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

Merry Christmas everybody for the people who joined the podcast within the last five years the last Few million three million subscribers This is my living room in Newcastle and this is Johnny and this George And that's you sir, and he's in Malaysia and this is a Christmas episode We've got one day to turn this around so Merry Christmas. It's Christmas day Enjoy the turkey and the pigs in blanket and we are gonna do some lessons and life hacks and fails from the last 12 months It's kind of a Christmas tradition, I suppose and also another part of the tradition Is that you go first Johnny so give us a life hack. Yeah. All right my life hack Which might not be allowed will see if it gets past the the Chris rule is already being a life hack. Okay? Is that all right? Yeah, the best once. Yeah It's the reason it's a life hack is I was speaking to a few friends about this and neither of them had heard of it And I was like, you know, I thought Chris is gonna be building it. I know. Well, it's it's the waking up up by Sam Harris Okay, what's that bad? He's sponsored. It's not ever you've been paid off by big Sam Big meditator big meditations come today. I think what do you guys meditate? Yes, no, yes, I think it is the Well, so the hack specifically is download the app Using the cut no download the app and listen to the fundamentals Like theory series and it's like five audios with Sam explaining why you should meditate And I think that is the thing I've meditated every day this year Which is first time I've ever happened and it was that audio series But that's not a meditation. That's not just buy-in. Yeah, so the app is also I think it makes it It's just like a daily audio you can follow the different every day. Okay. It's like daily programming Yeah, so programming for meditations. This was important because it got you to buy into doing here So there's like an analogy he uses in it which is This isn't word for word, but something like everyone's in it in a dream What about being a human being and it's like the dream is you're in a prison cell And everyone's trying to make the prison cell nicer by like buying things moving around and changing where the windows are and that's life and meditating allows you to just wake it from the dream and it's a completely different way of viewing kind of everybody's Absorbed in their thoughts and their feelings and just being run by their mind and meditating is just waking up from the dream But that series completely changed How I feel about meditating, but this you're not saying this is someone who hadn't made meditated a lot before it Yeah, so thousands of sessions of meditation previously. Yeah, but I think the difference is it's kind of like The switch where you go from like going to the gym because like you think you should So it just becomes like part of your personality part of what you do and that identity change for me was that series Do you feel that you stuff? Yeah, the identity Shift is is big as well the The quotes of what's your thoughts because they become your words What's your words because they become your actions what your actions becomes they become your habit It's become your beliefs your perception your identity So like starting at that means that the downstream habit so much easier to stick to I also love the rearranging the furniture in the prison cell analogy So how long are you doing these sessions for? I'll do like so the standard one is like 10 minutes long. I'll do I'll do that as the minimum and then If it's going well, I'll keep going if it's like you know those days in especially ones where like makes you have your eyes open That hard that particularly difficult. Yeah, just something now Those are difficult to do but if it's I think it the easiest way to make it a an effortless habit is not trying to do 30 minutes or 40 minutes Just have a minimum and then so how is getting out of the prison cell going? I could question I have glimpses where I'm like oh this is just a dream of being in a prison cell What does that mean the difficult well? What does it mean? It's the Identifying with your thoughts versus it's the experience of a self. I feel like this is for the first life act This is going I also don't feel like I'm qualified to talk about this That's what this is referred to the Refer to the the app because I think Sam is qualified to talk about it, but It's a it changes your perspective and your relationship with yourself and with now with the present moment the happiness truck doesn't even need to Be that metaphysical is just like Usually we we are motivated to do something to close a gap between desire and outcome and we do that and our brain goes And just releases a bit of like some neurochemical that makes us happy for a moment and then That neurochemical depletes and then we think that we have to go and achieve the thing in order to give us Self permission to release the little bit again into our brains and it's just that cycle Whereas if you realize that it's your brain that's releasing that stuff and you can just do it on tap Then you've sure so get a whole process. You're not having to Chase some something out there. It's such a good point. There's a resurface clip of the first huberman episode that I did from mid 2022 I saw the other day and he's got this line in it where he says it's all internal Everything in life is all internal you Finish a marathon in first place and you've been working your entire life to do it and you run across the finish line and That sensation no one else comes along and drips dopamine Down the back of your brain stem like this is just you generating all of this now obviously We're designed to respond to what happens in the real world like that's the entire way that we're sort of adaptively evolved But it does suggest that well if you can get closer to the root of where all of this stuff's coming from which is just internally You can probably at least Make it easier to achieve what it is that you want without having to fight into a headwind all the time Even the real world's a fast because you have 10 times the number of neurons going from your brain to your eye Then you do from your eye to your brain So your eyes actually taking more information from your brain than then the other way around so it's constant your brain's Constantly creating a prediction of reality So the best example is you know when you're kind of walking downstairs and this happens to me way too often where you think there's another Stair and you're at the end and you kind of feel the stare And then your foot goes down and you for a second you feel it's there and then you go oh shit and then you fall But your brain kind of simulated the reality so your brains constantly making these prediction models that don't actually exist and then when you have an error Or you have a failure that's when it Constantly corrects. It's not like when you think something's lemonade but actually it's water. Yeah Once a week You know that there's that moment at the moment of like something horrible Yeah, something horrible something horrible's happening. Yeah, right. Yeah, I know it's fine. It's just what it's just water. All right That's good one waking up at my semester hack isn't it? It's the thing that like change your relationship with now and Everything happens what was the call what's the intro calls thing called again? It's called the fundamentals so in waking up this theory practice There's like lectures to listen to there's all the album what series but there's an initial intro series called the fundamentals by sound Where he's basically trying to convince you to meditate and it's like five audios. They're all about 10 minutes long. Mm-hmm. Awesome. Well, it's like that time when you Made me Read the beginning all of the beginning of the six-minute diary. Yes. Yes, then you insisted and I said okay I'm reading but reading it is what got me to use it every day of course read an intro If you heard of John our meditation here we go. Here we go. This is a fun one of Because I think what happens to a lot of people is they go for it via the mindfulness route which is what a lot of people get Unborted to but you realize oh that's just a way so there's lots of different ways It's like thinking about exercise and only looking at running exactly Which is basically what's kind of happened in that space but the John meditation idea is when you essentially Keep rather than focus on your breath you focus on something that brings you great joy and it goes the best description I've heard of it is it's like a panic attack but for joy and then you pulse and pulse and pulse you think of Your child for example think about that think about that think about that and it's a much sometimes a quicker way than trying to Daily all thoughts what's your thoughts on John surf? The the two things that George is talking about there so at the the personal retreats that I did it's ten days of Floodlight meditation where you're you're scanning with as open focus as possible and trying to dial up the fidelity of your Sensations so that you can like start picking up like ten micro sensations per second That's used in a retreat setting because I've heard it described as like rubbing bits of flint together It's like it needs a lot of time and momentum to get going and then it builds the fire whereas John a meditation is a lot more like Hyper-focused. It's kind of like the laser beam versus the flood light I've not achieved John. I know George is is just chilling in John right now, but Yeah, it's it's super compelling. There's a there's a movement Can you remember the name of it George? I think it's the guy who said it's a panic attack for joy It's like a tech founder who was really stressed and now runs John a retreats in the States Yeah, I know who it is, but I've forgotten the chap's name off the top of my head There's a few. He's got a good description of it. And then Michael Burby as well has all of his retreats on YouTube. So you can follow along. All right. Saf, you're up. What have you got? So I have a lifehark. However, I think I need your guys help because I'm struggling to have some kind of categorization system in order to place the lifehark in. Does that make sense? Go on. So if you have any suggestions on how I might categorize the aforementioned lifeharks, that would be really helpful. Do you feel like some of them are like physical and some are digital? Yeah. Yeah. This is a joke. This is a joke. This one. For the people who are in the last 95% of subscribers, this is a joke that has been done 30 or 40 times. Probably a decade old. Yeah. Yeah, it's getting there. Okay. First one. Here we go. This is like you mentioned Chris about the curve of the large proportion of people who are actually just tuned in now. And I'm just like, what? These guys are mental. So my hack is use Uber for flights. Use Uber for flights. So. Honestly, I cannot believe how easy it is. So in the five minutes between landing the plane, getting reception and standing up and leaving, I booked my next flight to Vietnam on Uber on mobile. It's like, it already has your details and you just go, but done and it gives you Uber credits like 10% for every flight booked. So the benefit of this hack is that you're not having to go through like random airlines and sky scanner or Google flights. But only if that's stuff. It just gives you the best price with the easiest booking experience. And they don't charge a markup. I don't know what the business model is for that part of Uber. And that's just like last leader, but brilliant. So I'm never going back to booking flights any other way. I'm just doing it now. I'm doing it now on my phone. Uber travel. I mean, Uber, when you actually look at it, number of different things that Uber can do is pretty insane. You can get them to collect parcels for you. You can get them to drop off, drop off different stuff. I didn't know that they did not know that they did flight. What's the difference between this and sky scanner? Because I'm a big sky scanner stan. As far as I understand sky scanner, you still have to get redirected to the airline. And then you have to fill in all your details like four times and you pass port number and all this stuff. So currently I'm in Malaysia, but I've gone via Singapore and they're going Brisbane, Sydney, Vietnam, Bali, through lots of little airports and stuff. And these shitty little airlines that have websites that barely work. And you're just trying multiple times to book it. I spent 40 minutes trying to book something on like batik airlines. Couldn't get it working. Uber 37 quid took five minutes. Wow, free price freeze. Oh yeah. So they freeze the price and they let you change the dates flexibly as well for the car. So the cost of the price is the cost of freezing is just 18 pounds. Stay safe from price increases while you plan your trip. Oh, this is really good. This is really, really, really fucking good. Top tier I've hacked it. They also have things where if you book a flight now, and the price drops in between now and the flight happening, you get the difference. Wow. Big hack. This is, you've really come out of the gate swinging here. Jesus Christ. Well, this is proof of my business. Well, yeah, unfortunately Sam Harris isn't involved in this one. Okay. I'm going to go off the back of this one just because it makes the most sense. Flighty. You got a flighty? No. Oh, my days. Okay. So I learned this. Flighty premium. Of course. Fucking flighty premium. Talking to a flighty veteran here. So flighty is a flight tracking app. And what it does is it automatically links in with your calendar, your email inbox. When you book a flight and the confirmation comes through, it automatically loads everything in. And it tells you gate changes, delays, where your luggage is going to, what terminal you leave from, what time you're boarding. It can give you a history of the last time that the flight, all of the, the last 30 days of the flight, how much it's being delayed for what reason. If there's any adjustments that get made, it'll tell you immediately as well. While you're in the air, it'll track your journey and then bring you back into land. It tracks all of your previous stuff. It is, it's outside. So you never need to. Once you start using flighty, you will never check another airport board again, because it's all there and it gets updated before the board. Because the board usually takes a little bit of time, but this just comes through from whatever the central hub that's giving all this information out is. And it's just, it's seamless. The number of times that I have not missed flights, especially when you've got connections and it's outstanding. So flighty, I think premiums, maybe 30 bucks a year, 10 bucks. Super cheap. You can also add friends so you can see when your friends are flying, where they're flying if they're delayed as well. So you can track all of your friends flights also. And it automatically links in and then it gives you reports at the end of the year how long you've spent being delayed. And so this is some like cool additional things. But largely, never check another other, another airport board for what gate. Am I leaving from where's my luggage gone to? What time do I need to get there? It's got a little island, a tracking island and it also pops upon your home screen. So it's fantastically designed. Everybody that started using it, I