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

merry christmas everybody for the people who joined the podcast within the last five years the last few million three million subscribers uh this is my living room in newcastle and this is johnny and this george uh and that's yusef and he's in malaysia and this is a christmas episode we've got one day to turn this around so merry christmas it's christmas day um enjoy the turkey and the pigs in blankets and we are going to do some lessons and life hacks and fails from the last 12 months it's kind of a christmas tradition i suppose and also another part of the tradition is that you go first johnny so give us a life hack yeah all right my life hack which might not be allowed we'll see if it gets past the the chris rule has already been a life hack okay is that all right the best ones yeah yeah It's the reason it's a life hack is I was speaking to a few friends about this and neither of them had heard of it.

And I was like, you know, I thought Chris is really building attention here.

I know.

Well, it's, it's the waking up app by Sam Harris.

Okay.

Why is that bad?

He's been sponsored.

It's not.

Have you been paid off by big Sam?

Big meditate, big meditations come to me.

I think, well, do you guys meditate?

Yes.

No.

Yes.

I think it is the, well, so, so the, the hack specifically is download the app using the cut.

Now download the app and listen to the fundamentals like theory series.

And it's like five audios with Sam explaining why you should meditate.

And I think that is the thing.

So I've meditated every day this year, just first time it's ever happened.

And it was that audio series.

But that's not a meditation.

It's just buy-in.

Yeah.

So the app is also, I think it makes it, it's just like a daily audio you can follow.

They're different every day.

Okay.

It's like daily programming, cluster programming for meditation.

But this was important because it got you to buy into doing.

Yeah.

So there's like an analogy he uses in it, which is this isn't word for word, but something like everyone's in a dream about being a human being.

And it's like the dream is you're in a prison cell and everyone's trying to make the prison cell nicer.

By buying things and moving them around and changing where the windows are.

And that's life.

And meditating allows you to just wake up from the dream.

And it's a completely different way of viewing.

Everybody's absorbed in their thoughts and their feelings and just being run by their mind.

And meditating is just waking up from the dream.

But that series completely changed how I feel about meditating.

But you're not saying this as someone who hadn't meditated a lot before?

No.

You've done thousands of sessions of meditation previously.

Yeah, but I think the difference is it's kind of like the switch where you go from going to the gym because you think you should to.

It just becomes part of your personality, part of what you do.

And that identity change for me was that series.

Do you feel that, Yusuf?

Yeah, the identity shift is big as well.

The quote of watch your thoughts because they become your words.

Watch your words because they become your actions.

Watch your actions because they become your habits, become your beliefs, your perception, your identity.

So like starting at that means that the downstream habits are much easier to stick to.

I also love the rearranging the furniture in the prison cell analogy.

So how long are you doing these sessions for?

I'll do like so.

The standard one is like 10 minutes long and i'll do.

I'll do that as the minimum and then, if it's going well, i'll keep going.

If it's like you know, those days, you know especially ones where it like makes you have your eyes open, they're hard, they're particularly difficult.

It's just sitting there like those are difficult to do.

But if it's, i think the easiest way to make it a an effortless habit is not trying to do 30 minutes or 40 minutes, just have a minimum and then.

So how is getting out of the prison cell going?

Good question.

I have glimpses where I'm like, oh, this is just a dream of being in a prison cell.

What does that mean?

The difficult, well, what does it mean?

It's the identifying with your thoughts versus it's the experience of a self right.

I feel like this is for the first life act, this is going.

I also don't feel like i'm qualified to talk about this.

That's what this?

That's why i referred to the um, referred to the the app because i think sam is qualified to talk about it.

But it's a.

It changes your perspective and your relationship with yourself and with now, with the present moment.

The happiness trap doesn't even need to be that metaphysical, it's just like Usually, we are motivated to do something to close a gap between desire and outcome.

And we do that and our brain goes and just releases a bit of like some neurochemical that makes us happy for a moment.

And then that neurochemical depletes.

And then we think that we have to go and achieve the thing in order to give ourselves permission to release the little bit again into our brains.

And it's just that cycle.

Whereas if you realize that it's your brain that's releasing that stuff and you can just do it on tap, then you've short circuited the whole process and you're not having to chase some something out there.

Such a good point.

There was a resurface clip of the first Huberman episode that I did from mid 2022.

I saw the other day and he's got this line in it where he says, it's all internal.

Everything in life is all internal.

You finish a marathon in first place and you've been working your entire life to do it and you run across the finish line and that sensation no one else comes along and drips dopamine down the back of your brain stem like this is just you generating all of this.

Now, obviously we're designed to respond to what happens in the real world, like that's the entire way that we're sort of adaptively evolved.

