#723 - Modern Wisdom Christmas Special - Reflecting On The Wildest Year

24:13The one thing that can happen is begin to have like a reverse placebo where if I have a bad night's sleep and then I check it I feel like I've had an even worse night's sleep. I think for the whoop users completely disregarding a recovery score is a good idea. So that that was a quote it's you said you literally said to me we were walking to

24:36I'm so focused on like, it's amber today. I thought I'd go eight and a half hours of sleep. Bro, I slept through my flight, sorry, I stayed awake through my flight from Austin back to the UK, which means that eight hours had lasted me for two days, not good, dying all day yesterday. I got tracked on whoop, 11 hours of sleep last night, so that's probably like 11 and a half with a little bit of awakenness. But I'm only at 40 % recovered. Like, hey, get fucked. I had 11 hours of sleep last night. I feel great today, regardless of where my HIV and my resting heart rates are. And then there's a self -fulfilling prophecy that if you're told that you've slept badly, you start telling yourself the story that, oh, maybe I, and then you perform worse.

25:19And there's studies that confirm that, that if people are told falsely that they've slept badly, they perform worse on cognitive tests, then if they just can not give a lot of data. So is that a sleeper? No, it's a sleeper. So I think the way you've done it gone about it is great because you've identified what is the keystone needle mover, which is total sleep time. But there's a lot, tracking devices have a lot of redundant data. Excellent. They do have a lot of redundant data. And so my medical training is very much drilled into me that you don't test what you're not looking for because if you just do a panel of blood tests on someone who's asymptomatic and something's out of whack, what do you do?

26:00thing. You've now got a thing that you have to deal with and you don't have a context for being able to put it into the context of the symptoms that they're dealing with. So and it adds to the bandwidth as well, doesn't it? If you test loads of things all at once, if you have a smart meter, for example, and it tells you, this is how much energy I'm using now, and this is how much it's costing me, well, is that really going to change my behavior? Or have I just added to the open loops in my head if something that isn't helping. I like that. I like it. Yeah. So I suppose the summary is put less attention on tracking like the other side of the equation.

26:38Because you probably do that. Well, it depends who's listening, just the problem with these things. But if you're the sort of person who wears a wiper and you're probably handling the activity side and you probably ignore, you're like, I'm green recovered, but I got six hours of sleep and actually the biggest change is just volume of sleep. Focus on So as Johnny said, we've had quite a turbulent year. What do you tell us about that? So both. I guess the main thing is that from this time last year to now, the team has gone from two people to 19 people, which along with that comes a lot of operational complexity, a whole bunch of skill sets that Johnny and I just didn't have that we have to suddenly develop.

27:23We set up propane about 10 years ago, well 14 years ago, and we're very much like skit -soid introvert type characters that just like to be at our desk doing our own thing and we barely even communicate with each other. We're just like in the whole... You're annoying. Well, I'm sorry. So we just kind of in the whole doing our thing and suddenly it's like, oh, there's a team and we have to learn to let go of a lot of the processes that normally we'd be handling ourselves. So the lesson has been that when you're especially running a business, it's like an accelerated version of this. And I know you've been thrown into this is that it's, as James Clears says, it's a vessel for self -improvement disguised as a money -making enterprise.

28:05It's the biggest driver of your personal growth because it comes in and just twist your nipples and finds all of the spots that you've got your trigger points and it will force you to level up and to learn those skill sets and to grow. It's external to you. All personal growth is always done at your own pace, but the business isn't. So it forces you along. It's road running versus running on a treadmill. Yeah, you're getting steamrolled and it's like a heat seeking missile as well because it finds all of the things that would get you emotionally triggered or wound up. So a difficult client or getting working late nights or getting stressed about a potential I don't know, a legal case or whatever it is.

28:46But if you're more agreeable or disagreeable learning from this point of view. Fear that it'll go away, fear that it'll fail, feel you have people down, fear of how people think of you. Full spectrum. They're all turn out to turn out, aren't they? The business is a vehicle for personal growth disguised as a wealth -making machine. That's fucking brilliant. Is that in a time of cabbage? Don't think it is. Not sure. No, one of his tweets, I think. Is it one of the biggest hacks I've found for that is documentation. So let's say if you write quite a lot about anxiety and all the stuff when you get that fourth employee and you've doubled the head count.

29:18And if you could now go back at 19 and review those thoughts of how worried you was and anxious you was and you go, oh, and you can see the evidence of you now going, I'm now almost five X that. It makes it a lot easier to then play that again, go and look how anxious I was then and I figured it out. It's constant evidence whereas in business, there's no like Instagram account for it. So like trying to create as much documentation is. That's so great. And especially between you two guys as well to be able to share it. Oh yeah. We look back and think, remember that thing that we thought was a massive problem?

29:48You know what would be, you know, it would be a really good way to do this. A slack chat, a private slack channel that's just got you to in. Where you can just bring dump shit to each other. Like, dude, I'm feeling a little bit whatever, whatever about today. And that's all that goes in there. And that would be the journal between it, especially if you've got a business partner, going to be tougher for the solo pre -nurs. I remember it's in my day one. So day one for me is serious shit, right? It's like there's been periods of three years where nothing's gone in. There's been periods of six weeks where I've documented three times.

30:19Day one is for like fucking hell, like something really dramatic has happened. I remember there's still fucking in there. There's this one where the MC for room two upstairs in the R &B room of voodoo Saturdays at Riverside told me that he was leaving to go to a competing club night in Sunderland. And I felt that that was salient enough to put in my fucking day one. Right. That was the beginning of the thing that was going to be the snowball effect that would cause that first off the like Asian sock wasn't going to come anymore because he was their favorite MC and then after Asian sock went obviously all of the other dominoes were going to tumble and I was going to be homeless alone on a street and I was going to get gluten intolerance and live on a bridge.

31:02But that's perfectly appropriate because at the time you were just reacting to the circumstances as you found them and it was a hot button for you. That's the thing that tapped into this golden thread of like, I'm going to be under a bridge, I'm going to get a gluten intolerance, I'm going to have all these, it's like, so that was like a real hot button then and it is, you say it's great to come back to that and be like, just yeah. If you've seen day one has this feature of the on this day feature. Yes, yeah. I don't have enough, I don't have an eventries. So I try and use it, I just after I meditate, I just write what's on my mind.

31:35And if you just always, there's pretty much always, if you do enough, there's an on this day, on this day, eight years ago, ten years ago, twelve years ago, and you just like, God, there's so many recurrent things. I'm going to have to bank both of those comments for my next round, because you guys are front running, one of my other lessons. So again, like one of the worst life hack episodes is when two different people arrived and had done the same life hack, and then you got not - You said we're going to, oh, you're going to fucking up for a fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. All right, so my first one, it's cool that we've got this sort of human centipede of ideas coming on here.

32:08This is from you, which is max content razor. Would you consume your own content if not, don't post it? And that inspired post content clarity, which is your content diet should be spirulina for the soul, not fast food for your amygdala. And what I realized was that when you're consuming anything on the internet, it's almost all where it tends toward the limbic hijack because if it didn't, you would watch something else, which was more limbically hijacking, you know what I mean? So during the moment of consuming pretty much anything, this podcast included, you are a bad judge of whether or not that piece of content is good for you or not because it's just compelling.

32:48But what you can do is have a sort of pillow talk post -cuttle review of how did that particular session of YouTube watching or TikTok scrolling or Instagram browsing make me feel, and was there anything in there that is better or worse? And if there's stuff that continues to come in as worse, it's like unfollow not interested in this channel, don't recommend to me again. Does all of the social medias have a way of down voting as well as up voting channels? and you can get rid of them, you can hide them from your feed, you can do all the rest of the stuff. And if you hide something from your feed, it's tantamount to that entire worldview or that creator just die.

33:26Right? It's exactly the same. So unfollowing is great, isn't it? Like there are people who just they always come up on your feed and they annoy you and then you unfollow them. Yeah. Even muting, you know, if you can't, if there's some, you know, interpersonal reason why you can't get away with the unfollow, just muting accounts that you don't like. I always struggled with Instagram, delete it, download it, go back and forth with it. And I had this realization one day about this three, four question of like, did this educate me? No, okay, move on to the next question. Did this entertain me or make me laugh?

33:59So it's like an Alan Partridge thing or a funny meme that stays on. If no, move on to the next list of, do I want to see this person in the next six months? If no, mute. And that, it takes about 12 hours of pruning, like a day and a half of pruning just whenever you're on, and immediately the newsfeed is infinitely better. That is the one thing about the people complain about the four U -algorithms that they're filter bubbles, but you can also create a wonderful filter bubble. If all you do is like photos of docs, you will just have a feed of docs. Well, we're training the algorithms on what we actually want, but the problem is that what we want in the moment is not what we want to want after the moment.

34:38retrospectively, we wish that we were watching more of X or Y or Z. One interesting thing I think that's happening with YouTubers, I think they have time -based recommendations, so at different times of the day, different things get recommended to me based on my viewing habits. So I tend to listen to World War 2 documentaries, which Shane Gillis calls early on set Republican. Like, getting interested in history documentaries is like, you know, if your man starts watching World War 2 documentaries, keep on working. But it is a gateway drug. It's early on set Republican. But I do that, but it only recommends them to me at night.

35:11First thing in the morning, it's not middle of the day. It's always 10 minutes to 15 minute videos that I can watch with my lunch. So again, just train the algorithm. But yeah. And then for the content creators or fledgling content creators out there, this is something that I'm battling with at the moment. There are ways to play the algorithm, and there are ways to add value, and there are things that you want to do. And between within those three prongs, is some balance of what you have to do. You have to play within the limits of the Algo or else, you're just gonna be shouting into the ether, but you don't wanna be completely controlled by it because that's just audience capture.

35:42There is ways of having impact, but you can sacrifice, reach, and what you want to do. And then that's also, that's kind of a more virtuous version, but still kind of audience capture. And then there's what you want to do, which can be like just total solipsism, like self -masterpotry, congratulatory glory, but that's also not playing the game. So somewhere in all of them is where you want to be, but not leaning too far to just what does the audience want and what will get lots of plays because if you wouldn't consume it what the fuck you doing now realize this at the live shows that I was doing this tour.

36:14I would happily go for a beer with any of the people that arrived and I know for a fucking fact that there are tons of podcasts is who couldn't say the same like they're not making an audience of people that are like them or people that are cool or people that are interesting. and every single person that came up to me, I was like, fucking, like a happily, like a train with this person, I go for a coffee with this person or whatever, they're all interesting, they're all killing it, they're all in good shape, they're all like cool or whatever in some form or another. And yeah, would you consume your own content if not don't post it?