just can't believe it. So you get the gate information with anyone else's? Basically, that's the big thing is gate information plus live island that sort of tracks everything. But you just never have to think again and it's all automatically linked in with your emails. Has it changed how early you get to the airport? No, particularly, even for international now, I'm typically getting to an airport about an hour before I leave. That has been a high risk strategy, but in America you've got TSA and clear and things that can fast track you through security. What's the spread of airport arrival times in this room? I usually arrive about an hour before I'm going to depart. I usually about half an hour before boarding. What about you? 90 minutes. Okay. Yeah. For me, it depends where I am. If I'm in the US a lot earlier, if I'm in the UK a lot later. I feel like if you arrive at a flight or you could arrive 15 minutes before. That's right. If it's Heathrow, you need to get out a bit more time. Yeah. I definitely always love because everyone's got one yellow maid who just turns up 15 minutes before and chances it. Yeah. Unfortunately, America has much more flux between the size of the cues. The UK is usually pretty consistent unless you're at Heathrow. Whereas in Austin, sometimes the entire terminal has just been filled with people. Hundreds of yards of people. Then other times there's no one. So I don't know whether that's because the airport needs a bit of work. George, what have you got for us? I don't think we've spoken about airlines enough. So my one, I'll go in with something different, which is chess clocks. Oh, God. Oh, God. No, no, no, no. I know where he's going to go with it. So it's one of the ideas I got from the writer Tim Urban, who obviously did the amazing TED talk on procrastination. Then ironically spent like six years procrastinating on his book and he said the biggest lesson from it was when it comes to deep work, which I've got another point. I'll come on to in a second, but particularly when it comes to deep work, if you can get four hours done in a day, I think you're in the top 1%. But a lot of people think, oh, I work eight hours a day. I work 10 hours a day. And he found that when it came to writing the book, he would go to write it. And then other little bits of work would come up. They'd be a slack message here. They'd be an internet scroll here. So the chess clock methodology is you've essentially set it up where you have 16 hours in the day. Okay. And your goal is to get four hours on one side of the chess clock. And whenever you're doing anything that isn't the thing, you have to hit it over. So if you go to go to the bathroom, hit it over, go for a walk, hit it over. Somebody comes in, hit it over. So there's always an immediate price to bullshit or to distraction. And you realize, oh, wow. First off, when you do four hours, like properly four hours, that is a lot of time. And then a lot of the time you'll be there at 12 p.m. going, wow, like there's just all this kind of free time for the rest of the day. If you don't have a chess clock, like the other simple approaches to the literary set and alarm for four hours, and then at any time you stop, you have to pause it. So there's just always, it hacks the kind of brain's circuitry that there's always some form of punishment for distraction, whereas previously there isn't. And the amount of times you can convince yourself you're doing something that isn't the actual thing is, is significantly more important than the other. significant. I can see that working for like an external problem, like someone comes in, someone brings you email, whatever. But I think the main barrier to deep work is like an internal. So you're doing something and then you'll think, "I just need to do this and then you open the different window." Pause the clock. But the problem for most people I don't think is, like, I'm aware I'm distracted now, but I'll just be distracted. I don't think people are aware that they're being distracted. Well, this is the thing about the clock. It's kind of their ticking and you have to be a little bit more honest. And even then I'll be aware of, is this a clock-worthy pause? Or is this actually a justifiable use of time? So just having that there and that punishment there is pretty significant. What are your most common debates about whether it is or is not a clock-worthy pause? You're filling up the glass of water, can be on there. Or girlfriends come in, you know what I mean? It's like little things like that, but I'll tend to pause the clock here. So if you're writing and you're like, "Oh, I need to go somewhere to get this reference for this thing." Yep. That would be fine. But then if I, let's say for example, I need to go to a tweet to find the specific thing. That's fine. But if I then go on the news, feel you start scrolling. That's where it works. This is why the clock works really effectively. Whereas other techniques, it wouldn't work. Because there's a great George. The other thing that it separates out is if people think, "Oh, it's a speed thing or it's an efficiency thing, I need to be able to work faster or write faster or whatever," versus, "It's just a not spending enough time on task thing." Yeah, that's a big point. That you don't need to probably be more efficient or more effective or better or whatever. You just haven't realized how little time you're spending doing the thing you're supposed to be doing. Yeah. This isn't a half-brit's related to this. I have an app on my laptop that is like a blocker. That every time I go to an open email, it goes. It's not called "Turkey", it's similar to that. Especially if there's someone else in the room and they hear how often it goes. And then you tell them why it's going, "You just seem like a baby." It's like any time I try to open email, I message what's up and you just feel so stupid. All right, Johnny. Are we on lessons? Whatever you want. Take whatever you want. All right, I'll do a hack that's similar to what we've just been speaking about, which is brick for iPhone. You guys seen that? To near-field communication thing that you got to tap to unlock your phone. Try it. I never knew what NFC's times for Christmas. I'm lovely little bonus. There's a hack in it. I didn't expect you to describe it like that. It's very. It's accurate. Yeah, it's very detailed. We got to tap a thing to get your phone to work. Yeah, so you set a schedule on your phone. We've all tried all these app-blocking things that you can just ultimately delete the app. You have to go to where the thing is in the house. Press "Unbrick" and then tap the NFC device. It's just been the most effective thing. I've had a year of trying to block myself from having to press the chest cloth. It's been the most effective thing because having to stand up, go into another room, press "Unbrick" and then look at "Instagram". It's not going to happen. I'm still using Opal from years ago when I'm using Suggested It. It's just not quite as. You can get around that, right? There's nothing more humiliating than getting around. I've seen people do that. In front of others. Let me just show you this thing on you. Oh, wait. No. Hang on. Can you wait for 27 seconds, please? Pause session. Did you ever get the box, Johnny? No. I think it was a Jordan original. Jordan original, wasn't it? That's putting your phone in a box. George and Kimberly have got a timed box that you locked both your phones in for a weekend. Yeah, we did it on a Saturday, put the phones away in the box for the entire day. It was fun. You get incredibly bored. I just replaced it with a moleskin notepad. He walked around with a fucking notepad. You think he's earnest, he's a Hemingway. That is one of the best hacks. I don't even have this one written down, which is on the phone topic, getting a moleskin pocket notepad. It can go in your pocket. What's interesting is this thing here, this thing right here, this device, it's always whispering to you. Even now, it's saying, scroll, go on there, scroll on that. Go on the Gmail and make the sound right. Not George, not if it's bricked. Not if it's bricked. Even then, it whispers. You can't access it, but it's still whispering. It's still telling you to do it. It's whispers. You have the association, you have the Pavlovian conditioning with this device. What's interesting, as soon as you have the moleskin notepad, that you walk around with is that you then. That then begins to whisper to you. So when you take it out and you go for a walk, it's whispering, "Oh, check, page 3, that thing that you wrote down the other day." Having a moleskin notepad is. Can you sit with your thoughts? You could do, but I'm going for a walk and then I can capture my thoughts. I can sit with my thoughts and then I can capture the best ones. Can you think about a potential. Just top of your head. Potential problem with going from digital to analog. You could have written this down on your phone. Obviously, lots of issues, phones very distracting, all the rest of it. Can you think of perhaps an issue of having a single hard copy of your most important thoughts? I suppose. Losing it. Well, yeah, I mean, because it's interesting, you say that. That's a very. That's a very sort of fortuitous prediction, because we went to Dean's Italian. And as you were extolling the virtues of your moleskin notepad, you left it at Dean's Italian and they'd been it. So he lost all of his biggest thoughts. Hold on. So how does that feel? I saw Chris's counter move coming about to. (laughter) I purposely held off and I'll explain why. That wasn't a moleskin notepad. That was like a real shit notepad. So I think the way it was just bend it, because it was nothing. That's why I upgraded now to a moleskin notepad. Because if you see a moleskin notepad, no one's going. Why do you keep seeing no moleskin notepad? Because of this reason, if you get a regular molekin. If you get a molekin. It's a brown, doesn't it? Yeah, I don't know. It's a brown. Right, so your argument. Really open it. You're just bringing out like a. This is why I have a carbon copy. Oh, it's getting. This is James Mitzing. in the writing industry, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. So you're hoping that waiters understand the value of a molekin notepad. Yeah, I'm afraid to tell you I don't think that. That's it. I don't think that either. Okay. But the point. I think the point of these sorts of things is. I remember like you bought a light phone, didn't you? Mm-hmm. Years ago, there was like that movement of. By like a Nokia 3210 and live your life off that. But then you need Google Maps and you need Uber and you need. You need to sense some on a message or you need to ring someone. Having those features is useful. If you phone's in a box, you can't use your notepad to book an Uber. But if you just remove the things that whisper to you. And to get them active again, you have to get up and go into the other room. It's friction. It's just. I do remember I had a lock box thing, timed lock box, not too dissimilar to yours, but it had a plastic see-through cover. And there was little holes cut out of it. So you could actually use the phone. You could swipe through different things on the phone and kind of use it. But yeah, didn't you tell me that if you lock your phone in the box, you have to ring customer service. If you can't get it out, you basically. Smash it with a hammer and ring customer service. Because you can accidentally put it on for 30 days or even 30 hours. I'm sure somebody's done. It's like. Yeah, Mike smashed his with a hammer. It's really. So. Yeah, it's just. It's not my best. It's not my best. There's like a family and they will put their phones in the box and the kid ends up like smashing the box. The house. Like coded bias or something. Alright, so brick. Brick. Alright. An NFC device. It's opal with a physical thing in it. In other news, you've probably heard me talk about element before and that's because I am frankly dependent on it. And it's how I've started my day every single morning. This is the best tasting hydration drink on the market. You might think, "Why do I need to be more hydrated?" Because proper hydration is not just about drinking enough water. It's having sufficient electrolytes to allow your body to use those fluids. 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I'd like to drink LMNT.com/ModemWisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/ModemWisdom. Seth, wait. - There you go. - Back around to me. I really underestimated the potency of the attribution error and cognitive dissonance. So what I mean by that is, can you write on this, Chris, 'cause I feel like this is your absolute wheelhouse, that we over-attribute other people's behavior to their character, but we under-attribute it to situational factors. And then for ourselves, we over-attribute situational factors and we under-attribute our character. 'Cause it's too painful for us to just be like, "Oh, just 'cause I'm a shit person," rather than like, "Oh, it was 'cause the bus was late and 'cause whatever." But easy to be like, "Oh, they were just dick." And it can't have been that they were sleep deprived or looking after their toddler or whatever else. - The classic, the classic one is, I cut that guy off because I'm late for work. He cut me off because he's a bad driver. - Oh, yeah, great example. So the broader lesson that I'm seeing here is that people are a lot more emotionally driven than I think I'd really given it credit for. Like outside of our extremely autistic bubble, there's so much more cognitive dissonance that drives people's behavior and thoughts and actions. And so you know this thing of like, people buy with emotion and they justify with logic. It's not just buying behavior, it's everything. And the moment you start spotting this, you see it everywhere. So everyone listening must have had an experience where you're speaking to someone who has a particular stance or gripe or position or something, could be on politics, could be on a relationship issue, whatever. And the more you start to kind of get into it, you realize that they're just rotating their complaints or like they're moving goal posts but still being pissed off about something. Until you're like, oh, actually like the pissed off comes first and then the justification comes later. So it's that people don't actually want to get to this kind of rational objective truth. They just want to feel safe and they just want to hug and just want to be heard. And so I don't know who said this but it's a quote of, we only see what we want to see. We only hear what we want to hear. Now belief system is like a mirror that only shows us what we believe. So the lens or the glasses that we see the world through tell us more about the color of the lens than they do about the world out there. - I certainly this year since trying to do more emotions work have sort of come to the realization or the belief that most of the thoughts that we have a bottom up, not top down. You feel a thing and then you come up with a story that explains why you feel the thing as opposed to you're accurately determining that story from your brain downward. - It's very convincing as well 'cause it's what the brain does like it's a sense-making machine, isn't it? So the body goes, oh, I'm anxious, oh, my part's going whatever and then the brain has to quickly be like, oh, well, that's because