Reflecting On The Wildest Year - Christmas Special (4K)

ladies and gentlemen welcome to a modern wisdom Christmas special for those of you who are probably in the 99.5% that have joined within the last two and a bit years you won't recognize this location this is my living room in Newcastle this is where we did the first ever inperson episodes with Johnny and youf and we've got George Mack with us as well over from Dubai especially just for this not for Christmas or to see his parents just for this just for this episode who to thank it and uh we're all in for those that can't see we're all festively adorned in Christmas jumpers and Yousef is refusing even though he's hot refusing to take it off because it may have to happen halfway thanks for the reminder the microphone for the for the podcast the podcast yeah uh you may because you complain that it feels like a hair shirt so you need something to protect you underneath it's a stoic torture device just really trying to build up my willpower it's resilience training this Christmas jumper is resilience training anyway we're going to go through some of our best lessons and life hacks from the last 12 months for those of you that haven't heard a life hacks episode before we go round in a little Loop and to go through some of the most best way to make a toasted sandwich some new app that we've become obsessed by some new productivity system or a book or something that we've been watching and as is tradition Johnny there it is hot potato for you to go first is the toasted sandwich one one you cuz that was mine do you remember that one bring was brevel toasted sandwich maker it was a sleeve that you put bread in to a toaster to toast the I mean it's it's average to be honest but you remember it more than me we've done hundreds and hundreds of life hacks over the last and that's the one you remember that's one that I remember anyway first up what you got so mine's a it's a supplement and it's one that I think you feel very strongly about don't know what the other two guys think clear away specifically the raspberry lemonade flavor okay mixed with either lemon or orange element salts that's interesting I would genuinely have that over anything else that's a sophisticated blend it is it's great so you're using that post training just morning first thing in the morning yeah 30 grams of protein and some Salu sometimes Two Scoops Two Scoops sometimes Two Scoops raspberry flavor raspberry lemonade uh and what's that 50 55 grams of fruit I don't even know yeah enough that's good yeah and why you why that it's just I don't know like I I mean I'll get into this later in the episode when we talk about lessons but I've been big on this year is all about set things to background make something fun align the like what you should do with that was nice I think I was thinking about this the other day that that hosi uh clip that I had with him where I was explaining my love for pickle ball because it's 1,000 calories in 90 minutes and all you're doing is chasing a ball yeah like trying to get the thing whereas the guy that sits on the cross trainer for 90 minutes thinking to himself oh I'm so disciplined with David Goggins playing in his ear the outcome for both of us has been precisely the same except he's had to develop so much more and use so much more willpower if you take like I don't know 2009 me I'd be still trying to get protein and hydration and lemon and water and salt and all sort of stuff first as soon as I wake up and it's like oh egg whites and whereas that's like a delicious way to wake up so the principle behind that that I think is that there's no moral virtue in white everything so ramit setti talks about that with just automating your saving if you just have a direct debit that or a standing order whatever the international phrases for that for savings to just go out as soon as you get paid you're then not having to think each month oh I really need to save or whatever you just never see it it's just they do that with uh is it pension contributions they realize that they could get people to increase the contribution to their pension easier when they ask them to do it at the time that they got a pay rise because as yet they'd never realized the gains from that new paycheck and as a part of that people didn't feel anchoring bias largely right oh here's new money but it's a little bit less new money than you were thinking you were getting as opposed to old money now minus some so is the key there that you've got to forget about it you've got to be able because if you save if you're saving automatically and you aren't aware of it that's the win isn't it cuz you don't notice whereas if you think I've got a pay rise you just squander it before it even comes in and usually people overcorrect it's like I've done 30 minutes of cardio I'm going to have a couple of donuts you've just more than corrected for the calories it's also automation right yeah doing whatever the hard thing is there's some in that though that you said then of the thing that you like with a pickle ball for example and uh it's like U jovic versus Andre Agassi have you ever heard that thing so Andre Agassi became world number one went all the way down to like 120 was doing crazy drugs like hated tennis loads of childhood trauma but was constantly grinding it away and then they asked jovic like what about you and he goes I just like hitting the ball and if you can find where you like hitting the ball versus having to go Onre aesy mode such so Aaron Alexander who is my American equivalent of youf is literally is I'd love to know what that means interest Andre i' would love to meet you if you're very into very into Bodywork very gy like if I grab his lat unbelievably gay me like do you know it's like a really yeah does tons tons of body work um we were doing high side planks you know where you've got up on that and then you've got your other hand up as well it's pretty unable where your arms like this and he looked over at me and he could say I was gritting my teeth in the middle of this workout and he just said what would this be like if it was easier what would this be like if it was a [ __ ] awesome principle and you're like all right like I don't need to grip as hard to this thing there's times when you should do that you trying to max out your deadlift yeah but for the most part what would this thing I'm trying to achieve be like if it was easier like if you don't like your morning walk pick a better route if you don't like the drink that you have to have first thing in the morning find another brand or find a different flavor until you find the one that you actually enjoy if you don't like getting your steps in buy a dog yeah well I don't think many people like normal whey protein just to link it back to my point I think a loads of people drink whey protein with like yeah whereas clear way delicious G change your mate genuinely delicious all right seph you're up so life hack to begin with I'm excited about this cuz I've been working with a team of accountants and operational analysts to develop the optimal categorization system for life hacks and what they've landed on is basically digital and physical life hacks so I'm going to begin with a physical one which I got from my partner which is if you have I love how you had to take the glasses off like this is [ __ ] down to business this is important serious if you eat a lot of berries like me get yourself a Pyrex Tupperware with a sealable lid and they last days longer like they're no longer you know you would be like a tured plump bluebery that's not kind of a bit deflated and bit crap you just it maintains that for five six days cuz most of the packaging for berries has got little perforations in the top of the seal right is that not there for a reason so soon I I mean I don't know what their reason is I think because like there's a difference between what you just revolutionized the berry industry forever there someone some someone from Kia AA listening going how didn't we think about this so there's maybe a difference between the way things are stored in a supermarket for display versus at home so eggs and things are stored differently but berries give it a try do you ever get frozen berries I do but not quite as good they don't quite lie as well do they M well they haven't got the the snap yeah agreed uh I mean finding the right blueberries is a it's difficult a difficult challenge I've found that you can go super small and they're Tangy and take take your face off you can make you go like uh and then if you go too big there's never big and turgid and turgidity is what I optimize for it's the triangle isn't it so you get to pick two of three so there's taste turgid and size and you can only be on one of the vertices of the triangle it's a real shame this is the sort of thing you wake up and think about I've got a model for it yeah it's in my second tick uh all right my one so this is an old one the OG listeners of which it's literally like points of a percent that will have heard this one before so all of this is essentially new to everyone but it's one that I really reinforced again this year and has just continued to pay dividends I would probably say top five life hacks of all time wow text your friends when you're thinking about them just it continues to pay huge [ __ ] dividends why is everyone laughing is there a limit so let's say you think about someone five or six times in a day because it's a self- exciting process isn't it once you think of someone you're more likely to think of them again that day but if you keep texting them that day they're going to be like all right Chris like this is the youf who at 5 years old organized all of his toy trucks in a perfect semicircle by size and then color coming out just just to be sure are we is it every time that I think about evidently not like use use a filter of let's not be a crazy person so if there's any programmers or developers listening to this you've actually clarified a caveat quite importantly but no just when you're thinking about someone just send them a message like whatever it is you know we'll do it all the time like remember that thing or even just a link to whatever it is that we did previously that's resurfaced somewhere cuz you think about your friends way more than in contact with them and they never get to benefit from it by sending them a text saying hey mate just thinking about you hope everything's good or a memory about what it is that you're doing or whatever it is that's surfaced in your mind it makes them feel great because it's just nice to be reminded of that it makes you feel good because you've unselfishly just bestowed some you know love onto whoever it is and it keeps friendships ticking over if if your friends knew how often you thought of them friendships would decay much more slowly than they actually do and by doing this you actually reduce that gap between the two things I mean this is something that you've done as well right this year trying to do better yes yeah yeah yeah you are chronically bad with your phone which is actually being very good with your phone yeah yeah that that is the tough balance with the one you've given there of I try not to be on my phone too much and then I'll end up in that sloof of texting back and forth but the reason that you try not to be on your phone is not because of texting your friends texting is actually one of the if you had to like draw a graph of Roi activities texting friends is on the top it's the same as why you actually got me back into taking photos at events I'd mistakenly thought that taking a photo was cringe because the only reason you take a photo is so you could post it on Instagram so i' asssociated taking photos of things that you enjoyed with being a cringe in Instagram poster but it's actually I can take a photo and not post it anywhere and it's my memory for me so I had to like chop that bit off very important distinction yeah I have a recurring reminder at different cadences for friends to check in on them give them a call Etc so it's like Geo tag oh yeah Geo tag so if I'm in certain