks or something.

00:32:26 Speaker_03
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're everything's in.

00:32:36 Speaker_01
So I followed that but I just put another pillow in between the two top arms.

00:32:41 Speaker_03
So the pillows are crossed?

00:32:42 Speaker_01
No so one's behind my head and then I turn over to like spoon.

00:32:46 Speaker_00
Makeshift pregnancy pillow.

00:32:47 Speaker_01
But it's not for the legs because I found that if I had one. Too hot? If you've got to do this Brazilian jujitsu, you know, like sweep the legs and then pull it up and over.

00:32:57 Speaker_01
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?

00:33:06 Speaker_02
My one relates to, you mentioned then being on the road, big thing for myself this year again, don't have an office. I'm often working from hotels, coffee shops and things like that.

00:33:18 Speaker_02
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.

00:33:32 Speaker_02
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 Thiel interview, one of my contrarian takes that I give is, is that...

00:33:49 Speaker_00
It's very on-brand, Chris.

00:33:50 Speaker_02
Very good. 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?

00:34:02 Speaker_01
Slouched over.

00:34:03 Speaker_02
Real contrarian. Slouched over, hunch, 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.

00:34:15 Speaker_02
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 once you go to that, you can't go back.

00:34:24 Speaker_02
You look at everybody else and you go, how are you spending two hours in this depressed posture?

00:34:29 Speaker_02
It's like we've spoken about this previously that I think a significant amount of people being miserable is just being in resting serious face versus resting smile face. I thought about that.

00:34:40 Speaker_00
And resting serious body. Yes. So I presented at the International Posture Summit, believe it or not. Here we go.

00:34:47 Speaker_02
Come right up next to me in the urinal there. Come on. Did you know? You've seen this?

00:34:51 Speaker_00
No.

00:34:51 Speaker_02
being in Lily Phillips.

00:34:52 Speaker_00
Well, so there is a study that shows that your posture impacts how much you believe your own thoughts, which is interesting.

00:35:00 Speaker_00
So not so much mood and power pose and testosterone cortisol ratio has kind of been difficult to reproduce in the results, but believing your own thoughts. So if you're sat up Burrata stand. What does he call it? Burrata. Burrata.

00:35:18 Speaker_03
It's a type of cheese, isn't it? Burrata.

00:35:19 Speaker_00
Yeah. I've got a couple of them.

00:35:21 Speaker_02
Delicious. So, yeah. But my take with that is you've seen the, is it Jonathan Haidt who did the whole anxious mind? He says since 2008, anxiety has gone through the roof and it lines up with social media.

00:35:33 Speaker_02
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.

00:35:42 Speaker_01
Posture pilled. Yeah. No, I'm a big fan of it. I will say the height that you have it at and the closeness that you have your laptop to yourself.

00:35:50 Speaker_01
I would come down the stairs when we were both living in the Colton house in Austin, and you don't see a person.

00:35:57 Speaker_01
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 there's just a set of AirPod Pro Max's poking out the top, and you're like, oh, Georgie's behind there somewhere.

00:36:11 Speaker_01
It's terrible for day game.

00:36:14 Speaker_02
If you want to pick up girls at the coffee shop. You can't do any kino escalation. It's good for network. The amount of people go, he must be hardcore. What does he do?

00:36:22 Speaker_01
Meanwhile, he's reading David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity with ChatGPT open again. Fuck. All right. Should we do a lesson? Bring it on.

00:36:31 Speaker_03
Oh my God. Yes.

00:36:33 Speaker_00
Fine. Are we out of hacks now?

00:36:35 Speaker_01
No, we can go back and go.

00:36:36 Speaker_00
Okay, so I've got two micro hacks, but we can... Do you want to do one more round of hacks?

00:36:39 Speaker_01
Do you want to do one more round of hacks? I can do another hack. Let's do another round of hacks.

00:36:43 Speaker_03
I had another hack chambered, ready to go.

00:36:46 Speaker_01
Fire it.

00:36:47 Speaker_03
But now it's made me question the hack that I've picked.

00:36:49 Speaker_01
Don't worry.

00:36:51 Speaker_03
I am worrying, though. I'm gonna say... walking pad. Have we done that before? Walking pad. Walking pad.

00:37:00 Speaker_00
It's like a under desk treadmill.

00:37:03 Speaker_03
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.

00:37:12 Speaker_01
Is that why you stopped running?

00:37:13 Speaker_03
Exactly.

00:37:14 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:37:15 Speaker_03
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 2000 steps every, like maybe 4000 steps an hour. Can't be 4000 an hour. Why?

00:37:29 Speaker_01
Oh no, it could be. At that pace, yeah, probably about 4,000 an hour. Because you thought that was too many. Originally, but now I've repurposed. I realise you're wrong. Yeah, I am.

00:37:38 Speaker_02
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 concentrate?

00:37:45 Speaker_03
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.

00:37:55 Speaker_02
What types of work... A, sorry, what speed have you found useful and then what types of work have you found... 3.5. And that miles, kilometers? It's just what it says on the screen. You've both got the same one.

00:38:07 Speaker_01
Right. I think we might have this similar one.

00:38:09 Speaker_03
We have the same one.

00:38:11 Speaker_01
Right, but your legs are longer. Doesn't matter. I would imagine you walk quicker than these two. Does that matter?

00:38:18 Speaker_03
We're talking about preferences here.

00:38:21 Speaker_01
But it actually means they're walking a little bit more quickly.

00:38:23 Speaker_03
The question was, what speed have you found?

00:38:26 Speaker_01
You all like the same speed.

00:38:28 Speaker_00
Don't ask me my preference and then tell me that I'm wrong.

00:38:30 Speaker_03
You're fucking litigating me out of it here. Tie me up. So yeah, 3.5. Next question. What type of work? So you would think it needs to be like email, but it can be anything. I think it just helps, you just drop into whatever you're doing.

00:38:50 Speaker_01
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.

00:38:56 Speaker_02
I'm picturing you, Alan Partridge style, with like a Bluetooth headset on, short shorts, going 100k or it's going to sky.