this and it just like pulls together random things and thoughts to create this like, to weave this narrative. And then it holds onto that and it becomes, it identifies with it is such a like such a weird process but it just is happening in the background all the time. - How have you changed the way that you operate or have you applied this in any ways? Is it just an insight that's interesting philosophically? - It's just realizing that there's no point trying to argue with what someone's saying or trying to like convince someone on the head level and instead just like just give them a hug and look or like metaphorically and speak to the heart and realize that that's the stuff to address first before you get into any of the, what someone, so rather than listening to what someone is saying, listen to what they're feeling. - There's also this like side argument that people can go down when they touched out which is that people are irrational, they're not logical, they're driven by emotions and this is great account, a Chris Larkin and he has this great line which is emotions are logical, you're just bad at logic and when you actually get deeper to a layer, well why is that anger there or why is that anxiety there? We almost, we start with logic and then people kind of deny the emotional level but then even beneath that there's this kind of logic for all of those emotions that exist that we don't even get down to the basement and then don't even get to the point where you realize there's a basement in the basement. - Mm, mm, mm. All right, my next one. - Yeah, it's. - My next one, the stuff that's good. A while about us. See one of these? - A while about us. No, see one of these before? You've seen one of these, brand-lars. Over this. So everybody needs some form of water receptacle and I've cycled through quite a bit, I've cycled through Yeti. - Yeah. - I've used steel protein shakers, which are good for the protein thing. The reason that I like these a while about us, this is, that's Mark Zuckerberg's Ranches logo for you there. The reason that I like these ones, they're insulated. They have got, this size in particular has got a good capacity, it's maybe 700 ml. This spout thing here allows you to sip it like a straw, but also drink from it. This can hook through something and hold on and it'll keep stuff cold for a few hours. It doesn't look to, it comes in every different color that you can imagine, you can customize the whole thing. And if you want to get something printed on for yourself off of somebody else that's a logo or a word or something etched in it, you can, and it's 20 bucks for one of these, they're really cheap. They're fantastic and I adore mine and I use it all the time and I think everyone, pretty much everybody from the team's got one. And it's very satisfying. It's very satisfying. It looks nice, is it metal? Yep, also. Yeah, it feels nice. Johnny, if you watch the office, you know the Christmas special where David Brent's like a salesman and he's going around on the road and he's like doing the water off and he's given the whole pitch, it was literally like that and I was just expecting you to go at the end. So, who does your tampons? (laughing) Well, nice. You know who does your hydration, let me go. I thought you were, I thought everything was Yeti. You moved away from that. What are they better than Yeti? The sip, spout, the magic straw or whatever they call it, is really satisfying. It doesn't make me feel a bit like a baby, which, I'll tell you what I know. Yeah, it's okay. Yeti's good, they probably have better insulation, it'll keep stuff colder for longer, maybe. But the sizes of Yeti are a little bit more cumbersome. You know, they go from one that's definitely not big enough to one that's almost certainly too big. And the smallest or while the size, which is this one, is really good and fits in the side of most backpacks and it's that liter. No, I think it's just over 700. It's for a single summit, if you get over a liter, or even over close to water liter, you probably don't drink the same thing for that long, maybe you want to cycle it out, it gets heavy, but 500 ml's no any or enough. So, it's the optimal size. This is currently, come back next year when I disagree with myself, when I have a different phone blocking method than you have a different level. (laughing) Well, I'll still be recommending what you do. Oh, yeah, okay. Well, anyway. This was my raise that we left last years with, which was come back to me in six months after you've been using this hack. It's the 90th. And then I'll leave you. Yeah, well, I guess people won't even know about that. We did 20, 30 episodes of Lifehacks back in the day, which is still a non-insignificant amount of this entire podcast inventory. And one of the most important ones was that, after a while, we realized someone would come in all full of beans because this brand new Lifehack that they were in love with, was like, "Oh, I must tell you about a way to get YouTube premium for free by getting it through the Argentinian VPN service." (laughing) And then you have to wait 90 days to find out that you get charged back for fraud online, or whatever it might be. I'd never forget Eric, Eric Jorgensen taught us about that one way. If you try and cancel your Zoom subscription, they immediately offer you a 30% discount. Stuff like that. But there's some second order consequence. Oh, yeah, but it's downgraded you. You get ads on your own Zoom calls now or something. Yeah. But yeah, anyway, 90 days, if a friend comes to you, this is a meta Lifehack. Friend comes to you and says, "Mir, you've got to try this new, this fun blocking method." And then you say, "Okay, how long have you been doing it? You got two weeks?" You go, "Okay, come back to me in another two months, and we'll see if you're still using it, or if it's broken your life." I've had people complain about the Lifehack episodes because they watched them in order, and they would get four or five episodes in, and the thing that they'd been doing, you've contradicted yourself. We were like, "No, no, never ever do that. Do this instead." And that's just the cycle. Well, the issue is that the pace at which we drip fed Lifehack episodes when we started was appropriate. It was every couple of months, every three months or so for four years. If you just watch them like binge finishing game thrones, do you do speed run through our development? Yeah. Yeah. Which is probably quite a dangerous thing. You just don't live in reverse chronological order 'cause you'll mess yourself up. Oh, God. That's the right way to do it though. It's the start of the end. It'll be the stuff at the beginning of the first episode as well. probably their things were all still doing. - It is, sleep with your phone, I'll say the bedroom. All right, George. - Mine's more of a lesson or a two-part lesson. So one of the lessons this year was, so when I originally wrote the essay on high agency, one of the bits of the back that I got and other people gave me as well, is that the concept's not necessarily new, but it gives you a bit of language to refer to a think. And I've had that for a while with that term. And I was like, I mean, when one level above that, they're like, hold on, I don't have a bit of language to refer to when I need a bit of language to refer to something. So I sort of friend Henrik that, and he gave me from Scotl Exander, this, he calls it an idea handle, which is when you create a term or a name for a thing, and then you can kind of pick it up in the world. And a big thing for me this year has been around language, which I'll, but even where Yusef is right now, which is beautiful, like side tangent here, in Malaysia. They don't use plural. So rather than say tables, they say table table. So you just realize when you study language, so much comes back to you. But one bit of language I've been kind of playing around with, is we've spoken about this before around forgetting things and how much we forget. And I found this story about a seven year old boy called Henrik, and one day he's out and about playing in his drive in Connecticut. And a cyclist doesn't see him, and clatters into him, knocks him unconscious. And he wakes up, and the next few days he starts having a few seizures. And by the age of 25, he's having 25 seizures per day. And this is in the 50s. So he's trying everything to get rid of this condition. So he goes and signs up for experimental brain lobotomy surgery. And he wakes up from the operation. And he has some good news, some bad news, and some awful news. So the good news is that the brain surgery is basically cured his condition entirely. So he has no more epileptic fits. Bad news is that he won't remember the good news. Because the awful news is, is to destroy his ability to form new memories. So he lives from the age of about 25 to 85, not forming any new memories. So every day his psychiatrist would meet him and get to know Henry well over the years. And each day he would meet his psychiatrist for the first time. But there was a specific bit of detail about Henry, which I call Henry's mirror, which is every morning he would wake up, he would look at himself in the mirror, and he'd be shocked and perplexed at how old he was. 'Cause in his head he was always 25. And I kind of call this idea Henry's mirror, which is the problem with amnesia is not only do you forget, it's that you have amnesia of your amnesia. And it's this idea that all of us right now have some bit of Henry's mirror in us. You don't even realize it because by definition, you've forgotten it. So the classic example I use is, okay, Johnny, can you think of a clear sentence of thought from yesterday? Very much you had 10 to 70,000 on average. Can you think of one? But when you're in these overthinking spirals, it feels so real, it feels so tangible. And then it just fades away and all you have is a face that's getting older in the mirror each day. - It's very apocalyptic. (laughing) Before we continue, I've been drinking AG1 every day for years now because it's the simplest way that I've found to cover my bases and not overthink nutrition. And that is why I've partnered with them. One scoop gives you 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics and whole food ingredients in a single drink. And now they've taken it even further with AG1 next year. And the same one scoop once a day ritual, but this time back to by four clinical trials. 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How has this changed the way that you show up, if at all? - I think the big thing I've tried to change more, the first off, when it comes to overthinking, trying to realize that as a thought loop's happening, trying to stay in that mirror for a second, it will hold on. How many times does this happen? 'Cause this could be the 60,000 for time, this thought has happened, but I can't remember anything from yesterday, is one thing. The second thing is just very basic level, just trying to document more, take more photos, take more videos, journal more, and without realizing it's such an asset that's going to compound further and further in the future. Even like today, to be honest with you, it's fun that we get this for like 20 years from now, we can go, oh, what we was doing that day. But otherwise, the average person, the memory just goes, and then your life just goes. - Yeah. If you use day Christmas. - Merry Christmas. - Merry Christmas. If you use day one for journaling, do you guys use your journal? - No, they were. - No, it's such a day one. I do use day one, and I've used it more this year than any other year. - It just gives you every time you go and make a journal entry, it's like, on this day a year ago, two years ago, eight years ago, 10 years ago. - Yeah, the entries have been got on day one now. - I've been using it for like, I think 15 years. But how frequently are you doing it? - I try and do it every day. - Really? - Yeah. - Just like contents of mind and a picture every day. - What's being released? - So you've got thousands of entries. - Yeah, holy. - The main takeaway from all of it is like, it's just the same stuff. It's just the same. The same worries, the same things you're excited about, the same feelings. - Well, I think 10 years ago, you're like, what's the point? - Well, we assume that the Henry's mirror thing is true in as much as all of the problems that we're dealing with now feel fresh to us. - Mm-hmm. - But when you look across the expansive time, in the same ways you've got the same feet that you did 10 years ago, your psychological construction is made up of the same biases and fundamental fears, which I think you said to your sort of emotions point is why that's such a powerful way to communicate with people. And also the, it's why I've been trying to dig deeper, sort of even deeper than just talk therapy gets you to by unpacking, okay, where are these patterns coming from? And what is this, what are the emotions I'm unprepared to feel? Because I think that is really the only way to get to the bottom of the etch a sketch and to fully, fully shake it loose. - Well, you're right that you were the same, you were obviously the same person that you were 15, 20 years ago, but last year we talked about this where you think that your journal, especially in Johnny's case, we've got 15 years of day one journals, is gonna be useless in like the very early stages, you're like, "Oh, what does my 19 year old idiot self know about how I should be conducting my life now?" And then you look back on it and it's just exactly the same stuff that you're like, "Oh God." And it's like, life is a spiral curriculum and it'll keep spanking you with the same lessons until you finally absorb it, change what you're doing, and then the world around you will stop like hitting you with that same lesson. - Well, what's that, is it young until you make the unconscious conscious that will direct your life and you will call it fate? - And we see that often with other people, more clearly, you know, when you see someone who's always running into the same like style of problem and you like, "Oh yeah, it's 'cause they're creating it." - So one hack for this, it was actually one of mine for today but was it's on the topic is kind of what I call like this time technique. So let's say for example, you're going through insert difficult moment. So let's say, I don't know, you're going through a breakup or you're having in your case, Johnny, maybe a difficult issue of a member of staff or. - Which I'm gonna say about my members of staff. - No, you know what I mean, like, running a business, you're gonna have those, don't say me. (laughing) You're gonna have those issues. So what I kind of recommend, or I've been doing this for about three or four years, which is, I'll think of, okay, so let's say it's a work conflict, right, I will then go, okay, can I think of two or three times that are the most similar throughout my entire career like this? So I kind of write down those events and write down the date. And then I ask, okay, if I could go back in time now with all the knowledge that I have now, and if I could turn this event into like one of the best things that ever happened to me, what would be the three actions that I would take? Like, okay, and then next to the date, I write, okay, well, what would be the worst three things that I could do with all the knowledge that I have now? 