36:42It's just, it slices through all of the bullshit. Do you think there's a, do you think the people who listen to your podcast are you, but like a previous version of? I think like you have to make content for what would five years ago, Chris listened to, or a little watch, rather. Because I see what you want to watch now. It's different. It's probably a little bit different, right? So yeah, but I also think that if you were posting what you 10 years ago needed, it wouldn't be a few steps ahead of where you won. And so you can still frame things in the learnings that you've had. You know, all of us have been shaped by your time in a big four accounting firm, your time as a doctor, your time in a bunch of different agencies or moving to London to go do this thing.

37:25So you talk where you're at, but you frame it with where you've been. And I think that that helps people to get along the steps. This is an Ali Abdull thing where he said, you don't want to teach people who are 10 steps behind you because you can't remember the problems that you had 10 steps ago. You want to teach people that are sort of three or four steps behind you because it gives them the path. It allows you to still be within that purview. But this is you know a reason for tracking the journey again as we said about taking photos about noting things down because if you don't track the journey, all of those learnings are just lost and you can't remember the things that were only salient to you five years ago as revolutionary because now they're taken for granted.

38:03You see that with like wealth gurus? So that Grant Cardone saying, oh yeah, when you're buying companies, you really need to figure, remember that this is it, and it's like for a regular person off the street or talking about how you're going to rent your fourth holiday home in Andorra, like it's stuff that's so far removed from an attack algorithm. His life. Yeah, because you're like, well, what do I do with that? Yeah. Do you think that a possible pressure valve that, because I see a lot of YouTubers that will have a second channel for that kind of monologue? Uncensored, unfiltered, whatever.

38:34Do you think that's just for them to scratch the itch of content they want to create where they don't want to post on the main channel? Well, there's lots of second channels that are also dog shit. Like, like, they still don't add value. I heard this term a little while ago. So, I probably need you guys to help spin this up. Growth hacking relatability or speedrunning authenticity. And a lot of people try to do that. It's like, what are the ways that I can make myself seem more authentic or relatable than I am? But it's one of these things that's just, it's like the speed of light. It's like, you are as authentic as you are authentic.

39:06And trying to growth hack authenticity results in you seeming even less authentic. The brain rose effect, right? Like, fucking shadow boxing under a bridge with degenerate skateboarders, looking for a bear market in a bush. Like, yes. Oh, God. Yes.

39:26Me and George, can I tell them the story about that day we did VR? Oh, yeah, go. Right. Okay. So, what were we here for? What were we in town for? Arc? No. A caberman. We came to London. We've been back and forth so many times. We came to London for some event and we had a day and I had some mushrooms with me, some magic mushroom capsules. So me and George decided to do two. We double bubble, bang banged, the world's two most advanced virtual reality experiences. Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds at dot dot dot in London and then the Tower of London virtual reality experience. We did those back to back on mushrooms.

40:08So if you think that mushrooms is crazy, mushrooms in VR with a full cast of actors around you for two hours, twice, in the same day, was just fucking mind -blowing. It's enough to induce a psychotic break, isn't it? Well, I think the dosage was pretty optimal. It was like a 0 .7, 0 .8, kind of like just nice little fluffy thing. but it made everything seem so much more real. Do you plan to do both? Well, this is the ad you do on in your life. I saw, I meet up with Chris today, and I go and say, I go, what do you do, say, do you go to a walk? Maybe you saw on a quick work, and he goes, I've got some mushrooms, and we can go to a VR world.

40:46I go, I got flip a coin there, right? So, similarly. Yeah. It was fucking brilliant. It was a good day. One a day. Right, you're up. My one, so related to the chat so far, so the content razor that we spoke about then is very midwit. It's very what is the simple answer that works. And the big thing for me this year has been the Midwit meme. I'm quite obsessive about the Midwit meme because I'm a Midwit. I've diagnosed myself as a Midwit, I'm a recovering Midwit. I think you have to say it publicly to just start recovering from it. And I did something that was quite Midwit but I think it ends up working, which is like trying to figure out an algorithm that moves you to the guy on the left, to the stupid guy on the left.

41:28Because if you try and be the genius on the right, That's what the Midwit does, whereas what you want to do is simplify it down of rather than a complex content strategy of scheduling at 2 .30 pm every single day and this editing strategy from Alex Formos is not would I consume this? So the Midwit algorithm is basically it's what we spoke about in the first episode, but I've kind of completely neglected it which is just basic inversion So the biggest takeaway from me is so let's say I've got like three examples here. So one is writing one is writing, the other is e -commerce or like an internet business and the other one is happiness.

42:04So for like writing, the obvious midwit thing would be to consume the best writers of all time and find out their specific morning routines and trying to reverse it backwards. Versus with inversion you just say, if you were to make sure you was a terrible writer, what would you do? Well the first thing you'd do is you wouldn't write. Right. The second thing you would do is you would write inconsistently if you ever did. And then the third thing is actually what you said then, which is you'd write about things you didn't like to write about. I think this is a form. Go on. You would do things that make you feel like you're making progress toward writing.

42:38Yes, that's not writing. Yes, exactly. And all of a sudden, you via just inverting, you found out what the guy on the left would say. It'd be like, write, write consistently, and write what you like. And then even internet businesses where I see this a lot where people have these complex dynamic flows to this chat bot that then moves them through this a b cycle versus if you went okay, you wanted to guarantee an internet business would fail What would you do? Well one you'd have like the world's worst margins So you don't make like what like 0 .1 % margin would give you the worst margins possible The second thing is there's like no repeat purchase So there's such little LTV and also the average order of our use tiny and then there'd be like a zero Principle which would be like you're selling shit sandwiches.

43:25You're selling something that nobody wants So if you're selling shit with no margin no repeat Make it really hard to buy make the site low Pat site page load speed really down the list But it just right now just shit sandwiches with no margin no repeat customer thing is shit sandwiches got a bit of a niche a piece of that. This probably niche. Like the Nazi milk. Did we talk about that? No, no, no. Oh, it was correct me if this rings a bell or you get it. So is a woman doing photo shoots with Nazi memorabilia all around her and she's got her feet in some milk and she's bathing in milk and then bottles it up and sells it online as Nazi milk.

44:04And quite a decent markup on that. But again, niche appeal, you think, well, didn't Bell Del Feeam sell her bath water? I don't know. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. But those are both things that people want, actually wanted to buy. Anyway, shit. Moving it, we have to assume that's not what that's supposed to be. So, and then happiness is another one where people are doing such like complex strategies for that and going to Peru and taking eye out, which again, there's a time in a place for, but if you had to make somebody miserable, terrible sleep, terrible diet and exercise and terrible people and midwit, the way to find out what the guy in the left would be is just to invert things around and avoid the top three or four.

44:43So that's what it takes away. What is the opposite of success? Exactly. And avoid those things. And avoid those things. What would someone that was going to run a terrible online fitness bit? Well, like if you wanted to try and make the worst online fitness business you could, what would be the three things to try to do? Don't do them. Yes. And most, sorry, just a bit in, but most smart people will get caught upon the 16th smart thing for success and not avoid those things, including myself. We have a phrase which is just stay stupid with the advice. So like as soon as you start trying to make something complicated, like what would the stupid person do?

45:15They wouldn't understand the complexity. The difficulty is, I think, convincing yourself that the stupid advice is actually that, because there's examples of things where it seems simple, but it actually is the wrong thing to do. What like? And you're gonna ask me. Okay. So going and training chest every day, for example, I wanna get in good shape, I'm just gonna train chest every day. What do I like to do? I like training chest. I'll just do your peck deck every day. That's simple advice, but it's probably not the best part. There's a level of being informed that you need to, you need to like get just over the, like it's like a white belt mentality, right?

45:49Like the white belt actually does know. So all of the shit that you learn when you first start boxing, it's like here is how to throw a good jab. Guess what you're gonna throw most of during your entire boxing career, jabs. But then when you get to blue belt syndrome, a purple belt syndrome, the equivalent in boxing, and you're like, yeah, well, it's all about like my back off hand uppercut. I think that's really where I'm at. It's like, no, no, get fucked. This is the way to figure it out, isn't it? You look at, what are you a black belt in now? And then think back, what was I trying to do when I was a white belt?

46:17And I've just come all the way back to basics. And I'm just doing the basics consistently well. You've self -had one, which was someone asked, you've self -recently, like, what's his recommendation for pre -workout nutrition? And he was like, coffee in some honey on toast or something. and he's like, that sits on both sides. The coffee and the honey on toast, it's the first thing you try before you do, your first time session. And then you go through all the like, our journey. So the fourth cycle is, yeah. Creatin -y, you've got to be extra. And you're like, oh, now Jean Bottle. I'm gonna train later, I'll have some honey on toast and a coffee, I don't know.

46:50Yeah. So it's trying to find the, but it's still informed enough that it's useful. What's mental about this is that the first ever episode that me and George did in your old, old, old offices at social chain where we did inversion, how do you make, it's hard to work out how to be happy, but it's easy to work out how to make a happy person miserable. Yes. This is one of the most painful things that I've had to realize, which is many of the questions that I struggle with now exist in podcasts I recorded at some point over the last six years. Getting front run again.

47:27But you know what, we're clearly, we're clearly having a very similar 2023. Yeah, I mean, it's been, I think, maybe you just get disquieted by less stuff than us. Like your psychologically more stable, I think, than both of us. This is the trend I'm noticing that like here we are coming up with these half formed ideas and then George is like, well, I've actually got an algorithm for that in a full process that I've thought about as free. There was something to be said though about making content, forgetting that you made it and then it coming back to you. So like I said, so David Senra from founders recently tagged me in something where it was there's two kinds of people on the internet, one that doesn't understand the scale of the internet and the other, the other people that know they don't understand the scale of the internet.

48:11And he then quoted me and I was like, I didn't realize I said that, but I go, that's good. So there's no way back and found it, I go, I did say. Right, so there's two ways that this happens as well. The first one is you get quoted by someone saying a thing that you forgot that you'd said. That's level one. Level infinity is you get quoted by people who attribute quotes to you that you never said because it seems like it fits. So I've taught you all of you guys about this before, but Churchill and Drift is the name of the phenomenon whereby unattributed quotes get attributed to Churchill more and more over time.

48:43And it's like what you want is to develop like Williamsonian Drift. Like you want to insert yourself into a niche whereby it's people that go, don't know who said that. That sounds like a Chris Williamsson thing. This is going to be very careful with the other Chris Williamsson. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, this is also where it would be useful to have an Andrew Tate -esque army of Vietnamese repurposes, just starting to post quotes with like unattributed, but like, supposedly attributed to Chris Williams and to create the trend. That's how you begin that soon army. That's great. I really like that one.

