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

43:07And then it just fades away. And all you have is a face that's getting older in the mirror each day.

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44:29That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. How has this changed the way that you show up, if at all?

44:41I think the big thing I've tried to change more, first off, when it comes to overthinking, trying to realize that as a thought loop's happening, trying to stare in that mirror for a second and go, hold on, how long, how many times has this happened? Because this could be the 60 ,000th time this thought has happened, but I can't remember anything from yesterday, is one thing. The second thing is just very basic level, just trying to document more, take more photos, take more videos, journal more, and without realizing it's such an asset that's going to compound further and further in the future.

45:14Even like today, to be honest with you, it's fun that we get this for like 20 years from now. We can go, oh, what we was doing that day. but otherwise like the the average person the memory just goes and then your life just goes yeah if you use merry christmas merry christmas if you use day one for journaling do you guys use no they're such a day one i i do use day one and i've used it more this year than any other year it just gives you every time you go to make a journal entry it's like on this day a year ago two years ago eight years ago how many entries have you got on day one now i've been using it for like i think 15 years wow but how frequently are you doing it i try and do it every day really yeah just like contents of mind and a picture every day what's been so you've got thousands of entries yeah holy for the thing the main takeaway from all of it is like it's just the same stuff it's just the same the same worries the same things you're excited about the same feelings well i think 10 years ago you're like what's the point well we assume that the henry's mirror thing is is true in as much as all of the problems that we're dealing with now feel fresh to us but when you look across the expanse of time in the same ways you've got the same feat that you did 10 years ago your psychological construction is made up of the same biases and fundamental fears which i think yousef to your sort of emotions point is why that's such a powerful way to communicate with people and also it's why I've been trying to dig deeper, sort of even deeper than just talk therapy gets you to by unpacking, okay, and where are these patterns coming from and what are the emotions I'm unprepared to feel because I think that is really the only way to get to the bottom of the etch-a-sketch and to fully, fully shake it loose.

47:01Well, you're right that you're the same, obviously you're the same person that you were 15, 20 years ago, but last year we talked about this where you think that your journal, especially in Johnny's case, we've got 15 years of day one journals, is going to be useless in the very early stages. You're like, what does my 19-year-old idiot self know about how I should be conducting my life now? And then you look back on it and it's just exactly the same stuff that you're like, oh God. And it's like, life is a spiral curriculum and it'll keep spanking you with the same lessons until you finally absorb it, change what you're doing, and then the world around you will stop hitting you with that same lesson.

47:45Is it young? Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. And we see that often with other people more clearly. You know, when you see someone who's always running into the same style of problem and you're like, oh, yeah, it's because they're creating it. so one um one hack for this it was actually one of mine for today but whilst it's on the topic is kind of what i call like this uh time technique so let's say for example you're going through insert difficult uh moment so let's say i don't know you're going through a breakup or you're having in your case johnny maybe a difficult issue of a member of staff or um which i say about my members of staff no you know what i mean like running a business you're gonna you're gonna to have those.

48:32Don't sue me. You're going to have those issues. So what I kind of recommend, or I've been doing this one for about three or four years, which is I'll think of, okay, so let's say it's a work conflict, right? I will then go, okay, can I think of two or three times that are the most similar throughout my entire career like this? So I kind of write down those events and write down the date. And then I ask, okay, if I could go back in time now with all the knowledge that I have now and if I could turn this event into like one of the best things that ever happened to me what would be the three actions that I would take like okay and then next to the date I write okay well what would be the worst three things that I could do with all the knowledge that I have now because you you have this detachment from the event and you have like an extra uh 20 IQ points and then once you've done that just scribble out the date and replace it with today's date and pretend it's you from the future that's come back.

49:29And that's such an effective way, because even though we do forget so much of the past, the real stuff that you do remember are the most emotional events. And even now you can look back at things five to 10 years ago and have such detachment. Well, the patterns are the same, which means that the solutions will probably still work. If you can think of what you would have done previously in a situation that's analogous, and now you in the present are facing something similar. Yeah, it is... I love you, Georgian. Because that's what emotions are supposed to do, aren't they? It's supposed to be a navigation tool as feedback for, oh, you took a wrong step there, like, here's how to change in future.

50:08But we often don't and then keep experiencing the emotion. Yeah, the universe just continues to shout louder until you hear the lesson. The goal is to get, before it's screaming in your face, the goal is to try and jump that a little bit sooner. all right johnny what you got johnny johnny uh i have a lesson which ties in beautifully with this because one of the problems with having 15 years of journals is i can i watch i can see this like journey of me chasing all these little things so like i wanted to bench 100 kilos and then i wanted abs and then I wanted a 2-1 degree and I wanted a job and then I wanted propane to do well and I wanted certain revenue levels and it's always just this next thing you can see it happening through the journal entries and you realize it changes nothing like this in those same entries there's still worries problems the same worries the same problems and you watch you through time achieve these things and you're still worried about the same stuff and that creates this feeling of like what is the point of doing anything but the the thing that you realize woven into all of it is the thing that's changing the whole time is the like the traits that are that you and how your character is changing because chasing those things that are difficult require like delayed gratification they require like dealing with different difficult emotions they require like all of the skills that you have to build and all of the traits you have to build to build a business to a certain level or to diet for the leanest you have been whatever it might be you you change so it's this idea that like the goals i don't think they really compound they kind of do but they like the dopamine you get from that doesn't compound but the traits that you get from chasing the hard things is the compounding and that immediate that realization immediately flip back to like it's absolutely worth like listing out loads of really big difficult goals and chasing them because the i don't think there's any faster way to change who you are to improve you all and it's something that like being a my daughter's an hour of an age where like she's she's gone from being a baby to being like a little person i'm like oh god like there's a proper like responsibility here to be the example and i I think the best way to become the example is chase the difficult things that require the traits to come as part of the journey.

52:43I love your takeaway from that, Johnny. Because some people would be really nihilistic about that. They'd be like, oh, well, there's no point chasing anything. That's the first feeling. The first feeling is like, oh, what's the point? yeah whereas you're like actually this is a way to play the game without having to be fully sucked into the game well you still need to be conned by the game into believing that the game is what you want to play like this wouldn't work you would not be able to get yourself to do the hard thing if you didn't think that the other side of the goal of the hard thing was completion satisfaction self-actualization rest but i think people think oh when i get a million turnover i'll be happy that's not true but when you get a million turnover the person that you've become yeah and so you just change the thing the goal is kind of like the side quest to the thing but that's the goal is the thin end of the wedge the goal is what gets you through the door yeah because you're not thinking i can't wait to feel dissatisfied in this goal but happy about the person i've become yeah like you achieve the goal you get the little like it's the james smith thing like all winsfield it feels exactly the same yep then you're dissatisfied but you've changed the thing is you can't you don't know that at the time and the only way you can know that is those is like being able to see what you two years ago how you two years ago dealt with a challenge i think this is why progress feels so good and losing ground feels so bad then this this This is great for you, somebody who's been on a relatively linear journey of getting better, more mindful, more peaceful, more successful, more capable, more resilient, whatever.

54:23But if the thing happens in the opposite direction, whether you've achieved your goals or not, even maybe worse if you've achieved your goals, you say, I got the thing I thought I wanted. It turns out that just as you, I was a bit disappointed with how much that didn't satisfy me. oh fuck and i'm now a worse person in some sort of a way you know you're a boxer who gets the olympic gold medal gold medal uh gets fucking uh head injury uh and now has to deal with that also i'm unhappy about the fact that the gold medal didn't make me as happy as i thought it would and i'm now worse off well and henry's mirror like you've wasted time in the process is that you're now 85 just because of the brain injury yes yeah the point being that the saving grace you have around goals being more unsatisfying than people think they're going to be is that you have transformed yourself into something which is more evergreen than the goal and the brief drip of dopamine which is all internal anyway uh then than that is you've got something more than that and hooray but imagine if you didn't get the progress so i'd argue that aside from becoming like severely injured or disabled or something in the process, dealing with the hard things is where the trait changes happen.