00:39:06 Speaker_02
I once heard a story of, you know, so Ari Emanuel, who Ari Gold was based off on Entourage, so they own the UFC, WWE, he's like the apex lawyer in America for entertainment, and he's heavily dyslexic, so he just spends all day on the phone rather than doing anything that would

00:39:32 Speaker_02
use dyslexia I guess and I knew somebody who was in the office walking past his room and he's on a full inclined treadmill with like speaker on just saying fuck him, fuck him for another million, fuck him for another million.

00:39:45 Speaker_02
We're not moving until we fuck in front of a million.

00:39:47 Speaker_00
That's the gateway drug, isn't it? He's gradually stepping out.

00:39:50 Speaker_01
That's what you're going to be, 12 months time. I'll be on my way. Yeah, one of those.

00:39:56 Speaker_02
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. So you have such a high causal state. Going on my phone,

00:40:12 Speaker_02
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 the incline treadmill.

00:40:22 Speaker_00
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, which is probably terrible for your brain.

00:40:34 Speaker_02
Only allowing social media usage when you're doing incline cardio is actually

00:40:40 Speaker_01
That's not bad, but purposefully doing social media usage because you're an inclined cardio feels like... You end up fitter, but also a bit like... Yeah, it's weak.

00:40:49 Speaker_02
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.

00:41:02 Speaker_03
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.

00:41:13 Speaker_03
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.

00:41:24 Speaker_01
It very much depends what sort of a meeting it is as well. If it's you just, okay, like recap me on this, it's kind of sort of standard stuff. Okay, like here we go. I'll have a little plot.

00:41:36 Speaker_03
And if it's a really serious meeting and you're the only one walking and you're the one being really serious.

00:41:40 Speaker_00
It's the art of like perfectly level walking. So only your legs are moving, but you're just... Squat jog.

00:41:45 Speaker_01
I think you'd have a little bit of... shift.

00:41:50 Speaker_03
What brand did you go for? I don't know, but I do know it's out of stock.

00:41:54 Speaker_01
But if you go on Amazon... Oh brilliant, that's two great things.

00:41:56 Speaker_03
If you go on Amazon, they cancel each other out don't they? It doesn't matter. If you go on Amazon and search walking pad, I pretty much any of them, they range from, I think you tried to find like a bean one didn't you, for like 50, 60 quid?

00:42:10 Speaker_03
Up to whatever you want to pay.

00:42:11 Speaker_00
Like 300 quid, 200, 300 quid, get you a good one. All right, Steph, you're up. Great product promo there. Well, I don't know. I don't know what it is.

00:42:20 Speaker_03
And they can raise it anywhere. Yeah. 50 quid maybe.

00:42:23 Speaker_00
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 of the house. Cause I know that if I got a desk pad, it would enable my screen time and I'd be doing it more.

00:42:39 Speaker_00
And so Dickie Bush, who, um, twice now.

00:42:44 Speaker_03
Chris mentioned it before.

00:42:46 Speaker_00
There we go, double dickie. So he just said, don't do any work at your desk that could be done walking. And that includes like emails, voice notes, and to be honest, like most writing now with GPT, you can just dump a bunch of words into an audio file.

00:43:04 Speaker_03
I mean, if you get a walking pad, it's all work, isn't it?

00:43:08 Speaker_00
It's all work. But then you're just at your desk.

00:43:11 Speaker_03
You're still walking.

00:43:13 Speaker_01
What is it that you're looking for? To get outside? To get outside.

00:43:15 Speaker_02
To 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 that you can do that. Because they think you might be on a call. Yeah, that's not bad.

00:43:28 Speaker_01
Good. All right. Which one am I going to choose next? Last year I said Sleep Token, this 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.

00:43:39 Speaker_01
Really phenomenal, most recent album they just put out, the London vlog, the song at the end that we had and the tune that was threaded throughout. Shout out to Caleb, the frontman, who sent me the stems from the track.

00:43:53 Speaker_01
So he sent me the track broken up into its individual component parts so we could really, really dial that in. That was very kind of him to do. and they were my top played track of this year, I felt like important to give.

00:44:05 Speaker_01
That was alive, you had attention. Yep of course, good, bit mincey compared but it's alright. No good, that whole album's fantastic, it only came out in October and I think they still managed to get into my Spotify wrapped.

00:44:20 Speaker_01
place of... I'll do another one given that that one was just music. Mitcham deodorant. So, Luke got me onto this last year, and there is no deodorant that's anywhere near as good.

00:44:33 Speaker_01
This isn't just, like, the smell of it is fantastic, the price of it's great, the quality, it doesn't leave any white marks, and everyone's sort of looking for what's the best sort of deodorant.

00:44:42 Speaker_01
I'm not a 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.

00:44:57 Speaker_01
Mitchum and Beartooth. 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.

00:45:09 Speaker_01
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.

00:45:25 Speaker_02
It's a prompt for AI so either chat GPT Claude whatever your That's actually a life hack within itself, is to be an absolute LLM whore, if you can, is the following prompt. So, do you know the Elon Musk quote? It's around how to learn.

00:45:45 Speaker_02
It's essentially this idea that you want to view knowledge as a semantic tree. So you start at the roots, then you go up to the trunk, then you have the branches, then you have like the secondary branches, then you have the leaves.

00:45:58 Speaker_02
Whereas often the way we'll approach things is, oh, I wanna 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.

00:46:13 Speaker_02
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 then all the way there.

00:46:22 Speaker_02
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.

00:46:33 Speaker_02
And then you look at, okay, you have all these great people who are self-taught, so you can just teach yourself from Nikola Tesla to Leonardo da Vinci. You have access to the alphabet, so you can understand any concept with words.

00:46:46 Speaker_02
You have access to numeracy, which is only 10 digits, but you can access, you can understand any mathematical equation with numbers. Therefore, the only bottleneck to literally every single thing in your life, skill issue, knowledge.

00:46:58 Speaker_02
So placing that into Chord or ChatGPT, and you realize I can learn anything starting from there.

00:47:04 Speaker_02
So you start with the, you say this 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.