49:15Is there anything else on inversion? That's it. Just think of the top three to five things, flip it around and you've figured out how to be the guy on the left and you will forget those things time and time again. All right. Johnny, be the guy on the left. Am I on hack or lesson? Hack please.

49:37Tick tick. Here we go. Here we go. So I'm getting I'm personally invested in this one. So yeah, this is this is now an ad read for tick tick for me. Okay, forget the fact that there's a few million other other news. Don't say that anymore. Sorry. That's all right. Don't worry. Is it not just news? So I think we've done Chris dirty tick tick. Come on. Well, fucking left me out to dry. You still hung me out to dry. Would you like to tell? Yes. Would you like to tell the story of what you did to me. Well, I mean, I thought at the time, Chris, I was doing the right thing. Okay, I mean, when did it go?

50:15If only you'd just listen to my advice. I had to back into 2016. The problem is this, and, you know, we love you very much, but a lot of use of software recommendations come from a, like a niche being mentality. Yeah. They come from a very dry roasted being mentality. I'm what you would call an early adopter. You are an early adopter. You're the early adopters earlier. But you're earlier, you were here. You early adopt everything, which means some of it sticks and some of it doesn't. The reason it's called being is instead of like Microsoft Word, you used software called Bean. Which, do you still use it?

50:51No, it was some really lightweight open source text editor. Just to check. Have you got YouTube premium yet? I don't need it. So you still got the, what was the question that I asked? No, have you still got the Argentinian version for like 70p months or something? correct through a VPN. But that's, that's it. You spend how much money per year on YouTube ads. Can we just say the Argentinian YouTube premium? That's just not, let's not skim over that because that is being if I ever saw one. That is Nireen dry roasted.

51:24Oh, don't you worry, have BB. Have BB is okay. So all I need to say that when, when you have says, I've got this bit of software and it's good. You just let it, you let it simmer for at least 90 days. And then ask him again. Tiktok is one of those things. It's a calendar to do list, habit tracker, anything else? Pomodoro timer. Pomodoro timer does stats, all these sorts of things. But the thing it's given me is, which is a little bit it going against, you said, I've had a debate a long time about how you treat a calendar. You said put all of his tasks in his calendar and I just put events in my calendar and then delete them and then delete them all to first them.

52:13But I recommended I'm really focused you five years ago, four years and you've been using it since. I've been locked in, I've been grandfathered in. I even took Peter Ackie's course on it and then I brought Peter Ackie's on the show Separately, you know what I respect about you Chris is that like when you say okay, I'm gonna take on this recommendation You really yeah, you do it. You are one of the least flaky men I've ever met Well, you saw me doing Achilles rehab when we first went to Dubai Monopoly doing that like here that would have been here would make this where I was laid with my foot up But we went to Dubai and George is laid by a pool, like reading, like throwing monga quotes at me.

52:58And I'm over there doing five second eccentric, like single, like it's Salayas raises. When you did the McGill Big Three, like you used to use to crossfit thousands of hours. Everyone else is doing the world. You were just in the corner. Thousands of hours have done bird dog and side plank and McGill curl up. Do you regret it? No, no, no, no, So now I have a spine that functions. That works. So the thing that I remember you saying to me, like, I'm doing my weekly review and I hate it. And I just kept saying, let's just do a Chris, it's good for you. Tiktok makes that easier. So I basically just, everything, nothing, the hack is, nothing leaves the inbox without a date attached to it.

53:39But it's not necessarily a date, you'll do the thing. And then all you have to do is look at the today view on Tiktok. And you go down at the start of the day, I look at this, a batched box at the top. I either drag it to a time slot, I'm going to do it that day, or I review it, cancel it, delete it, delegate it. Do you have group view on TikTok? TikTok, can you send it to like each other? You can email things to his inbox and he can email things to my inbox. You can't view each other's, you can't share lists. Right, okay. That's pretty good. So if you're working on a project together, you could delegate tasks.

54:13You yourself's convulsing, can you see it? Yeah. What? Because he's just got so much to say. We have a shared list. Well, yeah, but you're a good example of separating planning from execution. So you have the planning time and then you turn up on the day and you just work through the time. It's something I changed my mind on this year, big time. I thought it was terrible. Tried it, didn't like it, got rid of it, went back to omnifocus. But you just then moved to things three. Don't move your brief three. Period. I've tried everything. It's like weep, I've tried the whole gamut. You don't forget.

54:43Don't forget I was about to switch to things three. I'm so I made fun of you. I'm on such satellite delay From you. I'm Douglas Murray in the Gaza Strip like waiting for peers Morgan like we've just got packet loss, aren't we? Yes. Yes. Thanks peers. I've got you like that's me in a fucking full -get Guantan tic, right? I want you as you've both promised me that one of you will sit down and and transfer I've got a full guide on YouTube that we've watched it. I've watched it already. I watched the full thing. Head of the curve. Of course. Well, I wanted to get the best in before you sit down and personally coach me through it.

55:18And I feel like, to be honest, I feel like it should be you. Because you cursed me with three years of the most advanced task manager in history. Yeah, it is. It's just like recompense. You know what I mean? You're right. I put you right in the deep end. You just blow up the new Omnihocus. What's this? They've just launched the new one. I don't care. It's quite interesting with like social networks or apps that are bad for you They're quite quickly get a moat like there's Instagram Facebook. Oh, it's gone There we go. He's gone. He's bailed out right well if you you have to be at least partly Christmas So there you go You have like Instagram TikTok Facebook YouTube and only recently as TikTok really come along But with productivity apps there's So it's so such decentralization and so much churn from product to product people leave But I do like what you said then about the life hack I do think that's the problem I often have with lifehacks is if a friend has just started one, you need that cooling off period.

56:10Because that's the time when you've easily allowed it. But it would come back in 90, that's the meta life hack today, which is weight at least 90 days for lifehacks. I sent you that thing the other day that was Paul Bloom quote tweeting someone else, where it was like, I've just learned about the recency bias and I have to say out of all of them it's my favorite. Yeah.

56:30Very good. Yeah, when someone says something to you, you set a reminder in tick tick. Right, there we go. 90 days. All right, Saf, you're up. So the most enduring life hack, you guys will be no stranger to this, but I feel like since we've, this is a new audience seeing this, it's gotta be Alfred. Oh, wow, yeah, okay. So Alfred is one of the OG life hacks and I have gotta be one of the heaviest users. So I've checked my stats. I've used it 400 ,000 times. four hundred times a day. I am 100 times a day. I invoke Alfred 400 times a day. It is invocates. Like it is him. It's a $20 piece of software like Spotlight that genuinely I would pay four figures for happily.

57:15Probably if they have more than these Alfred, they've read them. They've read them on clarinums. They could have me over a barrel. So Alfred developers, because please don't. I remember when you changed laptops, you said the thing you were most concerned about, was changing the references. I'll prefer to say, yeah, like. It is a bastard. I had to go through it with you. It feels like walking through a trickle using a computer that doesn't have Alfred. And I've worked in the NHS, and that's like, so. I've come from a conversion right optimization background. Okay, so Alfred is the hack. Let's say that no one, people that are listening don't know.

57:50So they describe it as spotlight on steroids. So it's a what spotlight spotlight is the little Magnifying glass button on your keyboard on my back space if you're watching this on command space opens up any webpage or file or App or whatever but Alfred has a load of extensibility as well so you can I can control all of my lights my Bluetooth clipboard history pasting Text expansions if you start typing your mobile number text that you often send quite a lot like hello So thank you for your inquiry blah blah blah, best wishes, all that kind of stuff. You just have it at the tip of your fingers and it is saved.

58:30What do you use the most? The clipboard history. Same as in SNIP. That's what that's. That's clipboard manager. Huge. Anyone that doesn't have a clipboard manager that spends a modicum amount, any more time on their MacBook or the laptop, MacBook only as well isn't it? It's so racist. I love it. Well, it's so bigoted. I love that though as well because it's like if you're using a Windows computer, you've got bigger problems. Yeah, let me learn you. Let me learn you about this. The clipboard manager is insane. So for the most part, you can only copy the last thing that you can only paste the last thing you copied, whereas this is, you can set it up to basically infinity, but it's like, I think for me, it's the last 300 or 500 or something things, which means that you can go through a document or a web page and find all of the different things that you need to copy and then go on to where you need to paste them and paste all of the different things that you need to paste.

59:19Full -clipboard manager, you can even do conditional formatting when it comes to the snippets, which is their text expansion. So I have an invite message. My invite for the podcast has got progressively shorter. Now it's, hi there, can you direct me to whoever handles your podcast invites, please? Thanks. And that's I -N -V -3. I -N -V -2 is when I need to show a little bit more, how do you say, like, reputational ankle, like sort of, that's a little bit. And then skin, I envy one is I haven't updated that in forever. Is that short shorts? No, it's huge. That's, oh yeah, it is. Yeah. That's only fans, only fans free member access.

1:00:00Very nice. Yeah. So I've got a full guide on that as well that kind of to walk through, but just start playing around with it and you'll figure out so many free trial period, I think, with only focus with that. There's a free version, but then the real juice comes from the $20. It's $20 once off. Power pack. Yeah. It's like pay five figures for that. 100%. The Delta of Price. I think it's you pay five figures for use of setup. Yeah. I think our setup's probably worth in the high four figure range. Yeah. Ethereum. All right. What have I got next?

1:00:39I'm pretty certain that hold luggage is a sigh -op meant to keep you poor and late. Wow. I am yet to find a scenario in which hand luggage isn't sufficient. Now you need to get good luggage. That's a huge mediator of this. But I was on tour, me and James Smith. I did 29 days on the road, just hand luggage. Wow. No waiting ever. So the luggage to come out the other end always with you at all times. And it causes you to be a little bit more thoughtful with what it is that you're packing, which is important because what you find is if you've got like, dude, hold luggage is massive. 23 kilos, unless you're carrying a ton of conditioner and shampoo.

1:01:20I was going to say, where do you put your treasur? You're salon and grade shampoo. We once went, liquids is the we want to went to Iceland not the super market the country place we want drove to Edinburgh while you've had meningitis to fly to Iceland and I tried to transport five kilos of press a me because I just hadn't thought I hadn't thought to decant it into something smaller wow you managed to sweet talk the glass region person at the desk he'll do that to transport liquids as well mind -blowing. The sweet talk, Glaswegians, into worse. Into a national security threat for Iceland. Yeah, too much treasure -me.

1:01:59What is this that you brought with you? So, cheapest thing there. It was the cheapest thing there. But yeah, whole luggage is a sigh up. Mentally, people are in late. So you can get away with hand luggage only quite easily. I have a lot of questions. Hit me. Liquid. Get travel -sized containers. and do you run out? Do you buy more when you drop? Up to 100, up to 100 mil. No. So I will caveat this, there's a couple of complications. First one is going to be if you use spray anti -perspirant, very difficult to five is 75 mil of that, very difficult. Lots of 105 mils, which is fucking infuriating.