55:47So you can go through the thing that feels like I'm going backwards. And at the time, yes, you're like objectively going backwards by the measure, by the revenue level, the body fat, whatever, the strength level, but the traits are still improving. Because I think anything extremely difficult - What about if you run out of motivation? What about if you dumped all of your uh enthusiasm into something that it turned out wasn't wasn't right that's assuming that that's the end point that might just be your way your your position here is that given a long enough time horizon you're gonna track and trend up into the right yeah like if you look at look at your journey to here as an example like you sat on this sofa how many five years ago six eight eight years ago eight years ago like if you watch the recordings back i do you seem completely different very and everybody would be like oh chris is you know what a what a fantastic existence chris must have like being this famous podcaster but that's really the side quest to the the development as a as a result of it it's a good part i mean what was the first one that we filmed love island love island what's it really like to live on love island episode 17 14 episode 14 so uh yeah we were sat on a different couch but the same living room yeah in may april or may of 2018 uh different couch definitely a different yeah i remember getting this leather couch yeah um and uh yeah you're right you're right that that it's i want to be in a different country i want to not have to stay awake till three in the morning running nightclubs i want people that i respect to know me and respect my work i want and then you go okay at each of those junctures they were satisfying but the satisfaction was short-lived what was longer lived well the person that you became so do you think if you'd picked so the goal you had was i know it wasn't like explicitly the goal the time of the goal was like, I'm going to build a top 10 podcasts in the world.

57:46No, it was not that. No. Yeah. Just to give a big asterisk there. We, we was on a beach during COVID. Um, and it's sort of been two and a half years into the podcast. So not, not an insignificant amount of time. Yeah. And Chris just said, if we're talking about goals and where he wants to take things, he goes, kind of pauses for a second. He goes, I think, I think a hundred thousand subscribers. I think as soon as I get that, I'll just chill out. I'll be happy then. i remember this whole production staff's uh you've got a hundred thousand now i i remember when i was first year of university and i remember buying a tub of protein and looking at it and thinking after this one i think i'll be done

58:33i was 18 and weighed about 76 kilos but it was that it was no sorry 69 i was 69 kilos fucking hell i remember when i hit 70 kilos when i was 20 years old and i was like i am fucking huge i i think if you picked an easier goal your development would have been totally different this is a big this is a big homoseism where he says um the person that you become along the way like how can you say that you're a man who can do hard things if you never did hard things then jimmy carl repurposed it even better and it's yeah this insight i think is it is a saving grace to a lot of people who feel that their goals are hollow um so i think that's a wonderful lesson like a really really lovely lesson all right yousef what you got yeah think of how many bags of protein you've eaten since then chris um so you did the same with balloons as well didn't you where like thousand subscribers you and dean had a like cake and balloons and a party each each subscriber level has got bigger and less grand in its celebration yeah did we even do a number for four million subs we didn't do we did we did something for a billion plays but yeah for four million subs i don't think it even registered well it did we like ah well we we need to get a piece of artwork and do that we did for the eighth in the world eighth in the world i had a what was supposed to be a red velvet cake but it wasn't it was a carrot cake masquerading as a red velvet cake and it was awful it was horrible and i tried i tried to eat it in utah it didn't go well It's crazy to think for like a hundred thousand, you did this mega party.

1:00:11And then for four million, you probably just sent a bicep emoji on Slack. That's it. Yeah, probably the Pornhub emoji on Slack. A quick aside, trust really is everything when it comes to supplements. A lot of brands may say that they are top quality, but very few can actually prove it, which is why I partnered with Momentus. They make the highest quality supplements on the planet and their whey protein is literally the cleanest on the market. It's fast-absorbing isolate sourced from grass-fed European cows, which means no hormones, no antibiotics, no GMOs. Plus it's NSF certified, meaning that even Olympians can use it.

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1:01:17All right, Seth, what you got? So just to piggyback off Johnny's there, because I really like the takeaway of like the person that you become. I think there's another thing that you can draw from that too. So I fully agree, but you were talking about like, chewing on the menu so mistaking the menu for the meal and ascribing that as the to to your happiness and we're the ones that always move the goalposts for our happiness every time we hit a particular milestone and we renegotiate the contract with our brain so that we end up in this trap where you know the your brain releasing a little bit of of some neurotransmitter but you raise the bar of oh, but it has to achieve an even higher bar to get the same little blurt of dopamine.

1:02:06And a lot of it's because we almost feel like it's too simple to just enjoy the basic pleasures of life that are immediately available of health and relationships and nature and the sun and friends and things that if they were taken away from you, you would actually want to exchange everything for that. So there's a book by a media giant who was the head of PC World Magazine and a bunch of conglomerates. It's called Felix Dennis, How to Get Rich. And it's like a tongue-in-cheek book about I'm sat here at the age of 84 writing this book to you, dear reader, who's probably in your 20s or 30s and despite the billions that i've amassed i would swap places with you in an instant because you have the one thing that i don't which is time and i would still have the better end of the deal um so it's almost like that the things that we're chasing like most people listening to this podcast are probably in the top like 20 percent of global wealth anyway and yet we think that if we get to the top 19 % or the top 18 % or whatever, that something's going to change.

1:03:24I saw Ferris shared this quote from Marian Seldes the other day. The hardest thing to teach a student and to believe consistently is that there is nothing out there to go and get. There is no part, career, opportunity for which you should be searching and scrounging and coveting. All of the preparation is within. And if you keep yourself mentally and physically fit and you remain generous with yourself and others and stay deeply in your study about your craft whatever is yours will then arrive so with that in mind it's like there are basic pleasures that are always available and when they're gone like health for example when that challenge we've all i think all of us have gone through some health challenge in the last like 10 years where we've suddenly been like oh wow actually i could really do with a bit more of that again um so instead it's like enjoy those pleasures and then organize your life such that you can enjoy the passage of time as you move towards your goal and then you've got the best of both worlds

1:04:51I think this is from the entire year, which is that unteachable lessons are unteachable. And this has been the best essay. I wrote it in January and then dropped it on Rogan a couple of weeks after that. And it's still just, it's a fundamental truism that there are a particular category of insights about life that you cannot learn without experiencing. And money won't make you happy. Fame won't fix your self-worth. You don't love that pretty girl. She's just hot and difficult to get. You should see your parents more. You should work less. You should spend more time in a hammock. You should enjoy a holiday without having your phone.

1:05:29You'll never care about anything that you're thinking of apart from when you're thinking about it. Like all of these lessons over and over. The next follower count won't matter. The reason that people proclaim them with such like grandiose ceremony when they get there is that they can't believe that that was the case, despite the fact that generations of parents and media and literature and archetype and myth and songs and art have told us, here are the pitfalls to look out for. And it's this weird kind of like cute narcissism that we all have, where we think that that might be true for them, but not for me.

1:06:10my particular it's the classic like oh shut up granddad like i'll figure it out myself yeah yeah okay my unique constitution would allow me to dance through this minefield a very well laden very well described tripwires and i won't trip on any of them so i'm working on uh the next build of this unteachable lessons thing because i think it's so good um one of the so first off i guess you are, if you chase something that you were warned was hollow to arrive there and find out that the warning was correct, you were in good company. That's the first lesson of the unteachable lessons thing. But the second one is that they are unteachable.