00:47:16 Speaker_02
And you're constantly just moving up and you realize, oh, I can literally teach myself anything.

00:47:23 Speaker_00
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, and then go to step one and then step two.

00:47:32 Speaker_02
But 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.

00:47:43 Speaker_00
big mistake that I made when studying medicine was not doing that earlier. You have to have a framework or a skeleton to be able to hang concepts on. Otherwise, you are just learning raw data and it's so difficult. Mason. Yes.

00:47:54 Speaker_02
There's nothing connected. You're just memorising like you did at school. You're never actually understanding.

00:47:59 Speaker_00
It doesn't fit together. Jason. There's a tipping point. 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.

00:48:10 Speaker_02
Is there something you've used that for recently? 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?

00:48:24 Speaker_02
So I started with that. with any kind of topic that will come up now, I will just whack it in there.

00:48:30 Speaker_01
For the LLM non-monogamous out there, what do you use each platform for? Have you found certain things are better on certain platforms?

00:48:40 Speaker_02
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 O version and then you have

00:48:50 Speaker_02
X now getting three times the number of supercomputer clusters with the Grok AI that's going to go live. So, me right now, I vary between Claude and ChatGPT, but I would be shocked if next year I'm saying the exact same thing.

00:49:06 Speaker_01
Yeah, it seems like Google is... Google's great, yeah.

00:49:09 Speaker_02
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.

00:49:21 Speaker_01
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.

00:49:30 Speaker_03
You got a lesson? I do. So it's a reframe on hard things or a hard thing.

00:49:39 Speaker_03
So I think, so something that 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.

00:49:52 Speaker_03
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.

00:50:03 Speaker_03
no more problems, but actually all that happens is the new, more thorny, harder problem.

00:50:09 Speaker_03
And reframing that as like, that is the thing where the development, that's the development opportunity because the next revenue level, the next achievement just always just feels exactly the same as the last one.

00:50:23 Speaker_03
Doesn't matter the size of it, it's 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 gain. So the phrase that I remind myself of is, for every level is a devil.

00:50:36 Speaker_03
And it's just the current devil you're facing. That's because we've had like a very weird year in business, like lots of problems that I think we'd have never expected. And your immediate response to that is like, oh,

00:50:51 Speaker_03
But actually, if you reframe 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.

00:51:04 Speaker_03
So that's been my lesson for this year. Probably the biggest one.

00:51:07 Speaker_01
I think that'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,

00:51:14 Speaker_01
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.

00:51:28 Speaker_01
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 creating gummy for every different thing? And yeah, I think

00:51:39 Speaker_03
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?

00:51:50 Speaker_03
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, fuck, like, because, like, that's my morning.

00:52:02 Speaker_03
And it's like, his bad news will be far worse.

00:52:04 Speaker_00
How many unreads have you got currently on Telegram? I don't know. I think the other day it was like 1, 2, 3, 4 for me and I screenshot it.

00:52:11 Speaker_03
On this lesson there's a beautiful, have you ever heard of the book called The Gap and The Gain?

00:52:24 Speaker_02
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, whether it's girlfriend cheated on you, fired from job, insert problem, whatever it is, right?

00:52:49 Speaker_02
and you go back and go, with the benefit of hindsight now, what would have been the worst interpretation of that problem?

00:52:55 Speaker_02
It's like, okay, girlfriend cheated on me, I'm a loser, I'm gonna binge a load of food, I'm gonna write a load of angry Facebook statuses about her, didn't work. That's the kind of worst interpretation of that problem.

00:53:06 Speaker_02
And you go, okay, well, what was the I'm detached from it. What would have been the best interpretation of that? It's like, okay, I'm gonna book this personal trainer for three months.

00:53:15 Speaker_02
I'm gonna 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.

00:53:28 Speaker_02
So you do that for the past problem. And then you just go, okay, now I'm a current problem. What's the current worst interpretation of this? What's the current best interpretation of this? Which one do you want to choose, Neil?

00:53:42 Speaker_02
What would you tomorrow and you today? 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.

00:53:52 Speaker_01
Mark Andreessen 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.

00:54:01 Speaker_01
And 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.

00:54:09 Speaker_01
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.

00:54:18 Speaker_03
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.

00:54:29 Speaker_04
Yeah.

00:54:30 Speaker_03
So if you're going to pursue the journey of like, well, I want to achieve the 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.

00:54:39 Speaker_02
So that's the prize. Is that a prize 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 1 problems, it's so obvious, because you're now a level 9 person.

00:54:50 Speaker_02
But then as soon as you get to level 29, you'll look back at level 9 in the same way. But that's because of the person you become by solving each problem.

00:54:57 Speaker_03
So that's a much more succinct way of saying what I was saying. 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.

00:55:09 Speaker_01
Yeah, because if that challenge came back up to you again now... So easy. Ah, fine. No worries. Yeah, that's very interesting. That's cool. I like that. Beautiful. Good one.

00:55:17 Speaker_00
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. With our clients, we have the same thing.

00:55:30 Speaker_00
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 I've completed it. Then all that happens is, very quickly from working with us, we fix that problem.

00:55:43 Speaker_00
It's not actually that hard a problem to solve. then they end up with a sales bottleneck, and then they fix that, and they end up with a fulfilment bottleneck, and then they fix that, and they end up with an operational bottleneck.

00:55:51 Speaker_00
And they're like, oh, actually, life isn't just sunshine and rainbows after this one thing that I can solve. So for me, a very similar lesson, which was we are the ones that define success in our lives. And

00:56:05 Speaker_00
yet for some reason we have a desire, we close the gap somehow by fulfilling the desire, and then we move the goalposts. Then we keep doing that and we're like, oh, why am I perpetually dissatisfied?

00:56:16 Speaker_00
Hearing your podcast with Andrew Wilkinson, the billionaire, whose main conclusion from becoming a billionaire is, oh, I'm still the same miserable, dissatisfied person I've ever been, but with more money.