1:02:41Don't use a roll on, not massive fan of a roll on, would rather go for a spray. That's a challenge. Yes, liquids, but large. by an anti -person when you arrive someone. If it depends how many stops you're doing it, this is one trip. Yes, if it's multiple trips, no, because that's just you, that's intermittent, intermittent purchasing. So you can get, you know, like 25 mil spray thing and just get like three or four or five of them and just throw them in. And you must be doing, like, you must be washing your clothes right now. I did, I did laundry while I was there, but I don't know about you. I, the, how would you say, like, over -to -n window of acceptable clothing to me isn't that broad, I don't have much more than about hold luggage, it's worth of clothes that are like nice and cool to me at any one time.

1:03:25So for me to cycle through that stuff, I would probably be doing it anyway. And I would just have random surplus pieces of clothing that wouldn't get one because I'm like, I don't like that t -shirt. Like I really love that t -shirt though. So I'll get that one washed and I'll do it again. So probably do that even if I was in hold luggage mode. And then what is the, what is the hand luggage recommendation? So before I started spending any amount of money on luggage, I would have said luggage is luggage, it's fucking pointless, like why are you even trying to do it? Then I upgraded and got an away, which is pretty good.

1:03:59And that has sort of tie down straps that make things like much more organized. And then I started using nomadic before I was a partner with them. So I bought their stuff and then became a partner with them. and it's just magical, like different sections, magnetic ties so that you can lock things down and push things down, different sections for everything. They have a, it's called it. You got the backpack. What's your backpack called? Travelpack? They've got two. One's a travel pack and the other's a, I can't fucking can't remember. I'll link it in the show notes below. But it's just, this backpack opens like clamshell from both sides and it's just phenomenal.

1:04:40So, nomatics, website just has all of this stuff on there and it's really good. But it just changes, it changes the quality of your life, having genuine high quality luggage. Even if you are going to go hold luggage, like there's ways that you can like lift different things up and oh man, it's fucking outstanding. Wow. Can it fit a spare doofay? James Smith managed to fit a pillar with him because he travels with his own pillar. What? In his pillar. No. like normal head pillow. He's bailed out of the pregnancy pillow life. A lot of people flying long haul had brought their own pillows. I noticed that.

1:05:15I feel like that's probably going to be a future life. If I was to predict what my life hack next year is going to be, I reckon taking a pillow with you while you travel. Is it a pillow? A pillow? No, no, no. If it's on his luggage. If it's in hand luggage, bro. Yes, it's a base. In a hand luggage. Fin pillow. If it's in pillow, it's a squish, not what you want, is it? Squash down. Anyway, that's my thing. Hold luggage. bail out of it, get good hand luggage and backpack and roller and you'll be able to get away with it. Also, one final one, if you are traveling and really struggling the space, whether it be hand luggage or hold luggage, if you want to just have like, let's say shoes, shoes take up quite a bit of room, aren't that heavy and you usually don't have space for them, just go into the airport, go to WH Smiths or something like that, buy a bottle of water, put your shoes in the bag, No one ever complains about you taking retail on from within the airport Where are the shoes before is this before you go through security?

1:06:10Yeah Yeah, so like literally just how you walking into the airport holding loads of carrying shoes Yeah, buy a bottle of water ask for a bag put it in the bag because if they didn't allow you on with stuff that you purchased from W8 Smiths or W8 Smith would not put it in the airport My wife self airports Damn hack So my one Again, it's one I've done for a while, so I put it, it's not fresh this week, so it's been through the filter past the 90 day filter. Pretty much, I would be spiced everyone who's listened to you as well as you two in the fitness scene, they've tracked like their lifts, they've tracked their nutrition, they've tracked sleep over the years, but very, very few people have ever tracked like their mental health or mood.

1:06:54So I created this idea, which I realized is quite a big therapeutic technique, which didn't realize at the time. But essentially, imagine you have your mood, so you have zero here, which is worst day of your life. And then like 10 here, ecstasy pill in the system, serotonin, like maxing off the charts. And let's say you kind of each day varies between a four to a six. And maybe not a British four or a six, because a British person like there were stays at four and their best days are six. But a wider ranging one. So let's say you have a four to a six every single day. As soon as you go outside of that, so if you go sub four for whatever reason, just have a little, like Apple note table, like negative mood here, positive mood there, just drop in the day and what the cause was.

1:07:37And likewise, if you go above a six, just write down, oh, great morning, slept eight hours, coffees in the system, D works at whatever it is that's caused it. To do that. To do those. Write it down. And then at the end of the year, You have like 70 different entries or even at the end of the month you'll have like five or six different entries that you can just be like Oh, okay, this thing's shown up multiple types and it's one thing to have like a bad hangover and say I'm not gonna drink again But you then forget come Saturday But then let's say you look at the data and you hold on 83 % of my Bad moods that were enough to register in this table like was alcohol and you can you can then put it in a little Google Sheet and just see that thing there.

1:08:24That hits so much harder and likewise with the positive moods as well. It's basically whoop for mindset, isn't it, for mood. Can I add a couple of things to that, Roger? I love that idea. This is the new Apple, there's my abysmal step count as well, for 1 ,200 steps. Busy morning. But slightly pleasant or slightly unpleasant day for example. So I think this is the journal or it's one of the recent updates to slightly pleasant day. So this is part of the new iOS. They have a mood tracker with tags, so you can do that natively within Apple Health. But also for something that's more sophisticated, you can use exist .io.

1:09:04Now that's it, log a mood. Can we show that to the camera? Neutral. I'm just going to do this. Oh, it's unpleasant. I'm just going to do this. Oh, slightly pleasant. But the reason that I still prefer exist .io, it's about $7 a month or something, is that you can pass the data and do a lot of good stuff with it and figure out what it isn't sound like you. It'll put you in the next spot to a CSV. Oh, lovely. And it'll, it pulls out correlations. Some of them might be a bit spurious like on days that it rains, you have sex more or something, but that's probably the thing about the correlation between the number of Nicholas Cage films released in a year and the number of people who die from drowning in swimming pools.

1:09:46It's like a really strong correlation. Yeah, I don't know how you can play on ice cream, ice cream cells and murderers in there is the sound of one. So have you learned anything from those correlations? Yeah, so I do it for a lot of the tests that we do. So when I'm testing out red light therapy or vagal tone methods or anything like that, I'll use Exist to track what are the effects on different aspects of your life. Oh, and it connects with your weapon, your Apple health and everything. You may be about a custom private web page that exports to a Google sheet. So you may between Apple Health and Exist .io, you may have found a way to do this.

1:10:26There's a simpler one which is just inside timer. We've seen that. Yeah, I ask you how you're feeling and there's like five faces, like very sad. But you need to be able to have why you're feeling that way. There's that as well. But you need to have it in metrics and then you need to be able to track trends. I tried all the custom solutions, but I come back to, again, midwit, like the Apple notes Google sheets. Google sheets. And because I can then write, I can get quite specific about what the thing was that day. And then the ability to reflect back on that six months and go, oh, that then triggers the memory of that day and I can go into a lot more detail versus if it's just purely a score and a tag, it doesn't ring the same because sometimes it'll be like a lot of pull -os or effect as well.

1:11:05It'll be three or four things. But imagine if you had it all connected where it says, when you tweet more frequently, your heart rate is higher and then you're like, ah, okay. So that's pulling like whoop data. It pulls everything in like it connects so much. It's either really helpful or like really upsetting. Well, again, I think it's about identifying the trends and then letting go of the tracking tools. Yeah. Right, Johnny, you're up. Lesson. Lesson. Lesson is looking at things in 10 year windows. So we, as you've mentioned, we've gone from two to 19 employees and the natural assumption would be, what did we do in January to make that happen?

1:11:50I actually think it's a decade of work that made that happen. And so the lesson is, if you assume that if you just take enough swings at whatever it is you try to achieve, you'll eventually get there and it will likely take a lot longer than you think, how focusing on how you can just be comfortable with the mundane, repetitive nature of it. And you mentioned this in your talk about how, well, when we were starting here, you're doing these episodes and no one was listening. So there was no reward, there was no weather wasn't a little bit like they have episodes of growing, I guess. But there's a lot of repetition without much success.

1:12:25And then this year, vertical. So if it's going to take another 10 years, how do you make what you're doing now enjoyable? you know, detaching from the outcome. Homosies got a bit about this where he says, Discipline people aren't more patient, they just find something to do in the meantime. Yeah, it's like just find something to do in the meantime. If you assume that it's gonna take a long time to achieve the thing that it is that you want to do, and presume that it's gonna take twice as long as you want it to take. Oh, that you realistically think that would take. How could you make it bearable that between now and then life just takes over.

1:13:06So there's two quotes that are, like one of them is a Churchill quote supposedly. So we'll never know. The other one is a Gary V. concept. The Gary V. concept is being very patient macro, but impatient micro. So it allows them to take 10 years but be very impatient this week today, this hour, whatever. And then the Churchill thing is success is going from fairly to fairly without loss of enthusiasm. which I think is really not to say we're a success, but I think the success for us has happened because we just didn't lose enthusiasm. But you also did a long time. It wasn't like you had lots of failures.

1:13:40There wasn't a point where you guys were close to bankruptcy or anything like that. And the thing behind the scenes, lots of failures. Lots of things that we tried in one day, boring failures, which were actually in some ways, even worse. Yeah, because you only lock in a failure when you hear, all right. All right, yeah, that's done. Whereas we just ran into lots of things. against the wall, like really try and try this thing and it didn't work. You tried this thing. But this is, I talk about this in the live show, the like unspectacular failures and how common they are, that like tarnish your entire experience of whatever it is that you're doing.

1:14:16Because you hear Rocky cutscene montage and he can't lift a log and then he goes back and he still can't lift a log and he goes back and he still can't and then he does lift a log and you're like, oh, all of those things with that. And yours is, like you're not even trying to lift a log, you just try to get your Alfred Shortcuts to work right. Or you're trying to send an invoice through Quickbox and it just doesn't want to work. You're like, you know what I mean? Like, it's like, with no easy way out. No, he's the way out. I'm just using a recenting, fucking Quickbox invoices. Ivan Dragos got all the Alfred Shortcuts.

1:14:50Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's better to touch the tool is completely optimized. Three dovase. Three dovase. So I think it's the lessons just assume it's going to take you longer than you think and then focusing on how do I make myself okay with that? Because then everyone wants the, there's a lot of focus on especially in our world and building business world where everyone's it now. And if you said to those people like, okay, it's going to take 10 years, how are you going to make yourself comfortable with that? It's trying to accept that and come up with a strategy where you still enjoy it, finding something you're doing the meantime.