'Cause you have this detachment from the event and you have like an extra 20 IQ points. And then once you've done that, just scribble out the date and replace it with today's date and pretend it's you from the future that's come back. And that's such an effective way, 'cause even though we do forget so much of the past, the real stuff that you do remember are the most emotional events. And even now you can look back at things five to 10 years ago and have such detachment. Well, the patterns are the same, which means that the solutions will probably still work. If you can think of what you would have done previously in a situation that's analogous and now you in the present, facing something similar. - Yeah, it is a love you, Georgian. 'Cause that's what emotions are so special. supposed to do on it. It's supposed to be a navigation tool as feedback for, oh, you took a wrong step there. Like, here's how to change in future. But we often don't and then keep experiencing the emotion. Yeah. The universe just continues to shout louder until you hear the lesson. The goal is to get before it's screaming in your face. The goal is to try and jump, jump that a little bit sooner. All right. Johnny, what you got? Johnny. Johnny, I have a lesson which ties in beautifully with this. Wonderful. Because one of the problems with having 15 years of journals is I can, I watch, I can see this like journey of me chasing all these little things. So like, I wanted to bend your under kilos and then I wanted abs and then I wanted a two one degree and I wanted a job and then I wanted it propane to do well. And I wanted to do certain revenue levels. And it's always just this next thing. You can see it happening through the journal entries and you realize it changes nothing. Like in the same entries, there's still worries, problems, the same worries, the same problems. And you watch you through time achieve these things and you're still worried about the same stuff. And that creates this feeling of like, what is the point of stealing anything? But the thing that you realize woven into all of it is the thing that's changing the whole time is the like the traits that are you and how your character is changing because chasing those things that are difficult require like delayed gratification, they require like dealing with different difficult emotions, they require like all of the skills that you have to build and all of the traits you have to build to build a business to a certain level or to die it for the leaner's you have been whatever it might be, you change. So it's this idea that like the goals, I don't think they really compound, they kind of do, but like the dopamine you get from that doesn't compound, but the traits that you get from chasing the hard things is the compounding. And that immediate that realization immediately flipped back to like it's absolutely worth like listing out loads of really big, difficult goals and chasing them because the I don't think there's any faster way to change who you are to improve your and it's something that like being a my daughter is an hour of an age well like she's she's gone from being a baby to being like a little person and I'm like oh gosh like there's a proper like responsibility here to be the example and I think the best way to become the example is chase the difficult things that require the traits to to come as part of the journey. I love the what you take away from that Johnny because some people would be really nihilistic about that. They would all well there's no point chasing anything up. That's the first feeling. The first feeling is like oh, that's the point. Yeah. Whereas you're like actually this is a way to play the game without having to be fully sucked into the game. Well, you still need to be conned by the game into believing that the game is what you want to play. Like this wouldn't work. You would not be able to get yourself to do the hard thing if you didn't think that the other side of the goal of the hard thing was completion, satisfaction, self actualization, rest. But I think people think oh, when I get a million turnover, I'll be happy. That's not true. But when you get a million turnover the person that you've become. Yeah. And so you just change the thing. The goal is kind of like the side quest to the thing. But that's the goal is the end of the wedge. The goal is what gets you through the door. Yeah. Because you're not thinking I can't wait to feel dissatisfied in this goal, but happy about the person I've become. Yeah. Like you achieve the goal. You get the little like it's the James Smith thing like all wins feel it feels exactly the same. Yep. Then you're dissatisfied. But you've changed the thing is you can't you don't know that at the time. The only way you can know that is those is like being able to see what you two years ago, how you two years ago dealt with a child or dealt with. I think this is why progress feels so good and losing ground feels so bad. This is great for you. Somebody who's been on a relatively linear journey of getting better, more mindful, more peaceful, more successful, more capable, more resilient, whatever. But if the thing happens in the opposite direction, whether you've achieved your goals or not, even maybe worse if you've achieved your goals. You say I got the thing I thought I wanted. It turns out that just as you, I was a bit disappointed with how much that didn't satisfy me. Oh, fuck. And I'm now a worse person in some sort of a wuffy. You know, you're a boxer who gets the Olympic gold medal, gold medal gets fucking head injury and now has to deal with that. Also, I'm unhappy about the fact that the gold medal didn't make me as happy as I thought it would. And I'm now worse off. Well, Henry's mirror, like you've wasted time in the process. Is that you know, just because of the brain injury. Yes. Yeah. The point being that the saving grace you have around goals being more unsatisfying than people think they're going to be is that you have transformed yourself into something which is more evergreen than the goal and the brief grip of dopamine, which is all internal anyway. Then that is you've got something more than that and hooray. But imagine if you didn't get the progress. So I'd argue that aside from becoming like severely injured or disabled or something in the process, dealing with the hard things is where the trade change has happened. So you can go through the thing that feels like I'm going backwards. And at the time, yes, you're like objectively going backwards by the measure, by the revenue level, the body fire, whatever, the strength level, but the traits are still improving. Because I think anything extremely, what about if you run out of motivation, what about if you dumped all of your enthusiasm into something that it turned out wasn't right? That's assuming that that's the end point. That might just be your position here is that given a long enough time horizon, you're going to track and trend up into the right. Yeah. Like if you look at your journey to here as an example, like you sat on this sofa for how many five years ago, six, eight, eight years ago, eight years ago, like if you watch the recordings back, I don't you seem completely different. And everybody would be like, oh, Chris is, you know, what a fantastic existence Chris must have, like being this famous pollcaster. But that's really the side quest to the development as a result of it. It's a good timing. What was the first one that we filmed? Love Island. Love Island. What's it really like to live on love Island? Episode 17. Episode 14. So yeah, we were sat on a different couch, but the same living room. Yeah. In May, April or May of 2018. Different couch. Definitely different. Yeah, I remember you getting to the leather couch. Yeah. And yeah, you're right. You're right. That it's, I want to be in a different country. I want to not have to stay awake till three in the morning running nightclubs. I want people that I respect to know me and respect my work. I want to do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, and then you go, okay, at each of those junctions, they were satisfying, but the satisfaction was short lived. What was longer lived while the person that you became? So do you think if you'd picked, so the goal you had was, I know, it wasn't like explicit, they go all the time. The goal was like, I'm going to build a top 10 podcast in the world. It was not just, no, yeah, just to give a big asterisk there. We, we was on a beach during COVID. And it's sort of been two and a half years into the podcast. Not an insignificant amount of time. Yeah. And Chris just said, if I talk about goals and where he wants to take things, he goes kind of porous for a second. He goes, I think I think a hundred thousand subscribers, I think as soon as I get that, I'll just show that up. I'll be happy then. I remember all production staffs. I got a hundred thousand now. I remember when I was my first year of university. And I remember buying a tub of protein and looking at it and thinking, after this one, I think I'll be done. I was 18 and weighed about 76 kilos. But it was that was, no, sorry, 69, I was 69 kilos. Fucking hell. I remember when I hit 70 kilos and I was 20 years old and I was like, I am fucking huge. I think if you picked an easier goal, your development would have been totally different. So this is a big, this is a big whalmosism where he says, the person that you become along the way, like how can you say that you're a man who can do hard things if you never did hard things? Then Jimmy Carter repurposed it even better. And it's, the other thing I think is it is a saving grace to a lot of people who feel that their goals are hollow. So I think that's a wonderful lesson, like a really, really lovely lesson. All right, you say for what you got? Yeah. Think of how many bags of protein you've eaten since then, Chris. So you did the same with balloons as well, didn't you wear like thousand subscribers. You and Dean had a like cake and balloons in the party. Each each of the subscriber level has got bigger and less grand in its celebration. Yeah. Did we even do number of balloons? Yes. Last for four million subs. We didn't do, we did, we did something for a billion plates, but yeah, for four million subs, I don't think it even registered. Well, it did. We like, ah, well, we need to get a piece of artwork and do that. We did for the eighth in the world, eighth in the world. I had a, what was supposed to be a red velvet cake, but it wasn't. It was a carrot cake masquerading as red velvet cake and it was awful. It was horrible. I tried to eat it in Utah. It didn't go well. It's crazy to think. It's crazy to think for like a 100,000 you did this mega party and then for four million you probably just sent a bicep emoji on Slack. That's it. Yeah, probably the pon-up emoji. Yeah, on Slack. Yes. 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Right now you can get 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to live momentus.com/modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom. Check out that's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com/modernwisdom and modernwisdom. A checkout. All right, Seth, what are you up? So just to piggyback off, Johnny's there because I really like the takeaway of the person that you become. I think there's another thing that you can draw from that too. So I fully agree but you were talking about chewing on the menu. So mistaking the menu for the meal and ascribing that as the to your happiness. And we're the ones that always move the goalposts for our happiness every time we hit a particular milestone and we renegotiate the contract with our brain so that we end up in this trap where you brain releasing little bits of some neurotransmitter but you raise the bar of, oh, but it has to be after achieving even higher bar to get the same little blur to dopamine. A lot of it's because we almost feel like it's too simple to just enjoy the basic pleasures of life that are immediately available of health and relationships and nature and the sun and friends and things that you would act like if they were taken away from you you would actually want to exchange everything for that. So there's a book by a media giant who wrote, he came up, he was like the head of PC World magazine in a bunch of conglomerates called, it's called Felix Dennis, how to get rich. And it's like a tongue in cheek book about like, I'm sat here at the age of 84 writing this book to you, dear reader who's probably in your 20s or 30s and despite the billions that I've amassed, I would swap places with you in an instant because you have the one thing that I don't, which is time and I would still have the better end of the deal. So it's almost like the things that we're chasing, like most people listening to this podcast are probably in the top like 20% of global wealth anyway. And yet we think that if we get to the top 19% or the top 18% or whatever that something's going to change, I saw Ferris shared this quote from Marion Selldez the other day, the hardest thing to teach a student and to believe consistently is that there is nothing out there to go and get. There is no part career opportunity for which you should be searching and scrounging and coveting. All of the preparation is within and if you keep yourself mentally and physically fit and you remain generous with yourself and others and stay deeply in your study about your craft, whatever is yours will then arrive. So with that in mind, it's like there are basic pleasures that are always available and when they're gone like health, for example, in the challenge, we've all, I think all of us have gone through some health challenge in the last like 10 years where we've suddenly been like, oh wow, actually, I could really do with a bit more of that again. So instead, it's like enjoy those pleasures and then organize your life such that you can enjoy the passage of time as you move towards your goal and then you've got the best of both worlds. I think this is, it might sound to, it's probably almost certainly would have sounded to us eight years ago when we started the pod. Opulent maybe entitled detached from reality and some sort, why, why just get stronger, bigger, more rich, more popular, whatever, why you need to make everything so abstract. But this leads into my favorite, my favorite lesson from the entire year, which is that unteachable lessons are unteachable and this has been the best lesson. I wrote it in January and then dropped it on Rogan a couple of weeks after that and it's still just, it's a fundamental truism that there are a particular category of insights about life that you cannot learn without experiencing and money won't make you happy, fame won't fix yourself worth, you don't love that pretty girls, you should just heart and difficult to get, you should see your parents more, you should work less, you should spend more time in a hammock, you should enjoy a holiday without having your phone, you'll never care about anything that you're thinking of apart from when you're thinking about it. Like all of these lessons over and over the next follow account won't matter. The reason that people proclaim them with such like grandiose ceremony when they get there is that they can't believe that that was the case despite the fact that generations of parents and media and literature and archetype and myth and songs and art have told us here are the pitfalls