00:56:27 Speaker_00
It takes somebody who's actually smashed that particular stream to be like, ah, maybe the answers aren't hiding behind more money or whatever. Ultimately, we defer gratification

00:56:42 Speaker_00
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 alligator at the boat.

00:56:55 Speaker_00
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.

00:57:05 Speaker_00
So in cell 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 the domains of life that we have sorted.

00:57:21 Speaker_00
Most of us, if you're watching this, hopefully you're healthy, you have access to being outside, you're not in prison, you have central heating, all this stuff.

00:57:32 Speaker_00
Physical health and time and family and son and all that stuff is just fully available in abundance. But we just go, I need another two grand or I need another whatever.

00:57:49 Speaker_00
I guess the lesson is to stop moving the goalposts, or if you do, recognise that it's just a game that we're playing, but you can still recognise that you are happy right now and all that suffering of the gap is just caused by the mind.

00:58:00 Speaker_00
So Felix Dennis has a book called How to Get Rich, which he's made it really distasteful in the way that it's branded and stuff. He's sat there like a maniacal monocle, because he's trying to paint this picture that you set that as the goal.

00:58:22 Speaker_00
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 time.

00:58:32 Speaker_00
I've made my 300 million dollars or whatever to then go and sit in a wood cabin and write poetry, and I could have done that at 30.

00:58:42 Speaker_02
Yeah, I had that realization, it's kind of like a nice meme, but you're already a billionaire just in an illiquid asset, which is your health, because any billionaire, and there'll be a lot out there right now, or centimillionaires that are on their deathbed, would give everything for your health.

00:58:58 Speaker_02
Therefore, yes, you can't liquidize it yet, maybe you will be in the future, but illiquid wealth, you're already a billionaire, which is a wild thought.

00:59:07 Speaker_01
the insight around the thing that you desire most is the thing that you assume will fix all of your problems.

00:59:14 Speaker_01
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 the total addressable market for more fame and more money is basically everybody and

00:59:29 Speaker_01
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.

00:59:39 Speaker_01
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 with me.

00:59:44 Speaker_00
It never does. It's as Frankel 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.

00:59:56 Speaker_00
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? And they're like, oh, a super yacht.

01:00:06 Speaker_01
All right, okay, so that's the level. Who was it that taught us that lesson about how when you ask people what they want their annual income to be, it's always- Sahil. Yeah, yeah, do you want to tell that story? Can you remember it?

01:00:20 Speaker_02
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 lines.

01:00:33 Speaker_01
2.5 to 3x, 2.5 to 3x, 2.5 to 3x.

01:00:36 Speaker_03
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 like would you want 10 million? Everyone goes? Yes.

01:00:45 Speaker_03
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

01:00:55 Speaker_03
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, it's the youth, it's like the future that you have ahead of you. But you ignore that.

01:01:06 Speaker_01
But 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.

01:01:16 Speaker_01
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.

01:01:27 Speaker_01
So beyond the health impact of it, there is no difference. The only thing is, you remember when you used to go back to school, or a Monday for me, it's a good example on a Monday.

01:01:35 Speaker_01
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...

01:01:42 Speaker_01
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.

01:01:52 Speaker_01
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

01:02:03 Speaker_00
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.

01:02:09 Speaker_01
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.

01:02:19 Speaker_01
Is it not multiplied by like physical ability?

01:02:23 Speaker_03
Enjoying anything is magnified when you can walk, there's no pain, you're fully mobile.

01:02:30 Speaker_01
Alright, my first one, that was fucking awesome, that was a good one too. This again from your birthday, outcomes matter more than inputs. You've been on this flex for quite a while.

01:02:41 Speaker_01
It's not too dissimilar to I look for efficiency over, I look for effectiveness over efficiency, but outcomes matter more than inputs.

01:02:49 Speaker_01
A lot of the time, especially as you get sort of further into black belt territory on the productivity bro optimization world,

01:02:57 Speaker_01
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.

01:03:08 Speaker_01
You have these sort of odd 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.

01:03:25 Speaker_01
Andy Grove. There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.

01:03:29 Speaker_00
So is this like don't conflate suffering with productivity or is it more like don't get attached to old systems that

01:03:38 Speaker_01
The suffering thing 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.

01:03:49 Speaker_01
It's what I did all of this stuff, look at all of the effort that I put in. What did you do on the back end of that? Because we've all had jobs, projects, things that we needed to finish.

01:04:00 Speaker_01
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.

01:04:09 Speaker_01
You had this huge email to write, and you spent 45 minutes cleaning the fucking kitchen. Why'd you do that? Well, I worked really hard today. And it's like, yes, yes, yes, but what were you trying to achieve?

01:04:18 Speaker_01
And it's also, I think, just a reminder that effectiveness is really the only thing that matters.

01:04:24 Speaker_01
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,

01:04:36 Speaker_01
A lot of the time, because 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.

01:04:48 Speaker_01
The only thing that you can bounce off is inputs. How much work did I do today? For instance, you wake up on a morning and you've slept in by three hours and immediately you feel like a piece of shit. You think, I'm a piece of shit because I slept in.

01:05:04 Speaker_01
You go, right, okay. You're looking at such a brief window, like the entirety of your life. But I'm in the lower quartile of the window.

01:05:12 Speaker_00
Your fucking sleep regularity.

01:05:15 Speaker_01
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?

01:05:24 Speaker_01
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?

01:05:29 Speaker_00
And that'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.

01:05:34 Speaker_02
There's a fun idea here which is just only setting on your to-do list the biggest thing that you have to do.

01:05:45 Speaker_02
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 lit. You feel brilliant.

01:05:58 Speaker_02
Yeah, but you also still have, to your point, that kind of Protestant guilt that I need to be working. why you're not working.

01:06:05 Speaker_02
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.

01:06:14 Speaker_02
And then the second one is, 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.

01:06:26 Speaker_03
There's like a really old Tim Ferriss article about this, about like how he stays productive. It's called like productivity tips for depressive people like me or something like that.

01:06:35 Speaker_03
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. Being busy is a form of indiscriminate action and procrastination. Busy people just don't know what to focus on.

01:06:51 Speaker_01
Your calendar is a better indication of your wealth than your bank account.

