#881 - Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Fails & Best Lessons
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What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. It is a Christmas special. I'm back on my old couch in Newcastle upon Tyne with Jonny and Youssef and George to catch up on what they've learned and their best hacks and New Year's resolutions for 2025. I kind of wanted to actually collect some of the highest value New Year's resolutions that we've all ever done. I kind of figured when you do New Year's resolutions, you're sort of coming up with them on your own and sort of trying to deconstruct what you think that you want

There's not really any reason that you can't just steal other people's, especially if they say, I still do this 10 years later. This resolution that I did in 2015 has stuck with me the whole time. And yeah, there's some good stuff in here. And it's so nice to be back with the boys. Obviously, Christmas time is a bit of a reflective period. So I hope this really spurs you on to come up with some good ideas for your own annual review and the planning process as you enter the new year.

Try and take a little bit of time, if you can, this week to down-regulate, unplug, obviously after having listened to this episode. But there's no episode on Thursday, so you can take that day off. Anyway, but now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Johnny, Yousef, and George. ♪♪♪

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. It is a Christmas special. For those of you who have only joined the show over the last year or the last few years, you might not recognize this room. And it is my old living room in Newcastle-upon-Tyne where we first started the show. I'm joined by Johnny Youssef from Propane Fitness and George Mack stopping off en route from Glasgow to Manchester, of course.

This is a Life Hacks, Lessons from 2024 and Best New Year's Resolutions episode. So if you haven't seen these, we'll go around in a...

a circle coming up with whatever we've discovered over the last year and then the rest of us will rip it apart or say that it's good and maybe there'll be some ideas for you for what you can implement going into the new year also if you haven't done a new year's review uh the exact template that i use and have crafted very delicately over the last decade or so is available right now for free at chriswillex.com slash review that's tradition something else which is tradition

Because you're getting hot potato and going first, so... Hot potato. A festive potato for you. Festive potato. Jonathan Watson, what have you got for us? Is it life hacks first? It is. So my life hack is a Ninja Creamy. So happy you said that. Really? I've got one. Have you? I've got one. Yusuf's been thinking about getting one. I think hasn't got one yet. What's a Ninja Creamy? Do you know what one is? No. Educate me. It's, um...

What I use it for is making ice cream from a protein shake. It's brilliant. So like skimmed milk, what do you use it for? The same thing or berries? I imagine you have berries in yours. Actually, no. Mine has been low sugar, high protein ice cream made with the exact protein powder that I want. So pretty much the same thing that you're doing. Yeah. Do you put topping in it?

So I've encountered a problem with that, which is when you have to make up the mixture and then put it in the freezer for it to freeze. The issue is the viscosity of the liquid when you put it in the freezer versus the viscosity of the liquid when it becomes ice cream is different. So if you put chocolate chips in, they all just sink to the bottom and create a layer. What's your solution? Well, you put them on after you've... So you creamy it and then you... Sorry, I'm just writing instructions. You do what? You do what?

I don't see a pen, George. It doesn't look like you're making notes. It looks like you're trying to make fun of me, George. Go on. You cream it. Cream it. And then once it's creamy, there's a mix in button. Oh. Have you not encountered that?

You've seen it. That's not for me. If I'm being completely honest, it's not me that uses it. Oh, God. What a bougie problem. So this is to distribute the chocolate chips throughout the height of the ice cream rather than all at the bottom like a screwball or all at the top like a... Like a topping. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but it is a topping. Yeah, okay. So you make it first and then once it's turned into ice cream... You add the shit that you want to mix. A little bit of topping and then press mix in or... I think it's called mix in. Or mix again. Okay. Okay.

uh what is the best recipes that you've come up with i think white chocolate and raspberry way from uh perform it's like p it's like p and then the number four rm or something like that okay um how many scoops two always two with skim milk how much 350 mil

400 ml is what you want to use because that takes you up to the limit, the limit line. It's just not quite, the ratio is not quite right. Sometimes a banana improves the texture. Interesting. Have you been able to get the sort of gelatinous stickiness that you want? That's something that I've struggled with. Do you like it to be more sticky or less sticky? A little sticky, a little more sticky. I think that's about how long it's frozen for. Xanthan gum. I don't want to get involved with that stuff. I feel like that's a whole other variable to manage.

Yeah. It's how much xanthan gum. Well, you'd just experiment, wouldn't you? But think how long it's going to take to get that right. That's true. Because you've got something that works sort of 80% now. Exactly. Okay. So white chocolate performed. White chocolate and raspberry whey. Yep. With raspberries and white chocolate chips as the topping mixed in. So good. It's like 40 grams of protein, a little bit more if you include the milk, and like 400 calories. It's brilliant.

And you see one of those off in one go? Yeah. Dessert? Lunch? Until you're not running anything. Usually, like, last meal of the day. That's pretty dialed. So good. That's very good. I'm a big ninja. I mean, ninja are just between the air fryers, all of the different air fryers they've got. They've got this air fryer crispy thing now, which is a glass tray at the bottom, so you can see how it sort of crisps, and you can make lasagnas, you know, where you have that sort of filtering on the top. I've not got an air fryer.

Do you have an air fryer, imagine? That seems like... Yeah, I should get one, should I? Do you have one, George? Yes, but I never used it. You really value culinary appliances that allow you to eat low calorie foods and make them nice. So I think an air fryer would be high value. Do you know what I think I value more than that? Something that allows me to see whatever it produces as one serving.

Ideally in a container. So what I think what I like about an endocrine is I can't have more or less than it. I just eat the whole thing. And I don't have to worry about like, oh, how many scoops of this should I have? Do you not eat the whole thing? Yeah. Okay. That's Chris's way of life. Eat the whole thing. So it's a saurine in a kilo of yogurt. I think an air fryer for you, I mean, this isn't even one of mine, but I think an air fryer for you would be nothing short of life changing. What would I use it for? Do you ever eat steak at home? Yeah. Yeah.

But not like regularly though. I have a Ninja Creamy every day. Okay. Would you eat steak at home if you could have from frozen amazing steak in 20 minutes? Is that your best suggestion? A steak? It's fucking unbelievable for steak. Yeah. This is a Peterson hack. As a woman who eats a lot of steak, she knows how to cook a steak. If that's all you're eating. Yeah. Which I am. So it's important. All right. I like that Ninja Creamy. So you're not having creamies?

That's a previous Chris thing. Correct. Got it. But what have you got? This is Ernie, actually. Is it? Fuck, I misgendered him. Thank you, George. So I've chosen this suit to introduce the most kind of serious point of the podcast, but I've been doing a lot of walking and journaling and reflecting, and I've actually been tuning an AI model using a few kind of different database structures to identify people

the optimal categorization method for life hacks and you're doing it again what i've come down to is physical and digital so you said this the exact same thing actually last year it was a team of operational analysts and yeah but i think we're getting closer to the same conclusion yeah same wow what a relief i think we're on something increase the compute and still hit the same wall

So the physical life hack is to use things that annoy you, like mild irritations throughout the day, as gratitude triggers. So you wake up in the morning, 7am, you hear a siren going past you, like "Bloody hell, I just want five minutes more sleep." That's a gratitude trigger for "That could have been me in the ambulance." Or like, you could be even the driver of the ambulance, still pretty rubbish having to drive an ambulance at seven in the morning.

Or you could be in the back of the ambulance. It's like, okay, there's a little switch. You encounter someone who's a bit of a dick to you at the checkout in a shop or whatever, and you go, they're being a dick because they're miserable at their job. They're having a bad time. I can go home and eat my sushi and pot of mango or whatever. They have to be on shift. So just having that little flip has been really valuable. I've been trying to think of something that you couldn't do that with, but I'm struggling.

I'm sure there's loads. Yeah. But it's, I guess it's how flexible do you want to be? What are you trying to have empathy for the other person? Or are you trying to sort of do inversion on yourself? What are you prioritizing? Both are good effects of that, aren't they? I think it's, it's like a nice side effect to have. Just be, be more happy. Yeah. It's pretty pro-social. I like that. Okay. Uh,

This is one from George's birthday this year in Miami, which Dickie Bush decided to do. And it's Uber Black XL.

So Uber Black XL, I don't know how available it is in the UK, but especially in America and probably in the biggest cities in the UK, you can order a seven-person Escalade with a driver that's always dressed quite nice and formally. And it's basically you having a private driver, but you just order it on Uber. And it's about maybe two to three times the cost of a normal Uber. So it's special occasions only for the most part.

But the way that you feel when you get into it and when you get out of it is lovely. And the experience is easily three times nicer than being in the back of someone's Kia Forte. Especially in America. This is a big America problem because it's less expensive. It's less more expensive in America. And the depths that your normal Uber X can descend to in America, as you learned firsthand this year.

It's like the back of some Nissan Altima, the 30 year old that you're sticking to the seat. It can go really low. So if you've had a tough day and you want to treat yourself, a journey home in a blue Uber black XL is nice. If you're out on a date and you sort of want to make something feel a little bit nicer,

Big fan. Why do you think the standard of cars in America is generally higher? Is it more of a status symbol? It's lower. Is it bimodal? Because you're saying that the...

Some Ubers go really low. Very low, correct, in America. The UK doesn't seem... I think Americans generally have lower standards for what they keep their cars to. If anybody's got a small dink in the UK, it's almost immediately taken to... I've got a small dink. You're always complaining about it as well. I know. It's terrible. But you take it to the shop or whatever and you get it fixed. Most people would. I need to get my dink fixed, actually. Come back with an XL. Make it bigger. LAUGHTER

Black Excel. I think it's a... I mean, you've been a big proponent of that as well, like using Uber Black Excel. Yeah. I think...

This is a highbrow podcast. In Dubai, for example, all the Ubers are essentially Lexuses. They're all beautiful. It's only when I was in the UK or the US experiencing Uber do you realize sometimes you could be going 70 miles an hour and it's more dangerous to be out the car than in the car. Right. Yeah, because in Dubai, I feel like I was always like a Mercedes Vito person in a suit. But that's just a Dubai thing. Yeah, right.

I've had some shockers. One I had in Munich where he just went rogue. Was trying to go to the petrol station, was going like different stop offs, was texting. And then when I had, I said, hey, can you not text on your phone? He just threw his phone against the window and then just started speeding faster and faster. Wow. And I thought, you should have paid the 20%. Was it you where someone was trading? What was it? He was trying to show you a video. Yeah. So we were in one Uber.