to look out for and it's this weird kind of like cute narcissism that we all have where we think that that might be true for them but not for me. My particular thing is that it's the cost of like oh show up grandad and like I'll figure it out myself. Yeah, yeah, okay. My unique constitution would allow me to dance through this minefield of very well laden, very well described tripwires and I won't trip on any of them. So I'm working on the next build of this unteachable lessons things I think it's so good. One of the, so first off I guess you are if you chase something that you were warned was hollow to arrive there and find out that the warning was correct. You were in good company. That's the first lesson of the unteachable lessons thing but the second one is that they are unteachable so the self-castigation of I should have known what I didn't know before I knew it. Like I should have seen this thing coming or whatever. That is simply not the way this unteachable lessons are self-reinforcing. They are unteachable which means you have to do them in order to be able to understand them and I think this is what maybe a good bit of us are reckoning with now that unteachable lessons don't really matter all that much until you're at the stage where you've learned that the lesson should have been realized in advance and you knew about it and then you get this guilt and you get the shame around. Oh, fucking hell, how could I not have seen? Did the guys not tell me? Did they not say that the four million subs wasn't the answer that the so on and I think what I realized was unteachable lessons is cool to point at but doesn't actually give anybody any sense of all it does is mark the way to the edge of the cliff that they are going to jump off of and on your way down you'll realize that you're in okay company so maybe you feel a bit less lonely but the next one is you can't realize this stuff before you've experienced it and because of that you shouldn't be whipping yourself into like pain and saying what an idiot I shouldn't have done this. It's a justification for self-compassion that way smarter way richer way more accomplished more worldly people who had more advantages than you knew more and did the exact same thing bigger for longer till the end of their life they died trying to do it and okay like you dedicated however many weeks, months, years, decades to this career relationship, pursuit, goal, dream, whatever it might be to find out that what was at the end of the rainbow wasn't a part of gold. You're in good company. What's up, programming? You can't just take it on faith otherwise you'll be sat there with FOMO. Yeah, it's the Navale thing, it's far easy to achieve your material desires than to renounce them. I ain't tight the best reason to achieve them. It took clear them off hundred percent. It's way easier and this sounds like a thing to say but demonetized. It's literally easier to buy a Ferrari than it is to rid yourself of the desire to get a Ferrari. That doesn't speak to how easy it is to get a Ferrari. It speaks to how difficult it is to be able to rid yourself of the desire for a Ferrari if you want to become in being able to get the Ferrari in the first place isn't it? Yeah. But yeah, I think like a really bad credit rating. Yeah, yeah, yeah, bitches. I think if by gaining a certain amount of money, you remove your desire to get more money. Fantastic. The quickest route to getting rid of the desires to achieve it. Yeah, yeah, hundred percent. Well, if I got next, you know, one we've discussed before actually. not on the show. So you spoke then about giving up desires. Another problem is envy or jealousy. And one of the things I've tried to do rather than give up envy or jealousy is have a bit more of a stricter criteria of when I'm willing to be envy or jealous. So what I kind of developed as this idea I call "Call of Duty" versus "War". So "Call of Duty" is kind of what I project Johnny's life to be be like, right? Like maybe some of the highlights that I hear and the wins and all of that stuff. And then the war is, okay, when I've actually been with you for a week and lived your life. If I'm envious of the war, then that's fine. But if I'm envious of this "Call of Duty" 1% highlight reel that doesn't exist, then that's a problem. So I use two examples. I mean, one of them is a business guy. We both know super, super, super successful. And he's got everything, beautiful family, amazing business, crushing it year and year. And he's got to the scale now where we're talking a huge mega business as with him. He can easily feel envious. He goes, yeah, I've got, I think it was 2000 lawsuits this month. When your business gets to that scale, you're constantly dealing with litigation from so many different angles. He's dealing with this personally as well. I jumped in on some email while you were. Yes, he's one of my favorite people in the world. But I go, oh wow, if I want to be envious, I've got to go to the war. I've got to be, oh, I also want the 2000 emails in month. And likewise, I mean, me and you were on the road trip. And I think it's probably good for the viewers because I think a lot of people could look at you and go, good looking guy, super successful, rich, nose loads of people. And that's the kind of call of duty model. Me and Chris are on a road trip in America. And we're going to put the tunes on and blare through the roads and then sky your podcast ads manager calls up. And I think with the way people assume the ads work for the show is probably, oh, Chris just gets a load of furry stuff and money, right? That's what I think they think. Whereas you kind of then get to sit there with the war. And it's Skygoen. Yeah, they're just not happy with that Instagram story. It's Chris good. I film that one four times now. Why they not happy with it? And I go, oh, okay, my model before was the call of duty. And now I'm seeing the war. So unless I've seen the war, I'm not envious. And if I see the war and I like it, I'm willing to be Napoleon. I think when Mark Zuckerberg was on Jorugan, he describes like his morning. And it's like he wakes up and he doesn't look at his phone because when he looks at his phone, it's just loads of all the issues. God, that never goes away. Like he doesn't matter how big the business is. Just gets more. Well, the emails are just worse. It's the emails that like 15 people below you didn't have the answer to. Well, that's another Sam Harris' and were there will never come a day when you don't have any problems. What did you think that you're going to wake up one day? And there be no problems like getting to a video game level where there's no more enemies to fight. No, your problems will change, but having problems will never go away. That the line from your idea about the Call of Duty versus War is nailed by James Clear here. How many people love the idea of a thing but not the reality? It doesn't make sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it. If you don't want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire to crave the result, but not the process is to guarantee disappointment. Beautiful. Beautiful. Nail it. Papa has this idea, he's not one of the founding fathers of modern science, that essentially life is problem solving. And then David Deutsch builds upon his ideas, which is, I guess a few things, but one, all problems, unless they defy the laws of physics, are fundamentally solvable. But so that's the optimistic note, but there's a big caveat there, which is as soon as you solve a problem, it leads to another problem. So solutions are infinite, but problems are also infinite. So let's say we solve the problem of fire. Okay. Now we have the problem of smoke. Okay. We've solved the problem of smoke. We've got a chimney. Okay. Now we've got a dirty chimney. Okay. We're going to solve that problem by getting some children in to clean it. Oh, now we've got the problem of child labor and it's just da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, it's both the beginning of infinity, both for problems and solutions. So life is problem solving. Very good. Johnny. We go. I have another lesson, which is it's a dad based lesson about being a dad. Have you seen American beauty? Seen the film American beauty? No, no. Tom Cruise. No. It shows that I haven't seen it. That's my, that's me verifying that I haven't seen American beauty. Kevin Spacey, I'd recommend watching it. It's really good. There's a scene in it where there's a guy watching, he's just sat mesmerized, watching a bag blowing in the wind. And he ends up in tears because there's, he can't believe the amount of beauty in the bag floating in the wind. And I've always been really jealous of that scene because there's a guy that's just absolutely mesmerized with something completely normal in ordinary and everyone's like going around chasing like the new thing, the novel experience, the new like location possession, whatever. The thing, the thing that I've noticed that I wasn't expecting about being a dad is the is watching watching your child see something for the first time completely reintroduces you to life like little things before they just became part of the background, part of the scenery. So like the first time they watch a dog bark, first time they see a bird flying the first time they hear a noise, you're just transported for that split second into like, oh god, yeah, that is, that's crazy that thing. And it's a complete, it's a, I think like you guys probably had this like one of the challenges of like, you get older and you feel like time goes faster and faster and faster and it's just the same experiences on repeat. It's a really nice like pinpoint back to like, oh yeah, like that cups colder than I was expecting it to be. Oh yeah, the moisture feels really weird and 10 minutes goes by. So it's been a really cool, something I wasn't expecting to happen, but it's been a really cool experience this year. That was so lovely. It's been great seeing that in you as well, Johnny. Over the year, I've honestly, I've like seen your heart open and like, almost unlock this like aspect to a personality that that your daughter's brought out in you. Thanks, what is it that's going on with us? Right, because you've had a kid, but none of us have a moleskin notepad. You were on a most, a little moleskin notepad, but none of us, I just get this sense, I don't know whether anybody else that's listening feels it, but 2025 was a very feely, generally, I think for a lot of people that were around me, it was like a big emotions. Yeah, I think our lessons and realizations each time we do this are not being weirdly similar. There's definitely were on a trajectory that's sort of moving at a similar kind of pace. You see that when you have a load of girls around one another, their menstruation cycles sync up, so it's. They got hacks sync up. Yeah, even remotely. Interesting. Yeah, that's cool, man. I mean, like the opportunity to revisit something old for the first time is just super cool. And obviously because you're marrying this with a deep meditation practice that's consistent, you're getting at this from multiple angles. Funny as you started the story then about the film, I started staring at the carpet, and I was in this gaze for the carpet for like five seconds, because one of my favorite stories that I read this year was from Morgan Housel's book. I don't know the name of the chap, but he, he's blind from basically birth to about 45 and he has this experimental eye surgery and he can see for the first time and he's after the surgery just at the opticians just staring at the carpet for like an hour and he's just fascinated by the details of the carpet and I realize I will pass carpet all the time and don't think about it here. So wouldn't it be crazy to be alive for a long time but experiencing something for the first time? Because you see those. Well, how do you do that? You see those videos of babies that hear for the first time, but they usually three or four or something. And you go, "Well, how much life would you have experienced up until that point?" But if you're someone who has a sense of self and maybe a partner and position in society and all the rest of it and then you get reintroduced this cosmic dose of novelty and wonder into a system that already is pretty well put together, I think I told you about this ages ago, the elderly clout hypothesis. We talk about the perils of fame too young but never the perils of fame too old. Like what happens if you're 16 you become the most famous psychologist in the world say, "Well, you know, Jordan Peterson had to navigate that. You get plugged out of obscurity, you think you know who you are, you think you know your place in society." And now that's. You've been ripped from your moorings and we've got to try and work out who the fuck am I in this new world. Yeah. And that's like. I think we all, we've all experienced that when we downloaded Alfred for the first time. Like everything we knew about the way we interface with technology suddenly just like, "Oh, God, I've been driving with the brakes on. I've been seeing in black and white all my life." There is a bit of me that thinks because the growth of the show is so like fucking exponential. So many amazing low hanging fruit insights to me feel cheap to do because they've been done maybe multiple times before, but because of the exposure that people have had to it, even within the same stream of content, which is modern wisdom and me, we probably do need to go back. I think this should be like a required reading, like mute the show. Yeah, we're going to go through the other genes. Right. We're going to break the Alfred server head space, calm and then arrived at waking up track path speed, ROM wads, you need to sleep at your phone outside of your bedroom. Right. This is one of the problems. Some of the hacks that we believed in, the companies are defunct now. I'm pretty sure you can't get like the sponsors, the protein works, I think actually went into administration. There is a lot of us are in the show notes at some point. Well, it was ROM WOD. Then you were on ROM WOD. I was a ROM WOD model. Did you stretch now? I did not. I don't do much stretching. No, George does loads. Do you? A little bit. Stretching all the time. You said four you got. We'll get back to talking in just one second, but first, if you have been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a huge role in your energy, focus and performance, but most people have no idea what there's are or what to do. It's something tough, which is why I partnered with function because I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to actually understand what's happening inside of my body. Twice a year, there were lab tests that monitor over a hundred biomarkers. 