cities it pings up with like oh I'm in London get in touch with Ali get in touch with whoever so I'm immediately picturing youf like actioning this life hack and I'm going to get a text from like yousef's VA saying yousef's in the back thinking about something like that very soon at a very strict Cadence very stri Cadence always at 9:00 p.m. at night I think I still need to reply to a message from you from like June there we go do do it on the podcast we do it should do it now I I wrestle with the worry that as soon as you message someone if they reply straight away now you're that could be 20 minutes back and forth do you know what you not like your friends no I do but that but but I think you've opened up a a bottomless task yeah so like similar to youf I'm like oh I should text Chris MH and you're you're good at it you'll reply and then that's it we' exchange but some people are like oh hey may oh this post kitle pillow talk yeah yeah like I was just doing my task man like well I don't know I've got a final question for you on this because I know Johnny is very easygoing on this if someone knows that you have a an internal system for every time someone every time you think of someone you have to text them every time sure but does that ruin the magic I don't think so should it seem spontaneous cuz I have a reminder for all my friends birthdays and so on and some people would be like oh well that's not the same you know you're not just doing it out of your own whereas Johnny's like oh no I think that's great because you've had the foresight so I think you're you're one of having reminders is less emergent my one is when you think of a friend text them like that there's no at no point in there is there any deceit right I was just thinking about you hope that everything's well like you've said what's happening your one is hi mate well well no it depends on why it's like hey mate my reminder just came up telling me to message you do you say that well yeah good point so if you say that the magic's gone precisely so you're one it's knowing how you do the magic trick isn't it yeah yeah yeah I'm now just going to check my phone every day and if you've not messaged me I haven't thought of you or maybe I think of you so much that I can't that it's more than once a day right George you can't my one's s my one is um [ __ ] oh it's thrown me that's really he said no private jokes yeah he's explaining that's not private everyone's seen you're right actually it's on BBC yeah so and enough for the Alan par references my one is going to um three-fold one I think it's going to um add years on to men's lives reduce the divorce rate and it also killed my fear of dying alone so um I had very low bar to get yeah I had this simultaneous fear that for ages I wouldn't be able to share a bed with anybody because I would constantly get woken up throughout the night and it's what point in the dating process do you bring that up of like we're going to have separate beds so I just assumed that it wouldn't work out and there was this image on redit for people who haven't seen it where a boyfriend and girlfriend track their sleep for like over a year and both of them the top two are very similar so fasted in bed uh 3 hours before bed um is a 16% Improvement in sleep getting in bed before 11:00 p.m. both of them that was the two most beneficial factors and then for her a beneficial Factor was sharing bed with partner and then you go all the way down his list through all the good ones all the way past alcohol all the way past like everything bad you can think of the single biggest thing a minus 25% score was sharing bed with a partner however for her it was plus 7% so she benefits from it meanwhile he's D and for context girls her menstrating was minus 15% so dou him yeah him sharing be with the part with her was was way worse care with this sorry was way worse than uh her menstrating is there a hack here George or is this I know I already know what's coming I've seen the end of this movie fact you might change you're screwed might change life this might change your life can I can I ask around the room do you sleep better or worse when a partner's in the bed way worse what about yourself worse what about yourself I don't feel like my date is good enough to answer the question I'd say it doesn't affect me okay well whenever I not with a partner in the bed it's like in a hotel traveling yeah and that's worse anyway okay so there's yeah there's not enough there I mean The evolutionary explanation would be you naturally men tend to sleep near the door anyway on average for these relationships you're then thinking if somebody breaks it and whenever she moves the duvet your adrenaline goes up and her adrenaline goes down CU she's like oh he's that double duvet is the life hack two dues Scandinavian style I tried it and it's it is the best thing okay so we need to really dig into this you sleep in a king Super King Super King Super King which is actually only in real size two singles side by side I mean it might be if that feels smaller it's not how a king right okay I think a king is actually two singles right uh anyway Super King so how would you do it he has a super king bed yeah you can't have two Super King dues so do you get two double dues yeah sizewise you can play around with that I just just two is your hack I don't know yeah but it's like saying oh my iPhone I don't know the exact iPhone case for your iPhone right however just never had an iPhone George's first lifea he wasn't prepared for the level of autism that we don't tie me up in legal oh what uh what size bed do you have again Super King just get two Super King dues but then that's ridiculous twoing dues it's going to be on the floor it's fine it's think about it it's going to be like so much baggy do it's still we'll go King then go King but two KS getting caught up in the details what this details details for me with the details okay okay unbelievable um I really think I really think that this this needs I mean we can put this out to millions and millions of people I would go as far as to say probably two double dues if you have a super king if you have a super king what we need is a PDF nice PDF supplemental appendices please all the guys who sleep with their girlfriend or wife have to go listen to this episode and then sell it to someone don't they that's true I think George said because of my courtis all so on that that we need two do and say how big are the dues I forgot to do the follow-up which was then when they track the double duvet it was the single biggest positive thing for him oh so the data seems to suggest that do you have two D I've been in the process of negotiating this since visiting George what's being the issue with negotiation just that she thinks it's a bit antisocial antisocial antisocial yeah but I think two singles will do because we're in a king and if a king is truly two single beds that's the perfect I think you're going to want I think you're going to want a little bit more I think you're Queen I think you're going to want two queens two doubles two doubles on a normal King is going to be a lot is a double not smaller than is a queen smaller than a double the amount of bandwidth given to this that's why need it's important yeah there'll be a PDF at some point we need a matrix and a PDF yeah I mean this is another thing it's how do you sell it to the partner my answer has just been buying the extra duvet and then just going in the duv this is the way we sleep now yeah and I discovered it by accident because I I read that data Didn't Do It um and then stayed in a hotel where there was like a blanket extra like a duvet extra um and it was magical I went from waking up five to six times a night to not they were using AA I think Aura yeah they were on Aura make yourself a custom journal entry and let's split test this and year's time no you just use something that it isn't something yeah likeing or skiing uh all right so lessons first one from you my God I thought we were doing life ha I was ready for one Loop of life hacks one Loop of lessons keep it variety Okie doy um just before we get started with that do you remember it I know exactly where I was at a set of traffic lights when I texted both of you this years ago I wanted to do something I think it was called like um like lesson lesson hacks or like life lessons it was life lessons and I was like why don't we do a series of life lessons as well as life hacks which is kind of what we're going to go through here and I seem to remember you saying something along the lines of like that's a big shout to presume that we're sufficiently interesting to actually bestow lessons on anybody M and uh so I bailed out of doing that but a couple of years later all of the listicle style episodes that I do like the hosi style one uh the ones that me and George do if it's a list of mental models all of that that is the progeny of originally what I was thinking about doing from life lessons and um I think it probably wasn't time at the time but I'm I reckon now we're we've ascended to be I thought that was you're the most requested guest on the podcast as well so according to my brain you want to listen to me on the podcast the most I would listen to you talking life lesson you get you get to talk to me all the time oh it's getting hot I'm so my first lesson is actually from yris okay really recently and it's linked to what George has just said so if anyone's listened to life hacks from the very beginning I've been on a real journey with tracking devices Fitbit Ora whoop borrowed your aura ring years ago didn't like it that much it was you said you summed up I think what the whole point of all these things is which was you said something like it's not about how recovered you are or what you score is it's just how much sleep you get MH and I think the point that what I've learned from all that stuff this year because we as we'll get on to we've had a fairly like jarring year where I've realized like if I don't prioritize the recovery side I'm so focused on the activity side the training side the step side but I never like the sleep and the recovery like I always push to one side but having something to just remind you every day like you should have a nap player like you're taking the piss like if you keep doing this it's going to get worse and worse and worse so having a recovery tracker or something external to prompt you to like you are not prioritizing this and if you don't prioritize it it's a problem it's going to Scupper you yeah yeah you're going to I mean this I'm aware that I'm both a whoop and eight sleep partner so this is maybe not great for my partnership with them but I can give you the the only takeaway that everybody that has one of those learns you're sleeping less than you think you are yeah yeah you're sleeping less than like it's just whoop you're sleeping less than you think you are like sleeping less than you think you are that should be the tagline yeah honestly and it it all that you get from tracking your sleep is [ __ ] I I was in bed I was sure that I was in bed for 8 hours turns out it was actually sort of 7:15 and of that 715 my efficiency was 85% which means I got 6 hours and 30 minutes of sleep last night and I thought I got eight hours it's just that over and over and over and over and over again well you need to be in bed for 9 hours don't you to get eight yeah yeah absolutely and now you're going to have double duve think about what 204 is going to oh yeah I just it's such a there's a good quote on that which I think I forgot who said it but um there's no such fingers being overworked there's just underr so true so true yeah I'm yet to find I'm yet to find a time where I've been overworked if just under arrested yes just under arrested yeah if I get a good night's sleep and train there's pretty much no amount of work have you been serious have you finished that no no I'm just plowing through the I decided like there's an obvious P there and just was like just trying to make eye contact to do at the same time um cuz do you guys what do you guys do use a whoop do