1:06:52So the self-castigation of I should have known what I didn't know before I knew it, like I should have seen this thing coming or whatever. That is simply not the way. The unteachable lessons are self-reinforcing. They are unteachable, which means you have to do them in order to be able to understand them. And I think this is what maybe a good bit of us are reckoning with now, that unteachable lessons don't really matter all that much until you're at the stage where you've learned that the lesson should have been realized in advance and you knew about it and then you get this guilt and you get the shame around, oh, fucking hell, how could I not have seen?

1:07:36Did the guys not tell me? Did they not say that the 4 million subs wasn't the answer, that the so on and da, da, da, da, da. And I think what I realized was Unteachable Lessons is cool to point at, but doesn't actually give anybody any sense of, all it does is mark the way to the edge of the cliff that they are going to jump off of. And on your way down, you'll realize that you're in okay company. So maybe you feel a bit less lonely. But the next one is you can't realize this stuff before you've experienced it. And because of that, you shouldn't be whipping yourself into like pain and saying, what an idiot, I shouldn't have done this.

1:08:20It's a justification for self compassion that way smarter, way richer, way more accomplished, more worldly people who had more advantages than you knew more and did the exact same thing, bigger for longer till the end of their life. They died trying to do it. And okay, you dedicated however many weeks, months, years, decades to this career, relationship, pursuit, goal, dream, whatever it might be, to find out that what was at the end of the rainbow wasn't a part of gold you're in good company what's that programming like you can't just take it on faith otherwise you'll be sat there with fomo yeah it's the naval thing it's far easier to achieve your material desires than to renounce them i think it's like the best reason to achieve them to clear them off 100 it's way easier and this sounds like a thing to say but demonetize um it's it's literally easier to buy a ferrari than it is to rid yourself of the desire to get a Ferrari.

1:09:23That doesn't speak to how easy it is to get a Ferrari. It speaks to how difficult it is to be able to rid yourself of the desire for a Ferrari if you really want to. It's who you become in being able to get the Ferrari in the first place, isn't it? Yeah. But yeah, I think like a really bad credit rating. Yeah, true. Bitches. I think like if by gaining a certain amount of money, you remove your desire to get more money. fantastic the quickest route the quickest route to getting rid of the desires to achieve it yeah yeah 100 um what have i got next uh you know one we've discussed before actually um not on the show so you spoke then about giving up desires another problem is is envy or jealousy and i've one of the things i've tried to do rather than give up envy or jealousy is have a bit more of a stricter criteria of when I'm willing to be envy or jealous.

1:10:19So what I kind of developed is this idea I call call of duty versus war. So call of duty is kind of what I project Johnny's life to be like, right? Like maybe some of the highlights that I hear and the wins and all of that stuff. And then the war is okay. When I've actually been with you for a week and lived your life, if I'm envious of the war, then that's fine. But if I'm envious of this call of duty, 1 % highlight reel, that doesn't exist then that's a problem so i use i mean i use two examples i mean one of them is um uh is a business guy we both know super super super successful and he's got everything beautiful family amazing business um crushing it year on year and he's got to the scale now where we're talking it's a huge mega business as with him you could easily feel envious he goes yeah i've got um I think it was 2 ,000 lawsuits this month.

1:11:13Because when your business gets to that scale, you're constantly dealing with litigation from so many different angles. Wasn't he dealing with this personally as well? I don't, yeah. He jumped in on some email while you were - Yes, yeah. And he's one of my favorite people in the world. But I go, oh, wow. Like if I want to be envious, I've got to go to the war. I've got to be, oh, I also want the 2 ,000 emails a month. And likewise, I mean, me and you were on the road trip. And I think it's probably good for the viewers because I think a lot of people could look at you and go, good looking guy, super successful, rich, knows loads of people.

1:11:46And that's the kind of call of duty model. Me and Chris are on a road trip in America and we're going to put the tunes on and blare through the roads. And then Sky, your podcast ads manager calls up. And I think with the way people assume the ads work for the show is probably, oh, Chris just gets a load of free stuff and money, right? That's what I think they think whereas you kind of then get to sit there with the war and it's sky going yeah they're just not happy with that instagram story it's chris good i filmed that one four times now why are they not happy with it and i go oh okay my model before was the call of duty and now i'm seeing the war so unless i've seen the war i'm not envious and if i i see the war and i like it i'm willing to be napoleon i think when mark zuckerberg was on joe rogan he describes like his morning and it's like he wakes up and he doesn't look at his phone because when he looks at his phone that's just loads of bad news.

1:12:36And that thing was like, oh God, that never goes away. It doesn't matter how big the business is. It just gets more. Well, the emails are just worse. It's the emails that 15 people below you didn't have the answer to. Well, that's another Sam Harrisism where there will never come a day when you don't have any problems. Where did you think that you were going to wake up one day and there'd be no problems, like getting to a video game level where there's no more enemies to fight. No, your problems will change but having problems will never go away. The line from your idea about Call of Duty versus War is nailed by James Clear here.

1:13:08How many people love the idea of a thing, but not the reality? It doesn't make sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it. If you don't want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire. To crave the result, but not the process, is to guarantee disappointment. Beautiful. Beautiful. Nailed it. Popper has this idea. He's one of the founding fathers of modern science. that essentially life is problem solving. And then David Deutsch builds upon his ideas, which is, there's a few things, but one, all problems, unless they defy the laws of physics, are fundamentally solvable.

1:13:43So that's the optimistic note. But there's a big caveat there, which is as soon as you solve a problem, it leads to another problem. So solutions are infinite, but problems are also infinite. So let's say we solve the problem of fire. Okay. now we have the problem of smoke okay we've solved the problem of smoke we've got a chimney okay now we've got a dirty chimney okay we're gonna we solve that problem by getting some children in to clean it oh now we've got the problem of child labor and it's just and it's both the beginning of infinity both for problems and solutions so life is problem solving very good johnny what you got i have another lesson which is it's a dad-based lesson about being a dad.

1:14:28Have you seen American Beauty? Seen the film American Beauty? No. No. Tom Cruise? No. Shows that I haven't seen it. That's me verifying that I haven't seen American Beauty. Kevin Spacey. I'd recommend watching it. It's really good. There's a scene in it where there's a guy watching, he's just sat mesmerized, watching a bag blowing in the wind and he ends up in tears because he can't believe the amount of beauty in the bag floating in the wind and i've always been really jealous of that scene because there's a guy that's just absolutely mesmerized with something completely normal and ordinary and everyone's like going around chasing like the new thing the novel experience the new like location possession whatever the thing the the thing that i've noticed that i wasn't expecting about being a dad is the is watching watching your child see something for the first time completely reintroduces you to life like little things before they just became part of the background part of the scenery so like the first time they watch a dog bark the first time they see a bird flying the first time they hear a noise you're just transported for that split second into like oh god yeah like that is that's crazy that thing and it's a complete it's a i think like you guys probably had this like one of the challenges of like you get older and you feel like time goes faster and faster and faster it's just the same experiences on repeat it's a really nice like pinpoint back to like oh yeah like that cup's colder than i was expecting it to be oh yeah the moisture feels really weird and 10 minutes goes by so that's been a really cool something i wasn't expecting to happen but it's been a really cool experience this year that is so lovely it's been great seeing that in you as well Johnny over the year I've honestly I've like seen your heart open and like almost unlock this like aspect to your personality that that your daughter's brought out in you thanks man what is it that's going on with us right because you've had a kid but none of us have a moleskin notepad you were on a moleskin notepad but none of us are i i just get this sense i don't know whether anybody else that's listening feels it but 2025 was a very feely year generally i think for a lot of people that were around me it was like a big emotions yeah i think our lessons and realizations each time we do this end up being weirdly similar there's definitely we're on a trajectory that's sort of moving at a similar kind of pace you see that um when you have a load of um girls around one another their menstruation cycles sync up so it's like a hack sync up yeah yeah even remotely interesting yeah that's that's that's cool man i mean look the the opportunity to revisit something old for the first time is just super cool and obviously because you're marrying this with a deep meditation practice that's consistent you're getting at this from multiple angles it's funny as you started the story then about the film i started staring at the carpet and i was in this gaze for the carpet for like five seconds because one of my favorite stories um that i read this year was from morgan housel's book i don't know the name of the chap but he um he's blind uh from basically birth to about 45 and he has this experimental eye surgery and he can see for the first time and he's after the surgery just at the opticians just staring at the carpet for like an hour and he's just fascinated by the details of the carpet and i realize i walk past carpet all the time and don't think about it yeah so wouldn't Wouldn't it be crazy to be alive for a long time, but experiencing something for the first time?