I'm on a huge highway and I'm at the back and I just go, what's he doing on his phone? Because sometimes he may be doing a WhatsApp or anything like that. And I look and he was, there was like trading charts on and he was shorting the Japanese yen. Nice. Like mid drive. And I said, what are you doing? So yeah, you may face them shorting the Japanese yen. I had an Uber driver in Croatia who had like mini seizures while driving.

And I couldn't work out whether it was like just something that happened to him all the time or whether it was serious, but he was like having a seizure and like pressing the accelerator as he was having a seizure. So we were like, we were coming up towards traffic and the car would like lunge and then brake, but he just didn't acknowledge it.

at all he's the opposite of the of the guy that we had in iceland so driving back the final the final coach out of the blue lagoon in iceland because the alternative was to stay there for nine and a half thousand pounds for the night and some hurricane level winds were coming in and we managed to make it onto this bus and we're at the back of the bus and it's

tilting up onto what feels like just its side wheels because of the strength of the breeze coming along. Johnny's solution, which was fucking genius actually at the time, was I'm going to go up to the front and look at the bus driver and if he's not concerned, we shouldn't be concerned. He went... Hands at the bottom of the wheel. Because for him it's just Wednesday afternoon. Another day at Graff, isn't it? It was the worst storm that Iceland had seen in several years as well. I think just that year. Yeah.

That guy is a source of inspiration. He's Jocko, a bus driver. All right. I'm coming in hard. Like Lily Phillips. Jesus Christ. The Kale algorithm.

So this is a custom built life hack, which I can put in the comment section. But me and Chris have had these debates for years that whether the platforms will ever change so you have control over your own algorithm. And I've been convinced it's going to happen. But I kind of sat there waiting for years for it to happen. And particularly my, I don't know where your weakness is, where your Achilles heel is in terms of digital platforms. Mine is YouTube by far. And the most frustrating thing is,

YouTube is the library of Alexandra.

You have all the world's knowledge. And if like Marcus Aurelius, Julius Caesar would trade everything to have access, not only to the best library, but then it turned into this magical video format where you can watch anything, teach yourself anything. And every day I would turn up to that library and I'd get distracted by fights and fentanyl in the car park, right? That was my YouTube experience. Oh, Logan Paul's done what? Coffeezilla's going to expose him for what shit coin? Click, click, click.

And I remember once I went on the, and this is a, if you want to stare into the abyss and have the abyss stare back into you, go youtube.com and press history and just scroll through some of the things that you've watched. And I went through quickly, like the last maybe a hundred videos I've watched and about 80% of them were regrettable in hindsight. So I had

the best library of all time, and I was watching absolute shite. What was interesting though, I looked at the videos I did enjoy and the videos that I didn't enjoy in hindsight, and you could have built this whole complex algorithm, but there was one simple thing that the videos I did enjoy and didn't enjoy had between them, and it was over 30 minutes long.

Any video that seemed to be over 30 minutes long, for the most part, I enjoyed in hindsight. And any video under 30 minutes long, I, for the most part, didn't enjoy. And I think there's something about the monkey brain that if you see a 15 minute expose on Logan Paul's new NFT debacle, it's like, oh, I can do that. But if it's a two and a half hour one,

It's a bit harder. A bit more discerning. It's a bit harder to justify. So is the conclusion to watch like 45 minute Fentanyl in the car park. I waste more time. So the conclusion. I tried that. But the problem is you go on YouTube.com.

thumbnail, title, you just don't have the willpower. Imagine if you had a social media feed and they just showed you porn constantly. You would end up watching a lot more porn as a result. So it's not necessarily about discipline. It's about preventing that coming on in the first place. So what I built was, I built a script that removes any videos under 30 minutes

and it's now the full KL algorithm. And I've gone from about 80% of my YouTube time I regret to 80% of my YouTube time is now enjoyable. What's the script running on? So you want to download a Chrome extension called Tapper Monkey.

Okay. Sorry, go ahead. I've got a couple of things I want to challenge you on about this. So you then, I built the code using Claude or ChatGPT and I can share the code with people. You put it in and it's permanently there now. So I no longer see any video under 30 minutes long and you go on my feed now and it's just like, Gletscher, standup comedian, cool documentary. Does that not mean though that you waste more time

Because the regret is about the video, but there's no regret about how long you spent watching the video. No, because I'm sure if you looked at your YouTube time, right, there's a difference in quality of things that you watch. Yeah, but usually I'm doing it instead of doing something else.

So it's rare that I find myself on my phone and then 30 minutes later, I'm like, "Oh, I'm so glad I watched that." But that might be because of this exact thing. But that assumes that the thing that I wasn't doing because of YouTube wasn't more important. That's fair. There's always some kind of opportunity cost trade off. But for me, so this is particularly on desktop and I would use YouTube end of the day as an alternative to TV. And that's where it versus... Yeah, I agree. The kind of two minute quick scroll is different. That's the cocaine algorithm. Yeah.

There's a couple of ways you can get one step upstream of that. So there's a native thing on YouTube where you disable the, it might be watch history or one of these features where it means that when you log onto YouTube, it's just a blank screen. You just have the search bar and

You've done that on the profane one. And now I never procrastinate with YouTube. Like it just doesn't, because you have to then actively like, oh, what am I going to search for? Rather than having stuff like pushed onto you. The problem with that though, is there's still value I find in the algorithm serving randomness and optionality. Okay. So you want, you want the upside of the. Yes. I want the upside of the randomness and the optionality without Logan Paul. In that case, you're trying to like fine tune it. The other thing that you can do is, and I think we talked about this last year using readwise or reader, uh,

to establish that past George is the only one who can determine what current George is going to watch. So you're not allowed to consume any media unless it's on your

to read list or to watch list. And you've made that decision ahead of time so that you've made the decision when you're in a position of strength, not when you're like, oh, I'm knackered and it's 9pm and I just want to... Just to find a potential problem with that, a lot of the time, you know how in three months I'm going to have all of this white space on my calendar, I'll agree to that. I really want to watch this thing. I'm sure that me tomorrow will want to watch it. I'm not convinced that me yesterday is the best adjudicator of actually what I want to watch today. So the problem there is you end up with like a huge queue of

stuff and then you either none of which you think is interesting but because you now don't have to pay the price you tomorrow has to consume it you kick the can down or you watch the relevant thing looking in the fridge and you're like i've got we've got no food in the house at all and actually like there's loads of food but it's like lettuce and a bit of not stuff you want and yeah you basically want an algorithm that's working nearer towards what your goals are and your long-term intents are but it's not just purely like boring educational shit

Like if there's like long form comedy on there, like long form comedy podcasts, I enjoy those way more, but there's something about the shortness of it. And I think having that pre-built in to remove it, my sister, little life hack to this, is also an email. If anybody has...

but just set up a filter that if it has unsubscribe in the email, it goes to a separate inbox and then you scroll through that and you've reduced about 80% of your email clutter. So just putting those systems in place is useful. Gmail has that automatically, doesn't it? Gmail has that automatically with the promotions. It does. As if you use them. Loads of them still slip through, yeah. All right, Johnny, you're up.

This is linked to what you were just saying, Chris, about waking up at night. So there's two hacks in one. One is Audible on a... So iMask, one AirPod, 30-minute timer on Audible, audiobook. It's life hack one.

Lifehack 2 is Audible have like a similar to a Netflix original, like an Audible original. Some of them are in Dolby Atmos. So it's like a film being read out, which is the most immersive thing I've ever heard. How immersive can it be with one air pod in? Well, because the other one's pressed. Do you find that you turn, that you can just...

go full like monk mode and stay there because I'm a even if you roll over though even if even if you roll over it's just one air pod it's fine you're asleep doesn't matter

The third life hack is Red Rising, the Red Rising series. Immersive audio version. Phenomenal. So good. So fucking fancy. What's Red Rising? Back to Fall Asleep. It's a series by Pierce Brown. Pierce Brown. Sci-fi series, the most addictive set of novels, but they'd redone it as a movie in your mind. Yeah, helps you get to sleep. Dolby Atmos, full...

audio cast, you know, they're not just saying what's going on back and forth to each other. They're fully acting it out. The sound effects. Yeah. Beautifully soundscaped. It's awesome. It's brilliant. I'm glad, I'm glad you like that. So that to fall asleep. And if you wake up at night, like stick an air pod in, I'm just, because you just immediately, especially with racing thoughts, you just immediately in another world.

Manta eye masks make a Bluetooth eye mask. Do they? That is built for you to sleep on. I have a pair of headphones called Philips, something that I call sleep pods. Snoozy's or some shit. They're just not very good. They're just not air pods, are they? Yeah, just one air pod in. Because you can have your head against the pillow with the side of the air pod in, still doesn't wake you up. I worry a little bit about...

what it's doing to me. It's the sort of thing I think Yusuf would worry me about if I spoke to him about it too much. Oh, about its non-ionizing radiation? Like, is that air pod talking to the air pod that's over there and like cooking my brain in the process? And there was a Chernobyl ear. Yeah. I mean, it's already going through. But I've only got one in. So is that okay? I don't know.

Who knows? Is it okay? I'm less concerned about Bluetooth earphones. As far as like EMF exposure, I think there are other things. Somebody shared an AirPod thing where it was like the communication between one AirPod and another. It's like sending multiple signals through your head. Yeah, but I think like... But as medical advice, you're saying that's fine. The problem is you've got to pick your battles, haven't you? It's like air quality, water quality, plastic exposures. Receipts. Receipts. So for me, it's like don't microwave plastic and don't be an idiot.

Drive with your seatbelt on. Drive with your seatbelt on and get any dinks in your car. Yeah, sort it first. Straight away. I like that. Just to add another one on there from Lifehacks four years ago, you can bulk buy your Audible every year. Can you? So you don't need to pay monthly. You can pay yearly, annual, and you'll get all of your credits up front and it's cheaper. That's brilliant. Was that Lifehack?