1:15:28I guess. You gave me instant nausea when you mentioned that earlier. If it's the idea of you mentioned this, you get to the top of the ladder and you realise the ladders get to the wrong wall. Oh right. Yeah. So with the 10 year, are you now planning out things on a 10 year time horizon? Or how is it kind of tactics? It's just looking rather than thinking like, what's the goal this month, this year? Think like, okay, whatever we need to keep doing, whatever we're doing for longer than we're planning to do instead of setting up something that feels unsustainable. How do I make it feel sustainable?

1:16:01So emergent success is something that I've been thinking about a lot. It's weird. Like Jocka Wellink said this before we started the podcast. I don't even think that we were recording when he said this. But he said, um, I asked him about plans, long term plans, but it might be in the episode I can't remember. I know he said five years ago, I'd never written a book hadn't launched a supplement company. Didn't have a podcast and was basically a grant out of the army. if I'd had any plan, all of the optionality and exponential success just blew it out of the water. So I think having long -term plans might work for some people in relatively predictable industries or sort of predictable processes.

1:16:37But for me, I've almost largely dispensed with plans that are longer than a year. I can guess where we're going to be over the next 12 months -ish, but most of it's just emergence. So free the view. So we had a business goal at the start of the year. we met that in the first quarter. How have you all - The best and the best kind? Yeah, but so like, so the planned pointless. One of the guys used to coach me for powerlifting, shifted Mike to Sherry. I don't know if you have none of them in focus. No, but you talked a lot. So he shifted like long, complicated periodization to just why don't we just write a week of training and then we'll just do that week of training until it stops working.

1:17:15Well, it's running out a year, give us five years, gives people a sense of control, but it's completely - But you're still just reacting to circumstances and things change and it's not. I think it's so dependent on the industry you're in. So like being a doctor, I imagine it's quite an easy thing to do a five -year plan. Oh yeah, because the whole path is laid out exactly. I want to become a Neuros -apidiatric Neuros. Exactly. You probably got a 15 -year plan just laid out for you there. But I particularly entrepreneurship or something that's very dynamic and kind of related to technology that's constantly changing.

1:17:47Exponentials, that's going to throw your shift. Throw your shit out of the water. There's no way that you're going to be able to hold on. Because all of the, there are things and opportunities that are going to be laid in front of you that you literally don't even know exist right now. You know, if you're trying to be a neurosurgeon, pediatric neurosurgeon, there isn't going to be some area of pediatric neurosurgeonry that you're as yet unaware of that's going to be able to be achieved within the space of six months. But if it's anything with a ton of optionality and all of this shit could happen immediately.

1:18:21Europe, South. I've been seeing a therapist for just under two years now and it's been a fantastic decision. So I think there's a lot of resistance that people have to do in that because there's kind of an implicit assumption that if you see a therapist that you're somehow broken or traumatized and I think that keeps a lot of people away from growing and you know and it's become, I've it's become rebranded a lot in the corporate world as like performance coaching or whatever, but it's just it is just therapy just rebranded under a new name. What it basically is, and a true therapist is actually just a mirror to you so that they don't really, they're not forthcoming with advice, they don't kind of nudge you too much, you turn up and they just hold up the mirror and show you how much of a twat you're being in your daily decisions.

1:19:15And I very much think it's like turbo journaling. The difference is when you journal, you are writing within your own echo chamber and your journal doesn't call you out for being a twat, whereas a therapist will call you out on your bullshit. So that's been really valuable and I would very much recommend like for the sake of 50 to 100 quid per session, well worth it. I've been in therapy as well. In Austin, I found a friend who did an awful lot of therapy for a very long time and is superbly fucked up and I figured if his therapist can deal with him, she can definitely deal with me. It's like I'm way less messed up than he is, at least that's what I thought.

1:19:59And it's been really, really great. And yet the mirror thing, what ends up happening, a lot of time you're spent just thinking about your childhood and you just don't give yourself the room any even marginally busy person just doesn't have the room to think about like that conversation you once had with your history teacher. I had Dr. Paul Conti on the show. He did that four episode series with Hubertman a few months ago. Unconscious mind, trauma, all that stuff. Dude, I'm living in Austin, Texas. So the concept of people being sat in a sauna, whining on about their ancestral trauma or like about how this thing from before affected them and all the rest of it has really kind of put the wibblies up me about just not wanting to like yeah all right mate like jog on like this isn't the Goggins jockeled side of me just doesn't want to hear it but Dr.

1:20:53Paul Conti's re -framed my perspective on that that there are things that you don't think about that are a part of your unconscious programming that your body takes completely for granted and and just sort of grandfather's in as part of the landscape or the texture of your mind or the way that you see the world. It's just this unconscious assumption that you take as truth or fact and it's not. And it wasn't before you had it and you've whitewashed your entire life to believe that this is the way it's always been and it isn't. And that shapes all of your micro decisions and the filter that you see, the world and all of that, as you say, because of one way that you chose to interpret something early on.

1:21:29So I guess the, I'd see journaling, pulsation, therapy, they're all on the same spectrum. It's just that one of them's kind of assisted. Like it's almost like you're using steroids to journal and you're getting more out of it. So like a forced guided prompted journaling. Yeah, exactly. The questions that prompted the like, I hadn't thought about that before. And there's that external accountability, isn't there? Like you then, because you can choose not to journal one day or you can choose not to write stuff out in depth, but if somebody would like to speak to them. Tell me more about that. Yeah.

1:22:04So on that note, and I guess this comes around to what you were saying before, I consolidated about 12 years of journals. So from day one, I was a lot more, I used day one a lot more heavily than you did by the sound of it. And I went through, it took me two or three months of a lot of time every day to consolidate date, all of the lessons and journal entries and everything, turn them into a visual map, identify the emergent themes. This was before I think. I think that GPT could have done this a minute. I know, it could have, but actually I think doing it manually was quite useful. It's like revising.

1:22:39Yeah. You don't need someone else to summarize your notes for you. You need to summarize that. You need to remember that. So I mapped it out and it was phenomenal to see it just laid out in a very big spatial categorized way of like, okay, this is what 12 years of journaling has taught me. And the ridiculous thing about it is that 21 -year -old you know all the stuff that you need to be doing now, but you just keep cycling through those same lessons. And it's like 21 -year -old version who is shouting, like, just do this thing. And then a couple of weeks later, you know, you've had like the childbirth, I'm knees you're about it, and you go, that's fine.

1:23:14And then it keeps coming back round. And I think until you integrate and do those lessons, the same things going to keep bouncing back into your consciousness until you process it. One of the worst things to realize, we often get asked all of us, well, what would you ten years ago wish that you'd known that you know now? And you look back and you think, oh, you know, there's this and this and this and this and this is the way I see the world are these are one of my patterns. Almost always, those things when I answer those questions are still things that me in ten years time will be wishing that me right now knew.

1:23:46It's midway once again. We're looking for the the higher optimization the next. Oh, this is more nuanced. No, no, no, no, I'm more sophisticated than that. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, you are still you, and your patterns are still your patterns. And maybe this is where the unconscious work comes in. Maybe some of the, you know, Dr. Polkante style, like unveiling the unconscious would break that. And you might genuinely have new or novel challenges that you need to change, but given the fact that you are still you, the things that you're, that you were fighting with 10 years ago are almost certainly the same things you're fighting with now.

1:24:16When did we do the things you would tell your 18 year old self -porkest. Fuck you now. I bet we should all go back and listen to that for you. It'll be almost certain it'll be the same shit. I think it was by Bitcoin and the D531. It was by Bitcoin and the D531. That was a by Bitcoin and the D531. Maybe not the worst of us. In fact, if you can count 531 as a single word, that would be four words that you could just like text your last self by Bitcoin, do 531. I found a tool when I was like 18 that you can email yourself in 10 years time. Yeah, the future me .org Yeah, something like that and I got the email the other day and it was like hi, it's you said Wow, 18 years old and yeah, what did he say?

1:25:00By the way, you were still you were still Muscle him then yeah very deep deep deep the muscle in Did you buy? I might have, actually, I might have set one for another 10 years. Honestly, I can't remember what I said, but it was quite emotional to see. I sent one to myself in a year, a couple of months ago. Nice. Looking forward to getting it. All right. Are we on lessons? We are in lessons, aren't we? Yeah. We are in lessons. All right. So this is technically one from last year, and it was inspired by a conversation I had with Jay Comfries. He said, these are the golden years. You can't wait until you've got no stress or worry in your life before you decide to be happy because guess what, you will always have stress and worry and anxiety and problems and issues to deal with.

1:25:52So you have to decide now that happiness is something you're going to have and it's that little throwaway line at the beginning which I use as a mantra, these are the golden years. It's a great heuristic to always think that when you look back, these times right now will be the ones that you cherish and to approach them with requisite joy. Only in retrospect can we see how beautiful the present actually was. Problems are a feature of life, not a bug. There will never come a time when you have no problems. What? Did you think that one day you're just going to wake up and cease having problems? Like completing a video game and leveling up to a map where there's nothing there?

1:26:24That's never going to happen. Your problems will change but having problems is going nowhere. Whatever negativity is consuming your thoughts probably won't matter in three months time. In three months you won't remember the negative texture of your mind or the boring, repetitive if things you thought, or maybe even what you were worried about, but the time that you spent worrying will have passed. So you're sacrificing your joy and presence in the moment for a problem which you won't even be able to recall in the future. Immortality would be the only life in which such flippancy with the days that you live for is acceptable.

1:26:53In your talk, you say everybody has this mantra of, after this week, things will calm down. It's the diet starts Monday, and Naval talks about that as like, you assume that because your calendar has white space in three months time. I'm going to be full of excitement and willingness to just book in coffees with all these people that I haven't been doing for a long time and I'll be able to start these new hobbies and start fishing and I'll be full of jubilant and willingness to try new things. It's like no, it's just you haven't filled up your calendar yet with the normal mundane stuff. So from a time management perspective and from a happiness perspective, that's been a real.

1:27:36Yeah, if you wouldn't say yes to this proposed meeting for tomorrow, don't say yes to it for three months' time, because it'll be exactly the same. It's going to be the exact same. You just have to presume that things are going to remain the same in terms of workload. And yeah, I think just these are the golden years as like, don't, and this is kind of, I guess, a little bit of a counter to some of the more Goggins, Jocco, Homozi pills, like Homozi Maxine philosophies, which are, you know, you can grit your teeth and now is the time to like go to war and like all of that stuff. But so many of the best outcomes that we've all got in life is when we found the intersection of something which is valuable and that we enjoy to do, because it makes everything easy.