1:18:32Because you see those videos. Well, you see those videos of babies that hear for the first time, but they're usually three or four or something. And you go, well, how much life would you have experienced up until that point? But if you're someone who has a sense of self and maybe a partner and position in society and all the rest of it, And then you get reintroduced this, you know, cosmic dose of novelty and wonder into a system that already is pretty well put together. I think I told you about this ages ago, the elderly clout hypothesis. We talk about the perils of fame too young, but never the perils of fame too old.

1:19:12Like what happens if you're 60 and you become the most famous psychologist in the world, say, well, you know, Jordan Peterson had to navigate that. You get plucked out of obscurity. You think you know who you are. You think you know your place in society. And now you've been ripped from your moorings. And you've got to try and work out who the fuck am I in this new world. I think we've all experienced that when we downloaded Alfred for the first time.

1:19:40Like everything we knew about the way we interface with technology suddenly just like, oh my God, I've been driving with the brakes on. I've been seeing in black and white all my life. There is a bit of me that thinks, because the growth of the show is so fucking exponential, so many amazing low-hanging fruit insights, to me, feel cheap to do, because they've been done maybe multiple times before. But because of the exposure that people have had to it, even within the same stream of content which is modern wisdom and me we probably do need to go back i think this should there should be like a required reading like mute the show yeah we've got to go through the ogs you're right because otherwise we're going to break the alfred server headspace calm and then arrived at waking up track pad speed rom wad you need to sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom right this is one of the problems some of the hacks that we believed in the companies are defunct now i'm pretty sure you can't get like there's sponsors the protein works I think actually went into administration and there's they're in the show notes at some point well it was Ron Ward then you were on Ron Ward I was a Ron Ward model do you do you stretching now I do none I don't do much stretching now George does loads do you a little bit stretching all the time Yousef what you got we'll get back to talking in just one second but first if you have been feeling a bit sluggish your testosterone levels might be the problem they play a huge role in your energy, focus, and performance, but most people have no idea what theirs are or what to do if something's off, which is why I partnered with Function because I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to actually understand what's happening inside of my body.

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1:21:59Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save 100 bucks by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. Similar to Johnny as well. periods have synced up. I have taken a bit of a journey from head to heart over the year too. And massive amounts of gratitude for being able to spend your guys' birthdays together, like to travel with you all and all of that stuff. I really just really seeing an appreciation for it. But almost like Johnny was saying about his daughter, where if you were transported, I think Hormuzzi talks about this, where it's like if you were transported from your 90s into today, and you're like, oh, I've suddenly got another, I'm suddenly 30 again.

1:22:52I've got another years to live. It's like you'd see it with a whole new level of gratitude. But my big one is me becoming post-truth. so this is the beginning of a hard right-wing pivot from you so here isn't it yeah here we go um the mirror only smiles when you smile has been my mantra for the year and it's just as concrete as it sounds like you're sat staring in the mirror miserable and going oh and i don't like what's in the reflection i need to try and change that a thing in the reflection and the mirror represents the world around you whereas actually like you can never change the reflection all you can do is bring the positive energy to it and then everything else reflects it back to you so it's just moving from left brain overly empirical have to get to some objective truth out there in order to give myself the permission to say that this is true or adopt a belief or adopt whatever you're like actually no like you you can you choose your beliefs like we choose them anyway so it's not as if like you're suddenly becoming woo woo by doing that um it's just being conscious about it and then bringing what whatever energy you want to see reflected back into the world and um in doing that it's just been it's like opening up a different gear in my mind so um that's been a big shift in just how i'm choosing to see reality very feelsy we're all very feelsy which i love i i think i do you know what it makes me think it makes me think that the intuition that i had for most of the last 12 months was right it's like this is a big um uh like my biases are being confirmed and uh it's not just you yeah it's not it's not and And I think certainly, at least from the show's perspective, a lot of what I've talked about over the last 12 months has been less hardcore hustle and grind Goggins mentality thing.

1:25:00I contributed to that. The industry of fuck your feelings, bro, just work harder. I served my time contributing to that. But even fucking Hormozy started to make the pivot this year where he's thinking, well, maybe I should pay a little bit of attention to what's happening below the neck. Maybe I should care a little bit more. And yeah, you could say a good summary is that it's all vibes, ultimately. But what you're trying to do is construct some external situation or life or level of success or belief system or whatever externally to make yourself feel something internally. But there is a more direct route there.

1:25:43Well, the post-truth idea Yusef has probably stems from, I don't know, Yousef, but Derek Sivers has this book called Useful But Not True. And he has this. I haven't read it, but yeah, very much. You can read it in a couple of hours. So there's, yeah, Sivers has this Useful But Not True. And he starts off with this story of, obviously for people who don't know, he ends up being a quite successful entrepreneur, internet programmer, et cetera, et cetera. But what a lot of people don't know is when he was 17, he crashed into a lady that was driving and broke her spine and she was paralyzed for the rest of her life and he carries this from like 17 to 34 just like ruminating on it day after day after day like what he did and like how all his success is meaningless because he's such an awful person and one day he goes well i'm going to take some agency over i'm actually going to go and see her and apologize so he turns up at a door she answers the door and he immediately starts sobbing like in tears and goes it's me derrick i'm so sorry i crashed into your car i paralyzed you and she's like hold on hold on she goes come on walk on in and she's walking so they both like sit down and he's kind of discovers that he didn't paralyze her like she like broke a bit of a vertebrae but she's been fine ever since and what's interesting is she's been blaming herself for the accident ever since so they both end up crying realizing that they both had these kind of false memories uh in their head the entire time yeah it's scary to work out that your worldview is incorrect which it is yeah yeah and it's emoji but in how many other places do you think that you've hit a woman how many how many assumptions do you have about yourself or about the world or about the past that weren't that aren't that way oh well and this is i think one of the problems that you have with going too deep into the therapy speak world without having action and i'm sure if i was to make this would be cool if i was to make a prediction for next year i get the sense that we will or at least for me i predict that i'm probably going to keep moving through the emotions thing but realize it's made me less effective and actually try and come back out the other side into more action-oriented stuff but doing it from a more embodied place like okay i've looked into the abyss and i've stared at the shadow a little bit and now i'm going to try and regarner the fuck your feelings bro just work anyway but while actually feeling them and uh well that's what you were saying while back chris where like it's not that we're throwing out the idea of being able to do hard work it's just not conflating the actual pain of the work with the progress yeah do you think that you know the thing i think we probably all had this before you like meditate or do any kind of self-improvement stuff is that will will this sap my desire to work harder or do you feel like that's happened you can get there i i think I can get there.

1:28:51Yeah. Because I can not in terms of not wanting the goals anymore. And perhaps part of this is simply just achieving a lot of the goals, but at least a good bit of it for me comes out of, well, how much of what I was doing was to hide from emotional states that I didn't want to feel. Like I feel lonely, so I'll work hard. Or I feel frustrated, so I'll work hard. Or I feel insufficient or inferior, so I'll work hard. And in that, you hide, you artificially bolster your sense of self-worth because you don't feel like without that you're enough. So you're chasing enoughness and you're injecting work rate into it.