you just do you just wing it with sleep I mix it up I've used uh whoop I've used Aura it depends on like different periods if I want to test thing one thing the 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 dis for the whoop users completely disregarding a recovery score is a good idea so that that was a question it's you said you literally said to me we were walking to egg [ __ ] in London and you said it's not how recovered you are time to sleep you got 100% and it just I know it's so simple but I'm so focused on like oh it's Amber to day got eight and a half hours of sleep bro I got so I slept through my flight sorry I stayed awake through my flight from Austin back to the UK which means that I 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 awakeness but I'm only at 40% recovered like hey get [ __ ] right I had 11 hours of sleep last night I feel great today regardless of where my HIV and my resting heart rate's at and then there's a self-fulfilling prophecy that if you're told that you slept badly you start telling yourself the story that oh maybe I and then you perform worse and there's studies that confirm that that if you're um if people are told falsely that they've slept badly they perform worse on cognitive tests than if they just no sleep bow so I I think you the way you've done gone about it is great because you've identified what is the Keystone needle mover which is Total Sleep time there's a lot tracking devices have a lot of redundant data excellent um 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 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 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 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 of something that isn't helping I like that I like it's yeah so I suppose the summary is put less attention on tracking like the other side of the equation CU you probably do that well depends who's listening just the problem with these things but if you're the sort of person who wears a woop band you're probably handling the activity side and you probably ignore you're like I'm green recovered but I got 6 hours of sleep and actually the biggest change is just just volume of sleep focus on sleep right Seth lessons lesson lesson so as Johnny said we've had quite a turbulent year what did you tell us about that both the 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 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 we set up propane about 10 years ago well 14 years ago and we're very much like skitso introvert type characters that just like to be at our desks doing our own thing and we barely even communicate with each other we're just like in the hole you're annoying well Fair um so we're just kind of in the hole 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 CLE says it's a vessel for self-improvement disguised as a money-making Enterprise the it's the the biggest driver of your personal growth because it comes in and just twists your nipples and finds all of the the 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 well it's external to you all personal growth is always done at your own pace but the business isn't so it yeah it forces you along it's Road running versus running in a treadmill yeah you're getting steamrolled and it's like a heat seeking missile as well cuz it finds all of the things that would get you emotionally triggered or wound up MH 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 be more agreeable or disagreeable learning to disappoint people fear that it'll go away fear that it'll fail Fe you let people down fear of how people think of you they're all 10 out of 10 aren't they business is a vehicle for personal growth disguised as a wealth making machine that's [ __ ] brilliant is that in Tomic abits don't think it is not sure not one of his tweets I think is it one of the uh biggest hacks um 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 when you got when you get that fourth employee and you've doubled the head count and if you can now go back at 19 and review those thoughts of like 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 5x that um it makes it a lot easier to then play that again going 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 and especially between you two guys as well to be able to share it is oh yeah we look back and think remember that thing that we thought was a massive problem you know what would be you know what would be a really good way to do this a slack CH a private slack Channel that's just got you two in where you can just brain dump [ __ ] to each other like dude I'm feeling feeling a little bit whatever whatever about today and that's all that goes in there and that would be the journal between especially if you got a business partner going to be tougher for the solo preneurs I remember it's in my day one so day one for me is serious [ __ ] right it's like there's a per been periods of three years where nothing's gone in there been periods of six weeks where I've documented three times day one is for like [ __ ] hell like something really dramatic has happened I remember there's it's still [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] day one right that was the beginning of the thing that was going to be the Snowball Effect that would cause 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 it was going to be homeless alone on a street and I was going to get gluten intolerance and live under a bridge gluten intolerance but 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 like 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 gluten intolerance I'm going to have all these it's like so that was like a real hot button then and it as you say it's great to come back to that and be like just have you seen day one has this feature of the on this day feature yes yeah I don't have enough I don't have enough entries so I try and use it I just after I meditate I just write what's on my mind and if you just always what there pretty much always if you do it often enough isn't on this day on this day eight years ago 10 years ago 12 years ago and he just like God there's so many like recurrent things going have to bank both of those comments for my next round cuz 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 [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] um all right so my first one it's cool that we're got this sort of Human Centipede of ideas coming on here the um this 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 amydala and um what I realized was that when you're consuming anything on the Internet it's almost always it tends toward limic hijack because if it didn't you would watch something else which was more lytically 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 but what you can do is have a sort of Pillow Talk post kitle review of how did that particular session of YouTube watching or Tik Tok scrolling or in 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 all of the social medias have a way of down voting as well as up voting uh 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 tant amount to that entire worldview or that Creator just dieing right 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 when you unfollow them it's like 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 had this when I always struggled with Instagram delete it download it d d d 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 next question did like entertain me or make me laugh so if it's like an Allan Partridge thing or a funny meme it stays on if no moves 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 um or 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 4u 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 retrospectively we wish that we were watching more of X or Y or Zed one interesting thing I think that's happening with YouTube is 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 II documentaries which Shane Gillis calls early onset Republican like getting getting interested in history documentaries he's like yo if your man starts watching World War II documentaries G keep an it is a gateway drug it's early onset Republican um but I do that but it only recommends them to me at night first thing in the morning it's not middle of the day it's always 10 minute to 15 minute videos that I can watch with my lunch so again just train the algo but yeah um and then for the content creators are fledgling cont 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 going to be shouting Into The Ether but you don't want to be completely controlled by it because that's just audience capture there 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 a kind of audience capture and then there's what you want to do which can be like just total solipsism like self masturbatory congrat congrat 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 [ __ ] are you doing and I realized this at the live shows that I was doing this tour I would happily go for a beer with any of the people that arrived and I know for a [ __ ] fact that there are tons of podcasters 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 [ __ ] like I'd happily like GO train with this person or 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 it's just it slices through all of the [ __ ] 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 listen to or or watch rather because I assume what you want to watch now is different is probably a little bit different right so yeah um 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 were 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 so you talk where you're at but you frame it with with where you've been and I think that that helps people to get along the steps this is an Ali abdal 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 5 years ago as revolutionary because now they're taken for granted you 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 a it's like for a regular person off the street or talking about how you're going to um rent your fourth holiday home in andur like it it's stuff that's so far removed from and it's like aggrav his life yeah cuz you're like well what do I do with that yeah do you think that a possible pressure valve that cuz I see a lot of YouTubers that will have a second channel for that kind of monologue uncensored unfiltered whatever do you think that's just for them to scratch the itch of content they want to create but they don't want to post on the main Channel that's interesting well there's lots of second channels that are also dog [ __ ] like like the they they still don't add value I heard this term a little while ago I probably need you guys to help spin this up uh 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 s 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 and trying to growth hack authenticity results in you seeming even less authentic it's the Brian Rose effect right like [ __ ] Shadow Boxing under a bridge with degenerate skateboarders looking for a bare Market in a bush like he is oh God he is me and George I we'll I'll can I tell them the story about that day we did VR oh yeah go right okay so uh what what were we here for uh what were we in town for Ark no I can't even remember we were in we came to we've been 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 we double bubble bang banged the world's two most advanced virtual realityy experiences Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds at dot dot dot in London and then the Tower of London virtual reality experience uh we did those back toback on mushrooms so if you think that mushrooms is crazy mushrooms in VR with a full like cast of actors around you for two hours twice in the same day was just [ __ ] mind-blowing that's enough to induce a psychotic break isn't it well we we I think the dosage was pretty optimal like we it was like a like a 0.7 0.8 kind of like just like nice little fluffy thing but it made everything seem so much to do both you do one and you're like I saw I meetting with Chris today and I see go what you want do today you like a walk maybe saw a quick workout he