1:28:18And in the meantime, that's actually going to be fun. Like what's the fucking soul point? Yes. Like if you're going to sacrifice your enjoyment in the moment for success in the future, so that when you finally have enough success in the future, you can enjoy yourself. Like, well, the bar stores upside down, given that most of all destination acquisitions can constitute journeys, like optimized for the journey, not the destination. The almost thing of the, and he calls it the grandfather frame, we heard that one. You haven't heard that one. It depends what it is. What on earth? So it was, it's like a 10 minute YouTube video he has, and I listened to it while, like, while on holiday, actually.

1:28:56And he talks about how he tries to look at life now, how 80 year old him would see currently. And you suddenly get an appreciation for like, I can like get up and go to the kitchen and like, my back doesn't hurt, my knees don't hurt. I don't have arthritis, spending time with my wife, we've just got married. Like this is a wonderful time of life. If you look at now and look, it focuses the things on, focuses the attention on things that you take for granted. But when you're 80, won't be there anymore. And I think that's like everyone talks about feel gratitude and keep, like write down things you're grateful for each morning.

1:29:33But that single video was the biggest of like, oh fuck yeah, like all this stuff. Like I had to spend time doing a podcast. When I'm 80, I'll be sat there and on my own, like looking back on now thinking, God, that was so good. So much fun. Yeah, these are the golden years. I think it's just such a good reframe. Just assume that now is the best that your life is ever going to be and in retrospect, you're going to wish that you could be back here now. It's that whole, when I was 20, I wanted to be a millionaire. Now I'm a millionaire, I just want to be 20. Yeah, it's like what Warren Buffett is rich, but he would trade places with every like 18 year old.

1:30:11Yeah, time billionaires is what they call it. It's hard to make a profound statement with these glasses on it really. Yeah, I think it works. I really think it works. All right. So one of my favorite ones from this year, which I think by definition it won't change because it's the Jeff Bezos 'ism of asking what's not going to change. everyone's obsessed with like what's going to happen with AI and what's going to happen in this industry, like how are things going to change? I've got to take this off. But few people ask what's not going to change. So he uses it for Amazon where it's like, oh, is this tech going to come in?

1:30:51Is this competitor going to come in? He goes, all that could happen, but even the smartest people throughout history have a very, very difficult time predicting the future. But if he goes, well, what's not going to change? You like creates this fake scenario of No customer is going to say, can I have slower delivery times? Can it cost more? Can you have fewer choices available Amazon? Then they're going to go, okay, those are the things to focus on. And looking at every industry or every sector that you give a piss about, really. And just saying, what isn't going to change? And then just focusing on those.

1:31:22It's the bloke at the electrical tower or the telecoms tower who's just got the lever. Like he's not going anywhere. And less electricity gets subverted by a new thing. That's not going to change. 100%. Even like for the podcast, right, you could, there's loads of new things that you can try to Spotify and YouTube and things like that, but what is not going to change 10 years from now? People want to listen to a combination of guests that they already know and love. People that they never heard of and topics that they are interested in now. topics that they didn't know that they were interested in in the future and they want to listen to it in an acceptable quality of audio and video.

1:32:05Like that's podcasting in a nutshell. So yeah, optimizing for those things. And it's the point of that to get distracted less. Yes. To focus on the few things that matter. Okay. So you put your attention on the core stuff and let the changes and the technology or whatever comes to go. I mean, you can still play around with the technologies you can still do that, but when people get so caught up. Like for example, if he was getting so caught up in a new technology, but then the delivery speed was getting slower and slower or people were getting faster or the prices were getting higher and higher.

1:32:36It's reminding of, oh, there's an infinite dashboard of metrics for me to focus on here. What are the ones I should focus on? He lives that as well. Like he's now just building infrastructure on infrastructure, isn't he? Like multi -generational. This is Amazon Web Systems and now he's moving on to bigger things from the Lex episode. Right, Johnny, you're up. Hack. Hack. This is a recent one. I want to tell you about recently, Opal Phone App for one of it as well. Enjoying it. I'm careful about my recent C bias. I've only been with it for like three weeks. I'm a 90 day window. I ignore this. Okay.

1:33:10Well, or, yeah, ignore this. No, but it's, it kind of, of all that, I've tried a lot of different like screen time, iPhone, app blocking stuff. I think this one makes it the simplest. Yeah, I agree. and it's cool how you can have like your friends on there. I think that's the best thing about it. So you can, there's just like a, it kind of taps into the like, I'd quite like to be top of the leaderboard. Absolutely. You did four hours and 15 minutes the other day. You go, immediately thought, I've got an extra three hours today. Yeah. Did you get one hour something like one hour or two? Yeah, a couple of times.

1:33:42You say, I saw that and I was like, I feel like I do okay with my phone. Saw that and I was like, God, like I've got. It's pretty robust. It's different. So yeah, an opal time blocking. and they have preset things. So I have an automated one, which is 7am till midday is deep work. And then there's one which is they do a lunchtime one, they do a last hour of the day one. I've custom put mine together. It's pretty easy to do. I think I've seen that in action. Your state is changing on I message. Right. My state wants it to do not disturb. You do not disturb. I don't think so now. I think that's a separate thing.

1:34:19Oh, I wonder if you could create a shortcut. So the almost it. When your, when Opal triggers a focus block, put you in focus mode. It automatically puts you in, do not disturb. I think just making the screen times hard, right? Like it's hard to use a phone properly. Or like without getting distracted. So turning it into a game, making it competitive, I want to be Chris. How do I be Chris? You start thinking, I could leave my phone. I mean, my screen times get trashed at the minute, but I could leave my phone away during this part of the day. I could not have it with me then. Like, I struggle to think how I'm going to be, to be honest.

1:34:56It's impressive. I'm bad. I'm bad. It don't worry. Did you just have like a... Give me a day. Give me time. Yeah, I've had a couple of good days. But it's also like new app effectiveness. Right. Something news come in that's just obliterated my ability to do stuff and I haven't yet found the way around. I'll get you over like a 60 day period. Probably. Almost certainly. Yeah. As of yet, my... You know, like the path of a river. It's like, oh, we're going to divert it round this way. It's really good at typing in your pin. Yeah, it just erodes. Yeah, exactly. So I'm going to burst the bank eventually.

1:35:22But right now, I'm in this beautiful Goldilocks zone. It gives you little gems each day as well, if you noticed. I've got loads. Yeah. I've got loads. So there you go. Look how excited we are about not using our phone. Opal. Good. Good. Pro. You're a re -endoris, who I think you met a few weeks ago. Yep. Has changed the way that I structure my day with the six alarms principle. So I set multiple alarms throughout the day. This sounds so stupid saying it allowed, but we've realized over the last few years that you have to treat yourself like a child to be able to get anything done. And I now set alarms at midday, just before shut down, at shut down, and then like bedtime routine.

1:36:03So what they do is just create this kind of bookend or like a wall in the day where it's like, okay, this block of time is now over. you're into the next phase, you're into the next phase. And it stops me from just kind of running on and just working late or ignoring my own arbitrary boundaries. And I think when you're self -employed, that becomes so important, especially shifting from what we've done, which is going from full -time employment with a clear clock on and clock off into an office or into a hospital. And then it's like the time is very clearly defined for you. But suddenly when you're self -employed, there's no boundaries on your time.

1:36:40And you could just, if you have the disposition like us, you would just work infinitely and end up working late and then stealing time from yourself because then you wake up late the next day and you're tired and then you work worse that day and you have to catch up. And then so it just avoids all of that with a simple alarm. So why do you have six? I actually have four. Reun says you can pick a number that's not so many that it divides the day into like a ridiculous number of blocks. But I think it's important just to pick time blocks that make sense for you based on when you want to start working, when you want to stop and work backwards from there.

1:37:18So you start at the end of your day and then alarms to like bookmark that. I was like, where should I be? Yeah. And it stops you from then just being like, oh, I've got quite a bit to do today. I'll just work a bit later because it's like, oh, no, there is a hard deadline to the day now. So it forces you to then filter things more aggressively and do everything gets Parkinson's Lord. Yeah. Yeah, that's nice. His anti -morning routine as well of just start writing within 90 seconds of opening your eyes is, I do that. I've been doing it. It's really good. It's really good. Yeah, this book, it looks like I'm gonna be working there.

1:37:53Pro Ness flow, row Ness. Yeah, I like to switch between Theta and Delta as much as I can, yeah. Don't wanna. Oh, am I gonna go for, all right, fuck it. Sleep token is my next life hack. Ooh, that their album, their band, I guess, halfway between, they're technically referred to now as Cometal, Cometal. Cometal, it's like metal that you'd have sex with. So like them, loath, um. Oh, wow. It's called Come Metal. Anyway, so Sleep Token are a band that have been around for quite a while. They managed to do it at the start of this year. Five tracks released from their album. Each one of them made it onto Spotify's most trending page.

1:38:36Each release, like every fortnight for three months or something, as a metal band, but calling them a metal band probably doesn't have a disservice. It's got kind of jazz in there, it's got rap, it's got R &B, and it is, I would say, the most complete album. take me back to Eden is the most complete album that I've ever heard in my entire life. And it's just, it's phenomenal. And I was listening to them in the gym earlier on thinking about life hacks for today. And I realized that across the last year, then all my top five songs from Spotify wrapped it all by, on that album, they're all by sleep talk and they're all from taking me back to Eden.

1:39:10And listening to music that just makes you so happy and is useful for uplifting your mood, making you train harder, getting you into a good state, just that. So sleep You've token, take me back to Eden, fucking, I'm up there. You sent that album to me and I dismissed it twice. So I think it takes a couple of times. Oh, you give it a crack and then bailed out and give it a crack. Yeah, these are actually in full. Yeah. Did you really? Yeah. Just if I think I was expecting something very different. Yeah. It's fucking awesome. It's very different. It's fucking brilliant. But yeah. It's very, very good.

1:39:42Strong. Very good. Gee. My one, so yeah, this is one that everybody knows about, but not to the level, I think I'm going to suggest. So me and Chad Gbt have developed quite an interesting relationship, say the least, but basically what Chad Gbt has unlocked, which I don't think most people have realized yet, is you can basically go to like level one of every single video game. So what I mean by that is I won't lie, there'll be things that people would speak about who are a lot smarter than me. So people discuss the laws of physics and they'd start talking. I'd be nodding my head, but I didn't actually know what any of that meant.