1:29:40And it's doing two things. it's pushing you towards something which makes you think well i'm moving in the right direction it doesn't matter if i don't love myself today because tomorrow i'll be better and you have this sort of permanent manana manana manana ring of that but the other thing is by being so busy it drowns out the fleeting thoughts that make you doubt stuff in any case so a busy calendar is a hedge against existential loneliness and if you just stack your day back to back i'm moving in the right direction so the long term like i'm doing the thing thing gets sorted plus the immediate I've insulated myself from being able to hear the thing thing is also happening so I think it can but ultimately if the reason that you work so hard is so that you can finally feel good about yourself or be happy or have good vibes and if in the process of doing that you destroy the vibes and you don't make yourself feel good about yourself if you can just access the vibes directly it doesn't matter like you have actually managed to find a shortcut through the mountain by tunneling straight through the middle of it and um it's still wet clay for me like all of this stuff is still really really really fucking wet clay but uh i think it's the i think it's the right way to go and i think that a lot of people realize this as well and it's there is kind of two worlds there's the the people who are still like looking at the top of the mountain and then some people who have done a little bit of stuff maybe got to some kind of an altitude and like don't think that i need to go any higher i think i actually need to go down and reassess my route and the people who are still on the climb just do not understand the perspective that the people who have gone a little bit higher up got and that's fine because eventually they'll get there and it's the unteachable lesson and so on and so forth but it does lead to um it sounds much more like uh upward aiming and and and supportive and noble to be on the climb and it sounds like privileged bourgeois to say, you know, man, I'm just like working on my vibes, dude.

1:31:40But I get the sense that anyone who's sufficiently mindful is going to end up there in any case. So I think this is a path that everybody's on just at different stages. The best analogy I've heard for this is that it's not about the weather, work, hard work, laziness whatever there's any there's no moralizing of the thing itself it's about if you're using feelings of insufficiency to drive your work then it's like you're using dirty fuel which will eventually destroy the engine so it's not hard work is bad it's if the dirty fuel is the thing which is driving you to do it then that's gonna collapse and why you're working hard yeah i've i had like the it's weird that you said that because i had like i've been thinking about this a lot of like the feeling that you have achieved a thing you've been chasing a long time and the like the the drive you kind of feel the drive going away a bit the what i what i think the next step is is like you've just completed call of duty on hard and now you need to start again at level one but on veteran and you kind of know like oh it's this level that guy's there and that guy comes out that door and shoot him so you're kind of going through that you pick a different thing to chase that's gone george this sounds very technical which you shouldn't be but do you think it's playing call of duty again at a hard level do you think it's playing a new game i think it has to be the same game because that's then you're like navigating the new goal but kind of knowing like oh this happens because i think the problem with like the first goal with the i want to bed gender kilos is you that is the beginning of the journey of this is it it's the type of way i just need this type of way i just need a hundred thousand subscribers but when you pick like if chris picked 10 million subscribers but all right well yeah here we go again but do you think same journey so to use the 100 kilos one do you think it's okay now i'm gonna do 110 120 or do you think it's oh now i want to get my resting heart rate down to this or i want to get great parties or whatever it is it's so i think like that's the it obviously it can't be the same goal so the call of duty is just an analogy do you see what i mean yeah so the reason it's like it's it's picking a new goal that that challenges you in a different way but you know that like this is just the this that's how you get the fuel that's how you get the drive back so it doesn't matter if it's the same thing or a new goal it's just a bigger thing than previous essentially yeah but it's the um it's like because i think when you have those feelings of like oh oh, you know, I've just kind of reached this goal and it was just fulfilling this thing.

1:34:19And I think that just means like you've arrived at the tail end of that. Like that particular arc. That's the final level. Well, you think in arcs a lot. I remember one of the insights from Relationships 101 that you had, which I think is still true, is a lot of people restart the same cycle with a new person, assuming that they're going to get some more longevity out of it. Or is it not? This relationship will be different. Yeah, no, it's largely the same arc from excitement to familiarity and people think that the familiarity is an indication that they should switch to get someone who the excitement lasts with for longer yeah but it's not that arc is pretty locked in and i i think that you're true and this is certainly true for me with the live stuff you know it's sufficiently similar to what i do but sufficiently different that it's a new territory a new video game to try and conquer and it feeds into the kind of starting from zero but I'm starting from zero.

1:35:14Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I guess the tighter and tighter spirals thing you said before is so true as well. Because in the micro, or if this is done too frequently, what this looks like is a non-essentialist worldview. It looks like you're trying to do lots of things at once, which means that you're not good at anything. It can be anything you want, but not everything. But you can be lots of things as long as you periodize when you're focusing on them. i couldn't have done live tour writing podcasts all the rest of the move to i couldn't have done that all at once but if i chunk them into sufficiently dedicated sufficiently long durations i'll probably get away with it uh all right we'll do we'll do one more one more little round um and if there's any absolute slammers just do a couple um this is a new one for me which I haven't written about yet.

1:36:06Just because you can lift it doesn't mean you should. And this is the inverse of the region beta paradox. So most people, if things get sufficiently bad, it galvanizes them to get out of a situation, something that's challenging or painful or difficult. But if you have an unusually high tolerance for discomfort and are pretty resilient, then you become like the David Goggins of suffering like fuck the boats I'll carry the whole fleet and what happens is you're able to put yourself into a situation where you can sustain discomfort or a wrong path or a challenging position or a job that you shouldn't stay in or a lifestyle that you need to check or whatever you can continue to push yourself through that because your capacity to hold on and to just keep going is so strong that you go way you find that the basement's got a fucking cellar with a trap door in it below the bottom of the line that most people's region beta would have kicked them out the bottom of it's like oh this was already bad enough and most people would have been galvanized into action but for some reason your capacity to like just keep going is so great that you do and you do and you do and you do and do and um it's strange because the things that you get praised for in public are often very damaging in private the the resilience that you need to get yourself through work is not the sort of thing that you're supposed to have in your friendships for instance you know if a friend continues to misuse you or take advantage of you or isn't there or it's just bad bad influence or whatever it is like if that's in work and you're trying to get this particular piece of coding or website to work and fit together fuck the zapier integration won't do this thing i'm trying to get this client i'm going to fly across the well and do all the rest of it that's fine but if it's you trying to regularly chase down a friend that's self-destructing there is a limit there is supposed to be a limit to that and um yeah the the realization just because something's heavy doesn't mean you should lift it and the reverse of that is just because somebody carries a weight well doesn't mean it isn't heavy so from the outside um a lot of the time people that listen to shows like this one and read your guys' stuff and George's stuff, they're usually the most put together person in the room, typically.

1:38:26They're the one that their friends turn to for advice, because you listen to, you read that psychology stuff, don't you? What should I do about my relationship with my mother or whatever it might be? And what that causes is for a lot of people to never ask the question of the person who usually answers and go, hey, how are you doing? can we check in the audio it's like no no no like i really mean how are you like what's what's let's turn this around and uh it takes a it takes a real brave friend it takes a real sort of impactful friend to push through the competence defense mechanism that everybody has up and um yeah in some ways that's another curse of competence that people don't see you as someone that needs reassurance or steps in to check on you.

1:39:14And I think, yeah, beware of using what you're praised for in public, your resilience in your private life. And just because someone carries the weight well doesn't mean it isn't heavy. That's great. It's RPE. It's RPE for personal life. Yeah, it is. I think this is kind of the same thing you're talking about, but like if you're a person, um, that is like in charge, responsible for things, you're, you're by default, the person that people come to for like advice or what do I do? How, how does this work? I think that straight away makes it harder to be like, I'm struggling because the, that you, I think the feeling that that creates is like, if I admit I'm struggling, they then have no one to ask, like, what do I do?