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Massive amounts of gratitude for being able to spend your guys birthdays together, to travel with you all and all of that stuff, I really just really seeing an appreciation for it. Almost like Johnny was saying about his daughter where if you were transported, I think Hormuzzi talks about this, but if you were transported from your 90s into today and you're like, "Oh, I've suddenly got another 30 again. I've got another year to live. You see it with a whole new level of gratitude." But my big one is me becoming post-truth. This is the beginning of a half right wing pivots and you serve here, isn't it? Mirror only smiles when you smile. Has been my mantra for the year. And it's just as concrete as it sounds. Like you start staring at the mirror miserable and go, "Oh, I don't like what's in the reflection. I need to try and change that thing in the reflection." And the mirror represents the world around you. Whereas actually, you can never change the reflection. All you can do is bring the positive energy to it and then everything else reflects it back to you. So it's just moving from left brain, overly empirical, have to get to some objective truth out there in order to give myself the permission to say that this is true or adoptive belief or adoptive whatever. You actually know, you choose your beliefs. We choose them anyway. So it's not as if you're suddenly becoming woo-woo by doing that. It's just being conscious about it and then bringing whatever energy you want to see reflected back into the world. And just in doing that, it's just been, it's like opening up a different gear in my mind. So that's been a big shift in just how I'm choosing to see reality. Very fielsy. We're all very fielsy, which I love. Do you know what it makes me think? It makes me think that the intuition that I had for most of the last 12 months was right. So this is a big, like my biases are being confirmed. And it's not just you. Yeah, it's not. It's not. And, you know, I think certainly, at least from the show's perspective, a lot of what I've talked about over the last 12 months is being less hardcore hustle and grind, Goggin's mentality thing. I contributed to that. The industry of fuck your feelings, bro, just work harder. I had, you know, I served my time, contributing to that, but even fucking homozy started to make the pivot this year where he's thinking, well, maybe I should pay a little bit of attention to what's happening below the neck. Maybe I should, maybe I should care a little bit more. And yeah, this, you could say like a good summary is that it's all vibes ultimately, but what you're trying to do is construct some external situation or life or level of success or belief system or whatever externally to make yourself feel something internally. But there is a more direct route there. Well, the post-truth idea you said has probably stems from, I don't know, you said, but the Derek Sivers has this book called Useful, but not true. And he has this. I haven't read it, but yeah, very much. You can read it in a couple of hours. So there's, yeah, Sivers has this useful, but not true. And he starts off with this story of, obviously, for people who don't know, he ends up being a quite successful entrepreneur in that programmer, etc, etc. But what a lot of people don't know is when he was 17, he crashed into a lady that was driving and broke her spine and she was paralyzed for the rest of her life. And he carries this from like 17 to 34, just like we're ruminating on a day after day, after day like what he did and like how all these successes meaningless because he's such an awful person. And one day he goes, well, I'm going to take some agency over it. I'm actually going to go and see her and apologize. So he turns up at a door. She answers the door and he immediately starts sobbing like in tears and goes, it's me, Derek, I'm so sorry. I crashed into your car. I paralyzed you. And she's like, hold on, hold on. She goes, come on, walk on in. And she's walking. So he's like, sit down and he's kind of discovers that he didn't paralyze her. Like she like broke a bit of a verb, but she's been fine ever since. And what's interesting is she's been blaming herself for the accident ever since. So they both end up crying, realizing that they both had these kind of false memories in their head the entire time. Yeah, it's scary to work out that your worldview is incorrect. Which it is. Yeah. In how many other places do you think that you've hit a woman? How many how many assumptions do you have about yourself or about the world or about the past that weren't that way? Well, and this is, I think one of the problems that you have with going too deep into the therapy, speak world without having action. And I'm sure if I was to make this would be cool. I'm supposed to make a prediction for next year. We will at least for me, I predict that I'm probably going to keep moving through the emotions thing, but realize it's made me less effective. And actually trying to come back out the other side into more action oriented stuff, but doing it from a more embodied place. Like okay, I've looked into the abyss and I've stared at the shadow a little bit. And now I'm going to try and re-garner the fuck your feelings, bro, just work anyway, but while actually feeling them. And. Well, that's what you were saying while at Chris, where like it's not that we're throwing out the idea of being able to do hard work. It's just not conflating the actual pain of the work with the progress. Yeah. Do you think that, you know, the thing, I think we probably will have this before you like meditate or do any kind of self-improvement stuff is that, well, will this sap my desire to work harder or do you feel like that's happened? You can get there. I think I can get there, yeah, because I can. Not in terms of not wanting the goals anymore. And perhaps part of this is simply just achieving a lot of the goals, but at least a good bit of it for me comes out of, well, how much of what I was doing was to hide from emotional states that I didn't want to feel like I feel lonely so I'll work hard or I feel frustrated so I'll work harder. I feel insufficient or inferior so I'll work hard. And in that you hide, you artificially bolster your sense of self-worth because you don't feel like without that you're enough. So you're chasing enoughness and you're injecting work rate into it and it's doing two things. It's pushing you towards something which makes you think, well, I'm moving in the right direction. It doesn't matter if I don't love myself today because tomorrow I'll be better and you have this sort of permanent maniana, maniana, maniana ring of that. But the other thing is by being so busy, it drowns out the fleeting thoughts that make you doubt stuff in any case. So busy can't be. is a hedge against existential loneliness. And if you just stack your day back to back, well, I'm moving in the right direction. So the long term, like I'm doing the thing thing, get sorted. Plus the immediate, I've insulated myself from being able to hear the thing thing, is also happening. So I think it can. But ultimately, if the reason that you work so hard is so that you can finally feel good about yourself, or be happy, or have good vibes. And if in the process of doing that, you destroy the vibes and you don't make yourself feel good about yourself, if you can just access the vibes directly, it doesn't matter. Like you have actually managed to find a shortcut through the mountain by tunneling straight through the middle of it. And it's still wet clay. For me, like all of this stuff is still really, really, really fucking wet clay. But I think it's the right way to go. And I think that a lot of people realize this as well. And there is kind of two worlds. There's the people who are still like looking at the top of the mountain. And then some people who have done a little bit of stuff, maybe got to some kind of an altitude. And like, I don't think that I need to go any higher. I think I actually need to go down and reassess my route. And the people who are still on the climb, just do not understand the perspective that the people who have gone a little bit higher up. Got. And that's fine because eventually they'll get there and it's the untouchable lesson and so on and so forth. But it does lead to, it sounds much more like, uh, up a damning and supportive and noble to be on the climb. And it sounds like privileged and bourgeois to say, you know, man, I'm just like working on my vibes, dude. But I get the sense that anyone who's sufficiently mindful is going to end up there in any case. So I think this is a path that everybody's on just to different stages. The best analogy I've heard for this is that it's not about the weather, work, hard work, laziness, whatever. There's any, there's no moralizing of the thing itself. It's about if you're using feelings of insufficiency to drive your work, then it's like you're using dirty fuel, which will eventually destroy the engine. So it's not hard work is bad. It's if the dirty fuel is the thing which is driving you to do it, then that's going to collapse. I'm working hard. Yeah. I have like the, it's weird that you said that because I've been thinking about this a lot of like the feeling that you have achieved a thing you've been chasing a long time and the drive, kind of feel the drive going away a bit. What I think the next step is, is like you've just completed Call of Duty on hard and I need to start again at level one, but on veteran. And you kind of know like, oh, it's this level that guy's there and that guy comes out that door and she hear me. So you're kind of going through that you pick a different thing to chase. That's going to be. This sounds very technical, which you shouldn't be. But do you think it's playing Call of Duty again in a hard level? Do you think it's playing a new game? I think it has to be the same game because that's then you're like navigating the new goal, but kind of knowing like, oh, this happens because I think the problem with like the first goal with the, I want to bet gender kilos is you that is the beginning of the journey of. This is it. It's the tub of weight. I just need this tub of weigh. I just need a hundred thousand subscribers. But when you pick like, if Chris picked 10 million subscribers, but all right, well, yeah, here we go again. But do you think same journey? So to use the 100 kilos one, do you think it's okay now, but I do 110 or 120 or do you think it's, oh, now I want to get my resting heart rate down to this or I want to get great applies or whatever it is. So I think like that's the, obviously, it can't be the same goal. So it the Call of Duty is just an analogy. Do you still let me? Yeah. So the reason it's like, it's picking a new goal that that challenges you in a different way, but you know that like, this is just the, that's how you get the feel, that's how you get the drive back. So it doesn't matter if it's the same thing or a new goal, it's just a bigger thing than previous essentially. But yeah, but it's the, it's like, because I think when you have those feelings of like, oh, you know, I've just kind of reached this goal and it was just fulfilling this thing. And I think that just means like you've arrived at the tail end of that, like you've that particular art. That's the final level. Well, you think you think in Oxford, I remember one of the insights from relationships one or one that you had, which I think is still true is a lot of people restart the same cycle with a new person assuming that they're going to get some more longevity out of it. Whereas it's not this relationship will be different. Yeah. No, it's it's largely the same arc from excitement to familiarity. And people think that the familiarity is an indication that they should switch to get someone who the excitement lasts with for longer. Yeah. But it's not that arc is pretty locked in. I think that you're true. And this is certainly true for me with the live stuff. You know, it's sufficiently similar to what I do. But sufficiently different that it's a new territory, a new video game to try and conquer. And it feeds into the main story from zero. But I'm starting from zero. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I guess the tied-wintered espiral thing, you said said before is so true as well. Because in the micro, or if this is done too frequently, what this looks like is a non-essentialist worldview, it looks like you're trying to do lots of things at once, which means that you're not good at anything. You can be anything you want, but not everything. But you can be lots of things as long as you periodize when you're focusing on them. I couldn't have done live tour, writing, podcasts, all the rest of the movie. I couldn't have done that all at once. But if I chunk them into sufficiently dedicated, sufficiently long durations, we'll probably get away with it. All right. We'll do one more, one more little round. And if there's any absolute slammers, just do a couple. This is a new one for me, which I haven't written about yet, just because you can lift it doesn't mean you should. And this is the inverse of the region beta paradox. So most people, if things get sufficiently bad, it galvanizes them to get out of a situation, something that's challenging or painful or difficult. But if you have an unusually high tolerance for discomfort and a pretty resilient, then you become like the David Goggins of suffering. Fuck the boats. I'll carry the whole fleet. And what happens is you were able to put yourself into a situation where you can sustain discomfort or a wrong path or a challenging position or a job that you shouldn't stay in or a lifestyle that you need to check or whatever. You can continue to push yourself through that because your capacity to hold on and to just keep going is so strong that you go way you find that the basements got a fucking cellar with a trapped door in it below the bottom of the line that most people's region beta would have kicked them out the bottom of. It's like, oh, this was already bad enough and most people would have been galvanized into action. But for some reason, your capacity to like just keep going is so great that you do, and you do, and you do, and you do, and you do. And it's strange because the things that you get praise for in public are often very damaging in private. The resilience that you need to get yourself through work is not the sort of thing that you're supposed to have in your friendships, for instance. You know, if a friend continues to misuse you or take advantage of you or isn't there or it's just bad, bad influence or whatever it is, like if that's in work and you're trying to get this particular piece of coding or website to work and fit to get the fuck this happier integration. Do this thing, I'm trying to get this client, I'm going to fly across the well and do all the rest of it, that's fine. But if it's you trying to regularly chase down a friend that's self-destructing, there is a limit, there is supposed to be a limit to that. And yeah, the realization, just because something's heavy doesn't mean you should left it. And the reverse of that is just because somebody carries a weight well doesn't mean it isn't heavy. So from the outside, a lot of the time people that listen to shows like this one and read your guys' stuff and George's stuff, they're usually the most put together person in the room. Typically, they're the one that their friends turn to for advice because you listen to, you read that psychology stuff, don't you, what should I, what should I do about my relationship with my mother or whatever it might be? And what that causes is for a lot of people to never ask the question of the person who usually answers and go, "Hey, how you doing? Can we check in?" They're like, "Oh yeah, it's like, no, no, no, like I really mean how are you like, what's let's turn this around?" And it takes a real brave friend, it takes a real sort of impactful friend to push through the competence defense