01:06:54 Speaker_03
And then the practical thing is write out all your to-dos.

01:06:58 Speaker_03
pick like the top three that make you most scared then pick one of them and just do it for three hours beautiful and that's that's how he says productive or effective wrestling with bears um would it be a need to do this fighting an axe legally representing lily phillips jesus it's always the thing that makes you i wanted to be guy a hundred

01:07:19 Speaker_02
If you look on your to-do list and pick the thing, you're like, oh. So the asterisk I give to that, you know, you mentioned then the one that will, and then do three hours on that.

01:07:26 Speaker_02
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.

01:07:34 Speaker_02
Cause 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.

01:07:41 Speaker_01
All I need to do is- Parkinson's law the breakup out into three hours long. Right. So we've got-

01:07:48 Speaker_02
Or I need to book this flight to this location. Or I need to set up this banking account.

01:07:53 Speaker_03
But if you've got three hours blocked out, you're definitely going to get it done, aren't you? True. I think that's the point. Fence off. Don't try to be this, like, oh, I'll just do ten minutes later. The most important thing to do today is that thing.

01:08:04 Speaker_03
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.

01:08:13 Speaker_01
Do you want me to? You're up. Kind of related to this one, 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, we don't talk about doing it before.

01:08:23 Speaker_02
So this is like a life hack slash lesson, they're both, both related. And I call it turning bullshit into reality. and I'll do the exercise with you guys now. If I only did this every day, whenever I've done it, I've gone, that's a great day.

01:08:42 Speaker_02
So, we start with bullshit. What are your values? Do you have any that come to mind? And if you don't have, like, I've thought through, like, my values, blah, blah, that bullshit.

01:08:53 Speaker_02
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?

01:09:02 Speaker_00
Pass.

01:09:03 Speaker_02
Come on, just give me something that you value. Personal gratitude. I don't know.

01:09:08 Speaker_00
Yeah. Gratitude.

01:09:08 Speaker_02
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?

01:09:23 Speaker_02
Run 5k. What was yours again?

01:09:25 Speaker_00
The gratitude trigger.

01:09:26 Speaker_02
Gratitude it could be write a thank-you letter to ABC and yours was adventure adventure It could be message the group chat to arrange this holiday that we've been putting off.

01:09:37 Speaker_02
Okay, so just write down ten 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 happen next action from neurons to atoms.

01:09:53 Speaker_00
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.

01:10:00 Speaker_02
You can mix those up, though.

01:10:02 Speaker_00
Yeah, so I was reading Patrick Lencioni recently, and he said a lot of companies will go like, oh yeah, we'll do our values statement, and they'll say our country values honesty.

01:10:11 Speaker_00
And you're like, okay, 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.

01:10:23 Speaker_00
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.

01:10:29 Speaker_02
Ultimately, 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.

01:10:37 Speaker_01
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.

01:10:45 Speaker_02
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.

01:10:59 Speaker_02
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.

01:11:11 Speaker_02
Whereas this is time moving from just being reactive each day to being proactive. For example, the gratitude one. When would you really go, I'm going to write this thank you letter?

01:11:22 Speaker_02
You might have been putting off this thank you letter for four years that would take you 10 minutes to do. Then when you actually reflect on the year, it's one of the few things that you actually remember.

01:11:31 Speaker_00
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.

01:11:37 Speaker_02
And then if you can just move that to another note, you just keep storing. Storing that I am that person.

01:11:44 Speaker_01
Should we do some resolutions? I basically had this idea that

01:11:51 Speaker_01
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.

01:12:01 Speaker_01
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.

01:12:09 Speaker_01
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

01:12:17 Speaker_01
resolutions or new habits or behavior change, things that you've done, simple things, given that, you know, this is going out on Christmas Eve, and people are going to be thinking about it.

01:12:27 Speaker_01
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 to go with that. Have you got any? I do.

01:12:38 Speaker_03
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?

01:12:47 Speaker_01
Adapted 75 hard.

01:12:49 Speaker_03
Just because like when you look at actually 75 hard out of the box there are things in it that I think are... Too hard. Too hard, far too hard. No just there for I think maybe slightly destructive in some ways and also I just don't want to do.

01:13:00 Speaker_03
Which ones did you find? So like training twice a day, every day. I just don't think there's any, I think there's ways to pursue that sort of goal without those things. It's like... Drinking a gallon of water, like Stone the adulterers.

01:13:15 Speaker_03
It seems like an arbitrary. Yeah, I realize it's there because it's hard, but I think the thing. Like Holy War. Not for me. 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.

01:13:28 Speaker_03
And if you miss a day, you go back to the beginning.

01:13:29 Speaker_03
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.

01:13:42 Speaker_00
you regale us of our friend who set himself a target of having a banana every day?

01:13:51 Speaker_03
Yeah, I mean, yeah, so our friend Ben One of his things was have a banana I think because he'd read it was something to do like good for bowel health And it got to like 11 o'clock at night. He was staying in Cambridge didn't have a banana.

01:14:04 Speaker_03
So was driving around Cambridge Trying to find 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.

01:14:19 Speaker_03
He went out, sat in the car, sat in the car, meditating in the car, just to tick the box. I don't know. 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.

01:14:30 Speaker_01
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, oh, it's wedding season. Yeah.

01:14:43 Speaker_01
It's like, good luck, mate. Or you have to go sit down and meditate. Me and the boys flew to Australia, you're on a plane for 17 and a bit hours. Where's the banana? You couldn't plan the banana in advance?

01:14:57 Speaker_03
It's more that you don't view any personal habit change or behaviour change as difficult. If you've been able to stick to something for 75 days without interruption, any other change you want to make is easy.

01:15:08 Speaker_01
So it's the meta lesson, not the individual.

01:15:10 Speaker_03
It's got nothing to do with the... as long as you don't pick ridiculously easy things.

01:15:14 Speaker_01
So 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.

01:15:21 Speaker_03
Yeah, and it can be anything. 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 committing to a period of time of, I'm not going to miss a day.