1:40:01I'm the guy. I'm supposed to be the guy or the go. So I think that I've definitely felt that feeling of like, when you're supposed to be kind of holding all of the everything together, you sort of have to maintain that like facade to a degree, even if you'd like, I don't know what to do. If you say that suddenly the whole, the whole thing. That's an interesting one. I remember reading, um, Endurance by Alfred Lansing and he's talking about Shackleton's diary entries versus what everybody else's diary entries are. Right. And Shackleton's diary entries are just racked with self-doubt and uncertainty.

1:40:31And And the whole experience is him just swimming in melancholy and fear. But the soon as he puts the diary down, he steps outside and he just, you know, galvanizes this entire group. So I do think that in a professional context, and if you are a leader, this is a price leaders pay that nobody else gets to see. But this is the reason that you're supposed to have a fucking supportive spouse or good friends who don't work for you or a therapist that you can talk to or whatever, whatever your outlet of choice is, but somebody who's there and with whom you can go, I don't fucking know what I'm doing.

1:41:06I don't know how to get out of this. And I think that's the value of multifaceted social group. Napoleon has this line that a leader is a dealer of hope. Could be Churchillian drift, but I'm pretty sure it's Napoleon. And my literally takes me onto of mine which is perfect um so to do a very much like a christopher nolan reveal now i'm going to criticize my previous one so then you come in here it's been a setup all along so the reveal is i think right now in 2025 2026 the deep work um which is kind of sitting there focused without any distractions is extremely useful but it's currently overpriced relative to the amount of people that probably listen to your show and do that and what i call deep sparring is significantly underpriced which is kind of what you discussed then right that you can't say to people oh i'm struggling with this particularly people that are relying on you but like i've realized now there's probably about three to five people in my life um where we can sit down go for dinner um i did this on friday with my friend harry in london we went for dinner spoke everything through and our laptops there and he was going through issues he's facing i was going through issues he was facing and vice versa and there's this uh nick camatra line of um when i advise other people i gain 20 iq points and when i advise myself i lose 20 iq points so you essentially gain 40 iq points because they get to come in and look at all your problems and they're a super smart person and then you get to go in and look at their problems and then the next time you come back because you've been together you're kind of endlessly smarter it's like what we spoke about at the start of the um just before we recorded which is the film oppenheimer you needed that deep sparring time in person if if feinman was in south america and fermi was over there like it wouldn't happen so there's something that yeah that and what's beautiful about the deep sparring idea is you probably need like three to four hours a quarter and then you stack up all that deep work on top of it versus you sitting in your own little cage ruminating coming up with the most absurd conspiracies about yourself and then working on top of that um i think it's a huge negative do you think the other people in this in the deep sparring need no should they have no context they have to be kind of completely separate um no i think you probably want somebody who you don't directly work with but you want somebody who you really really respect um like a good rule of thumb i've i've tried to take this year which is ignore like all criticism from critics and like listen 100 % or criticism from creative people or people that are doing things um so i think in that regard then i mean you probably could think of four or five people that you could sit down with and and the thing is it's kind of they call it a live straddling poker which is um when you go in other people start going in and i think there's some truth to that as well where if you go in and say hey i'm struggling with this what do you think you was to take over my life with a vr headset on what would you do they come up with gems and then they immediately go, well, I've got this thing and it's beautiful.

1:44:17It's licensed to go there. I think especially for guys. And this is one of the problems upon reflection with a lot of what's happening in the UK, I think, because you kind of have a multiplier effect of already a British allergy to earnestness and sincerity, plus the male allergy to earnestness and sincerity, and they kind of stack on top of each other. But if you can find somebody who is prepared to go there and you open the door that typically is reciprocated the problem is when you do it with the wrong person and they go what the fuck do you mean mate i don't get what you're talking about i was laughing because uh harry is the absolute master of that he's the antidote because he will just drop in an absolutely wild take on something and just be like, prove me wrong.

1:45:16And I don't think I can even repeat any of those takes, but yeah, it's the perfect thing. You have to have a sparring partner or friends that you can drop absolutely anything with, put it on the table in front of you and everyone just goes, all right, let's dissect this. What's interesting as well is if you study history, this is so common. So you had the Lunar Society in the UK during the Industrial Revolution, where all these pioneers, so Erasmus Darwin, who was Charles Darwin's grandfather, James Watt, and about 10 other leaders of the Industrial Revolution or poetry at the time would meet during a full moon.

1:45:51Because this is obviously pre-electricity, James Watt's still working on what he's working on. They know during a full moon they'd meet in somebody's garden and they would all discuss. So the whole foundation of the Western world was built on that. You then have Benjamin Franklin in the US where he'd have these like junto societies that he would host and he would mingle. I was literally reading the other day the book about the start of uber so uber starts because one guy is frustrated that he can't get a taxi so he's doing what i occasionally do while order from multiple taxi companies at once and the taxi arrives so he's then banned from all taxi apps and one day he's watching um casino royale and he sees james bond with his gps technology and he goes hold on because that's an idea and travis who's the the other founder of uber he hosts these jam parties at his house since he sold his company so he can just mingle and meet people and they're playing table tennis and that's where the idea of uber comes from so this idea of kind of sitting by yourself i think is just a fallacy that is a very a modern thing that deep sparring is so um significant throughout history the lone genius theory for sort of how history gets moved forward is so bullshit it's so fucking bullshit dude and i guess that would be another another lesson from this year i put it in one of the vlogs that came out recently which was you can go pretty fucking fast and quite far on your own and even if it's not as trite as like if you want to go fast go on your own if you want to go far go with other people that i don't know you can probably with enough resilience if you're the david goggins of suffering you can just fucking grit your teeth and make it to 80 and you'd have you'd have done fine but it'll be way less fun like if you want to have fun do it with other people so not only are you more effective it's also it's also more fun and it's easier yeah so you can get you let's say that you can get it done but you would have it be done with more discomfort more self-doubt and yeah you get to celebrate this fucking thing you get to celebrate whatever it is that you're doing with other people there's a great line of um you know the whole gladwell concept of 10 000 hours which has been debated but even in that context there if you meet with smart friend and discuss these issues you've now got 20 000 hours because you've got their 10 000 hours and you have 10 people you have 100 000 hours you can see where this is going so you're as friends with as many people as possible okay uh you got any simons to finish off with?

1:48:02Anything that you really wish that you'd said? I have a little hack that I've found useful. So it's being more practical with gratitude, practical ways to engineer that feeling. Because I've always struggled with that. I don't know about you guys, the whole like write three things you're grateful for, but you end up writing the same stuff. So one's a question that you can ask daily and one is a thing that you do one time. the one time is ask chat gpt or whatever your ai of choices so to say i am 35 i live in this city this whatever describe a monday a hundred years ago and the level of you just need to read it once you're like oh my god like heating not having to eat like spam for dinner not having to navigate through like a world war and all these things and you just suddenly see like little things in your day that you can a microwave completely take for granted you're like wow you sent me that passage is that what you've just got off no i was which passage you can refer to uh where water like i had a shower i woke up in a comfy bed and i did something else and you compared it to a queen an emperor and yeah just i mean i could do a six hour series on this right but even just study any part of history and you realize everything's so much worse than it is uh now and also everybody's always complaining so you kind of realize no matter how much better it gets everybody's going to always be complaining i mean you study world war ii it's not even that long ago and you go most of the people like we would have been on the front lines here's a crazy stat the average age of the Luftwaffe that were bombing the UK was 26.