1:40:20Or like any kind of rudimentary concept that I just just owned out at school, and they immediately, it's like level 37, or it's like they're talking about level, sorry, season 12, episode four of Friends, the six minute mark, and I have no context of who any of the characters are. And the ability to go into chat GBT, chat GBT isn't useful for any like dynamic on the edge topics. So like if you were learning TikTok ads, it wouldn't be that great for it. But if you go on there, I can be two examples. So like David Deutsche's book the beginning of infinity read it and it's quite dry I probably Just below the IQ threshold where it would like the IQ market fit for that book and what I would do is I Prompt chat you be seeing a guy.

1:41:00Okay. I want to know the 10 most important concepts from this book One by one and do not move on until I say I understand And I will just sit there it will be so prints the first one and I go I don't get that word there And I don't get what you mean by that and then it sprints something else out and I go, okay, explain like a smart 10 -year -old Dada -dada and you get to the bottom of the basement and you go, ah, I get it Whereas in the book, you'll be getting it getting it getting it and then they'll say a concept that you don't fully understand And then he moves on and then that concept is like the um the foundation for all these other stuff and you just check out And the ability to use chat GPT for any kind of foundational topic and say with an airport You showed me the other day.

1:41:42You can use the audio version as well, so you can speak back and forth to it. You look at it and you go, I can understand anything. Nothing is too intimidating if I use chat GPT correctly. So there's almost, there's no such thing as not knowing something is just not prompting chat GPT to the level and the personalization it can have. Because I think that's the fundamental thing where the education system breaks is, I think the vowel spoke about it, but you'll be understanding, understanding, understanding, then you're off one day. You come back in and you didn't get that bit of algebra and they keep going on and on and on but the ability to get any Bit of nonfiction foundational text personalized to you and doesn't move on until you understand it is absolutely phenomenal Massive with that I did a maths degree and if you if you zone out for a couple of minutes in in a pure maths Proof you are yeah, you're from that's it's so the fact that you can the air pods thing I think is massive that you should like so chat GPT have now introduced conversational AI.

1:42:38So you can have an air pod in, go out for a walk and talk to it about explain relativity to me. And I think the tonality that it uses is frightening. Hey, would you like to know more about that? It's the sound so human. It's only going to get more and more human. Yeah. But the thing I'd say with this is for anybody who listen as any topic now that you're kind of embarrassed to ask people about or somebody says something that you don't want to ask because you assume every smart person knows that. Any topic you just say, explain them up 10 most important topics. Don't move on until I say I understand and just keep asking why, why, why.

1:43:15Explain like a 10 -year -old and you just realize you can understand any topic. If you leave it all in the same, if you have one big thread with all the stuff you want to learn, does it? Can it just quick it? Yeah, quick it. It's the biggest to learn as well. The fundamental problem is, Google had a little bit of that, but with time, Google's only got worse and worse. Somebody said something recently where it's like if you Google what disease you have you don't find out what disease you have You just find out which one has the best SEO and that's the fundamental problem like Google Which is always the most serious one as Google as a product is getting worse and worse every single year and chat GPT is getting better and better It's just a matter of Until it goes but it is so good for personalized education particularly for Historical or foundational topics any moment of history any book that's been around for a long time So good, or even if you're on holiday somewhere and you go, I'm here.

1:44:05Tell me the 10 most important things about this place. It's incredible. That's strong. All right. We've got about 10 minutes left. Should we do one more round of hacks or one more round of lessons? What do you think? I've got a decent lesson a week. I'll be last. All right lessons it is. Um, I think this is originally from the book 10 ,000 weeks by Oliver Burke, Oliver Bergman. um, defining something I struggle with a lot, defining done or defining a productive day I had a time. So I had this realization that I very rarely, if ever, leave a training session with unfinished exercises, I finished the exercises, but I'm not in the gym for like stupid amounts of time.

1:44:46I've like thought about it and I've like planned myself a reasonable number of exercises and I finished them, but I almost always end a day with uncomplete tasks. So I like look at my tedious. And then you finish the day feeling unsatisfied. It's fine, satisfied. So just slightly underregging. It's as simple as it is. Just slightly underregging how many things you're going to do in a day. So create your to -do list for like hungover, tired you because you can always just borrow stuff from tomorrow. And if you, that's how you do eight things a day every day. Today you, you plan to do six and you borrow two from tomorrow, you feel mint when you finish the day.

1:45:26But if you plan to do 10 and you only do 8, you feel terrible. There's a permanent dissatisfaction, I think, that many people, especially me have with our to -do list, there are more things that you have to do that you have an infinite number of things to do. And even if you don't have an infinite number of things to do, you definitely have an infinite number, almost an infinite number of more things that you can do today. Which means that there will permanently be I've it's not it's like a like bailing out. It's like, and that's enough for now as opposed to I am finished. And that sense of I am finished is a degree of satisfaction that I think we should all be try to achieve more of.

1:46:00I have this, I have this resistance. It doesn't like, oh, well, but that means I'll do a lot of stuff, but I won't. I'll get to the end of the to do some, yeah, do some. Well, it's the calendar white space thinking, oh, well, I've got all this white space. Well, if I'm not filling it all up back to back, ramming myself with tasks, then I'm pulling short, but actually, if you do that and you have no buffer time, it just takes a poo that's two minutes too long to completely knock out your entire speaking experience. Dude, I remember this when I snapped my Achilles, I had this very precisely planned weekend.

1:46:32So it was the weekend that a bunch of new tenants were moving into one of my houses and I needed to get this new TV and drop it off and all of the IKEA stuff that was in the back of my car so that the guy that would build it was going to be there. He was going to be there the next day but the TV needed to be collected today and that meant that I had to go at the St.

1:46:49Sprees. didn't account for the fact I wasn't going to be at the cricket pitch, I was going to be at the fucking Royal Victoria infirmary, like having a boot put on. And then I realized I was like, right, Dad, I know that I've just had the most traumatic injury of my entire life thus far. But we now need to leave the RVI and go to St. Brees to collect this fucking television. Our else this very carefully put together house of cards is all going to come tumbling down. So yeah, I've got a selfie with you in the hospital. You were in Cricket whites. Correct. I was still going to be cut out of my fucking cricket.

1:47:19My brand new cricket whites. My mum was my mum was I still you sent me a picture of it with how's the bogey? Do you do? So boggy. Very boggy. You squeezed where you're currently should be in those there was no. It was just like it was just flesh. I left foot drove home from the RVI. So I snatched my right foot and I left foot drove home because I was out. I can't be bothered going to get my car tomorrow. That's the better hope of which is the variation where you overpress break left. Left foot drove home. Accelerator, and break. This is where Lifehack's episode one, his... By an automatic car.

1:47:54Yeah. You're the real winner. It ain't that manual. Wow. Yeah, that's impossible. Let's game over. All right. Yeah, that's good. I like that. It's just one thing, tactically, how do you do that? What does that look like on Tick -Tick? So you'll learn in your private one -to -one, but you just... I generally will stack the morning and then leave white space in the afternoon. because the morning stuff always takes longer than you think. And then I always, and almost always, end up with a little bit of extra time at the end of the day, and you can just take off a few bonus things. And if you leave with enough, if you finish today with nothing, and you tick tick feels great.

1:48:28That's nice. So that's like a couple hundred quid a day in happiness, I think, every day. So. So I've got a mini lesson from you, and a mini lesson from you. None from me? Well, we've kind of collabed on our lessons today, but you don't have to try and make him feel or more important to your lessons than you are. So I learned a lot from George visiting him a couple of weeks ago, but one of the things that's definitely clear here is that whenever you run into a problem, you derive a principle from it. You write about it and create some content to kind of solidify that lesson and you fail fast with figuring out like how can I stress test this problem.

1:49:11So the midwit thing works very well. and the failing fast, I don't know, I experienced this because George took me foiling, which was excellent. It's like a motorized surfboard. And on the way there, he said, you see, you're going to fall spectacularly in the water 40 times before you can consistently stand on the foil. So expect that, so that you're not just always disappointed with how badly you're doing. And having the bar set there was great because then it meant that I'm not expecting to be good. I can have lots of spectacular falls and then if you manage to stand on any less than 40 after 40 fails, brilliant.

1:49:53It feels like a bonus. So what's the metal lesson? The metal lesson is pull out the principles, stress test them and fail fast. I think pricing in failure is so good. Because it turns into a video where it's, when I take the belief for it, I give them technical instructions and I'll listen, because it's their first time. But that one thing always rings home. Because otherwise they try and stand up on the first go, fall off and go, I'm a failure. And then each rep reinforces that. Verses when you say you're going to fall off 40 times in a row, they then see each one as a rep that up, boom, done the third one, done the fourth one.

1:50:25Yeah, I was excited to fall the next time. And actually it took way less than 40. Yeah. Jim Smith has a bit about this in his live talk where he says he was knocking door to door for end power and realized that every 200 door knocks he got a sale and then his sales manager was like how many more sales do you need for today and he said to say how many doors does he take for you to get a sale and 200 he was like well knock on 400 more fucking doors then and it's just okay that's the way to bake it in it's like just the price of business basically. 100 percent you say you had a second one. The lesson from you is pick a thing and take it seriously.

1:50:57So that's something that's a manga idea, but this podcast is the testament to that. We we started our podcast in 2013. We picked a thing among many things. We didn't take it seriously. You did an episode with us in 2015, 2016. You were like, hmm, quite like this. And you were like, I'm going to go balls deep on this three episodes a week, well -researched episodes, aiming for good production quality straight away when you did the reps and you enjoyed the process as well. You didn't just do it expecting that, like, oh, I want episode four, why hasn't this got more views yet or whatever? It was just, I'm doing this to master the craft and enjoy the process and without being able to do that, I'm sure you would have given up way earlier than you did and way earlier than the...

1:51:51Well, it's a lesson curve. All of the pursuits that we're all trying to do that the person who enjoys walking will walk way further than the person that has to walk. Yeah, exactly. So those are the two meta lessons as much as I can say would apply to everything. What's difficult is giving a prescription without a diagnosis. And I think this is the problem with content in general that without doing that, you're kind of scattered gunning stuff, you're shotgunning stuff because obviously in medicine to use that analogy, you always have a patient in the room with a symptom, a guiding principle, and you do history, examination, investigation, diagnosis, treatment.

1:52:31And if you shuffle those steps around, you're going to have a really low hit rate. So the broader principles are as good as we can get. And then the fastest way to make faster progress is to work with someone to diagnose what is my bottleneck right now. and how can I then fix that? All right, I think I'm gonna do one hack and one lessen quickly, because I can do that. Hack is Kindle released this year, the largest most expensive Kindle yet, which is the Kindle scribe, which has got a pen that comes with it, and it's all advertised as, and you can use this, it'll replace your paper, it's kind of trying to compete with the remarkable, doesn't have the features of a remarkable.