I should really pay more attention. We've just done a lot. I mean, I reckon we've done a thousand life hacks. That's like top tier though. You'll save probably 30 or 40% and you get all of your credits immediately. So you don't have to wait until next month. If you've got a bunch of books or you're on holiday and you want to download four, you've got all of your credits for the next 12 months ready to go. Does Red Rising stop being good? Because there's like several books, right? I'm on book...

six or seven now I can't remember which one it is and I'm still going everyone that I know same storyline yep same protagonist wow and everyone that I know that's got onto it is I think it I think it crossed a point of like when they're in the mine at the beginning I'm like it's a little bit a little bit dull as soon as you get out and then he's out and he's like oh my god this is you can see how it's just this world it's huge book two and book three are just

obsessive. So, Red Rising. You should go and download it. Even if you don't get the graphic audio, whatever it's called. There's a good rule of thumb. Fiction before bed is amazing. It's kind of like the mind walk thing, right? Out of your own head, you're not thinking about your problems. Good. Very good. All right. Seth. There's the heuristic of what can I remove? You know, so delete, automate, then delegate. But there's also...

what am I already doing or using that I could be using better? So a few examples would be like, I'm already spending the time meditating in the mornings. Like how can I make that time more effective? Or I'm already sleeping seven hours a night. How can I improve the quality of that? Um, I'm already, you know, everyone's seen someone exercising in the gym, like every time you go to the gym and they're there and they're just kind of like, and they're like texting and just swinging their arms around, not really doing anything. You're like, they're,

taking all of the steps to get the result, but wasting the actual critical time in there. But this also applies to the decision of like, do I add something or do I just make what I'm already doing better, get more use out of that, squeeze the lemon? So rather than adding in like a red light box and additional supplements and all this kind of stuff, it's like, well, what am I doing already?

We often get clients that ask us like, oh, what's a good bit of software for this? Or what's a good software for this? And you're like, well, what are you already using? And you like 80% of the time, the software stack that they're already using does the thing that they're looking for, but they're just looking for the next thing. And so...

I'm always on about TickTick, but the deeper I go with it, the more I'm like, oh, actually, there's no point looking for any other app to solve any of these other problems. Because if you just really dive into TickTick, and now my referrals are so much that I've got an account until 2067 or something. Yeah.

So now I'm just like lifetime believer of TickTick. So yeah, like, and as I've applied this in the last few weeks, whenever I've like found myself trying to solve a problem, I always take a pause and go, hang on, what in what we already have, what software we're already paying for, what tools we already have can do the thing? Have you got another example?

So this is a niche one, but we were looking for a way to convert Twitter threads or X threads into carousels. And I was looking at new bits of software and actually like we already use hype fury for scheduling tweets and they have a built in thing for this.

But I think it's just the natural habit of like, wow, what's the- Shiny new thing. Shiny new thing. Something new to solve this problem as opposed to looking where you already are. What's your one of, you don't need new lessons? You need to relearn your old ones. Yeah. I mean, most of the stuff that you already, most of the answers to problems you have now, you already know, and you probably learned five years ago. So ironically, we were talking about this just before the episode and last year on this episode, that life is a spiral curriculum.

And that you look back on your... Beautiful. Yeah, you look on your journals from when you were like 19 and even who you think was your 19 like idiot self was still telling you the same thing that you need to learn. It's the same problems, isn't it? Same problems over and over. The day one feature of like today.

today a year ago five years ago ten years ago and you're writing about the same fucking but you're the same person that's why like the common thread between all of that is you and lots of stuff changes on the surface but fundamentally the same challenges that you have the same emotions that come up the same worries and concerns you do oh my god so much has changed in life you know i'm a dad now i'm in a different country now a different career now whatever it might be and you go you mean you're still the same person so experiencing the same thing

All right, my next one, one that we've done a long, long time ago but continues to pay huge dividends. Clip the curtains together in hotel rooms using the trouser hanger. I challenge anybody...

to take me on with that you get into a hotel room and these curtains for no reason i've got you know a three inch or a two inch gap between them and you've tried to sort of do that weird thing where you push them and see and then they sort of settle and they settle a bit better sometimes and you're like oh is that good should i leave it and you go i'm gonna go again you do it and it's further apart you're like fuck uh set of trouser hangers from the uh wardrobe pin it at the top if you've got two trouser hangers one two and then three four at the bottom and

Pitch black, beautiful. Why not just wear an eye mask? You could, but sometimes even with an eye mask, you're rolling around, it comes off a little. It's just, I think you should always optimize for environment first and then other stuff second. Technically, the light receptors on the skin will also explode. The back of your knee can actually wake you up. So that's that. And then I guess the other one, which is related to sleep. I've spent a lot of time on the road again this year, a lot of time in hotels. Yeah.

Good pillow, bad bed, good night's sleep. Bad pillow, good bed, bad night's sleep. Basically, the pillow is the most important thing. Pillow is the most important thing because it's the most sort of obvious experience of you interacting with the bed is whether or not it's this sort of...

One of those ones that fucking has a... Yeah. And then you went with... I didn't get somebody to hang out. I'm fucking sleeping or drowning here. And yeah, that's it. Pin the curtains together in a hotel bedroom and optimize for better pillows. And the way you can do that, what you want to do, is find what pillow do you like and then how available is it on Amazon Prime worldwide.

And then if you can find one that you like that's available like that and it isn't an insane price, you can add, you know, 25 pounds or whatever onto a stay, but improve your sleep quality by maybe 30 minutes or an hour a night by just ordering a pillow to the hotel. You get in, you're like, ah, fuck, it's one of the ones. Get the order done next day, get a good night's sleep. There's a Kelly Starrett thing, like piece of advice from years ago, where if you lie on the mattress and you bend one leg, the mattress is the wrong level of turgidity.

So like if you, let's say you're going into extension, so you bend one leg to get out of extension. And I think that's if the mattress is too hard.

That's the thing. So with the pillow versus mattress thing, I could sleep with no pillow, but if the mattress is bad, I wake up and I'm like tight-headed. Your Kelly Starrett hack with pillows has changed my life as well. Wow. It won't even be a life hack. Using the towel roll. I think it's from a, it'll be from like a 2017 life hacks or something. It's back when it was like phone video Kelly Starrett on YouTube. Is it the towel roll thing? That's, and it's, it's lying like, so it's like tucking your shoulder back and then the towel sits here and then you're, everything's fine.

Everything's in a straight line. So I followed that, but I just put another pillow in between the two top arms. So the pillows are crossed? No, so one's behind my head and then I turn over to like spoon. To make shift pregnancy pillow. But it's not for the legs because I found that if I had one... Too hot. It just... If you've got... You've got to do this Brazilian jiu-jitsu, you know, like sweep the legs and then pull it up and over. If anyone that uses a pregnancy pillow consistently, very impressive, but you can't move side to side. So normal pillow. G, what have you got?

My one relates to, you mentioned then being on the road, big thing for myself this year again, don't have an office. I'm often working from hotels, coffee shops and things like that. And the combination of the Boyata portable laptop stand with the Apple magic keyboard and the Apple magic mouse. So a few points on this.

Number one, this is a bit Tony Robbins, but my kind of contrarian take on the world right now, if I sit in that Peter Thiel interview, one of my contrarian takes that I give is, is that... It's very on brand, Chris. Very good. The contrarian take right now is, if you had to picture a depressed person's body language in your head, what do they look like?

Slouched over. Real contrarian. Yeah, slouched over, hunched, where's their eyes? Down. And people are spending eight to 10 hours a day like that, whether it's on their laptop or on their phone. So the Boyata stand means that the laptop's raised like perfectly in front of you like that. Your shoulders are back on the mouse.

And you go, once you go to that, you can't go back. You look at everybody else and you go, how are you spending two hours in this depressed posture? It's like we've spoken about this previously that I think a...

a significant amount of people being miserable is just being in resting serious face versus resting smile face. I thought about that. And resting serious body. So I presented at the International Posture Summit, but even not us. Here we go. Come right up next to me in the urinal there. Come on. I told you, no. You've seen this? No. Been in Lily Phillips? Well, so this is... There is a study that shows that your posture impacts how much you believe your own thoughts, which is interesting. So like...

not so much mood and power pose and testosterone cortisol ratios kind of been difficult to reproduce in the results, but believing your own thoughts. So if you're sat up, burrata stand, what does he call it? Boyata. Boyata. It's a wrap of cheese, isn't it? Burrata. Yeah.

I've got a couple of them. Delicious. So, yeah. But my take with that is you've seen the, is it Jonathan Haidt who did the whole anxious mind? He says since 2008, anxiety has gone through the roof and it lines up with social media. Obviously that's, I think, had a factor, but that's well discussed. However, it also lines up with everyone's head being down, their eyes being down and shoulders hunched over. Posture pilled. Yeah.

No, I'm a big fan of it. I will say the height that you have it at and the closeness that you have your laptop to yourself. I would come down the stairs when we were both living in the Colton house in Austin and you don't see a person.

What you see is this massive MacBook like this. And because it's spread out as well, it's covering his entire body. And then there's just a set of AirPod Pro Maxes poking out the top. You know, George is behind there somewhere. It's terrible for day game. If you want to pick up girls at the coffee shop, you can't do any kino escalation. It's good for network. The amount of people go...

He must be hardcore. What does he do? Meanwhile, he's reading David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity with ChatGPT open again. For the 52nd time. Fuck. All right. Should we do a lesson? Bring it on. Oh my God. Yes. Fine. Are we out of hacks now? No, we can go back. Okay. So I've got two micro hacks, but we can... Do you want to do one more round of hacks? I'm trying to sum them in.

I can do another hack let's do another round of hacks I had another hack chambered ready to go fire it but now it's made me question the hack I've picked don't worry I am worrying though I'm gonna say walking pad have we done that before walking pad walking pad

It's like a, both just like, yeah, exactly. So you need a standing desk and then it's a treadmill. That's like, you can't run on. I mean, I've never tried, but it says don't run on it. So I figure like probably best to listen. Is that why you stopped running? Exactly. Yeah. But the, just that as a way of, you just do like two hours of work while on that, you forget that you're on it. And you've, I think it's like 2000 steps every like maybe 4,000 steps an hour.

Can't be 4,000 an hour. Why? Oh, no, it could be. Yeah, you're going to... At that pace, yeah, probably about 4,000 an hour. Because you thought that was too many. Originally, but now I've repurposed. I realise you're wrong. Yeah, I am. Walking pad. And what kind of pace? Because do you ever get to a pace where you're going too fast and then you can't concentrate? Yeah, the classic type A problem. Then you're like, all I'm doing now is walking. Looking at my screen. Yeah, trying not to just slightly miss the walking pad and walk into the computer.

What types of work, A, sorry, what speed have you found useful? And then what types of work have you found? 3.5. 3.5. And that miles, kilometers? It's just what it says on the screen. You've both got the same one. Right. I think we might have this similar one. We have the same one. Right. But your legs are longer. Doesn't matter. I would imagine you walk quicker than these two. Does that matter?

We're talking about preferences here. But it actually means they're walking a little bit more quickly. The question was, what speed have you found? You all like the same speed. Don't ask me my preference and then tell me that I'm wrong. Fucking litigate me out of it. Tie me up. So yeah, 3.5. Next question. What type of work? So you would think it needs to be like email or, but it can be anything.