1:49:43The average age of the RAF pilots, the reason why this isn't modern wisdom is the reason why we're not all speaking German, you'd be fine with the blonde hair, blue eyes, is the average age of an RAF pilot, 21. And you know how averages work. There's going to be a few of us blokes that are bringing that age up. And you just kind of go, oh my god like it's it's never ending um how much better it's gotten um but how much people will still keep complaining so i have a just a little twist on the gratitude thing because i did in that bedroom there the time capsule from you know the last decade of my life there is nine or ten six minute diaries and there's six months each so it's a lot of daily writing and the gratitude never got below the neck for me.

1:50:34And that sounds great. And I'm sure that it, you know, it's shocking. The question I would ask that I would get you ask yourself is, does this feel like I'm feeling it? Or is it just another sort of cognitive thought experiment? So this is my second one. Beautiful. So that's the, that's how I teed you up without knowing. Yeah, I did. That's like the, you know, shift the canvas. It's like, oh, all these things that I take for granted, how nice. The second question that you can ask yourself every day is, which I think I might've mentioned before, it's just what would, what would eight year old me have appreciated about my day to day?

1:51:09And that's stuff like I got to walk to the shop and buy a drink and walk back again without nothing hurt. Or like I'm at this part of my relationship with my partner and we got to do this and we've got all these plans and all these things to be excited about. And we have a holiday coming up and I get to go with whatever. That's the stuff that I feel. I think that's the way that I really struggle with. Write three things you're grateful for, but I find that question, you pick the stuff you would ignore because it's the stuff that when you're 80 just won't be there anymore, that you overlook, which is that's what 80-year-old you will be grateful for.

1:51:48What do you think those biggest things eight-year-old Johnny will be thinking? I think it's the feeling of excitement about what's still coming. that like my daughter's a certain age and getting to see her grow up like friendships watching people achieve things there's so much to be still be excited for and not to say that doesn't that goes away when you're 80 but i think you're facing very different very different 10 years when you're 80 years old have you heard that quote the quote from a.n whitehead uh civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking of them so like johnny from 100 years ago doesn't like johnny from now doesn't have to go up the mountain and milk the goats and then like wash the clothes in the um the wooden pot and all this kind of stuff um and therefore can do stuff at much higher orders of operation that that uh famous email from steve jobs i grow little of the food i eat uh and of the little i do grow i didn't breed or perfect the seeds i didn't make any of my own clothing i speak a language i didn't invent or refine i did not discover the mathematics that i use i'm protected by freedoms and laws i didn't conceive of or legislate etc etc and then it's like at the end it's sent from my ipad like just a little hat tip like we're standing on the shoulders of giants yeah yeah that's good the the gratitude thing is hard to get right um certainly try the jhana stuff give that a go the panic attack of happiness yeah panic attack of joy see what happens it's michael the guy from earlier i'll put you in touch with him what do you guys think 80 year old you will be grateful for

1:53:32for me the obvious one i was reading this um chess clock it's called

1:53:42alfred yeah the i was reading there's this book called ken it's by ken lou um so he does these short stories and there's one called paper menagerie and kind of the ending is um he's reading a letter from his mom after she's died and it's a chinese family and they say the saddest the saddest feeling in chinese culture is to grow up an age where you're ready to take care of your parents and realize they're no longer there so that's probably the one that i think i'd be like oh wow my parents are still here oh that's cool that's cool i like the song by ken lu as well like Kenlu Kenlibu dibu dautsu Kenlu you know that one oh but it's going to be Christmas number one after that rendition Jesus Christ wow okay Yusef anything beyond that I don't know how you're going to top it yeah so I've got

1:54:44and sorry for derailing your your hack there Johnny I've got some like micro ones, but obviously Johnny and my hacks are so similar that in knowing we had this episode coming up, I went through my Obsidian, which has definitely passed the Watson filter, still using it, and looked at my George folder and thought, I just need to celebrate a few of the hacks that I've stolen from George and have served me well. So the boardroom exercise, which is basically you're sat at a boardroom in your mind when your mind is too busy and you go, okay, I've got different versions of myself all around the board.

1:55:29So you might have like the finance accountant version of you with the green cap and the cigar, or you have like the romance version of you with the rose and the teeth and the gym version of you, whatever, all these different kind of mini personas and you just give them all a chance to have their say so everyone else shut up you you've got five minutes take the floor voice what you need to say and as you work your way around you just clear out the pipes and it's just the the quietest that your mind will ever be. So George, thank you for that one. Framing decisions as experiments, big one I've learned from him this year of rather than deliberating over a decision that is a two-way door, you can just treat it as an experiment and then it just gets rid of any sense of like, oh, I've got to get this right.

1:56:29final three

1:56:34I'll take them unless there's any uh comments or questions on on those so far okay this is difficult because i've just for people's reference i've got no like visual feedback so i'm just like talking to myself having a great time we're loving it hojicha so if you like coffee but you're weaning yourself off you can go decaf but also hojicha is roasted matcha it's got that kind of caramelly chocolatey type taste but with much lower caffeine same level of theanine as matcha tea so becoming more popular lovely drink very uh very wholesome especially in the winter time or you can have it cold iced so hojicha um using voice notes as a trigger to go outside either listening to or recording voice notes i've just set myself a rule where i have to be walking around to send or receive a voice note just stops me from being a slug at my desk and you know just gets me up and out um the final one's a little bit long so i might

1:57:55however um all right i'll uh i'll steamroll through my last few uh take a photo of the room key slip with your room number on it when you check into a hotel good one just as you get it just have your phone out take a photo of it then i've been on tour a lot i've been through oh god 50 or 100 hotels maybe in the last couple of years and uh you especially if you're going back to back to back. There is no way you can remember your room number. I've been lost. I've had to go back down to not lose my room key, but to just be reminded of what room I'm in. That's a particularly embarrassing one. So just take a photo of the room key.

1:58:32Uber Black XL in America, they don't do it in the UK. Uber Black XL is so nice. If you're in the States, it gets a big Escalade or a Ford Explorer or something with a guy in a suit. And it's usually maybe twice the price, two and a half times the price of a normal Uber. so probably not good for big journeys but if you're out with some friends if this is a dicky one from your uh birthday in miami that he used it's just such a nicer experience if you've got four people four people will go in an uber x but it'll be pain uber xl you've still got bags of room we use two uber xls as our tour vans basically for all of tour with the soundboard and everything else that we needed to take.

1:59:11And then the last one is a quote from Franz Kafka in 1912. And it's basically a summation of all of the life hacks that we've ever done. It's a distillation of everything that you need to do in your life. So Franz Kafka in 1912, dearest, I beg of you, sleep properly and go for walks.

1:59:35I think it's so great. it's a single sentence for how you can probably get most things better in your life yeah well everything's better with those two things sleep properly and go for walks double do that that's the first entry in his in his day one that he's looking back on 20 years later and be like oh you still haven't slept properly or gone for enough walks you got anything left uh yeah i'll speed through we're doing a little speed round then um number one um is i told you about my um if i become the chancellor of the exchequer how i would increase the gdp by three percent overnight i would install large whiteboards in everybody's home so i think just having a large whiteboard always there there's that like it's kidlin's law of them if you could if you can state a problem clearly you've already solved it by 50 percent and my kind of twist on that is when you have a whiteboard, it's actually 70 % because it kind of stays there staring back at you and eats part of your subconscious.