1:53:16It's not, it doesn't have a folio keyboard fold out thing. It's not as advanced as that. And like how many times are you thinking, do you know, I really wish that I could like hand write a note right now? They're also trying to say, well, you can hand annotate books, but you can't write on the margins or write on the words. You have to highlight tag a note and then within the note that gives you an area that you can write. So for the writing area stuff, it's kind of bollocks. It's also if you haven't got a paper white or an oasis yet and still found yourself wanting more Kindle, it's not enough.

1:53:52That being said, it is probably in terms of screen area, maybe even bigger than an A4 piece of paper. So you fit a ton of text and I didn't realize how enjoyable reading long pages of text is rather than moving through pages a lot. Each time that I move a page, there's a non -zero chance that I'm going to be like, I'm at the top of another page here. And there's something about, it's very enjoyable. For me personally as well, I have a habit of spinning a pen through my fingers and it helps me focus. If I do something small that distracts a little bit of physical energy from myself, I focus a lot more on whatever I'm thinking about.

1:54:29So the fact it's always got this pen attached, can do that, can change page with the pen by tapping it. You can also highlight very accurately by using the pen, which is something I use, then that gets resurfaced through, read -wise. but I'm like a power user when it comes to Kindle, Santa Kindle is the way that I read articles. I don't read substacks on the computer. I don't read blog posts on the computer. All of that goes through Kindle. And it's just a huge monster piece of kit with a pan attached to it that you can highlight and navigate with. And that's very enjoyable, super bright. Is it like an E inks green or is it like a...

1:55:03So it's like a high pad. You can do like the flux setting as well. So for... Yeah, going super, I'm not at the 90 day mark for it yet, so I can't really see you. You want to see me? But it is, I'm 60 % of the way through Elon's new biography, and I'm not even thought about the charger, I've got like 86 % battery. It's in your batteries insane. I'll tell you what's even more in the same way to do it. Turn it to airplane mode. Turn a kindle to airplane mode, and it's just, it's an infinite fucking energy machine. It's crazy. And then just a quick lesson, which is from Morgan House, or your expectations to find your happiness more than your circumstances.

1:55:40If you presume that happiness is what you want minus what you have, like a lot of billionaires are broke and that meta -lesson of you can try and dial down your expectations, which is kind of hard. We're all type A people that want to achieve a lot and not leave it on the table, but always just looking for that reframe of, look, why am I even bothered about chasing this particular thing? Is it just because I once saw this guy that I used to go to whatever with or that I used to know from this thing who's just done X or Y or Z or they're on in the say shells or he's got a Ferrari or like all of that bullshit just comes back to like every time that you decide to bring a desire into your life see it as a it's like a carna payment on happiness.

1:56:31It's like I'm going to if I decide to bring this in I'm withdrawing from an overdraft and I'm going to have to repay that at some point, like really, really carefully scrutinize desires and expectations because they're delays on happiness. A great meme for that is like net reality. Say where you have net profit, like reality minus expectation, net reality. Like if someone has an incredible reality, but their expectations are greater, they're a minus EBITDA. Yeah, that's in terms of it. Something you skimmed over with consuming content mindfully was that you have a read later app, whatever that is.

1:57:07And you're only allowed to read from that app. So it stops you from reactively just reading an article in one of the 20 tabs you've got open. And instead it has to go through your established system. Yeah. By doing that as well, the center kindle thing, it makes you very mindful. It's like, do I want this on my Kindle library page? Do I really want this on there? Probably not. And there's always most of to read than time to read it in. So triaging what you have to read, center kindle plus scribe, plus pen spinning, plus massive battery time and big screen. Fucking, I have to say I also bought another Oasis.

1:57:41So I now have Kindle next to my bed and I have a Kindle downstairs. I have two Kindle devices. I found that moving them between the two, I would get into bed and I'm like, it's downstairs, guess what? I'm not reading now. Like, I'll watch Netflix or whatever. And the same vice versa for a morning routine. I'm like, oh, it's the upstairs. Yeah, I'll just skip reading today. It's like things in places. I think just one final thing on the expectations thing, the TED talk where paradox of choices and a very short, is it his TED talk? I think he talks about the key to happiness as low expectations and I've always struggled with that, with actioning that because the happiness, to increase your happiness if you just decrease your expectations, do you guys have any practical ways of doing that?

1:58:23Be careful about what desires you let into your life. If like expectations are always going to be high for what you want, but there's ways that you can tune that up. I could definitely make your expectations higher. It's the inversion thing. It's like, how do you reduce expectations? All right, how do you increase expectations? I would spend tons of time on the internet looking at people that are doing better than me. I'd see things that I don't want and unquestioningly presume that I want to have those things because they're ahead of me in some form or another. Like, do you really want a private jet?

1:58:49No, but I look at someone that has one. I go, oh yeah, I should have a private jet. It just gets added into that. But if you extend that, it's like, okay, so my, like the people I spend all my time with should be like the least successful people I should find. Gadsad. I mean, Gadsad found in his book about happiness is most recent one that you need to have a minimum amount of sex per week in order to be happy, but the best way to be happy about your sex life is to be having a little bit more sex than the friends around you. It's like the thing of like you should be more successful than your wife's sister's husband.

1:59:19Yeah, correct. Whatever it is. And like as long as you're above that, But, Krishney. Jean. So I've got, I'll do a quick life hack and I'll bless through my lesson. So a quick life hack is most of people listening to this probably, or significant about having a iPhone, and the alarm clocks designed by Apple are all like Guantanamo Bay creations from the CIA. They are horrific and the thought that you'd wake up your sleep. But I've tried that, like if you go through them all, you press every single one. And all of them are like, that's a nice, soothing thing you'd hear at a spot. They've all got a really high attack on sound, haven't they?

1:59:52That's a shrill of sympathy cocktail. What you can do if you go on the custom tune store and search by neural beats, it's 79p. So here's a big investment. It's 79p, I found this and like, and find the one that relaxes you. And it's such a better way. If you've got to, he's not up to your iPhone. What do you mean? That's the big question. That's probably a question. That's a fucking, I mean, I don't think you're lying, sir. But you're sleeping with your phone, your cell phone. Sleeping with your phone in your bedroom. Yeah, but I used to use an Alexa and then I asked the news. Radio alarm clocks have been around for nearly a hundred years.

2:00:21There's about three life hack contraventions that you're judging. So for all of the straights, a lot of people listening to this will be using their iPhone. And that is a useful one. This is the midwit meme. Don't use the phone. Don't try and repurpose the phone alarm to be more successful. Get rid of the phone and buy either sunrise alarm clock. You can get one on Amazon for 15 bucks or standard radio alarm clock five pounds. You know there's one called, I think it's called like clocky now that has wheels on it. So it's alarm clock and then as soon as it sets off, it starts driving around. So there's a few versions.

2:00:52There's one that's a mat, yes, stand on it and solve a mat problem. I'm fine. I'd be such a bad hangar. Does anyone like, I don't use an alarm. I just wake up. My, I think it's a bit of a slight signal, right? Like, you just go at it at the same time. It's easy. That's not always, anyway. Shut up, Johnny. Lessons for so far. I've done a lesson from the little, obviously, throwback to manga, Bezos. This one comes from the Gallagher brothers, Liam and Noel. Nice. So they have a lyric which hits me every single time. I think it's the best lyric I've ever heard which is questions are the answers you might need and it hits me hard so Essentially even when I have people ask me for advice now or even when I'm thinking myself or even creating content Just having a recurring question that I come back to is so useful versus having a specific answer so you avoid the prescriptions mindset one of the things is there's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I know if you heard that, and they, within that they create a super computer which, like, is supposed to give them the answers to life and the universe, and it just spits back 42.

2:02:01And it's like, because you didn't know what the question was. And so many things I come back to, questions now. So have you read Elon's book yet? So, I mean, I can tell you it right now. This is what it is. Okay, it's basically him. He comes up an idea, and then somebody works him a go, that's not possible when he goes, does it defy the laws of physics? And then they're like, well, not technically, we still can't do it. And he goes, why? Why? Why? And then he hits the base level belief and goes, fix that. And then he goes, also, do it by next Tuesday. And it's like, it's Bill Barock. It's that it's just him going, does it defy the laws of physics?

2:02:34And then they go, no, I won't done by next Friday. It's just, it's just a question. Does it defy the laws of physics? And then deadline. That's, that is the 100 anecdotes is the book just doing that again and again and again. So does it defy the laws of physics is a question? One of my favorite things right now is I have friends come to me for advice and I'd often used to like get super detailed and give them so much advice and people wouldn't listen and I was like, okay, so what I do now is I'm just like, well what would you advise me if I came to you in the exact same situation? You didled me with this in Dubai.

2:03:05Yeah, it didled me with it in an Uber. Yeah, and it works and they come up with something that's so profound and personalized that hits home versus me trying to give them generic things. And the Tony Robbins, like, what will you do? And I don't know. Well, if you did know, what would it be? That works every time. Unbelievable. What we said earlier, when we had a quick order break that if you have bad breath, you're the only person in the room that doesn't know. But as soon as somebody else has bad breath, you do know. And it's the ability when you take them out of that frame and have a question.

2:03:33It's given them the answer that they needed all along. And then a few of the favorite questions that I have at the minute, which is, If you meet somebody who's way smarter than you, asking them the question of, well, what question should I be asking you? Is a great one. Another one, which is kind of a test right now in where people often end up in super tribalistic thinking of this team over here or this team over here. I can tell whether someone's a full on NPC, by whether they can answer this question, which is, who is somebody you admire? And you get them to answer that. like who's your kind of cult hero and he goes, what do you disagree with them on?

2:04:09Or what's their worst point that they make? And then the inverse too, like, who's somebody you strongly dislike? And what's a great point that they have? And you find people who are really high at critical thinking or have really thought it through from both sides can answer that really fast. But a lot of people just, let the thought of them conceding a point to somebody on the opposing team, or being able to criticize their guru, the software just hits a 404 error very fast. not a thinking. Gentlemen, I really appreciate you coming through. It's been a wild year for you guys and for me and for you as well although you're less traumatized than we are so you seem to be able to do it.

2:04:49Do a little bit more effectively. It goes without saying everyone that's been tuning in for any of the episodes where you used to see us sitting on this couch. I really appreciate you for tuning in. I hope you have a fantastic Christmas. This is going to go out two days before Christmas so we can say Merry Christmas to everybody. Merry Christmas. And yeah. You see, you're going to finish on last Christmas. It's going to sing the whole thing out. Is that what you're here for? That's what you promised. You've got the glasses on. I appreciate you all having Merry Christmas. We'll catch you soon. Merry Christmas.

2:05:18Bye.