I think it just helps. You just drop into whatever you're doing. But there's that Kelly Starr thing about when you're on a phone call that's getting intense, you stand up and start walking around because we're meant to locomote while we think. I'm picturing you, Alan Partridge style, with like a Bluetooth headset on, short shorts going 100k or it's going to sky. I once heard a story of, you know, so Ari Emanuel, this guy,

can't sue it, I guess it's not that bad. Ari Emanuel, who Ari Gold was based off on Entourage, so they own the UFC, WWE. He's like the apex lawyer in America for entertainment. And he's heavily dyslexic, so he just spends all day on the phone rather than doing anything that would use dyslexia, I guess. And I knew somebody who was in the office walking past his room and he's on a full incline treadmill walking

with like speaker on just saying fuck him fuck him for another million fuck him for another million we're not moving till we fuck him for another million that's the gateway drug isn't it he's gradually that's what you're going to be 12 months time oh the online one of those a um fucking people for a million a

My sister to your one is I found when I was in America, because of the time zones reversed, I'd wake up at 6:00 AM and you've already got so many bits of work that you have to do. So you have such a high cortisol state. Going on my phone, incline treadmill, and then just working for the first 30 minutes, replying to messages and emails meant that the cortisol in the morning is then getting counterbalanced by the incline treadmill.

I knew a guy who, you've met him actually, who would do cardio and just have TikTok on like autoplay because he said it made 45 minutes just... Does work. Which is probably terrible for your brain, but... Yeah, only allowing social media usage when you're doing inclined cardio is actually...

That's not bad, but purposefully doing social media usage because you're an inclined cardio feels like... You end up fitter, but also a bit... Yeah, tweaked. Because Steve Jobs famously used to only do walking meetings or a lot of walking meetings. Have you found doing it for meetings useful? Or do you not want to be that guy? I mean, Johnny used to try and record podcasts whilst going on. So I was going to say that.

It's not really the audience to say like, well, I think I did better podcasting because Chris is quite good at podcasting. But I think you produce a better podcast while walking. Apart from the sound. Apart from the sound. But who cares about the sound? Yeah. Meetings are the only thing I would struggle with for some reason. I think because you just feel like, you know, I'm that guy walking on the meeting. It very much depends what...

sort of a meeting it is as well you know like if it's if it's you just okay you like recap me on this way it's kind of sort of standard stuff okay like here we go i'll have a little plod and if it's a really serious meeting and you're the only one walking and you're the one being really serious like the art of like perfectly level walking so you only your legs are moving but you're just squat jog i think you'd have a little bit of shift uh what brand did you go for don't know

But I do know it's out of stock. But if you go on Amazon... Oh, brilliant. That's two great things. If you go on Amazon... They cancel each other out, don't they? It doesn't matter. If you go on Amazon and search walking pad... Walking pad. I pretty much any of them. They range from... I think you tried to find a bean one, didn't you? For like 50, 60 quid. Up to whatever you want to pay. Like 300 quid. 200, 300 quid. Get you a good one. Mm-hmm.

All right, Seth, you're up. Create a product promo there. Well, I don't know. I don't know what it is. And they can raise so well. Yeah. 50 quid maybe. So this is also to springboard off your and your hack, which is just to only do voice notes while I'm walking. So it's just to get me out the house because I know that if I got a desk pad, it would enable my screen time and I'd be doing it more. And so Dickie Bush, who twice now.

Chris mentioned it before. There we go. Double dicky. So he just said, don't do any work at your desk that could be done walking. And that includes emails, voice notes. And to be honest, most writing now with GPT, you can just dump a bunch of words into an audio file. I mean, if you get a walking pad, it's all work, isn't it?

It's all work. But then you're just at your desk. But you're still walking. What is it that you're looking for? To get outside. To get outside. To have environment change. And you can now walk with AirPods in talking to yourself and people no longer think you're a nutter. It's great that. Because they think you might be on a call. Yeah, that's not bad. Good. All right. Which one am I going to choose next?

Last year I said Sleep Token, this year I'm going to say Beartooth and it's going to make you very happy that I've finally come around to listening to Beartooth. Really phenomenal. Most recent album they just put out, the London vlog.

the song at the end that we had and the sort of the tune that was threaded throughout shout out to Caleb the front man who sent me the stems from the track so he sent me the track broken up into its individual component parts so he could really really dial that in that was very kind of him to do and I just that they were my top played track of this year I felt like important to give alive alive yeah attention yep of course so good bit mincy compared but

It's all right. No, good. That whole album's fantastic. It only came out in October, and I think they still managed to get into my Spotify wrapped, so...

place of uh i'll do i'll do another one given that that one was just music uh mitchum deodorant so luke got me onto this last year and uh there is no deodorant that's anywhere near as good this isn't just like the smell of it is fantastic the price of it's great the quality it doesn't leave any white marks and everyone's sort of looking for what's the best sort of deodorant i'm not fucking medieval peasant i don't use roll-on deodorant but

Spray, Mitchum, and they also have in every boots of UK airports, they'll have the travel size. So you can actually take a 50 mil travel, throw that in your bag. Pretty sick. Mitchum and Beartooth. So what's good about it? Smells good. Doesn't leave any white marks and you don't sweat. It just seems to be all the boxes. And as of yet, most of them have a lingering smell like Dove.

Dove deodorant, you can smell somebody wearing it from like fucking a few miles away. And I don't like that. It's like, it basically odourless, but does the job. So unbeatable. Naughty. Naughty. Speaking of naughty, my one is not naughty. It's a prompt for AI. So either chat GPT, Claude, whatever your, that's actually a life hack within itself is to be an absolute LLM hole. Yeah. If you can. Um,

is the following prompt. So, do you know the Elon Musk quote? It's around how to learn. It's essentially this idea that you want to view knowledge as a semantic tree.

So you start at the roots, then you go up to the trunk, then you have the branches, then you have the secondary branches, then you have the leaves. Whereas often the way we'll approach things is, oh, I want to learn about the heart. I'll just put on this random Andrew Huberman podcast with the specialist about the heart and just kind of hop in. But you don't have any of the roots or anything there. So you never actually retain any information. Whereas when you

treat knowledge as a semantic tree. You work all the way up from the base and then all the way there. And a big realization this year was, it's kind of a bit of a Deutsch concept, but essentially this idea that the only thing, the only bottleneck that really exists is knowledge.

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

numeracy, which is only 10 digits, but you can understand any mathematical equation with numbers. Therefore, the only bottleneck to literally every single thing in your life, skill issue, knowledge. So placing that into chord or chat GPT, and you realize I can learn anything starting from there. So you start with the, you say the specific Elon quote, and you say, teach me about X, but start with the roots and then work all the way up and don't move to the next

layer until I say I understand, and you're constantly just moving up. And you realise, oh, I can literally teach myself anything. This is a nice development from your last year's one, which was

Treat me like a total idiot and start at zero until I say I understand. Yes. And then go to step one and then step two. The step here is to really then, you can then just move it into like a mind mapping software and literally just build the tree yourself. So then you have that semantic tree in your head of all the interweaving parts. Big mistake that I made when studying medicine was not doing that earlier. You have to have like a framework or a skeleton to be able to hang concepts on. Otherwise you are just learning raw data and it's

so difficult. There's nothing connected and you're just memorising like you did at school. You're never actually understanding. There's like a tipping point. If you just brute force raw dog enough data, eventually you'll start to see the coalescing parts kind of join the dots but it's

Not a fun way to do it. Rough going. Is there something you've used that for recently? I started yesterday with longevity. So I'm going to, because that's a topic that I've always wanted to learn about, but I just kick the can down the road because I'm like, where do I even begin? So I started with that. Try with any kind of topic that will come up now. I will just. What do you, for the LLM non-monogamous out there, what do you use E?

each platform for? Have you found certain things are better on certain platforms? Yeah. I mean, there's a huge asterisk here that this will be outdated by tomorrow because it's constantly... Literally yesterday, they released the new O version. And then you have X now getting... It's like three times the number of supercomputer clusters

with the Grok AI that's going to go live. So me right now, I vary between Claude and ChatGPT, but I would be shocked if next year I'm saying the exact same thing. Yeah, it seems like Google is... Google's great, yeah. The new Grok one now where you can be on Twitter and ask Grok to explain things to you. Grok has way fewer bottlenecks. It's way less politically correct as well. It has access to Twitter's live data. That's being updated much more quickly, but it's also being updated by people who are on Twitter.

Highly dangerous data set there to use. Lesson, Johnny. Lesson. You got a lesson? I do. So it's a reframe on hard things or a hard thing. So something that I think I've been guilty of is not necessarily thinking like, when I achieve this, I'll be happy, but rather like, when I achieve this, problem's gone. Like, solve that thing now. And actually...

I mean, it's mainly a propane thing. Propane's grown a lot over the last two, three years, and you always think, "We'll hit this revenue. We'll hire this person. We'll achieve this thing. No more problems." But actually all that happens is the new, more thorny, harder problem.

And reframing that as like, that is the thing where the development, that's the development opportunity because the next revenue level, the next achievement just always just feels exactly the same as the last one. It doesn't matter the size of it, it's exactly the same, but the who you become as a result of solving the problem at the level that you're at

that's the gain. So the phrase that I remind myself of is for every level is a devil. And it's just the current devil you're facing. That's because we've had like a very weird year in business, like lots of problems that I think we'd have never expected. And your immediate response to that is like, oh, but actually if you reframe that as like, that's where the growth is, that's where the personal growth is, see it differently. And it becomes almost like,

Not exciting, but it's like, wow, there's something on the other side of this. So that's been my lesson for this year. Probably the biggest one. I think that's really good. It's not too dissimilar to what we spoke about last year and I think what all of us are kind of zeroing in on, which is

Accepting that things are going to be tough but not necessarily white knuckling our way through it and not assuming that there's any additional nobility in white knuckling it and trying to increase the difficulty or sort of the Hustle-pawning your way through things take like if there's a way that I can make this simpler or find the gummy Yeah, exactly. How can you how can you have a gimme for every different thing? And uh, yeah, I think

assuming that one day you're going to wake up and there'll be no problems is... I remember the, I think it was Mark Zuckerberg on, maybe on Rogan, where he was like describing his morning. Has anyone heard this? So like Mark Zuckerberg's morning was like, he wakes up and he goes and surfs because like when he looks at his phone, it's really all really shit bad news. And I was like, well, because that's my morning. And it's like his bad news will be far worse. How many unreads have you got currently on Telegram? I don't know.

I'm on 46,000. I think you're on more. No, I think the other day it was like 1, 2, 3, 4 for me. And I screenshotted it. It's particularly satisfying. On this lesson, there's a beautiful... Have you ever heard of the book called The Gap and the Gain? Benjamin Ardy. Yeah. So there's one line in that that stuck with me and I still think about and it's kind of a semi-life hack related to this, which is...