goes I've got some mushrooms we can go to a VR world I I guess guess flip a coin then right so similar yeah yeah it was [ __ ] brilliant it was a good day what a day right you're up um my one so um related to the chat so far so the content razor that we spoke about then is very midwit um 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 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 because 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 p.m. every single day and this editing strategy from Alex homos is no 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 right writing one is writing the other is e-commerce um or like an internet business and the other one is happiness so for like writing like the obvious midwit thing would be to consume the best writers of all time and find out their specific morning routines and try to reverse it backwards versus with inversion you just say if you was 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 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 there's a you would you would do things that make you feel like you're making progress toward writing yes that aren't writing yes exactly and all of a sudden via just inverting you found out what the guy on the left would say it' 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 chatbot that then moves them through this AB 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'd make like like .1% margin we give you the worst margins possible the second thing is there's like no repeat purchase so there's such little LTV and then and also the average order value is Tiny and then there'd be like a zero principle which would be like you're selling [ __ ] sandwiches you're selling something that nobody wants so be selling [ __ ] with no margin no repeat make it really hard to buy make the site load site page speed really that be later down the list but it just right now just [ __ ] sandwiches with no margin no repeat customer thing is [ __ ] sandwich has got a bit of a niche appeal probably Niche like the Nazi milk there we go did we talk about that no what's that oh it was correct me if I if this rings a bell or you got it so is uh woman sat doing photo shoots with Nazi memorabilia all around her and she's got her feet some milk and she's bathing in milk and then bottles it up and sells it online as Nazi milk and quite a decent markup on that but again Nicha peel you think well didn't Bel deline sell her bath water I don't know yeah I'm pretty sure bath in a bath but those are both things that people want I actually wanted to buy anyway something somebody we have to off this podcast sponsor um so uh and then happiness is another one where people are doing such like complex strategies for that and going to Peru and taking I which again there's a time and 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 on the left would be is just to invert things around and avoid the top three or four so what is it what is the opposite of success exactly and avoid avoid those things what would someone what would someone that was going to run a terrible online fitness 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 yeah because and most sorry just to put in but most smart people will get caught up the 16th smart thing for success and not avoid those things including myself we we have a phrase which is just stay Stupid with the advice yeah it's like as soon as you st trying to make something complicated like what would the stupid person do they wouldn't understand the complexity the difficulty is I think convincing yourself that the stupid advice is actually the because there's there's examples of things where it seems simple but it actually is the wrong thing to do what like and you you going to ask me okay so going and training chest every day for example I want to get in good shape I'm just going to train chess every day what do I like to doing I like training chest I'll just do pec deck every day it that's simple advice but it's probably not the best there's a level of being informed that you need to get you need to like get just over the like it's like a white belt mentality right like the white belt actually does know so all of the [ __ ] that you learn when you first start boxing it's like here is how to throw a good jab guess what you're going to throw most of during your enire boxing career Jabs but then when you get to blue belt syndrome or purple belt syndrome the equivalent in boxing and you're like yeah well it's all about like my back off hand uppercut like that's really where I'm it's like no no get [ __ ] 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 and I've just come all the way back to basics and I'm just doing the basics consistently well Yousef had one which was someone asked Yousef recently like what's a like what's his recommendation for for pre-workout nutrition mhm and he was like oh like coffee and some like 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 arm session and then you go through all the like Ary extract bottle I'm going to train later I'll have some honey on toast and a coffee I don't know yeah so trying to find the but it's still informed enough that it's tell you useful what's mental about this is that the first ever episode that me and George did in your old old old old offices at Social chain where we did inversion how do you make uh 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 but you know what we're clearly we clearly had a very similar 2023 so yeah I mean it's been I think maybe you just get disquieted by less stuff than us like you're you're 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 and a full process that I've thought about there is something to be said though about um making content forgetting that you made it and then it coming back to you so like I said so dve David senra from Founders recently tagged me in something where it was there's two kinds of people on the internet um 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 and he then quoted me and I was like I didn't realize I said that but I go that's good so there's I went back and found it I go I did say that uh 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 Tau all of you guys about this before but churchillian drift is the name of the phenomenon whereby unattributed quotes get attributed to Churchill more and more over time and it's like what you want is to develop like William sonian 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 like a Chris Williamson thing like you got to be very careful with the other Chris Williamson to try it sem yeah well you know this is also where it would be useful to have a Andrew Tate esque Army of Vietnamese repurposes just starting to post quotes with like unattributed but like supposedly attributed to Chris Williamson to create the trend that's how you begin that tsunami that's great I really like that one is there anything else on inversion that's it just um think of the top three to five things flip it around and youve 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 uh tick tick here we go here we go so I'm get I'm personally invested in this one so 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 just news I think we've done Chris dirty with tick tick haven't we [ __ ] left me out to dry you 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 I thought at the time Chris I was doing the right thing okay I mean if only you just listened to my advice back in 2016 the problem is that and you know we we love you very much but a lot of Yousef software recommendations from a like a niche Bean mentality yeah they come from a very dry roasted Bean mentality I'm what you would call an early adopter you are an early adopter no you're the early adopter early adop you early you you early adopt everything which means some of it some of it sticks and some of it doesn't the reason it's called Bean is instead of like Microsoft Word you used software called Bean which at you still use it no it was some really lightweight open source text editor just to check have you got you YouTube premium yet I don't need it so no what was what was the question that I asked no have you still got the Argentinian version for like 70p a month or something correct through a VPN um but that's that's it you spend how much money per year on YouTube ads can we just say the Argentinian YouTube premium let's just not let's not skim over that cuz CU that is beaning if I ever saw one that is Syrian dry roasted don't you worry Habibi h b it's okay so all that is to say that when when youf says I've got this bit of software I think it's good you just let it you let it simmer for at least 90 days and then ask him again um tick tick is one of those things it's a calendar to-do list habit tracker anything else Pomodoro Timer pomodora timer does slats all these sorts of things but the thing it's given me is which is a little bit going against Yousef and I have had a debate a long time about how you treat a calendar Yousef puts all of his tasks in his calendar and I just put events in my calendar and then deletes them and then deletes them or defers them but I I recommended om Focus to 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 Aki's course on it and then I brought Peter akis on the show separately you know what I respect about you Chris is that like when you say okay I'm going to take on this recommendation you really yeah you you are one of the least flaky men I've ever met well you saw me doing uh Achilles rehab when we first went to Dubai maniacally doing that been like here that would have been it would mate this is where I was laid with my foot up isly boring upset toy we went to uh we went to Dubai and George is laid by a pool like reading like like throwing Munga quotes at me and I'm I'm I'm over there doing 5sec decentric like single-legged cus raises when you did the mill big three like used to used to go to CrossFit thousand ofs everyone else is doing the wad just in the corner thousands of hours I've done bird dog and side plank and Migel cup do you regret it not at all not at all I now have a spine that that functions that works y um so the thing I remember you saying to me like I'm doing my weekly review and I hate it and I just kept saying like just just just do it Chris it's good for you tick tick makes that easier so I basically just every nothing the hack is nothing leaves the inbox without a date attached to it but 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 tic tick and you go down at the start of the day I look at there's 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 it do you have group view on Tik Tok tick tick can you send it to like each other can email things to his inbox and he can email things to my inbox you can't view each other's have Shar lists right okay that's pretty good so if you're working on a project together you could delegate tasks can yousef's convulsing can you see it yeah yeah he's just got so much to say a shared list well yeah but you you 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 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 omn focus but you just then move to things three don't perod I've tried everything it's like it's like whoop I've tried the whole but the gamut don't forget don't forget I was about to switch to things three I'm so I made of you I'm on such satellite Delay from you I'm Douglas Murray in the Gaza Strip like waiting for Piers Morgan like we've just got pcket loss haven't we yes yes thanks Piers I've got you like that's me in a [ __ ] FL jacket TI right I want you you've both promis me that one of you will sit down and and transfer quite different flows I've got a full guide on YouTube that I've already watched it I've already watched watched it already watch the full thing ahead of the curve of course well I wanted to get the best in before you sit down and personally coach me through it and 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 it is it's just like recompense you know what I mean you're right I I I put you right in the deep end they have just launched the new omn Focus 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 