mechanism that everybody has up. Yeah, in some ways that's another curse of competence that people don't see you as someone that needs reassurance or steps into check on you. And I think, yeah, be aware of using what you're priced for in public, your resilience in your private life and just because someone carries the weight well doesn't mean it isn't happy. That's great. It's RPE. It's RPE for personal life. I think this is kind of the same thing you talk about, but if you're a person that is in charge responsible for things, you're by default the person that people come to for advice or what do I do? How does this work? I think that straight away makes it harder to be like, I'm struggling. Because I think the feeling that that creates is like, if I admit I'm struggling, they then have no one to Ask like what I'm the guy. I'm supposed to be the guy or the girl so I think that I've definitely felt that feeling of like When you're supposed to be kind of holding all the everything together You sort of have to maintain that Like facade to a degree even if you'd like I don't know to do if you say that suddenly the whole The whole thing for it. That's an interesting one So I remember reading Um endurance by Alfred Lansing and he's talking about shackled and diary entries versus what everybody else's diary entries are Right and shackled and diary entries are just racked with self-doubt and uncertainty and it took the whole experience is him just swimming in melancholy and fear But the soon as he puts the diary down he steps outside and he just you know galvanizes this entire group So I do think that in a professional context and if you are a leader This is a price leaders pay that nobody else gets to see But this is the reason that you're supposed to have a fucking supportive spouse or good friends who don't work for you or A therapist that you can talk to or whatever whatever your you know outlet of choices, but somebody who's there and with whom you can go I don't fucking know what I'm doing. I don't know how to get out of this Mm-hmm, and I think that's yeah the value of multifaceted social group Napoleon has this line that a leader is a dealer of hope could be church early in drift, but I'm pretty sure it's Napoleon Napoleon and My literally takes me onto mine, which is perfect so To do very much like a Christopher Nolan reveal now. I'm gonna criticize my for previous one so then you come in here It's been a set up all along So the reveal is I think right now in 2025 2026 that deep work which is kind of sitting there focused with any distractions is Extremely useful, but it's currently overpriced Relative to the amount of people that probably listen to your show and do that and what I call deep sparring is significantly underpriced which is kind of what you discuss then right that you can't say to people Oh, I'm struggling with this particularly people that are relying on you, but like I've realized now it's probably about three to five people in my life Where we can sit down go for dinner. I did this on Friday with my friend Harry and London you went for dinner Spook everything through at our laptops there and he was going through issues. He's facing. I was going through issues He was facing a vice versa and does this a Nick comatural line of When I advise other people I gain 20 IQ points and when I advise myself I lose 20 IQ points So you essentially gain 40 IQ points because they get to come in and look at all your problems And they're a super smart person and then you get to go in and look at their problems And then the next time you come back because you've been together you're kind of ennously smarter It's like what we spoke about at the start of the just before we recorded which is the film Oppenheimer You needed that deep sparring time in person if if Simon was in South America and Fermi was over there like it wouldn't happen So there's something yeah that and what's beautiful about the deep sparring idea is you probably need like three to four hours a quarter And then it you stack up all that deep work on top of it versus you sitting in your own little cage Ruminating coming up with the most absurd conspiracy to about yourself and then working on top of that I think it's a huge negative. Do you think the other people in the in the deep sparring need no Like should they have no context? They have to be kind of completely separate. No, I think you probably want somebody who you don't Directly work with but you want somebody who you really really respect Like a good rule of thumb. I've tried to take the sheer which is ignore like all criticism from Critics and like listen 100% or criticism from creative people or people that are doing things Um, so I think in that regard then you I mean you probably could think of four or five people that you could sit down with and and I think is It's kind of they call it a live straddling poker which is um when you go in other people start going in And I think there's some truth to that as well where if you go in and say hey, I'm struggling with this What do you think you was to take over my life of a VR headset on what would you do? They come up with gems and then they immediately go well, I've got this thing and it's beautiful It's licensed to Go there. I think especially for guys And this is one of the problems upon reflection with a lot of what's happening in the UK I think because you kind of have Multiplier effect of already a British Allogy to earnestness and sincerity Plus the male allergy to earnestness and sincerity and they kind of stack on top of each other But if you can find somebody who is prepared to go there and you open the door That typically is reciprocated the problem is when you do it with the wrong person And they go What the fuck do you mean me? I was laughing because Harry is the absolute master of that. He's the antidote because he will just Drop in an absolutely wild take on something and just be like Prove me wrong And I don't think I can even repeat any of those takes but yeah, it's the perfect thing you have to have Sparring partner or friends that you can drop absolutely anything with Put it on the table in front of you and everyone just goes all right, that's Let's dissect this. What's interesting as well is if you study history This is so common so you had the Luna society in the UK during the industrial revolution where all these Like pioneers so arasement Darwin who was Charles Darwin's grandfather James war and about 10 other leaders of the industrial revolution Or poetry at the time would meet during a full moon because this is obviously pre-electricity James What's still working on what he's working on they know during a full moon they'd meet in somebody's garden And they would all discuss so the the whole foundation of the western world was built on that you then have Benjamin Franklin In the US waiting how he'd have these like junto societies that he would host and he would mingle I was literally reading the other day The book about the start of uber so uber starts because one guy's frustrated that he can't get a taxi So he's doing what i occasionally do while order from multiple taxi companies at once and the taxi arrives So he's then banned from all taxi apps and one day he's watching Casino Royale and he sees James Bond with his GPS technology and he goes hoed on So that's an idea and Travis who's the the other found revuber He hosts these jam parties at his house since he sold his company So he can just mingle and meet people and they're playing table tennis and that's where the idea of uber comes from So this idea of kind of sitting by yourself I think it's just a fallacy that is a very a modern thing The deep sparring is so significant throughout history The lone genius theory for sort of how history gets moved forward is so Oh shith It's so fucking bullshit dude And I guess that would be another another lesson from this year I put it in one of the vlogs that came out recently which was You can go pretty fucking fast and quite far on your own And even if it's not as try to as like if you want to go fast go on your own if you want to go far Go with other people that I don't know you can probably with enough resilience if you're the David Goggins of suffering You can just fucking grit your teeth and make it to 80 and you'd have you'd have done fun But it'll be way less fun Like if you want to have fun do with other people's so not only you more effective It's also it's also more fun and it's easier Yeah, so you can get you would let's say that you can get it done But you would have it be done with more discomfort more self-doubt And yeah, you get to celebrate this fucking thing you get to celebrate whatever it is that you're doing with other people There's a great line of um, you know the whole Gladwell concept of 10,000 hours which has been debated But even in that context there If you meet with smart friend and discuss these issues you've now got 20,000 hours because you got there 10,000 hours Then you get 10 people you have a hundred thousand hours you can see where this is going Should be friends with as many people as well as okay You got any Simon's to finish off with you got anything that you really wish that you'd said I have a little hack But I found useful run it. It's so it's being more practical with gratitude Practical ways to engineer that feeling because I've always troubled with that Then about you guys the whole like right three things you've got it for for you. But you're not bright and the same stuff So one's a question that you can ask daily and one is the thing that you do one time the one time is ask Chachypt or whatever your AI of choices so to say I um 35 I live in this city this whatever describe a Monday a hundred years ago and the level of You just need to read it once and you're like oh my god like heating Not having to eat like spam for dinner Not having to navigate through like a world war and all these things and you just suddenly see like little things in your day That you can a microwave completely take the granted he like wow You sent me that passage is that what you've just got a no I was which passage you refer to uh where Water like I had a shower I Walked up in a comfy bed and I did something else when you compared it to a queen and emperor and yeah from just I mean I could do like six hours series on this right But even just study any part of history and you realize everything's so much worse than it is Now and also everybody's always complaining So you kind of realize no matter how much better it gets everybody's gonna always be complaining I mean you study world war two It's not even that long ago and you go hold most of the people like we would have been on the front lines Here's a crazy star the average age of the Luftwaffe that were bombing the UK was 26 the average age of the RAF pilots It's the reason why this isn't modern's wisdom is The reason why we're not all speaking to you. You'd be fine with the blonde hair blue eyes Is the average age of an RAF pilot 21 and you know how averages work There's going to be a few of us blocs. They're bringing that age up. And you just kind of go, "Oh my god, it's never ending. How much better it's gotten, but how much people will still keep complaining." I have just a little twist on the gratitude thing because I did, in that bedroom there, the time capsule from the last decade of my life, there is nine or ten six-minute diaries, and there's six months each. So it's a lot of daily writing. And the gratitude never got below the neck for me. And that sounds great, and I'm sure that it, you know, it's shocking. The question I would ask that I would get you ask yourself is, does this feel like I'm feeling it, or is it just another sort of cognitive thought experiment? Plus so this is my second one. Beautiful. So that's the. Yeah, I like it. Without knowing. Yeah, that's like the, you know, shift the canvas. It's like, "Oh, all these things I take for granted. How nice." That the second question that you can ask yourself every day is, which I think I might have mentioned before, it's just what would, what would eight-year-old me have appreciated about my day today? And that stuff like, I got to walk to the shop and buy a drink and walk back again without nothing hurt or like, "I'm at this part of my relationship with my partner, and we got to do this, and we've got all these plans and all these things to be excited about, and we have a holiday coming up, and I get to go with whatever. That's the stuff that I feel. I think that's the way that like, I really struggle with, write three things you're grateful for, but I find that question. You pick the stuff you would ignore, because it's the stuff that, when you're 80, just won't be there anymore, that you overlook, which is, that's what, 80-year-old you will be grateful for. What do you think those biggest things at your old Johnny will be thinking? I think it's the feeling of excitement about what's still coming. But like, my daughter's a certain age, and getting to see her grow up, like, friendships, watching people achieve things, there's so much to be still be excited for. And not to say that doesn't, that goes away when you're 80, but I think you're facing very different, very different 10 years when you're 80 years old. Have you heard the quote from AN Whitehead, "civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking of them?" So like, Johnny from 100 years ago, Johnny from now doesn't have to go up the mountain and milk the goats, and then like, wash the clothes in the wooden part and all this kind of stuff, and therefore can do stuff at much higher orders of operation. That famous email from Steve Jobs, "I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow, I didn't breed or perfect the seeds, I didn't make any of my own clothing, I speak a language I didn't invent or refine, I did not discover the mathematics that I use, I'm protected by freedoms and laws I didn't conceive of or legislate, etc, etc." And then it's like, at the end, it's sent from my iPad. Like, just a little hat to it, because we're standing on the shoulders of giants. Yeah, that's good. The gratitude thing is hard to get right. Certainly. Try the John's stuff. Give that a go. The panic attack of happiness. Yeah, panic attack of joy, see what happens. It's Michael the guy from Elliot. I'll put you in touch for him. What do you guys think 80-year-old you? We'll be grateful for. For me, the obvious one, I was reading this chesscock. It's called Ken. Alfred. I was reading this book called Ken, it's by Ken Liu, so he does these short stories. And it's one called "Paper in the Na'juri". And kind of the ending is, he's reading a letter from his mom after she's died. And this is a Chinese family. When they say the saddest, the saddest feeling in Chinese culture is to grow an age where you're ready to take care of your parents and realize they're no longer there. So that's probably the one that I think. I'd be like, "Oh, wow, my parents are still here." That's cool. That's cool. I like the song by Ken Liu as well. Like, "Ken Liu, Ken Libra Di Bu Dao Tsu, Ken Liu." You know that one. It's going to be Christmas number one after that, right? -In this edition. -She's Christ. Wow. Okay. You said, "Anything beyond that, I don't know how you're going to top it." Yes. I've got. And sorry for derailing your hack there, Johnny. I've got some micro ones, but obviously, Johnny and my hacks are so similar