Forget your current problem, whatever it is. Just go back to maybe even a more severe problem in the past, whether it's girlfriend cheated on you, fired from job, insert problem, whatever it is, right?

And you go back and go, with the benefit of hindsight now, what would have been the worst interpretation of that problem? It's like, okay, girlfriend cheated on me. I'm a loser. I'm going to binge a load of food. I'm going to write a load of angry Facebook statuses about her. Didn't work. That's the kind of worst interpretation of that problem. And you go, okay, well, what was the...

I'm detached from it. What would have been the best interpretation of that is like, "Okay, I'm going to book this personal trainer for three months. I'm going to book this trip with my friends that I was putting off because I was supposed to go on holiday with her, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera." You look at that now in the cold light of day and which one do you wish that you chose? It's so obvious. You do that for the past problem and then you just go, "Okay, now I'm a current problem.

what's the current worst interpretation of this? Da-da-da-da-da. What's the current best interpretation of this? Da-da-da-da-da. Which one do you want to choose in the end? What would you tomorrow want you today to do? The Jocko Gurt. And then literally do that exercise and just refuse to get up until you've hypnotized yourself that it's the best thing to ever happen to you. Mark Andreessen was on the show the other week and he gave me this quote from Sean Parker that said, running a startup is like eating glass. You just start to like the taste of your own blood. Mm-hmm.

And I think that's the acceptance that after a long enough amount of time, problems are always going to be there. You're not going to get to a point where there aren't any problems as the CEO or founder of a business. Your only job is to work on the hardest problems, the problems that nobody else can fix. And they always stop with you and there will always be pressure. The more advanced you are in any field, in any pursuit, the problems are worse, aren't they? Or more complicated, more painful. Yes. And it's just easier to be at the basic level of everything.

So if you're going to pursue the journey of like, well, I want to achieve the highest level in anything, it's like, well, the final level going from level nine to level 10 is going to have the worst problem attached to it. So that's the price. Is that the price that you're prepared to pay? I think there's some truth to that, but

that. But I think that's also the benefit of hindsight. You now look back at level one problems is so obvious because you're now a level nine person. But then as soon as you get to level 29, you'll look back at level nine in the same way. But that's because of the person you become by solving each problem. So that's a much more succinct way of saying what I was saying is that like, it's the person you are on the other side of the problem of like, wow, that was so basic. Like two years ago, I was worrying about this thing that's

really easy now yeah because if that challenge came back up to you again now you're so fine no worries yeah that's very interesting that's cool i like that beautiful good one

We didn't coordinate this, but you've described the irony of the human condition, that we will always hit this spiral curriculum and still run into the same problems. And with our clients, we have the same thing. So we help coaches to move online and they often think that if I can just fix my lead generation, then my life will be sorted and I'll be absolutely, you know, I've completed it. And then all that happens is like very quickly from working with us, you know, we fix that problem. It's not actually that hard a problem to solve, but

But then they end up with a sales bottleneck and then they fix that and they end up with a fulfillment bottleneck and then they fix that and they end up with an operational bottleneck. And they're like, oh, actually, like life isn't just sunshine and rainbows after this one thing that I can solve. So for me, very similar lesson, which was we are the ones that define success in our lives. And.

Yet, for some reason, we have a desire, we close the gap somehow by fulfilling the desire, and then we move the goalposts. And then we keep doing that, and we're like, oh, why am I perpetually dissatisfied? And hearing your podcast with Andrew Wilkinson, the billionaire, who's just like, his main conclusion from becoming a billionaire is, oh, I'm still the same miserable, dissatisfied person I've ever been, but with more money. And it's like, it takes somebody who's actually smashed that particular stream to be like,

ah, maybe the answers aren't hiding behind more money or whatever. And so ultimately, we defer gratification or we feel like we're

suffering the most in the thing that we're most deficient in. So whether it's money or time or friendships or whatever, that's like the thing which is like the alligator at the boat. And whoever has something like that, it's like the drowning man wanting air. They feel like that is the thing which if they solve it, life would be complete. So like incel forums, they're obsessed with like, if I could just get a girlfriend, then I'd be totally fine.

The weird thing about all of this, I think, when I reflect on this, is that the domains of life that we have sorted - and most of us, if you're watching this, hopefully you're healthy, you have access to being outside, you're not in prison, you have central heating, all this stuff. Physical health and time and family and sun and all that stuff is just fully available in abundance. But we just go, "I don't know, but I need another

two grand or I need another whatever and so um

The I guess the lesson is to stop moving the goalposts or if you do recognize that it's just a game that we're playing but you can still Recognize that you are happy right now and all that suffering of the gap has just caused by the mind So Felix Dennis has a book called how to get rich which is he's made it really like distasteful in the way that it's branded and stuff and he's sat there like like a maniacal like monocle and the kind of because

He's trying to paint this picture that you set that as the goal. He says, I'm writing this at the age of 83, and if you're reading this book, I would swap places with you in a heartbeat because you have the one thing that I don't, which is time. I've made my $300 million or whatever to then go and sit in a wood cabin and write poetry. I could have done that at 30. Yeah.

Yeah, I had that realization. It's kind of like a nice meme, but you're already a billionaire just in a illiquid asset, which is your health. Because any billionaire, and there'll be a lot out there right now, or centimillionaires that are on their deathbed would give everything for your health. Therefore, yes, you can't

liquidize it yet. Maybe you will be in the future. For illiquid wealth, you're already a billionaire, which is a wild thought. The insight around the thing that you desire most is the thing that you assume will fix all of your problems. I came up with this idea the other day of unteachable lessons. And I think one of the unteachable lessons is money and fame won't fix all of the problems that you have in life because the total addressable market for more fame and more money is basically everybody. And

Andrew Wilkinson is a billionaire coming on. It's so done. It's so done that when he even comes on, there's a bit of me that thinks we can't go down that road because I know of the antibody response system on the internet. I also know that it just doesn't, it seems to not land and maybe it wouldn't have landed with me. And it probably still doesn't land. It never does. It's it's as Frankel says, it's one of the three insatiable desires, money, sex, and power, and you can keep chasing them. So, I mean, Wilkinson was talking about his mate who was like a multi-billionaire and

And was like, oh, but Jeff, he's like really rich though, isn't he? And he was like, but what can Jeff afford that you can't? And they're like, oh, super yacht. All right. Okay. So that's the level. Who was it that taught us that lesson about how when you ask people what they want their annual income to be,

It's always- Sahil. Yeah. Do you want to tell that story? Can you remember it? Yeah. Essentially, whenever you ask somebody what would be your goal income where you stop and relax a bit more, it's basically always 2.5 to 3x where you are right now. And then as soon as you hit that, it just rebates- 2.5 to 3x. Rebase lines. Rebase lines. Yeah. It's so funny. That thing going around social media where they ask someone, "I'll give you 10 million, but you can't wake up tomorrow. Would you

Would you accept? Or like, would you want 10 million? Everyone goes, yes, yes. But then you can have 10 million, but you don't wake up in the morning. Do you still want the 10 million? And everyone goes, oh no. As you're saying, well, waking up tomorrow is worth more than 10 million. And people go, but if you really think about that, it is like, oh, right. So the most valuable thing is the thing that I take for granted every single day

Which is, I suppose, it's the youth. It's like the future that you have ahead of you. But you ignore that. But a lot of that as well is framing because you can't cash the future in right now. Like the fact that nothing is promised beyond just this moment right now. And sure, your felt sense of it as you're older, maybe you can do less. There's less you can do with this moment right now. But

tomorrow at 80 and tomorrow right now are the exact same amount of time. So beyond the health impact of it, there is no difference. The only thing is, remember when you used to go back to school, or a Monday for me, it's a good example on a Monday. For me, I go to bed on a Sunday night, I reliably have good sleep and I'm fired up for a Monday because it feels like the whole week is ahead of me. But I get to sort of a

a Friday or a Saturday and I have this sort of retrospective energy to me where I'm thinking about the week and then it gets to Monday morning again and I'm sort of excited and it almost feels like that but with age it's like there's no real reason if you can do the full non-dual fucking attachment thing

There's no reason why a day now and a day in 20 years time is worth any more or any less. In fact, you should. We do it at all timeframes, don't we? Because I'm sure in our 20s, we were like, oh, but the 30s and then the 40s, it's the same. At some point, it's going to flip, right? At some point, it's going to be like, oh, if you're not careful about it, that you're going to get older and start thinking wistfully about what was behind, not hopefully about what's to come. Is it not multiplied by like physical ability?

By a big margin. Like enjoying anything is magnified when you can walk. There's no pain. There's no, you're fully mobile. All right. My first one. That was fucking awesome. That was a good one too. That was a good one. This again from your birthday. Outcomes matter more than inputs.

You've been on this flex for quite a while. It's not too dissimilar to I look for efficiency over, I look for effectiveness over efficiency, but outcomes matter more than inputs. A lot of the time, especially as you get sort of further into black belt territory on the productivity bro optimization world,

you do this sort of weird rain dance, this sort of productivity rain dance of lots of things that maybe you needed them previously, or maybe they never served you, or maybe they did serve you, but they don't serve you now, but you keep doing them. You have these sort of odd attachments to ways of working and things that you do or members of staff or systems or processes or, or whatever it is. And, uh,

What's that quote about people working so hard and achieving so little? Who's that? Andy Grove. Andy Grove. There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little. So is this like don't conflate suffering with...

productivity or is it more like don't get attached to old systems that got you to where you are? The suffering thing is probably a part of it, but this is probably even more zoomed out than that, which is a lot of the time people focus on how hard I've worked during the day, regardless of whether it was suffering or not. It's what I did all of this stuff. Look at all of the effort that I put in because what did you do on the back end of that? Because we've all had

jobs, projects, things that we needed to finish. And the very thing that you're putting off is the most important thing that you're supposed to do. And you go, dude, I worked all day. And you go, track what you did today. You cleaned the kitchen.