quite quickly get OTE like there's Instagram Facebook he's gone there go he's gone he's bailed out right well if you you have to be at least partly Christmas so there you go um you have like Instagram Tik Tok Facebook YouTube and only recently has Tik Tok 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 you that's the problem I often have with life Hax is if a friend has just started one you need that cooling off period cuz that's the time when they're going to be the loudest but if they come back in 90 that's the meta life hack today which is wait at least 90 days for all life I sent you that thing the other day that was Paul Bloom quote quote tweeting someone else where it was like um uh I've just learned about the recency bias and I have to say out of all of them it's my favorite very good yeah when someone says something to you set a reminder in tick tick there we go 90 days all right Seth 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 a new audience seeing this it's got to be Alfred oh wow yeah okay so Alfred is one of the OG life hacks and I have got to be one of the heaviest users so I've checked my stats I've used it 400,000 times 400 times a day 400 times a day I invoke Alfred 400 times a day it isus like it is it is him it's a $20 piece of software like Spotlight that genuinely I would pay four figures for happily happily happily five probably if if morgage on his Alfred to pay for on clana they could have me over a barrel so Alfred developers please don't I remember when you changed laptops you said the thing you were most concerned about changing preferences yeah like it is a bastard I had to go through it with you it feels like walking through trial using a computer that doesn't have Alfred and I've worked in the NHS and that's like so I come from a conversion rate optimization background um okay so Alfred is the hack let's say that no one people that are listening don't know so they describe it as Spotlight on steroids so it's a what Spotlight spotlight is the little magnifying glass button on your keyboard on your space if you're watching this on command space opens up any web page 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 um clipboard history paste in uh text expansion so if you start typing your mobile number text that you often send quite a lot like Hello 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 what do you use the most the clipboard history and snippet that was what that's the cboard manager anyone that doesn't have a clipboard manager that spends a modicom amount any more time on their MacBook or the laptop it's MacBook only as well isn't it it's so racist I love it so bigoted I 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 um 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 onto where you need to paste them and paste all of the different things that you need to paste full clipboard manager uh 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 uh and that's iv3 in invvy 2 is when I need to show a little bit more uh how do you say like reputational ankle like a sort of that's a little bit uh and then imv one is I haven't updated that in Forever is that short shorts no it's huge that's oh yeah it is that's only fans only fans free member access um very 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 you get free trial period I think with omn focus with with uh there's a free version but then the real juice comes from the $20 it's $20 once off like power pack pay five figures for that 100% the Delta of price to I think it's you'd pay five figures for youf setup yeah that's our setup's probably worth in the like high four fig range yeah ethereum uh all right what have I got next uh right I'll go for this one um I'm pretty certain that hold luggage is a sop 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 J Smith I did 29 days on the road just hand luggage wow no waiting ever for luggage to come out the other end it's always with you at all times uh 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 I was going to say where'd you put your treas your salon grade shampoo we once went liquid is we once went to Iceland not the supermarket the country we once drove to Edinburgh while Yousef had menitis to fly to Iceland and I tried to transport five kilos of Tres uh because I just hadn't thought I hadn't thought to deant it into something smaller wow you managed to sweet talk The glaswegian person at the desk he'll do that to transport liquids as well mindblowing sweet talk glaswegians into worse into a national security threat for Iceland yeah too much Tres what is this that you brought with you um so cheapest thing there it was the cheapest thing there but yeah um hold luggage is a scop meant to keep you poor and late and you can get away with hand luggage only quite easily I have a lot of questions hit me liquids uh get travel size containers and do you run out do you buy more when you up to 100 up to 100 Mil no so I will caveat this there's a couple of applications first one is going to be if you use spray anti-perspirant very difficult to five a 75 mil of that very difficult lots of 105 Ms which is [ __ ] infuriating um don't use a roll on not a massive fan of a roll on would rather go for a spray that's that's a challenge yes liquids but you buy anti person when you when you when you arrive somewhere if it depends how many stops you're doing if this is one trip yes if it's multiple trips no cuz that's just you that's inter 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 you must be doing like you must be washing your clothes regular I did I did laundry while I was there but I don't know about you I the uh how do you say like Overton window of acceptable clothing to me isn't that broad I don't have much more than about hold luggage worth of clothes that are like nice and cool to me at any one time so 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 wor cuz I'm like 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 [ __ ] pointless like why are you even trying to do it then I upgraded and got an away which is pretty good uh and that has sort of tie down straps that make things like much more organized and then I started using nomatic 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 a you got you got the backpack what's your backpack called travel pack they've got two one's a travel pack and the other's a uh I can't [ __ ] can't remember it'll be I'll link it in the show notes below um but it's just it's this backpack opens like clamshell from both sides and it's just phenomenal so nomatic website just has all of the stuff on there and it 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 [ __ ] it's outstanding wow can it fit a spare du James James Smith managed to fit uh a pillow with him because he travels with his own pillow what pregnancy pillar no uh like normal head pillar he's bailed out of the pregnancy pillar life too hot lot of people uh flying Long Haul had brought their own pillows I noticed that I feel like that's probably going to be a future if I was to predict what my life hack next J is going to be I reckon taking a pillow with you while you travel isow pillow or he fits out in his luggage it's in hand luggage bro in hand luggage thin pillow if it's a thin pillow it's not what you want is it squash down anyway that's my 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 for 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 were the shoes before is this before you go through security yeah so like literally just so you're walking into the airport holding loads of shoes carrying shoes yeah buy a bottle of water ask for a bag yep put it in the bag because if they didn't allow you on with stuff that you purchased from wh Smiths or wh Smith wouldn't operate in the airpoort go [ __ ] yourself airports damn hack um so my one um again it's one I've done for a while so I put it it's beenin it's not fresh this week so it's been through the filter um past the 90-day filter pretty much I would be surprised 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 so I create 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 days varies between a four to a six and maybe not a British four or a six cuz a British person like their worst days a four and their best days are six but um a 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 date and what the cause was and likewise if you go above a six just write down oh um great morning uh slept eight hours coffee's in the system deep works whatever it is that's caused it write it down two dues um 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 okay this thing shown up multiple times and it's one thing to have like a bad hangover and say I'm not going to drink again but you then forget comes Saturday but then let's say you look at the data and you go hold on 83% of my bad moods that were enough to register in this table like was alcohol and you can you can put it in a little Google sheet and just see that that thing there that 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 George so I love that idea um this is the new Apple there's my abysmal step count as well, 1200 steps um 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 you having a slightly pleasant day so this is part of the new iOS they have a 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. oh that's it loger mood can we show the can we show that to the camera neutral if I do this oh it's unpleasant go this way oh slightly pleasant but the reason that I still prefer exist doio 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 doesn't sound like you it it'll put yeah it'll export to a CSV oh lovely and it'll you it pulls out correlation some of them might be a bit spous like on on days that it rains you have sex more or something but I suppose that's that probably you see that thing about the uh the correlation between the number of Nicholas Cage films released in a year and the number of people who dry from uh die from drowning in swimming pools it's like a really strong correlation yeah I don't summer in ice cream and ice cream cells and murders isn't it is the sound one so have you learned anything from those correlations yeah so I I do it for a lot of the tests that we do so when I'm testing out red light therapy or um 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 whoop and your Apple health and everything well you made a custom private web page that exports to a Google sheet uh so you may between apple health and exist. you may have found a a way to do this there's a there's a simpler one which is just inside timer we seen that yeah they ask you how you're feeling and you can there's like five faces like very sad but you need to be able to have why feeling that way but you need to have it in metrics and then you need to be able to track Trends you do that I've tried the um all the custom Solutions but I come back to again midw like the Apple notes go table 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 l ofer effect as well it'll be three or four things 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 to so much it that's either really helpful or like really upsetting it well it again I think it's about identifying the trends and then letting go of the tracking yeah right Johnny you're up lesson lesson lesson is uh looking at things in 10year Windows so we as Yousef 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 I actually think it's a decade of work that made that happen and so the lesson is if if you assume that if you just take enough swings at whatever it is you're trying 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 it you mentioned this in your talk about how well when we were out here you were doing these episodes and no one was listening so there was no reward there was no well it was a little bit like the episodes were growing I guess but there's a lot of repetition without success and then this year vertical so if it's going to take another 10 years how do you make what you're doing now enjoyable detaching from the outcome H Mo's got uh a bit about this where he says uh disciplined