and I had this episode coming up. I went through my obsidian, which has definitely passed the Watson filter, still using it, and looked out my George folder and thought, I just need to celebrate a few of the hacks that I've stolen from George and have served me well. So the board room exercise, which is basically your sat at a board room in your mind when your mind is too busy and you go, "Okay, I've got different versions of myself all around the board." So you might have the finance accountant version of you with the green cap and the cigar, or you have the romance version of you with the rose and the teeth and the gym version of you, whatever, all these different mini personas. And you just give them all a chance to have their say. So everyone else showed up, "You, you've got five minutes, take the floor, voice what you need to say." And as you work your way around, you just clear out the pipes and it's just the quietest that your mind will ever be. So George, thank you for that one. Framing decisions as experiments. Big one I've learned from him this year, rather than deliberating over a decision that is a two-way door, you can just treat it as an experiment and then it just gets rid of any sense of, like, "Oh, I've got to get this right." Final three. I'll take them. And last but not least, comments or questions on those so far. Keep running them. Okay, this is difficult because I've just for people's reference. I've got no like visual feedback, so I'm just like talking to my friend. I have a great time. We're loving it. Hojiccia. So if you like coffee, but you're weaning yourself off, you can go decaf, but also, Hojiccia is roasted matcha. It's got that kind of caramele chocolate-y type taste, but with much lower caffeine, same level of theonine as matcha, too. Becoming more popular, lovely drink, very very wholesome, especially in the winter time, or we can have it cold. So Hojiccia, using voice notes as a trigger to go outside, either listening to or recording voice notes, I've just set myself a rule where I have to be walking around to send or receive a voice note. Just stops me from being a slug at my desk and you know, just gets me up and out. The final one's a little bit long, so I might. All right. I'll steamroll through my last few. Take a photo of the room key slip with your room number on it when you check into a hotel. As you get it, just have your phone out, take a photo of it. I've been on tour a lot. I've been through, oh god, 50 or 100 hotels, maybe in the last couple of years, and you, especially if you're going back to back to back, there is no way you can remember your room number. I've been lost. I've had to go back down to not lose my room key, but to just be reminded of what room I'm in. And that's a particularly embarrassing one. So just take a photo of the room key. Uber Black XL, in America, they don't do it in the UK. Uber Black XL is so nice. If you're in the States, it gets a big escalade or a Ford Explorer or something with a guy in a suit. And it's usually maybe twice the price, two and a half times the price of a normal Uber. So probably not good for big journeys, but if you're out with some friends, if this is a dicky one from your birthday in Miami that he used, and it's just such a nicer experience. If you've got four people, four people will go in the new Brex, but it'll be pain. Uber XL, you've still got bags of room. We use two Uber XLs as our tour vans, basically, for all of tour with the soundboard and everything else that we needed to take. And then the last one is a quote from Franz Kafka in 1912, and it's basically a summation of all of the life hacks that we've ever done. It's a distillation of everything that you need to do in your life. So Franz Kafka in 1912, dearest, I beg of you, sleep properly and go for walks. I think it's the single sentence for how you can probably get most things better in your life. Yeah. Well, everything's better with those two things. Sleep properly and go for walks. Double do that. That's the first entry in his day one that he's looking back on 20 years later. Still have a set probably a gum for enough walk. You got anything left? Yeah, I'll speak. through. We're going to a little speed round then. Number one is, I told you about my, if I become the chancellor of the XCHECCA, how I would increase the GDP by 3% overnight, I would install large whiteboards in everybody's home. So I think just having a large whiteboard always there, there's that like, it's Kidlin's law of them. If you could, if you can state a problem clearly, you've already solved it by 50%. And my kind of twist on that is, when you have a whiteboard, it's actually 70% because it kind of stays there staring back at you and eats part of your subconscious. That's number one. Number two, and I want to make sure that I get a bit of context here because it does sound stupid this one. But let me just test the room. One thing I discovered during COVID, I would do a lot of text messages, a lot of voice memos and a lot of scheduled Zoom calls. How often do you just randomly ring a friend? I actually do that quite regularly. You do it quite a bit. Never. Never. And I find myself, and I think there's probably a lot of people listen to the show that do that as well, where it's like, hey, mate, you want to chat tomorrow at nine. And it's that, you know, that meme of there's two guys, one's trying to stab the other, and it's like me and like one schedule call my entire day versus I will just randomly pick up the first thing my thing like this year is to just randomly ring people whenever I can not case and just check in on friends because you just stop doing it. I've not actually had a phone call with a friend for 18 months. What's your pick up rate? What's the pick up rate on the calls? About 30, 40%. Okay. Yeah. And then when you factor in dial backs, it's like 70 to 80%. And you just end up having conversations that you wouldn't have and it leads to that kind of deep. This does create a deep, deep anxiety in Johnny, though. It's the reason he doesn't text back too quickly. Yeah. Well, that's the stuff for conversation. The hack for the hack. Go on. Double dial. What do you mean? Ring them again straight away. Okay. That makes it feel like emergency. Yeah. So exactly so I'll answer. So if I rang you right, but it's not an emergency, but it doesn't matter. Right. So you've got to assume one of two things. I'm either actually not available, in which case the double dial isn't going to work. More, I am available, but I'm busy, which means that the second one just pushes through a threshold to a level of severity that is inappropriate for what you're trying to do. And by your choice, all you've done is optimize you a pickup rate on the first time you call them, but future times they're going to, "Oh, that's double dial, Johnny." Meanwhile, his house is on fire. Yeah. Okay. So you're worried about boy who cried real both because. Okay. And also you've, I think it's more of fun conversation, right? That's the whole game, though, is to have more fun. I don't need to like optimize my conversion rate on a chat. But you want to speed more people, though, no, surely. Then you've picked the ring back. They'll ring back when you call somebody else. Yeah. Just go on the area manual style. I think this has touched your nerve in you guys. I feel like if you're going to ring someone, ring twice, say, "If you're going to ring it, me want to speak to them." So you're brumpling, ring making it. You're sounding very entitled. Well, I think it's entitled to ring someone. I'm going to call you so many times after. If you double dial, I'm sorry. The point is, right, you ring someone because you're trying to get in touch with them. So act like you're trying to get in touch with them. But this is not like a formal conversation. It's very like, what's up? What's going on? Fine. You guys are inferring that if I ring twice as an emergency, but I'm just trying to speak to you, which is the purpose of the first call. Always be closing. Always be calling. Anything else? Let's do, I mean, you said mentioned it. Then you can do some fun ones of just create your own language. So we need subtitles on for the rest of this part. But no, just like changing words. So you said mentioned not using decision, using the word experiment. And you realize, "Oh, when you use that, you're light on yourself." But also the best part about it is you tell everybody else you're running an experiment. You say, "Hey, I'm going to move to this place." Oh, it's a big decision. Everybody kind of reflexively acts like it's a big decision. It's Kapil Gupta, standup comedian who goes on stage, one version of him, and immediately apologizes after the offensive joke. The crowd picks up on it. The other version just kind of laughs it through. And there's what you guys worried about. It's not a big decision. Have you considered though that there might be some decisions that warrant you taking them seriously and also warrant sort of a serious reception and you're making light of it. May cause your friends to be a bit more blase than is warranted. Perhaps you shouldn't try and base jump for the first time ever off that cliff. Yeah, I mean, that's how it's fighting. It's going to be fighting. It's having a laugh. I mean, I'll chat to that about my 20 children, I'll just have. No, I mean, I mean, it's a bit of a conversation. I mean, that's a little bit of a, I always find these conversations a bit like, it's like somebody's so far this way. Somebody's sort of overthinking like what they're going to order from a dinner menu to then like, "Oh, maybe don't just have three kids with three different women." It's like, you know, the classic thing of you have a female friend who says, "Oh, I don't want to go to the gym. I'm going to get too bulky." And it's like, I've been trying that for years. And I can't do it with 10 times the test of strength. So I don't think you've got to worry about somebody going from not being able. This is specifically for people that are struggling with decisions. Like the decisions that are reversible, labeling them as experiments is useful. Other one is if I say the word problem, what's the kind of emotional reaction that you get? Construction. Construction. Pain frustration. If I say the word puzzle. Excitement pain. So. Yes. I'm working on a new one for the news. I've been thinking about, because the news is just because of all of the news that you can see. Even the, call it the gel man's. You know, gel man, amnesia or the currents or the wrongs. Because it's just a matter of the wrongs. Do you remember when you tried to, do you remember, because you've been, you've been doing this for as long as I've known, you've been doing this for nearly eight years now. Remember when you tried to rename the untilet bowl hit P that drops on the seat. I didn't try and rename that. I tried to give it a name because it didn't have a name. Okay. Because I was thinking remember that. Yeah, it's catch you, right? Okay. It's, it's fly dripping rather than fly tipping. It doesn't have a name. Think about I've got an amix in there with 16 digits on the front. I haven't been able to recall it. Must have used it 200 times in the last couple of years. I can recall fly dripping. The fact that my brain has decided to hook itself into the name for piss on a toilet bowl, but not the 16 digit number, which is in between me and maybe getting out of a third world jail cell. It's also the name for piss on a toilet bowl that three people in the world would recognize. Many more now. Yeah. Well, so there's just, I mean, probably a good one to finish on is book recommendations, specifically around language. So there's a book called The Etymological, which is where I got a lot of this stuff from. There's a bloat. So he has this line in here where he's chatting about Milton and this guy invented the following words, right? This is how generative this man was. Impressive, obtrusive, jubilant, lequacious, unconvincing, satanic, persona, fragrance, beleaguered, census, undesirable disregard, damp, criticise, irresponsible, love-law-on, exhilarating, sectarian, unaccountable, incidental and cucking. He created all those for his words. So fly dripping. You've got to keep churning them out there. We've seen Shakespeare's equivalent. No. Insane. The numbers of words is the number of words that Shakespeare created, which are part of common parlance now as well. For this, we just accept language as it is. A fun one is from that book, is where the word, and it's Christmas related, is where the word turkey comes from. So we think it's basically because it's the, it came from Turkey. But interestingly in Turkey, they call it essentially Hindu, referencing to India. So it didn't come from Turkey and it didn't come from India, but it's this whole chain that exists. So Turkey did not come from Turkey. Remember in that book, because I've got the paper back in that same book next to my bed after you recommended it. And shit comes from German words. Is it shiser? But there's a couple of interesting potential explanations for it. One of them being store-high in transit. So if you had manure and you were taking it on a ship, you wouldn't want it down the low where people could smell it. You'd want it in one of the higher storage units, store-high in transit. It's one of these situations where I guess you get kind of a chichillion drift explanation that's culpable but wrong. Because posh is port out starboard home. And it was also to do with the sides of the ship that the upper class we're going to be put on. But store-high in transit. Mark Fossith on the show soon. So if you've got anything before we leave, are you going to join us in saying goodbye in Malaysia? Yeah, I wish I could be with you guys, but glad to at least have a seat on the laptop. You've been sat on a look really comfy. You've been on one of the cushions in the corner for the entire episode. That's it, ladies and gentlemen. Merry Christmas from us here. This is cool to be able to do this again every year, every wintertime back in Newcastle where we first started doing this podcast coming up on eight years ago now. Have a good period. Eat everything that you can. Take some time off and do a little bit of reading and review in between now and the New Year. I know it's super duper intense, but I think it's a if used right, it's a really nice period. Some people get sad around this time of the year, but it's the shortest day of the year just when 21st. So it's like typical stuff gets dark and then it gets lighter. So I hope that our touchy-feely life hacks and lessons has kept you appropriately festive. And all of us except for you so because because he's selfish in a different country. We dressed up appropriately. So anything to say? What are we done? We're done. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Give some love to your family members or if you're in Malaysia, family member, family member. [laughter] Excellent. Merry Christmas, everyone. Merry Christmas. Unreal. Let's go. [cheering] [whooshing] If you are looking for new reading suggestions look no further than the Modern Wisdom reading list. It is 100 books that you should read before you die. The most interesting life-changing and impactful books I've ever read with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And you can get it right now for free by going to chriswillx.com/books. That's chriswillx.com/books.