You had this huge email to write and you spent 45 minutes cleaning the fucking kitchen. Why'd you do that? Well, I worked really hard today. And it's like, yes, yes, yes. But what were you trying to achieve? And it's also, I think, just a reminder that effectiveness is really the only thing that matters. You can continue to put your foot harder and harder and harder on the accelerator. But if you've also got your foot on the brake or if you're driving in the wrong direction, it kind of doesn't matter. So outcomes matter more than inputs, as in,

a lot of the time because you're the feedback loop on when am I going to get the output is usually a little bit down the line. Maybe it's going to be tomorrow, maybe it's going to be next year, maybe it's going to be in five years time or whatever. The only thing that you can bounce off is inputs. How much work did I do today? And then for instance, you wake up on a morning and

You've slept in by three hours and immediately you feel like a piece of shit. You think, I'm a piece of shit because I slept in. You're right, okay. You're looking at such a brief window, like the entirety of your life. But I'm in the lower quartile of the window. Your fucking sleep regularity.

the entirety of your life and you've taken this one moment and be like because of that one thing that i did it's like what if that allows you to get way more out of this week what if this allows you to get closer to your goals much more quickly or what if this is just something that your body needs so that you can be happier and there's one way to guarantee that you won't get the best out of this week is if you just beat yourself up for it for the rest of the day piece of shit there's a fun idea here which is just only setting on your like to-do list

the biggest thing that you have to do. And sometimes it might be like 10 minutes long. It might be send an email or fire this person or put this job ad live and then just give yourself the rest of the day off. I did that for a few weeks and it was fucking weird. You feel brilliant. Yeah, but you also still have it to your point, that kind of Protestant guilt that I need to be working while you're not working. Even though I've achieved more,

than I would do by doing the most important thing. There's then just this sense of anxious, I need to be busy, I need to be busy. So that's the first one. And then the second one is, yeah, if you don't know what the most important thing is,

you've identified what the most important thing is. It's figuring out what the most important thing. So it's a beautiful loop. There's a, like a really old Tim Ferriss article about this, about like how he stays productive. It's called like productivity tips for depressive people like me or something like that. But it's,

There's loads of quotes in it, like doing something well doesn't make it important, which I think about all the time. Doing something well does not make it important. That's it. That's it in a minute. And like being busy is a form of like indiscriminate action and procrastination. Like busy people just don't know what to focus on. Your calendar is a better indication of your wealth than your bank account. Yeah. And then write out, the practical thing is write out all of your to-dos.

pick like the top three that make you most scared then pick one of them and just do it for three hours beautiful and that's that's how he says productive or effective wrestling with bears um would it be a need to do this fighting an axe legally representing lily phillips jesus it's always the thing that makes you i wanted to be guy 100 um if you look on your to-do list and pick the thing you're like oh

So the asterisks I'd give to that, you know, you mentioned then the one that will, and then do three hours on that. The key thing there is even, you know, Elon Musk algorithm of like question every assumption and then simplify, simplify, simplify. Even that I would drop off, do three hours because it might, the biggest thing might just be, I need to,

break up with this person or I need to do so just do that thing this flight all I need to do is Parkinson's law the breakup out into three hours long right so we've got or I need to book this flight to this location or I need to set up this banking account but if you've got three hours blocked out you're definitely going to get it done aren't you true I think that's the point is like fence off like don't try to be this like oh I'll just do ten minutes later I'll do like the most important thing to do today is that thing that's all you're doing until lunch until it's finished

But it's no one ever does it. And people write too many things in their to-do list, don't get them done and push them over to tomorrow. Kind of related to this one. It's a good, it's a very cool one. So funny how all of the hacks and all of the lessons end up. We haven't coordinated this before. We don't talk about doing it before. This is like a life hack slash lesson. They're both, both related. And I call it turning bullshit into reality.

and I'll do the exercise with you guys now. If I only did this every day, whenever I've done it, I've gone, that's a great day. So we start with bullshit. What are your values? Do you have any that come to mind? And if you don't have, like, I've thought through my values, blah, blah, that bullshit. Any values that you just immediately come to mind of things that you'd like to do more of? Johnny, there's no wrong answer. Physical challenge. Physical challenge. Yusuf? Pass.

Just come on. Come on. Just give me something that you value, like that you- Or a personal gratitude. I don't know. Yeah, gratitude. Gratitude. Okay, cool. Adventure. Adventure. Okay. So you create an Apple note and you put that value at the top. Now you have to creatively brainstorm 10 ways you can do that. So for example, physical challenge, it could be- Run. But like run 5K, right? Run 5K. It could, what was yours again? The gratitude trigger. Gratitude. It could be write a thank you letter to ABC and yours was- Adventure. Adventure.

It could be message the group chat to arrange this holiday that we've been putting off. Okay. So just write down 10 and then just go through, do, go through, do, go through, do. And you've taken this kind of esoteric,

bullshit value that you've always wanted to have. Into next action. From neurons to atoms. That's very cool. The reason I struggle with the values thing is that I think you've got to be very cautious about what you say are your core values. You can mix those up though. Yeah, but so reading Patrick Lencioni recently and he said a lot of companies will go like, oh yeah, we'll do our values statement and they say our country values...

honesty. And you're like, okay, but unless you value honesty above the market baseline, you don't actually value honesty. That's not one of your core values because everyone should value honesty by...

So he's like, the only time you should say you have a company value is if you are actually like above the market trend. Ultimately, the only thing that matters with values is did you do the thing? Because even if you didn't think of the values, but you did the thing, then you actually valued it more than saying I have values. So even there with- That's unless you whip yourself into doing a thing that you didn't want to do and then after the fact you didn't- That's my value! Yeah, that's what I put it on

The reason why this exercise I think is actually useful is because what ends up happening when you do it is it's a load of things that have been rattling around your subconscious in the shower or before you go to bed that begin to percolate someday. And as you guys know, as you mentioned earlier, as you move up levels, levels, levels, the thing that seems to happen is you get way more urgent but not

still important but not super important stuff whereas this is time to moving from like just being reactive each day to being proactive like for example the gratitude one when would you really go i'm gonna write this thank you letter you might have been putting off this thank you letter for four years that would take you 10 minutes to do but with this and and then when you actually reflect on the year it's one of the few things that you actually remember you've also brought yourself in alignment with the person that you want to be as well which is quite a nice

Side effect too. Exactly. And then if you can just move that to another note, you just keep storing that I am that person. Should we do some resolutions? I basically had this idea that coming up with resolutions for yourself a lot of the time, whatever it is, by March, some ungodly percentage of people have already stopped doing the thing they said was the most important thing at the start of the year.

A good part of that is maybe habit change or behavior change is difficult to do, but maybe a bigger part of it is, well, they chose the wrong things. Like the stuff that I've chosen that stuck with me for the rest of my life. And I figured, I don't think I've ever seen anyone do this before, but what are the highest ROI resolutions or new habits or behavior change things that you've done? Simple things, given that this is going out on Christmas Eve and people are going to be thinking about it. This might actually be a nice little

finger food buffet that people could go actually the boys said that this one really stuck so I'm gonna go with that so have you got any I do I for the last I didn't do it last year I did like three years in a row of a version of 75 hard

Anyone ever done that before? Adapted 75 hard. Just because when you look at actually 75 hard out of the box, there are things in it that I think are- Too hard. Too hard. Far too hard. No, just there for, I think maybe slightly destructive in some ways. And also I just don't want to do. Which ones did you find? So like training twice a day, every day. I just don't think there's any, I think there's ways to pursue that sort of goal without those things. Yeah.

drinking a gallon of water. Stone the adulterers. It seems like an arbitrary... I realise it's there because it's hard, but I think the thing... Like the few of those... Not for me. The thing that's hard about it is you have to do the things, the habits you set to do for 75 days in a row and if you miss a day you go back to the beginning. And I think...

As a, like just trying to do that, you realize how hard that is and how many like little bullshit reasons come up and how you have to kind of like go out of your way a lot of the time to tick off the box. I think it's a good lesson. Can you regale us of our friend who set himself a target of having a banana every day? Yeah. I mean, yeah. So our friend Ben, um, one of his things was have a banana, I think, because he'd read it was something to do like good for bowel health.

And it got to like 11 o'clock at night. He was staying in Cambridge, didn't have a banana. So he was driving around Cambridge trying to find banana. He's also like meditated. So one of his things when we were doing it was meditate an hour a day. He's meditated at a wedding before, like gone out. Left the wedding. I'm sorry. Was he the group? He went out and sat in the car, sat in the car, meditating in the car just to tick the box.

I don't know. It's not something to like sustain for the rest of your life, but I think you learn, you learn something about yourself when you're doing it. Well, one of the problems of it is that it doesn't agree with a varied lifestyle. Exactly. 75 hard is brilliant for the first sort of autistic two, two and a half months of the year. But as soon as you get into it, it's wedding season. Yeah. It's like, good luck, mate. Yeah. Well, you have to go find out, you know,

Me and the boys flew to Australia. You're on a plane for 17 and a bit hours. Where's the banana? You couldn't plan the banana in advance. It's more that you just, you don't view any like personal habit change or behavior change as difficult. If you've been able to stick to something for 75 days without interruption, it's

Any other change you want to make is easy. So it's the meta lesson, not the individual. It's got nothing to do with the, as long as you don't pick like ridiculously easy things. So you would basically say that a good resolution is to do some version of 75 hard, but adapt it into stuff that you really, really value. Yeah. And it can be anything, like anything you're trying to do, but keep putting off or something you're inconsistent with, just commit to. It also doesn't have to be 75 days, but like committing to a period of time of, I'm not going to miss a day. I'm going to like move heaven and earth to not miss a day.

And you get to the end and you're like, oh, what an achievement. Anything else would be easy. Yeah. There's so many adulterers and sodomites that need stoning. And if you just commit. Where's that from? I don't know. You know what it is? It's like a wispy memory from the guy who I think you spoke to, Chris, who lived the Old Testament for...

a year. What? Jesus Christ. I would have thought I would have heard about that. I don't think I spoke to him. I think it's just something you've read. Old Testament or New Testament because those are two very different. Yeah, so he set himself different challenges each year. Lived inside of a whale. Built a big, did he build an ark? So he had to physically, he had to grow out his hair and like throw pebbles at sodomites and adulterers and like he basically, he tried to live like, to live the life of that like,

for a year and then he like his other challenge was uh read the entire um encyclopedia britannica and he said it really pissed off his wife because is this ringing a bell no like he was just he wasn't he'd be like did you know that the uh byzantine period she's like oh stop it with your trivia but yeah anyway he didn't throw pebbles somebody who did like

early on it was yeah early they did maybe something each month for a year a different thing each month for a year yes yes yes yes but not it wasn't nothing to do with that no he didn't build an ark and try and get to two by two hi it's good welcome back to the show today we have a man who's

What a derailment. Old wisdom. The process that we use for goal setting each year is stolen from Garrett J. White, who probably stole it from someone else and so on. He's got a lawsuit at the moment. Yeah. Big style. Wow. Interesting. So it's splitting your year into quarters and then splitting that into four domains of your life. Body, being, balance and business. Or health, wealth, love and happiness. But I quite like the alliteration. And

you then basically look at, okay, what's my three-year vision? Directionally, where do I want to go? What's my one-year target for that? Divide that into quarters. What does each 12-week sprint look like in each of those domains? And then how can I do a weekly action or a daily action to hit a weekly checkpoint to hit that quarterly target in each domain? And it's designed so that you're not like blasting it, grinding your face off with stuff. You're just turning up and just hitting a single each day.