01:15:31 Speaker_03
I'm going to move heaven and earth to not miss a day. And you get to there and you're like, oh, what an achievement. Anything else would be easy.

01:15:39 Speaker_00
Geoff. Yeah. There's so many adulterers and sodomites that need stoning. And if you just commit- Where's that from? You know what it is? It's like a wispy memory from the guy who I think you spoke to, Chris, who lived the Old Testament for a year. What?

01:15:59 Speaker_03
Jesus Christ. I thought I would have heard about that. I don't think I spoke to him. I think it's just something you've read on Old Testament or New Testament because those are two very different things.

01:16:07 Speaker_00
Yeah, so he set himself different challenges each year. Lived inside of a whale. Built a big... Did he build an ark? So he had to grow out his hair and throw pebbles at sodomites and adulterers. He basically tried to live the life of that.

01:16:24 Speaker_00
verbatim for a year. And then his other challenge was read the entire Encyclopædia Britannica. And he said it really pissed off his wife, because, is this ringing a bell?

01:16:36 Speaker_00
He'd be like, did you know that the Byzantine period, and she's like, oh, stop it with your trivia. But yeah, anyway.

01:16:42 Speaker_03
You didn't use somebody who did like early on. They did maybe something each month for a year, a different thing each month for a year.

01:16:52 Speaker_01
Yes, yes, yes, yes. But it wasn't. Not the Old Testament. Nothing to do with that. No, he didn't build an ark and try and get two by two. Welcome back to the show.

01:17:09 Speaker_00
What a derailment. 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.

01:17:25 Speaker_00
splitting your year into quarters, and then splitting that into four domains of your life – body, being, balance and business, or health, wealth, love and happiness. I quite like the alliteration.

01:17:38 Speaker_00
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?

01:17:51 Speaker_00
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 blasting it and grinding your face off with stuff.

01:18:03 Speaker_00
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 overweighting one domain of your life.

01:18:15 Speaker_00
So the idea is to kind of counteract people who just double down on their business and they end up overweight and spiritually disconnected and divorced and all this stuff, but they got the million. That framework's been really helpful for me.

01:18:31 Speaker_00
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.

01:18:44 Speaker_00
For years, I drunk the Kool-Aid that I can multitask, and because I've got Alfred installed and keyboard shortcuts and whatever, I can just flip between windows and tabs.

01:18:53 Speaker_00
It feels more productive because your brain's like, oh great, there's loads of things happening. But the quality of that work, the attention residue, all that stuff isn't worth it.

01:19:04 Speaker_00
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.

01:19:15 Speaker_00
And then to create 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.

01:19:25 Speaker_00
And it sounds like overkill, but I think our brains are so scatty that we need to just be fully hemmed in and forced to focus on that one thing.

01:19:35 Speaker_00
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.

01:19:44 Speaker_00
And then you feel like an absolute dingus if you go off task because everything's screaming like, no, no, no, finish this task.

01:19:51 Speaker_01
The only reason you're here is to do that. That's cool. I like that. So I had two. 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.

01:20:01 Speaker_01
That used to be quite contrarian when you first started it. I remember, yeah.

01:20:05 Speaker_02
Yeah, it was fucking crazy. Give it five years, Old Testament will be right in here. You'll get stoned.

01:20:14 Speaker_01
Wow. Okay, so my two highest ROI resolutions that I've done, they've stuck with me. Number one, sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom. And number two, go for a walk first thing in the morning. I've always wondered about the phone thing.

01:20:28 Speaker_03
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 radio waves?

01:20:36 Speaker_01
No, 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.

01:20:46 Speaker_01
But you just take the charger for your phone and you put it outside of your fucking bedroom. And it's like, I can't believe how many people still have it.

01:20:55 Speaker_01
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.

01:21:04 Speaker_01
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, well, You know like it's just there go.

01:21:14 Speaker_01
I'm gonna get up.

01:21:15 Speaker_01
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 a 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 this terrible thing issues

01:21:30 Speaker_00
Well that or it's Alexander's library.

01:21:32 Speaker_01
You say, oh well there is Alexander's library on the other side of this room with infinite... Yeah, whether it's framed well or badly, what's your one task now? Go to fucking sleep. So go to sleep.

01:21:42 Speaker_01
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 I just noticed that if I woke up and I was feeling a little...

01:21:54 Speaker_01
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.

01:22:03 Speaker_01
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 blah.

01:22:12 Speaker_01
It's like the midway, the guy on the left says, morning walk makes me feel nice. And those two things, I think, you know, the two that I've done

01:22:23 Speaker_01
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.

01:22:32 Speaker_01
It's like, plug it in in the bathroom and then go into the bedroom. But morning walk phone outside of the bedroom has been two of the highest ROI. Do you still do no caffeine first thing? Yeah, yeah. So I'm avoiding that.

01:22:45 Speaker_00
Your point about Huberman is great that he's been able to pacify the midwits by legitimating scientifically. Yeah, for people to just follow the guy on the left stuff.

01:22:56 Speaker_02
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 joked that I'd be willing to bet nobody who listens to that

01:23:12 Speaker_02
Sleep's as good as my mate Quinny, who's just like, just shut your eyes, lad. You know what I mean? Like, he just doesn't overthink it.

01:23:17 Speaker_00
He deliberately doesn't optimise it because he's like, if I mess with it, then I'm gonna sleep worse if it's not.

01:23:22 Speaker_02
Sleep is one of those perfect examples of... One of the reasons a lot of people have insomnia is trying to overthink sleep.

01:23:28 Speaker_02
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 failed to sleep three times as faster.

01:23:41 Speaker_02
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 then you won't sleep.

01:23:50 Speaker_01
Yeah, but it's an interesting realization that

01:23:58 Speaker_01
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.

01:24:10 Speaker_01
It shouldn't be the case that I need Andrew Hubeman 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.

01:24:23 Speaker_03
Because I'm not sure on, like, my personal experience of that, I'm not sure I feel much of a difference.

01:24:28 Speaker_01
by not having the caffeine first.