2:00:35That's number one. Number two, and I want to make sure that I get a bit of context here because it does sound stupid, this one, but let me just test the room. One thing I discovered during COVID, I would do a lot of text messages, a lot of voice memos, and a lot of scheduled Zoom calls. How often do you just randomly ring a friend? I actually do that quite regularly. you do it quite a bit yeah never never and i found myself i think there's probably a lot of people listen to the show that do that as well where it's like hey mate do you want to chat tomorrow at nine and it's that you know that meme of there's two guys one's trying to stab the other and it's like me and like one schedule call my entire day versus i will just randomly pick up the fast be my thing like this year is to just randomly ring people um whenever like a nutcase and just check in on friends because you just stop doing it i go i've not actually had a phone call with a friend for 18 months what's your pickup rate what's the pickup rate on the calls about 30 40 okay yeah and then and then when you factor in dial backs it's like 70 to 80 percent and you just end up having conversations that you wouldn't have and it leads to that kind of deep this does create a deep deep anxiety in johnny though it's the reason he doesn't text back too quickly yeah well that's a separate conversation the hack for the hack go on double dial what do you mean ring them again straight away okay really that makes it feel like emergency Yeah, exactly.

2:01:56So if I rang you once... Right, but it's not an emergency. But it doesn't matter. Right, so you've got to assume one of two things. I'm either actually not available, in which case the double dial isn't going to work, or I am available, but I'm busy. Which means that the second one just pushes through a threshold to a level of severity that is inappropriate for what you're trying to do. And boy, you're trying to... All you've done there is optimize your pickup rate on the first time you call them. but future times they're going to go, oh, that's double dial Johnny. Yeah. Meanwhile, his house is on fire.

2:02:31Yeah. Okay. So you're worried about boy who cried wolf because, okay. And also you've, I think it's more, it's more of fun conversation, right? That's the whole game there is to have more fun. Don't start me off with adults. I don't just don't have fun. I don't need to like optimize my conversion rate on a chat. But you want to speak to more people then, surely? Then you just pick, they can ring back. Yeah, they'll ring back when you call somebody else. Yeah. Just go, I go in the area manual style. I think this has touched a nerve in you guys i feel like if you're gonna ring someone ring them twice if you're gonna ring them you want to speak to them so you're sounding very entitled well i think it's entitled to ring someone i'm gonna call you so many times after do it if you double dial the point the point is right you ring someone because you're trying to get in touch with them so act like you're trying to get in touch with them but this is not like a formal conversation it's very like what's up what's going not fine you guys are inferring that if i ring twice it's an emergency but i'm just trying to speak to you which is the purpose of the first call time always be closing always be calling

2:03:36anything else um let's do i mean you said mentioned it then you can do some fun ones of just um create your own language um so you need subtitles on for the rest of this part but no um just like changing words so um you said mentioned not using decision using the word experiment and you realize oh when you use that you're light on yourself but also the best part about it is you tell everybody else to run an experiment you say hey i'm going to move to this place oh it's a big decision everybody kind of reflexively yeah acts like it's a big decision it's kapil got to stand up comedian who goes on stage one version of him immediately apologizes after the offensive joke the crowd picks up on it the other version just kind of laughs it through and there's what you guys worried about it's not a big thing have you considered though that there might be some decisions that warrant you taking them seriously and also warrant sort of a serious reception and you're making light of it may cause your friends to be a bit more blasé than is warranted perhaps you shouldn't try and base jump for the first time ever off that cliff yeah i mean ah no it's Fice and it was going to be Fice he was having a laugh I mean I'll chat to that about my 20 children I've just had I always find these conversations a bit like it's like somebody's so far this way somebody's overthinking what they're going to order from a dinner menu to then like oh maybe don't just have three kids with three different women it's like the classic thing of you have a female friend who says oh I don't want to go to the gym I'm going to get too bulky and it's like i've been trying that for years and i can't do it with 10 times the testosterone so i don't think you've got to worry about somebody going from not being able this is specifically for people that are struggling with decisions like the decisions that are reversible labeling them as experiments is useful um other one is if i say the word problem what's the kind of emotional reaction that you get constriction constriction pain frustration if i say the word puzzle excitement pain

2:05:41I'm working on a new one for the news I've been thinking about because like the news is just because of all of the news that you can see I'm going to call it the gel mans because you know gel man amnesia yeah or the the currents or the wrongs because it's just remember when you tried did you remember because you've been you've been doing this for as long as I've known you've been doing this for nearly eight years now remember when you tried to rename the un-toilet-bowl-hit pee that drops on the seat. I didn't try and rename that. I tried to give it a name because it didn't have a name. Okay. What was it?

2:06:16Can you remember the name? Yeah, it's catchy, right? It's fly-dripping rather than fly-tipping. It doesn't have a name. Think about, I've got an Amex in there with 16 digits on the front. I haven't been able to recall it. must have used it 200 times in the last couple of years i can recall fly dripping the fact that my brain has decided to hook itself into the name for piss on a toilet bowl but not the 16 digit number which is in between me and maybe getting out of a third world jail cell it's also the name for piss on a toilet bowl that three people in the world would recognize many more now yeah many more now um so there's just i mean probably a good one to finish on is book recommendations specifically around language.

2:07:03So there's a book called The Etymologicon, which is where I got a lot of this stuff from. There's a bloke, Mark Forsyth, he's amazing. So he has this line in here where he's chatting about Milton and this guy invented the following words, right? This is how generative this man was. Impassive, obtrusive, jubilant, loquacious, unconvincing, satanic, persona, fragrance, beleaguered, sensus, undesirable, disregard, damp, criticise, irresponsible, love lawn exhilarating sectarian unaccountable incidental and cooking he created all those for his words so fly dripping you've got to keep churning them out there have you seen shakespeare's equivalent no insane the numbers of words the number of words that shakespeare created which are part of common parlance now is wild but it's where we just accept language as it is a fun one is from that book is where the word is christmas related is where the word turkey comes from so we think it's basically because it's the it came from turkey but interestingly in turkey they call it um essentially uh hindu referencing to india so it didn't come from turkey and it didn't come from india but it's this whole chain that exists so turkey did not come from turkey i remember in that book because i've got the paperback of that same book next to my bed after you recommended it and um shit comes from uh german words is it scheissen um but there's a couple of interesting potential explanations for it one of them being store high in transit so if you had manure and you were taking it on a ship you wouldn't want it down low where people could smell it you'd want it in one of the higher um storage units store high in transit it's one of these uh situations where i guess you get kind of a chuchillion drift explanation that's culpable but wrong because posh is port out starboard home and it was also to do with the sides of the ship that uh the upper class were going to be put on but store high in transit uh mark fosythe on the show soon so have you got anything before we leave or are you gonna join us in saying goodbye in malaysia yeah i wish i could be with you guys but i'm glad to at least have a seat on the laptop Well, you've been sat on a, you look really comfy.

2:09:10You've been on one of the cushions in the corner for the entire episode. That's it, ladies and gentlemen. Merry Christmas from us here. This is cool to be able to do this again every year, every winter time back in Newcastle where we first started doing this podcast coming up on eight years ago now. Have a good period, eat everything that you can, take some time off and do a little bit of reading and review in between now and the new year. I know it's super duper intense, but uh i think it's a if used right it's a really nice period i know some people get sad around this time of the year but it's the shortest day of the year just went 21st so it's like typical stuff gets dark and then it gets lighter so i hope that our touchy-feely life hacks and lessons has uh kept you appropriately festive and all of us except for yousef because he's selfish and in a different country uh we we dressed up appropriately so anything to say or are we done we're done Merry Christmas Merry Christmas give some love to your family members or if you're in Malaysia family member family member

2:10:15Excellent Merry Christmas everyone Merry Christmas Unreal let's go

2:10:26If you are looking for new reading suggestions look no further than the Modern Wisdom reading list it is 100 books that you should read before you die the most interesting, life-changing, and impactful books I've ever read, with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And you can get it right now for free by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.