So that you move towards your goal and you're fully aligned. You don't end up out of balance with like overweighting one domain of your life. So the idea is to kind of counteract people who just like double down on their business and they end up like overweight and spiritually disconnected and divorced and all this stuff, but they, they got the million. And so, yeah.

That framework's been really helpful for me. It also gives me one thing to focus on in each domain. The other big thing that's had the most impact, I think, is single tasking.

For years, I drunk the Kool-Aid that I can multitask and that because I've got like Alfred installed and keyboard shortcuts, whatever, I can just like flip between windows and tabs and it feels more productive because your brain's like, oh great, there's loads of like things happening. But the quality of that work, the attention residue, all that stuff isn't worth it. And so, like you said about deciding what's the key thing this morning and just blast three hours on it, blinkers on, noise cancelling headphones, whatever,

and just do that one thing. And then to create a feedback loop with that, you have something that is a visual or a tactile reminder of this is what I'm working on right now. And it sounds like overkill, but I think our brains are so

that we need to just be fully hemmed in and forced to focus on that one thing. So whether it's a post-it note stuck on your monitor or like a floating bar that you have pinned on the top of your desktop, whatever it is saying, you are doing this right now. And then you feel like an absolute dingus if you go off task because everything's screaming like, no, no, no. The only reason you're here is to do that. That's cool. I like that. So I had two, I guess you brought up...

sobriety which is one of those ones that's so sort of taken for granted now that I've forgotten about it. That used to be quite contrarian when you first started it. I remember, yeah. Yeah, it was fucking crazy. Give it five years, Old Testament will be right in. Yeah, you're getting stoned.

Wow. Okay, so my two highest ROI resolutions that I've done that have stuck with me. Number one, sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom. And number two, go for a walk first thing in the morning. I've always wondered about the phone thing. Is it something specifically to do with the phone being in the bedroom or is it just next to your bed?

Is it like the fact that it's near you and it's emitting radio waves? No, no, no, no. It's just being so far away that you can't use it on a nighttime and that it's not the first thing that you do in the morning. It's basically intermittent fasting for your phone with environment design. But you just take the charger for your phone and you put it outside of your fucking bedroom. And it's like, I can't believe how many people still have it. It is sapping days of sleep out of you every year.

days and days and days, even if you've got the best relationship with your phone in the world, because if you can't sleep, there is always the most compelling device in human history, only within arm's reach. And even if it's over the other side of the room, the problem that I would encounter is I'm like, well, you know, like, it's just there. Go, oh, I'm going to get up. I'm going to go downstairs into the kitchen. I'm going to unplug it from the place that it lives, where it sleeps overnight. And then also when you wake up on a morning, it's not there for you to see. What were you saying about Mark Zuckerberg or whoever it is? You know, all of us, we open our phone and there's just

bad thing. Terrible thing. Issues. Well, that or it's Alexander's library. You say, oh, well, there is Alexander's library on the other side of this room with infinite novelty. Yeah, whether it's framed well or badly, what's your one task now? Go to fucking sleep. So go to sleep. And then the morning walk thing just...

This was something that I'd started doing probably from some shit I'd learned from us researching things forever ago. And I just noticed that if I woke up and I was feeling a little nervous or sort of anxious energy or whatever, whatever I was feeling in the morning, by the time that I'd done a 15 minute walk, by the time I came back, it just felt less strong and less important.

And there's all manner of Huberman explanations about whatever it is, the ventral dorsal stream and you're locomoting through while you're doing lateral eye movement, which down regulates the way, blah, blah, blah. It's like the midwit, the guy on the left says, morning walk makes me feel nice. And those two things, I think, you know, the two that I've done

In every different hotel, every different place that I've stayed, every different country that I've gone to, those are two things that I really, really try and rely on. The phone outside of the room when you're on the road is difficult. It's like plug it in in the bathroom and then go into the bedroom. But morning walk, phone outside of the bedroom has been two of the highest ROI. Do you still do no caffeine first thing?

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm avoiding that. Your point about Huberman is great that he's been able to pacify the midwits by providing- Legitimating scientifically. Yeah. For people to just follow the guy on the left stuff. Yes. We have this joke that, so Huberman did a, and I do love Huberman, but he did a five part podcast with Matthew Walker on sleep. And I think it was like 20 hours long. And I joke that I'd be willing to bet nobody who listens to that

Sleep's as good as my mate Quinny, who's just like, just shut your eyes, lad. You know what I mean? Like, who just doesn't overthink it. He deliberately doesn't optimize it because he's like, if I mess with it, then I'm going to sleep worse if it's not. Sleep is one of those perfect examples of...

One of the reasons a lot of people have insomnia is trying to overthink sleep. There was a famous study where they took two groups, one that were paid to go to sleep as fast as they can, and the other group that wasn't paid anything. And the group that wasn't paid anything fell to sleep three times as fast as the other group. So outside of all the sleep science, the number one part of the semantic tree is don't put too much stress on yourself because then you won't sleep. Don't take money for it. Yeah. Yeah, but...

It's an interesting realization that you need, especially now this super rational, hyper evidence-based world where experts are only the people that are allowed to comment on stuff, that you need someone to justify something that you already did that already made you feel good. It shouldn't be the case that I need Andrew Huberman to explain to me why the thing I do and like and is good and effective for me is something that I should do and like and is good and effective for me. So that's why I brought up caffeine.

Because I'm not sure on my personal experience of that. I'm not sure I feel much of a difference. By not having the caffeine first? Or having caffeine first, yeah. I'm sure the science will tell me differently. But I think that's a good example. You're like a heavyweight boxer that can just take slugs with caffeine. No, I think I just have the appropriate amount and then I stop. Lots. Lots. Just don't get silly with it. Not after midday. Good rule. Chee.

I do have one, but to go meta New Year's resolutions to begin with, the first thing is to kind of question the question. I found this stat when I was researching New Year's resolutions last year, and it said that 91% of New Year's resolutions fail. So quick little thought experiment for you, Christopher, right? Let's say...

You come to me and you go, oh, I need to get this flight to Paris. Wizz Air's gone. I go, I don't really, Chris, I've got this airline. It's got a 91% failure rate. Are you going to get on it? No. Or let's say, Yusuf, I know what you're like. You've been out on the town. You've been out with Mr. Old Testament. You're having fun. You've met a lovely lady. You go back to the room and you go, fuck, I've got no condoms. And you knock on my door and I go, oh yeah, yeah, take this one. And it just says on the seal, 91% failure rate. Would you do it?

So if something has a 91% failure rate, you have to look at it before I think you do it. So then you look at things like Alcoholics Anonymous. Can I just question something? Go on. I think the failure in those examples is...

It's like saying 91% of people fail to make the flight on time. Or 91% of people can't get the condom on. So you've gone meta about my meta. No, no, no. We will end up in infinite labs like Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson. What do you mean by truth, Johnny? What do you mean by condom? Exactly. So basically, I would first look at things that actually work. So I'd look at Alcoholics Anonymous, where you have a group. So you have kind of social groups.

shame. You have a recurring theme. You have basically New Year's resolutions operate like the psychological version of North Korea versus you kind of want to move towards Singapore, a system that actually works versus a horrific failure rate. So even small things of, okay, whatever the thing is, I'll sometimes do this whenever I have a deadline that I'm being a bitch about is I'll just message my mate Harry and say, hey, I'm going to bet

this uncomfortable amount of money that I will do the thing. And as a result, I will do the thing. There's the scene in Fight Club where Tyler Durden goes into this random shop and he finds this Asian guy behind the counter, takes him outside, gun to his head and says, tell me what you want it to be, Raymond. Raymond. Raymond. And he's like,

shaking, unsure. And he goes, I want you to be a veterinarian. And he goes, I'll come back here in 30 days and if you're not a veterinarian, you'll be dead. You can bet that he didn't have a 91% failure rate. So I think first off, questioning the question, which is pretty hardcore. But then the real soft call, nice thing that I would recommend is journaling. All of that is said. Journaling is... So this one is less about... It is essentially...

You don't appreciate writing a journal now. It's kind of like investing in the SMP. You go, I could be doing all these activities, but a journal five years hence, the value of that is so significant. It's like even now, if I go on a flight and I can go through exactly how I thought 10 years ago or what I was doing, because you forget so much. And going back to your point earlier, it's just the same problems over and over again. I had a friend of mine who I think had his journal stolen.

and because he left it in his suitcase that got stolen. I go, how much was that worth to you? And he's like, probably like 15% or 15 or 20% of everything I have. It's so valuable. Jim O'Shaughnessy, who's one of the smartest guys I know, older gentleman, he's about 60. And he was telling me about journals he has from when he was like 21 and the value that that has to him. Have I told you about this, George? I took a journal every day from the age of 13 to 19. Wow. On a Microsoft Word document. And then one day I opened it, file corrupted. Just like,

Oh, well, did you never back it up? No, I was like, well, that's the end of that and just stopped. Not backing that up is the least you thing ever. Or is that where it starts? This was when I was transitioning Windows to Mac. So it was in that. However, I've still got the file so I could maybe uncorrupt it now with modern technology. Whether you do this very well, you take a lot of photos, videos. I don't do that. I'm trying to do it more.

but more photos, more videos, more journals, because the value of it is so significant. 10, 20, 30 years. Day one. Day one. No. You can leave audio messages. Oh, really? You can photos, videos.