people aren't more patient they just find something to do in the meantime yeah yeah it's like just find something to do in the meantime if you assume that it's going to take a long time to achieve the thing that it is that you want to do and presume that it's going to take twice as long as you want it to take or that you realistically think it could take how could you make it bearable that between now and then life just tis over so there's two two quotes that are like one of them is a Churchill quote supposedly we never know the other one is a Gary Gary ve concept the Gary ve concept is being very patient macro but impatient micro so like allow something to take 10 years but be very impatient this week today this hour whatever um and then the Churchill thing is success is going from failure failure to failure 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 it wasn't like you had lots of failures there wasn't a point where you guys were close to bankruptcy or anything like that I think be behind the scenes lots of failures lots of things that we tried mundane boring failure which were actually in some ways even even worse yeah I suppose you only lock in a failure when yeah all right whereas we just ran into lots lots of like just little nudges like head against the wall like really trying hard tried 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 right that like tarnish your entire experience of whatever it is that you're doing because you hear uh 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 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're just trying to get your Alfred shortcuts to work right M or you're trying to send an invoice through quickbox and it just doesn't want to work you're like like it's you know what I mean like that with no easy way out no easy way out just use resending [ __ ] quick box invoices Ivan Drago's got all the Alfred shortcuts yeah yeah yeah it's better touch tool is completely optimized three Duos but yeah I think so the lessons just um assume it's going to take you longer than you think and then focusing on like how do I make myself okay with that CU I think everyone wants the there's a lot of focus on especially in our world in building building business world where everyone wants 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 it's trying to accept that and come up with a strategy where you still enjoy it finding something to do in the meantime I 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 realize the ladder's against against the wrong wall right yeah how so with the 10year are you now planning out things on a 10year Time horizon or how is it kind of tactically Chang just it's just looking rather than thinking like what's the goal this month this year think like okay whatever we we need to keep doing whatever we're doing for longer than we're planning to do M instead of setting up something that feels unsustainable how do I make it feel sustainable so emergence success is something that I've been thinking about a lot it's weird like Jocko willink 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 or it might be in the episode I can't remember and uh he said 5 years ago I'd never written a book hadn't launched a supplement company didn't have a podcast and was basically a grunt 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 uh Industries or or sort of predictable processes but for me I've almost largely dispensed with plans that are longer than a year it's like I can guess where we're going to be over the next 12 months is but most of it's just emergence so for either of you so we had a we had a business go at the start of the year we we met that in the first quarter how did the best kind yeah but so like so the the plan pointless one of one of our a guy who used to coach me for powerlifting shifted Mike tar yeah I'm not him the pock no but you so he 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 planning out a year gives or five years gives people a sense of control but it's completely but you're still you're still just reacting to circumstances and things changing 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 5year plan oh yeah because the whole path is laid out ex I want to become a neuros a pediatric neuros you probably got a 15year 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 exponentials are just going to throw your [ __ ] throw your [ __ ] out of the water there's no way that you're going to be able to hold on CU 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 you're if you're trying to be a neurosurgeon pediatric neurosurgeon there isn't going to be some area of pediatric neurosurgeon re 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 turn of optionality in all of the [ __ ] Could Happen immediately Europe up Seth 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 doing 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 you know and it's become I've notic 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 branded 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're not 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 [ __ ] you're being in your daily decisions and 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 JN doesn't call you out for being a [ __ ] whereas a therapist will call you out on your [ __ ] 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 uh in Austin so I I found a friend who did an awful lot of therapy for a very long time and is superbly [ __ ] 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 and uh it's been it's been really really great and yeah the mirror thing what ends up happening a lot of time is 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 um I had Dr Paul Cony on the show he did that four episode series with huberman if few months ago uh unconscious mind trauma all that stuff F 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 wibbles up me about just not wanting to like yeah all right mate like jog on like this isn't the Goggins Joo pilled side of me just doesn't want to hear it um but Dr Pan's re framed my perspective on that that there are things that you don't think about that are part of your unconscious programming that your body takes completely for granted and just sort of grandfathers in as part of the landscape or the texture of your mind to 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 so I guess the I'd see journaling vation 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 you're using steroids to journal and you're getting more out of it it's like a like a forced guided prompted journaling yeah exactly the questions that prompt the like oh I hadn't thought about that before and there's that like external accountability is like you you you then cuz you can choose not to journal one day or you can choose not to write stuff out in depth but if someone speak to them tell me more about that so on that note and I guess this comes around to what you what you're 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 day to consolidate all of the lessons and journal entries and everything turn them into a visual map identify the emergent themes this was before chat GPT could have done this at minutes I know it could but actually I think doing it manually was quite useful it's like revising yeah you don't need someone else to summarize your notes for you you need to summarize not so I and 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 Tau me and the ridiculous thing about it is that 21y old you knows all the stuff that you need to be doing now but you just keep cycling through those same lessons and it's like 21y old version of you is shouting like just do this thing and then a couple of weeks later you go oh you've had like the child birth Amnesia about it and you go it's fine and then it keeps coming back around and I think until you integrate and do those lessons the same thing is going to keep bouncing back into your Consciousness until you process it one of the worst things to realize is we often get asked all of us will what do you what would you 10 years ago wish that you'd known that you know now and you look back and you think oh oh you know there's this and this and this and this is the way I see the world these are one of my patterns almost always those things when I answer those questions are still things that me in 10 years time will be wishing that me right now knew it's midwit once again we're looking for the the higher optimization the next oh this is more nuanced no no no I'm more sophisticated than that it's like 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 paulan 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 when did we do the things you would tell your 18-year-old self podcast [ __ ] hell I bet we should we should all go back and listen to that almost certainly it'll be the same [ __ ] I think it was buy Bitcoin and do 531 it was buy Bitcoin do 531 that was it by Bitcoin do 531 maybe not the worst advice if you had in fact if you had If You Can Count 531 as a single word that would be four words that you could just like text your last self buy Bitcoin do 531 I found a tool when I was like 18 that you can email yourself in 10 years time yeah future me.org yeah something like and I got the email the other day and it was like hi it's youf I'm 18 years old yeah it what did he say you still you still you were still you were still Muslim then yeah very deep deep in the Muslim God deep did you reply I might have actually I might have set one for another 10 years um honestly I can't remember what I said but it was really 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 wait are we on lessons we are on lessons aren't we yeah we are on lessons all right so this is uh technically one from last year and it was inspired by a conversation I had with Jake Humphries uh 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 so 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 that'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 3 months time in 3 months you won't remember the negative texture of your mind or the boring repetitive 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 if in 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 3 months time that oh I'm going to be full of um 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 I'll be able to start these new hobbies and start fishing and I'll be full of jubilance and willingness to try 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 yeah if you wouldn't say yes to this proposed meeting for tomorrow don't say yes to it for three months time it'll be exactly the same it's going to be the exact same yeah you just have to presume that things are going to remain the same in terms of workload and uh yeah I think just these are the golden years as like don't and and you know this is kind of I guess a little bit of a counter to some of the more Goggins Joo hosy pilled like hosy maxing philosophies which are you know you can grit your teeth and and 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 and in the meantime that's actually going to be fun like what's the [ __ ] point 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 it's like well the bar stool's upside down given that most of all destination Acquisitions can constitute Journeys like optimize for the journey not the destination the hosy thing of the I think he calls it the grandfather frame have you heard that one you haven't heard that one it depends what it is Earth so it was it's like a 10-minute YouTube video he has and I listened to it um while like while on holiday actually and 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 who just got married like this is what a like beautiful time of life you like look at now and look at it focuses the things on focuses the attention on things that you take for granted but in when you're 80 won't be there anymore and I think that's like a everyone talks about like feel gratitude and keep like write down things you're grateful for each morning but that that single video was the biggest of like oh [ __ ] 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 