01:24:29 Speaker_03
Or having caffeine first, yeah. And I'm sure the science will tell me differently, but I think that's a good example.

01:24:35 Speaker_00
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.

01:24:42 Speaker_03
Lots. Lots. Lots.

01:24:43 Speaker_00
Just don't get silly with it.

01:24:44 Speaker_03
Lots. And not before, not after midday. Good rule.

01:24:48 Speaker_02
G. So I do have one, but to go like meta New Year's resolutions to begin with, the first thing is to kind of question the question.

01:24:57 Speaker_02
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

01:25:15 Speaker_02
you come to me and you go, oh, I need to get this flight to Paris. Wizz Air's gone. I go, don't worry Chris, I've got this airline. It's got a 91% failure rate. Are you going to get on it? No. Or let's say Yusuf, I know what you're like.

01:25:28 Speaker_02
You've been out on the town. You've been out with Mr. Old Testament. You're having fun. You've met a lovely lady. You go back to the room and you go, fuck, I've got no condoms. And you knock on my door and I go, oh yeah, yeah, take this one.

01:25:39 Speaker_02
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, that seems to work.

01:25:51 Speaker_03
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 that 91% of people can't get the condom on.

01:26:03 Speaker_02
So you've gone meta about my meta. So can I go meta about you? No, no, no. We won't end up in infinite labs like Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson. What do you mean by truth, Jonny? What do you mean by condom? Exactly.

01:26:14 Speaker_02
So basically, I would first look at things that actually work. So I'd look at Alcoholics Anonymous, where you have a group. So you have kind of social shame. You have a recurring theme.

01:26:24 Speaker_02
You have basically New Year's resolutions operate like the psychological version of North Korea. versus you kind of want to move towards Singapore. A system that actually works versus a horrific failure rate.

01:26:38 Speaker_02
So even small things of, okay, whatever the thing is, 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 that I will do the thing.

01:26:51 Speaker_02
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.

01:27:05 Speaker_02
Raymond. Raymond. And he's like. shaking, unsure, and he goes, I want you to be a veterinarian. And he goes, I'll come back here in 30 days, and if you're not a veterinarian, you'll be dead. You can bet that he didn't have a 91% failure rate.

01:27:19 Speaker_02
So I think first off questioning the question, which is pretty hardcore, but then the real soft core nice thing that I would recommend is journaling.

01:27:28 Speaker_01
All of that is said.

01:27:32 Speaker_02
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.

01:27:49 Speaker_02
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. Going back to your point earlier, it's just the same problems over and over again.

01:27:58 Speaker_02
I had a friend of mine who I think had his journal stolen. 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 20% of everything I have. It's so valuable.

01:28:11 Speaker_02
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.

01:28:21 Speaker_00
I told you about this, George. I took a journal every day from the age of 13 to 19 on a Microsoft Word document, and then one day I opened it, file corrupted. Just like, Oh well.

01:28:32 Speaker_03
Did you never back it up?

01:28:33 Speaker_00
No, I was like, well that's the end of that and just stopped. Not backing that up is the least you thing ever. Or is that where it started? This was when I was transitioning Windows to Mac, so it was in that.

01:28:43 Speaker_00
However, I've still got the file so I could maybe uncorrupt it now with modern technology, I'd be able to.

01:28:49 Speaker_02
like whether it's you do this very well you take a lot of photos videos i don't do that um 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 day one day one no yeah you can use you can leave audio messages you can photos videos

01:29:07 Speaker_01
She's big Apple notes for everything. One size fits all. Should we do, what have you got left? Should we do one more round of life hacks? What have we got?

01:29:16 Speaker_00
I've got a lesson and a fail.

01:29:18 Speaker_01
Okay. I have a lesson. Are we doing fails? Uh, we can do. Let's 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.

01:29:30 Speaker_03
Oh, you're potatoing me? Yeah. You looked at him, but you're potatoing me. It's all on you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. trying to find the micro plate equivalent in happiness. What's a micro plate? It's a plate that's less than 2.5 kilos usually.

01:29:48 Speaker_03
So it's like half a kilo, 0.25 of a kilo. So when I was doing powerlifting, you realize really quickly that 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.

01:30:05 Speaker_03
But 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.

01:30:18 Speaker_03
So in business, again, like most of our lessons of business wise, we grew really fast and you're like, fantastic. We like, was it really this really steady growth rate? And then like 300% and you think phenomenal, like next, next thing, next thing.

01:30:32 Speaker_03
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.

01:30:47 Speaker_03
Because 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.

01:30:59 Speaker_03
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.

01:31:09 Speaker_01
I'm going to have to leapfrog ahead of you because it's my lesson. On your podcast. True. Yeah.

01:31:17 Speaker_01
Trajectory is more important than position, which is a Jimmy Carr-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 so tightly attuned to what is the direction that I'm on, not what is my absolute position.

01:31:37 Speaker_01
Happiness is relative. It's not absolute. And yeah, I spoke to, weirdly enough, got this theory co-signed by Dan Bilzerian before he went all anti-Semitic. Old Testament Dan. Old Testament Dan, that's what he calls himself. Old T Dan.

01:31:54 Speaker_01
I basically said, like, you've sort of gone to the top of the hedonic mountain, so to speak. In some ways, do you wish that you'd

01:32:04 Speaker_01
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.

01:32:16 Speaker_01
So what you would say success isn't more Success isn't a better vantage point to have a view from, it's a higher point to fall from.

01:32:27 Speaker_01
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.

01:32:35 Speaker_01
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 that?

01:32:47 Speaker_01
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 within.

01:32:59 Speaker_00
Actually that's housed within direction over speed.

01:33:01 Speaker_03
So going from a 220 deadlift to a 225 deadlift versus a 395 to a 400 kilo deadlift, it feels the same.

01:33:08 Speaker_00
As opposed to... It's way harder to operate at the higher level. As opposed to like, I want to get stronger.

01:33:12 Speaker_01
And also the 400, so James Smith says all wins feel the same. But there's no uber surcharge for going 395 to 400 versus going 210 to 215. Any revenue level, any bank account number, it's all level programs. Dopamine is dopamine, isn't it?