She's big Apple Notes for everything. One size fits all. This guy on the left, Apple Notes. It's frictionless. One size fits all. What have you got left? Should we do one more round of life hacks? What have we got? I've got a lesson and a fail. Okay. I have a lesson. Are we doing fails? We can do. Let's do another lesson and then we'll see where we come in at. Okay. Have you got another lesson? Yeah. Beautiful. So I'll take the potato. You're up, potato. Oh, you're potatoing me. Yeah. You look to him, but you potato me. It's all on you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Trying to...

find the micro plate equivalent in happiness. What's a micro? Micro plate. It's a, it's a plate that's less than 2.5 kilos usually. So it's like half a kilo, 0.25 of a kilo. So in, when I was doing powerlifting, you realize really quickly that like,

200 kilos when that's your one rep max, that feels the same as 210, feels the same as 220. It's just always your one rep max. But what makes it engaging is the fact that it's slightly more than you did last week, last month, last year. And I think whenever you go like the steroids equivalent in anything, there's just always the debt to pay.

in hindsight. So in business, again, like most of our lessons are business-wise, we grew really fast and you're like, fantastic. We like this really steady growth rate and then like 300% and you think phenomenal, like next thing, next thing. But actually like going back, I'd have taken a way slower growth rate year in, year out, because the experience is way better and finding the like

just take the PB, like just take the extra rep, just take the extra kilo week in, week out. Because for me, I think the only thing that matters is the feeling that you're making some kind of progress. Something's moving in the right direction. It doesn't actually matter what the absolute number is. And that's because now we're further on, it's harder to find the half a kilo

than if we just thought, hang on a minute, this is growing way too quickly. Let's slow down. I'm going to have to leapfrog ahead of you because it's my lesson. And your podcast. True. Trajectory is more important than position, which is a Jimmy Carr-ism. But that being number 300 in the world, but last year being 350 feels better than being number two in the world, but last year being number one. Because you're so tightly attached

attuned to what is the direction that I'm on, not what is my absolute position. Happiness is relative, it's not absolute. And yeah, I spoke to, weirdly enough, got this theory co-signed by Dan Bilzerian before he went all anti-Semitic. Old Testament Dan. Old Testament Dan, that's what he calls himself. Old T. Dan. He, I basically said, like, he'd sort of gone to the top of the hedonic mountain, so to speak. In some ways, do you wish that you'd

dragged out that progress a little bit more because it would have allowed you to have had more places to go to. That basically every new record you set, especially big step changes in terms of success, is just a new higher bar for you to now... So what you would say success isn't more...

success isn't a better vantage point to have a view from it's a higher point to fall from and it becomes increasingly difficult to get those you know to improve your lifts when you're first going to the gym by five percent is maybe five kilos but after a couple of years in the gym it's a significantly larger amount it's significantly higher level of pressure so yeah trajectory more important than position but chris sparks as well direction over speed how is it yeah i don't know whether that's quite the same

Trajectory over position. Trajectory is more important than position in that your growth is more important than your absolute location. Actually, that's housed within direction over speed. So going from a 220 deadlift to a 225 deadlift versus a 395 to a 400-kilo deadlift, it feels the same. It's way harder to operate at the higher level. As opposed to, like, I want to get stronger. And also the 400. So James Smith says all winds feel the same.

But there's no uber surcharge for going 395 to 400 versus going 210 to 250. Any revenue level, any bank account number. Dopamine is dopamine, isn't it? So the problem is, are you suggesting that you purposefully throttle? Yes. How?

It's difficult, but anytime you notice yourself progressing in something, just accept the slower rate. Because everyone's always trying to make things faster. They're always trying to get leaner quicker, get bigger quicker, make more money faster. That's the world, right? But just accept the smaller rate of growth or the smaller rate of progress. To Chris's point, how do you do that now? Are you intentional of going, okay, I want 15% this year and then I'm capping at 15%? Aim for a steady improvement in something.

rather than going for big targets. Obviously, I don't have all of the answers, George, I'm sorry. Existentially, very difficult. But as a concept, because you would take, if I offered you 200% growth in something, your immediate response would be like, yeah. In business, like Gino Wickman talks about having growth phases and then consolidation phases, where rather than just like, because if you spam the growth and scale, you're going to end up with like unrickety growth.

Whereas if you take some time where you go, actually, I'm just going to like focus on internal growth for a while and like solidify the foundations before the next sprint, you're going to create a more sustainable. You always have to pay the debt off, don't you? Yeah. Always. Good insight. Nice. Seth. Have you ever had a chat with someone who says that they want a goal and then you start giving them solutions and they'll keep coming up with rotating reasons and excuses for not doing it?

So this is, I think, a novelism, correct me if I'm wrong. If information was all that was needed, we would all be billionaires with perfect abs. So something I've really learned over the last couple of years is there is somebody's actual goal, and then there is the story that they tell themselves about what they think their goal is. And often it's not the same. Someone's actions versus their words.

George got me a book a few years ago called The Courage to be Disliked. It's basically a summary written by Parable about Adler versus Freud. Adler was one of Freud's contemporaries, and he's kind of the lesser-known Freud, Jung, Adler, those original psychologists.

His view is the teleological view rather than the etiological view. So Freud's view is something happened to me when I was a child and it's caused me to behave like this. So past event produces current behavior. Adler is the teleological view, which is future goal impacts current behavior. So the example given is somebody

is always getting rejected by people and they've made themselves repulsive to other people so that they can tell themselves the story that, oh, no one likes me and everyone finds me whatever. But the goal baked into that, the hidden payoff of that belief, is that it keeps them safe because they can reject themselves before other people can reject them. So they construct a certain identity that allows them to fulfil that goal and meet the payoff. So

We run a program to help people grow their business in a specific niche, but quite often you'll see that the more barriers and the more guardrails you put up to make failure absolutely impossible,

what's happening is you're kind of backing someone into a corner where it's like you're removing the technological friction, you're removing the blueprint friction, you're removing the what to do and how to do it in the process until suddenly there's nothing left but you as the bottleneck. And so you mentioned this with GPT, I'm glad you did, which is that now we have infinite access to the best computational models working at super PhD level and

all information at our fingertips and people haven't suddenly become infinitely more productive. All it's done is take away another excuse and another objection to the point where you're like, "Now it really is just me." And so someone's willingness to actually show up and do the thing is still always going to be the final frontier. How would you summarize that lesson overall?

what people tell themselves the goal is isn't always the goal. So look at actions versus behavior and don't think that you just have an information bottleneck and that'll solve everything. Yeah, I guess it's weird to think, how can you say that you value a thing if your actions show no indication? Yeah, actions versus words. In that way, yeah. Look at your calendar to find your priorities. Yeah. Yeah.

It's all shit that we learned fucking 10 years ago. 10 years ago. Yeah. But now you're like, oh yeah. Gee. Lessons or life hack or- Lesson, please. Okay. Have we got more after this or is this the final one? Last one. Okay, cool. I'll try and get through as much as I can. So first one is-

going back to Old Testament for a second, is the Socratic method. So one thing I would do- What do you mean by that, George? There we go. Matter about matter. What do you mean? What do you mean by truth? What do you mean by Socratic? What do you mean? So one thing that I would typically do, being an idiot, is whenever somebody would say something I disagree with, I would just stop listening to what they're saying and then just start

processing the dunk I'm about to do in my head. And then as soon as they stop talking, I'm dunking, but I'm noticing they're just doing the same thing.

So now just rather than disagreeing with people, just asking questions. And not only do you actually not necessarily ruin relationships or have emotional issues with other people, you actually also sometimes change their mind quite a lot as well. So like one example, I was in the car and I was with a friend of mine and he was telling me about how

He has his current job and he would like to work remote, but there's not that many remote jobs out there. So my immediate like dunk on brain goes, hold on. I hire people in these roles all the time. I can pull up these numbers. What are you on about? I was like, okay. I was like, hmm. So I was like, here's a question. How many kind of in-person jobs do you think there are in your town? He's like, I don't know. I thought if you just had to guess. He's like, I don't know, 10,000. Okay. Okay.

And then how many remote jobs do you think there are in the world? And he just paused for a bit and he goes, yeah, you might be right.

Versus if I would have tried letting them come write the code in their own head and being a Socrates calls it being a midwife. You're helping them give birth to the new idea rather than trying to push it into them is a big thing. And then the other one, so I've been quite fascinated by doom loops this year. So a doom loop would be I'm feeling anxiety. Fuck, why am I being anxious?

why are you criticizing yourself for being anxious? And it's just anxiety. You get anxious about your anxiety, which leads to more anxiety and it's boom, boom, boom. Or why am I so depressed? And so you have the initial stimuli that's kind of, you don't really control. And then it's your reaction to that.

And getting a little bit deeper into meditation this year, there were two things that I found useful. One is to, I call it the Pilkington fork. So Carl Pilkington, the philosopher K Pilkington, he's telling a story to Gervais about when he got mugged in the center of town, some guys came over to him and like, give me your phone. And usually there's two ways you react to that. It's like punching them or it's like running away. Yeah, sure, sure. And he goes, but I love this phone.

He goes, it's my favorite thing. And he starts like being very strange. He goes, how are you by the way? He goes, we've met before. And just like completely freaks them out that he doesn't know how to react the mugger. And he just walks away. So using that on my own brain. So if I get super, um, if I get, there's a few things, one asking my brain, what's the next thought you're going to have? And it just stops. And then sometimes a random thing will appear. And then you go, well, was that me? Cause I didn't try and bring that up. So you have this natural detachment as well as when I hear, um,

anxiety. So let's say I'm anxious about an event I've got going up and then I'll start going, fuck, why am I being anxious? Then I go, ah, I get it. I get why you're anxious. And all of a sudden, because you've not had the cortisol reaction to the cortisol, it kind of, the Pilkington fork occurs and you break out. So those are my two ones. Awesome. Yeah. I think I called them second order emotions. Oh, I like that. That like infinite regressive,

resentment at your frustration about your bitterness, about your anxiety. Final one, because we did it. You guys might like this from a business perspective. My friend, Harry Dry, phenomenal human being. He gave me this nugget, which is positioning is arranging information in the customer's head.

So I'll do it again. Positioning is arranging. You see, I'm arranging. You are. You met her again, right? Positioning is arranging information in the customer's head. So example would be, Loom used to be record your screen, whereas then they didn't change the product. They just changed the position.

the positioning, how it was structuring the customer's head to removing meetings and it explodes and separated from the rest of the competition. And then I thought, okay, frame is how you arrange information in your own head and frame itself is positioning is completely underlooked and frame is completely underlooked as well. That was brilliant.

Cheers mate. You're on fire mate. I feel like my, the information's been arranged differently in my head. I feel we just need to, we've got so much energy we need to go to like the local M&S and just throw stones at people. I actually, that was exactly what was next. It's that and then chicken. Boys, I love you all. I appreciate you. Merry Christmas. I'm sad that we don't get to spend as much time together as we used to. No fails. No fails.

Why don't we save them for next year? We'll save a fail for next year. We can keep everyone coming back. But no, I really do. I'm so happy and so proud of what all of you have done. It's fucking fire. It's great. Likewise, Mark. I'm very glad that you're in my life even though we're apart from each other. 100%. What a year it's been as well. What a year. Fire. Ladies and gentlemen, Merry Christmas. See you next time. Get away. Get off it.