these are the golden years I think it's just such a good such a good reframe just assume that now is the 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 Warren Buffett is Rich but he would trade places with every like 18y old mhm yeah time billionaires is what they call it it's hard to make a profound statement with these glasses on it really really you'd be surpris I really think it works all right you're up so um 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 oh like what's going to happen with AI and what's going to happen in this industry what how are things going to change got to take this off um 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 is 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 he creates these fake scenario of no customer is going to say can I have uh slower delivery times can it cost more can you have fewer choices available Amazon and okay 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 it's the bloker the electrical Tower or the telecom's tower who's just got the lever like he's not going anywhere unless electricity gets subverted by a new thing that's not going to change 100% e even like for the the podcast right you could there's loads of new things that you can try with 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 like that's podcasting in a nutshell uh so yeah optimizing for those things and is 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 the core stuff and like let the changes and the the technology or whatever come and 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 it's reminding of oh there's 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 multigenerational this is Amazon web systems and now he's moving on to bigger things from the the Lex episode yeah right Johnny you're up hack hack this is a recent one one I told you about recently ople phone app for it as well enjoying it I'm careful about my recency bias I've only been with it for like I'm 90day window so ignore this okay well or yeah ignore this um no but it's it kind of uh of all the I've tried a lot of different like screen time iPhone app blocking stuff I think this one makes it the simplest yeah agreed um 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 a qu to be top of the leaderboard I saw that you did 4 hours and 15 minutes the other day immediately thought I've got an extra three hours today yeah yeah did you get 1 hour something like 1 hour 20 yeah a couple of times you see you see 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 so yeah opal time blocking and they have like preset things like um so I have like an automated one which is like 7:00 a.m. till midday is like deep work and then there's one which is like they do a lunchtime one they do like 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 status changing on iMessage right does it to do not disturb you want do not disturb I don't think so no I think that's a separate thing oh I wonder if you could create a shortcut so that when you're 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 screen time's 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 beat Chris how do I beat Chris like you you start thinking like I could leave my phone I mean my screen time's getting 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 I struggle to think how I'm going to beat you to be honest it's impressive I'm bad I'm bad don't worry did you just have like a good day give me time yeah I've had a couple of good days but it's also like new app Effectiveness something new's come in that's just obliterated my ability to do stuff and I haven't yet found the 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 around this way your P yeah just yeah exactly so I'm going to burst the bank eventually but right now I'm this beautiful Goldie Lock Zone it gives you Little Gems each day as well have you noticed I've got loads yeah I've got Lo go look how excited we are about not using our phone opal good good Pro Europe ran Doris who I think you met a few weeks ago y 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 aloud but we 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 shutdown at shutdown and then at like bedtime routine so what they do is just create this kind of book end or like a 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 and you could just if you 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 uh ran says you can he he says you can pick a number that's not 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 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 so you start start at the end of your day and then alarms to like bookmark that of 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 morning routine as well of just start writing within 90 seconds of opening your eyes is I do that I've been doing it's really good yeah this book that it looks like I'm going to be writing flow press uh yeah I I like to I like to switch between Theta and Delta as much as I can yeah um what am I going to go for all right [ __ ] it um sleep token is my next life hack o that their album they're a band I guess halfway between they technically referred to now as [ __ ] metal [ __ ] metal [ __ ] metal it's like metal that you'd have sex with so like them loath um oh wow it's called metal uh anyway so sleep token are a band that have been around for quite a while they managed to do at the start of this year five tracks released from their album each one of them made it onto spotify's most trending page each release like every fortnite for three months or something as a metal band but calling them a metal band probably does them 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 complete album that I've ever heard in my entire life and it's just they're phenomenal and I was listening to them in the gym earlier on thinking about life hacks for today and I realized across the last year they're all my top five songs from Spotify wrapped are all by on the album they're all by Sleep token they're all from take me back to Eden and 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 token take me back to Eden [ __ ] 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 did you listen to it in full yeah did you really yeah just the I think I was expecting something very different y um very different it's [ __ ] brilliant but yeah it's so it's very very good strong very good G um my one so uh yeah this is one that everybody knows about but not to the level I think I'm going to suggest so me and uh Chach BT have developed quite an interesting relationship to say the least but basically um what chat 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 like nodding my head but I didn't actually know what any of that meant or like any kind of rudimentary concept that I just zoned out at school and they immediately it's like level 37 or it's like they're talking about level sorry season 12 episode 4 of friends at 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 Tik Tok ads it wouldn't be that great for it but if you go on there I'll give you two examples so like David deutch's book the beginning of infinity I read it and it's quite dry I probably just below the IQ threshold where it would like IQ Market fit for that book and what I would do is I I prompt chat gbt and I go okay um 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 would just sit there it 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 just print something else out and I go okay explain like a smart 10-year-old d d and you get to the bottom of the basement and you go ah I get it whereas in the book he'll s 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 airpod you showed me the other day you can use the audio version as well so you can speak back and forth to it you can you look at and you go I can understand anything that nothing is too intimidating if I use chat gbt correctly so there's almost there's no such thing is not knowing something is just not prompting chat gbt to the level and the personalization it can have because I think that's the fundamental thing that where the education system breaks is um I think Nal 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 non-fiction 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 math proof you are yeah you're F that's forever so the fact that you can the the airpods thing I think is massive that you show like so chat GPT have now introduced conversational AI so you can have an airpod 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 sounds so human doesn't it's only going to get more and more human but the the thing I'd say with this is for anybody listeners 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 the 10 most important topics don't move on until I say I understand and just keep asking why why why explain 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 quicker more quickly then begins to learn as well the fundamental problem is is Google had a little bit of that but with time Google's only got worse and worse somebody said something recently um 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 that's that's the fundamental problem like Google which is always the most serious one is it 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 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 a holiday somewhere and you go I'm here tell 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 weak hack I'll do lesson all right lessons it is um I think this is originally from the book 10,000 weeks by Oliver bman Oliver Bergman um defining something I struggle with a lot defining done or defining a productive day ahead of 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 I've like thought about it and I've like planned myself a reasonable number of exercises and finish them but I almost always end a day with uncomplete tasks so I like look at my to and then you you finish the day feeling unsatisfied unsatisfied um so just slightly under egging it's as simple as it is just slightly under egging how many things you're going to do in a day so create your to-do list for like hung over tired you CU you can always just borrow stuff from tomorrow and if you let's say you do eight things a day every day today you you plan to do six and you borrow or two from tomorrow you feel mint when you finish the day but if you plan to do 10 and you only do eight you feel terrible well 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 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 more things than you can do today which means that there will permanently be I've it's not it's like uh 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 trying to achieve more of I have this res I had this resistance to because I'm like oh well but that means I'll do less stuff but I won't I'll get to the end of the to do this I'm like yeah do some bonus stuff the calendar white space thinking oh well I've got all this white space if I'm not filling it all up back to back ramming myself with tasks then I'm falling short but actually if you do that and you have no buffer time it just takes a poo that's 2 minutes too long to completely knock out your speaking experience dude I remember this when I snapped my achilles I had this very precisely planned weekend so 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 and 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 to the sa Breeze but I'd already planned cuz the sabur was next to the cricket pitch where I was going to play didn't account for the fact I wasn't going to be at the cricket pitch I was going to be at the [ __ ] Royal Victoria infirmary like having a 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 sabes to collect this [ __ ] television or 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 you wearing Cricket whites correct I was still I had to be cut out of my [ __ ] Cricket my brand new Cricket whites my mom was my mom was dead sent me a picture of it with how's the boggy cuz so bogy a bogy you just squeeze where your kicia be there was no it was just fles it was just flesh I left foot drove home from the rvi so I snapped my right foot and I left foot