01:33:26 Speaker_01
So the problem is, are you suggesting that you purposefully throttle?

01:33:29 Speaker_03
Yes. How? It's difficult, but anytime you notice yourself progressing in something, just accept the slower rate. Because everyone's always trying to make things faster.

01:33:38 Speaker_03
They're always trying to get leaner quicker, get bigger quicker, make more money faster. That's the world, right? But just accept the smaller rate of growth, or the smaller rate of progress.

01:33:47 Speaker_02
How do you, to Chris's point, how do you do that now? Are you intentional of go, OK, I want 15% this year, and then I'm capping at 15?

01:33:53 Speaker_03
Just aim for a steady improvement in something, rather than going for big targets. Obviously, I don't have all of the answers, George, I'm sorry.

01:34:01 Speaker_01
existentially very difficult.

01:34:02 Speaker_03
But like, as a concept, because you would take, if I offered you 200% growth in something, you would probably, your immediate response would be like, yeah.

01:34:11 Speaker_00
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 and scale, you're going to end up with like on rickety foundations.

01:34:22 Speaker_00
Whereas if you take some time and 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

01:34:31 Speaker_00
You just always have to pay the debt off, don't you?

01:34:34 Speaker_01
Always. Good insight. Nice. Seth?

01:34:38 Speaker_00
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.

01:34:54 Speaker_00
If information was all that was needed, we would all be billionaires with perfect abs.

01:35:00 Speaker_00
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. Often, it's not the same.

01:35:16 Speaker_00
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 versus Freud.

01:35:31 Speaker_00
Adler was one of Freud's contemporaries, and he's kind of the lesser known Freud, Jung, Adler, like those kind of original psychologists. His view is the teleological view rather than the etiological view.

01:35:44 Speaker_00
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 behavior. Adler is the teleological view, which is future goal impacts current behavior.

01:35:59 Speaker_00
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, ah, no one likes me and everyone finds me whatever.

01:36:14 Speaker_00
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.

01:36:23 Speaker_00
So they construct a certain identity that allows them to fulfill that goal and meet the payoff.

01:36:30 Speaker_00
So 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,

01:36:46 Speaker_00
what's happening is you're backing someone into a corner where you're removing the technological friction, you're removing 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.

01:37:00 Speaker_00
You mentioned this with GPT, and I'm glad you did, which is that now we have infinite access to the best computational models at a super PhD level and all information at our fingertips, and people haven't suddenly become infinitely more productive.

01:37:18 Speaker_00
All it's done is take away another excuse and another objection to the point where you're like, now it really is just me. Someone's willingness to actually show up and do the thing is still always going to be the final frontier.

01:37:36 Speaker_01
How would you summarize that lesson overall?

01:37:39 Speaker_00
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.

01:37:49 Speaker_01
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, yeah. Look at your calendar to find your priorities.

01:38:00 Speaker_01
It's all shit that we learned fucking 10 years ago. But now you're like, oh yeah. G. Lessons or life hack or?

01:38:07 Speaker_02
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.

01:38:24 Speaker_02
So one thing I would do… What do you mean by that George? What do you mean by truth? What do you mean by Socratic?

01:38:33 Speaker_02
So one thing that I would typically do, 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.

01:38:50 Speaker_02
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.

01:39:01 Speaker_02
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.

01:39:12 Speaker_02
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.

01:39:27 Speaker_02
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 was like, okay. I was like, hmm. So I was like, here's a question.

01:39:40 Speaker_02
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?

01:39:54 Speaker_02
And he's just paused for a bit and he goes, yeah, you might be right.

01:39:58 Speaker_02
versus if I would have tried letting them come write the code in their own head and being a... Socrates calls it being a midwife, that you're helping them give birth to the new idea rather than trying to push it into them is a is a big thing.

01:40:15 Speaker_02
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 criticising yourself for being anxious? And it's just,

01:40:30 Speaker_02
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.

01:40:43 Speaker_02
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, the philosopher K. Pilkington once said, he's telling a story to Gervais.

01:41:00 Speaker_02
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

01:41:31 Speaker_02
and it just stops. And then sometimes a random thing will appear. And then you go, well, was that me? Cause I didn't try and bring that up. So you have this natural detachment as well as when I hear, um, anxiety.

01:41:43 Speaker_02
So let's say I'm anxious about an event I've got going up and then I'll start going, fuck, why am I being anxious? Then I go, ah, I get it. I get why you're anxious.

01:41:51 Speaker_02
And all of a sudden, because you've not had the cortisol reaction to the cortisol, the Pilkington fork occurs and you break out. So those are my two wants.

01:42:00 Speaker_01
Mason. Awesome. Yeah. I think I called them second order emotions. Oh, I like that. That like infinite regressive. resentment, your frustration about your bitterness, about your anxiety. Final one, because we did it.

01:42:15 Speaker_02
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'll do it again.

01:42:28 Speaker_02
Positioning is a range, I'm arranging, you see I'm arranging, you met her again, right? Positioning is arranging information in the customer's head.

01:42:36 Speaker_02
So example would be Loom used to be record your screen, whereas then they didn't change the product, they just changed the positioning, how it was structured in the customer's head to removing meetings and it explodes and separated from the rest of the competition.

01:42:53 Speaker_02
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.

01:43:05 Speaker_03
That was brilliant. Cheers, mate.

01:43:07 Speaker_02
You're on fire, mate.

01:43:08 Speaker_03
I feel like my... the information's been arranged differently in my head.

01:43:11 Speaker_02
I feel we just need to... we've got so much energy, we need to go to, like, the local M&S and just throw stones at people.

01:43:16 Speaker_01
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. Why don't we save them for next year?

01:43:30 Speaker_01
We can keep everyone coming back. But no, I really do. I'm so happy and so proud of what all of you have done. It's fucking fire. It's great. I'm glad that you're in my life, even though we're apart from each other.

01:43:40 Speaker_00
100%. What a year it's been as well. What a year.

01:43:42 Speaker_01
Fire. Ladies and gentlemen, Merry Christmas. See you next time.