drove home because I was like I can't be bother going to get my car tomorrow that's the better of which is the variation where you over press the break left left left left foot drove home bro accelerator and break this is where life hacks episode one has buy an automatic car yeah you're the real winner that in a manual wow yeah that's impossible that's game over uh all right yeah that's good I like that it's just one thing like tactically how do you do that like what does that look like on tick tick so just so you'll learn in your private onet to one but you just I I generally will like stack the morning and then leave whites space in the afternoon cuz the morning stuff always takes longer than you think and then you 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 no if you finish today with nothing and you tick tick feels great that's nice it's like that that's like a couple hundred quid a day in happiness I think every day s so I've got a mini lesson from you and a mini lesson from you none from me well we've we we've kind of collabed on our lessons today but you don't have to try and make him feel 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 so the midwit thing works very well and the failing fast so I experienced this because George took me foiling which was excellent It's like a motorized surfboard and on the the way there he said Yousef 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 cuz then it meant that I I'm not expecting to be good I can have lots of spectacular Falls and then if you manage to stand on it any short any less than 40 after 40 fails brilliant feels like a bonus so what's the meta lesson The Meta lesson is pull out the principles stress test them and fail fast I think pricing in Failure is so good it turns into a video whereas when I take people e for I give them technical instructions never listen because it's their first time but that one thing Always Rings home CU otherwise they try and stand up on the first go fall off and go I'm a failure and then each rep reinforces that versus when you say you're going to fall off 40 times in a row the then see each one as a rep like oh boom done the third one done the fourth one yeah I was excited to fall the next time and actually it took way less than 40 yeah James Smith has a bit about this in his live talk where he says he was knocking door too 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 two he like how many doors does it take for you to get to sale went 200 he's like well knock on 400 more [ __ ] 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% you say you had a second one the lesson from you is pick a thing and take it seriously so that's something that's a Monga idea but this podcast one okay it's 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 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 and 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 it's a less the we that the who enjo walk Will Walk Way further than the that has to walk yeah exactly so those are the two mattera 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 scatter gunning stuff you're shotgunning stuff because um obviously in medicine to use that analogy always have a patient in the room with a symptom a guiding principle and you do history examination investigation diagnosis treatment and if you Shuffle those steps around you're going to have a really low hit rate so the the broader principles are as good as we can get and then the 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 going to do one hack and one lesson quickly because I can do that uh hack is Kindle released this year their 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 a remarkable doesn't have the features of a remarkable like it's not it doesn't have a a folio keyboard foldout thing it's not as advanced as that and like how how many times are you thinking 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 and 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 that being said 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 nonzero chance that I'm going to be like G 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 distract a little bit of physical energy from myself I focus a lot more on whatever I'm thinking about so the fact it's always got this pen attached can do that you 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 resurface through readwise but I'm like a power user when it comes to Kindle cender Kindle is the way that I read articles I don't read substacks on the computer I don't read blog posts on a computer all of that goes through Kindle and it's just a huge monster piece of Kit with a pen attached to it that you can highlight and navigate with and that's very enjoyable super bright uh is it like an e in screen or is it like a same like an iPad you can do like the flux setting as well so for go super warm yeah going super I'm not at the 90day Mark for it yet so I can't 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 battery is insane I'll tell you what's an even more insane way to do it turn it to airplane mode turn a Kindle to airplane mode and it it's INF it's an infinite [ __ ] uh energy machine it's crazy um and then just a quick lesson which is from Morgan housel your expectations def find your happiness more than your circumstances uh if you presume that happiness is what you want minus what you have like a lot of billion as are broke and that metal 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 Zed or they're on a in the SE shells or he's got a Ferrari or the what like all of that [ __ ] 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 CL of payment on happiness it'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 there there delays unhappiness 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 at a minus E bit Yeah in terms of it something you skimmed over with consuming content mindfully was that you have a a read later app whatever that is and 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 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 more stuff to read than time to read it in so triaging what you have to read sent Kindle plus scribe plus pen spinning plus massive battery time and big screen [ __ ] I have to say I also bought another Oasis uh so I now have Kindle next to my bed and I have a Kindle downstairs so I have two Kindle devices I found that moving them between the two I get into bed and I'm like it's downstairs guess what I'm not reading now like I'll watch or I'll whatever um and the same vice versa for a morning routine I'm like oh it's still upstairs I'll just skip reading today it's like things in places I think just one final thing on the expectations thing that like the Ted Talk where Paradox of choices and very schw yeah is it his Ted Talk yeah I think he talks about like the key to happiness is low expectations and I've always struggled with that with actioning that because the the happiness to increase your happiness if you just decrease your expectations do you guys have any practical ways of doing that be careful about what desires you let into your life 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 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 no but if I look at someone that has one I go oh yeah I should have a private jet and it just gets added into that like but 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 uh Gad sad see what I mean Gad sad found in his book about happiness his most recent one that uh 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 correct or whatever it is and like as long as you're a that Christy gee so I've got I'll do a quick Life Hack and I'll blast through my um lesson so a quick life hack is most of people listening to this probably or significant have an iPhone and the alarm clocks designed by Apple all like Guantanamo Bay Creations from the CIA they are horrific and the thought that you'd wake up your sleep I've tried that like if you go through them all you press every single one none of them are like that's a nice soothing thing you'd hear at a spot they' all got a really high attack on the sound haven't sympathetic coil what you can do if you go on the custom tune Store and search binaural beats it's 79p so it is a big investment but 79p I found this like and find the one that relaxes you and it's such a better way if you got W up to your iPhone what do you mean yeah that's that's probably a question that's a [ __ ] but you're sleeping phone phone sleeping with your phone in your bedroom yeah but I used to use an Alexa and then I asked the new radio alarm clocks have been around for nearly 100 years there's a about life contentions that all of the 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 five5 you know there's one called I think it's called like Clocky now that has wheels on it so it's an alarm clock and then as soon as it sets off it starts driving around you have to get there one that's a mat you have to stand on it and solve a mat problem [ __ ] that' be such a bad hanger does anyone I don't use an alarm I just wake up my like just go to bed at the same time it's easy yeah that's not always anyway shut up Johnny lesson so so far I've done a lesson from um little obviously throwback to Monga Bezos this one um comes from the gallager brothers Liam and null nice so they have a lyric which hits me every sing 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 um 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 um is uh this Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy I know if you heard that and they within that they create a super computer which like supposed to give them the answers to life and the universe and it just spits back 42 and 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 uh book yeah 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 and go that's not possible and he goes does it defy the laws of physics and then they're like well not technically he goes but we still 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 build a rocket it's it's that it's just him going does it defy the laws of physics and then they go no I go I want it done by next Friday it's just CR it's just a question does it defy the laws of physics and then deadline that's that is the aund anecdotes is the book just doing that again and again again so does it defy the laws of physics is a question um one of my favorite things right now is I have friends come to me for advice and i' 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 what would you advise me if I came to you in the exact same situation you you diddled me with this in Dubai yeah diddled 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 the Tony Robbins like what will you do I don't know well if you did know what would it be that that works every time unbelievable yeah which it's what we said earlier when we had a quick toilet break that uh 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 a question it's given them the answer that they needed all along and then a few other favorite questions that I have at the minute which is where 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 team this team over here or this team over here I can tell whether someone's a full-on MPC 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 or 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 like the thought of them conceding a point to somebody on the opposing team or being able to criticize their Guru it the the software just hits a 404 error very fast monor thinking gentlemen I really appreciate you coming through uh 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 you seem to be able to deal with it deal with it more effectively uh it goes without saying every everyone that's been tuning in for any of the episodes where you used to see us sitting on this couch uh 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 uh yeah you going to finish on Last Christmas he's going to sing the whole thing out is that what you're here for that's what you promise put the glasses on uh I appreciate you all have a Merry Christmas we'll catch you soon Merry Christmas bye