But It does suggest that well, if you can get closer to the root of where all of this stuff's coming from, which is just internally, you can probably at least make it easier to achieve what it is that you want without having to fight into a headwind all the time.

Even the real world's a farce, because you have 10 times the number of neurons going from your brain to your eye than you do from your eye to your brain.

So your eyes actually taking more information from your brain than the other way around.

So your brain's constantly creating a prediction of reality.

So the best example is, you know, when you're kind of walking downstairs and this happens to me way too often where you think there's another stair and you're at the end and you kind of feel the stair and then your foot goes down and for a second you feel it's there and then you go, oh shit, and then you fall.

But your brain kind of simulated that. the reality so your brain's constantly making these prediction models that don't actually exist and then when you have an error or you have a failure that's when it constantly corrects it's not like when you think something's lemonade but actually it's water yeah exactly does that happen a lot to you once a week but you know that there's that moment at the moment of like Something horrible's happening.

Something horrible's happening.

I know, it's fine.

It's just water.

Alright, that's a good one.

It's the meta-hack, isn't it?

It's the thing that like change your relationship with now.

And what's the intro course thing called?

Again, it's called the fundamentals.

So in waking up, there's theory practice, there's like lectures to listen to.

There's all the alan watt series, but there's a.

There's an initial intro series called the fundamentals by sam, where he's basically trying to convince you to meditate, and it's like five audios.

They're all about 10 minutes long.

Awesome, wow.

It's like that time when you made me read the beginning, all of the beginning, of the six minute diary yes, yes.

Then you insisted and i was like okay, i'm reading, but reading it is what got me to use it every day, of course, reading that intro.

Have you heard of jhana meditation?

Here we go, here we go.

This is a fun one of um, because i think what happens to a lot of people is they go for it via the mindfulness route, which is what a lot of people get onboarded to, but you realize oh, that's just away.

So there's lots of different ways.

It's like thinking about exercise and only looking at running exactly um, which is basically what's kind of happened in that space.

But the jhana meditation idea is when you essentially keep rather than focus on your breath, you focus on something that brings you great joy and it goes.

The best description i've heard of it is it's like a panic attack, but for joy, and then you pulse and pulse, and pulse.

You'd think of your child, for example, think about that, think about that, think about that.

And it's a much, sometimes a quicker way than trying to delete all thoughts.

What's your thoughts on jhana, Seth?

The two things that George is talking about there.

So at the Vipassana retreat that I did.

It's 10 days of floodlight meditation where you're scanning with as open focus as possible and trying to dial up the fidelity of your sensations so that you can like start picking up like 10 micro sensations per second.

That's used in a retreat setting, because i've heard it described as like rubbing bits of flint together.

It's like it needs a lot of time and momentum to get going and then it builds the fire, whereas jhana meditation is a lot more like hyper focused.

It's kind of like the laser beam versus the floodlight.

Um, i've not achieved jhana.

Um, i know george is is just chilling in jhana right now but um yeah it's, it's super compelling.

There's a, there's a movement.

Can you remember the name of it, george?

I think it's the guy who said it's a panic attack for joy.

He's like a tech founder who was really stressed and now runs jhana retreats in the states.

Yeah, i know who it is, but i've forgotten the chap's name.

Off the top of my head.

There's a few.

He's got a good.

He's got a good description of it.

And then michael burby as well.

Um, has all of his retreats on youtube um, so you can follow along.

All right saf, you're up.

What have you got?

So i have a life hack.

However, i think i need your guys help um, because i i'm struggling to have some kind of categorization system in order to place the life hack in.

Does that make sense?

Go on so.

So if you have any suggestions on how i might categorize the aforementioned life hacks, that would be do you feel like some of them are like physical and some are digital?

Yeah yeah, this is a joke.

This is a joke for the people, for the people who are in the last 95 percent of subscribers.

This is a joke that has been done 30 or 40 times probably.

It's like a decade old.

Yeah yeah, it's getting there, Okay.

First one.

Here we go.

This is like you mentioned Chris, about the curve of the large proportion of people who are actually just tuned in now.

And I'm just like, what?

These guys are mental.

So my hack is use Uber for flights.

Honestly, I cannot believe how easy it is.

So in the five minutes.

Between landing the plane, getting reception and standing up and leaving, I booked my next flight to Vietnam on Uber on mobile.

It already has your details and you just go done and it gives you Uber credits like 10 for every flight booked.

So the benefit of this hack is that you're not having to go through random airlines and Skyscanner or Google Flights or any of that stuff.

It just gives you the best price with the easiest booking experience.

And they don't charge a markup.

I don't know what the business model is for that part of Uber, unless it's just like lost leader, but brilliant.

So I'm never going back to booking flights any other way.

I'm just doing it now.

I'm doing it now on my phone.

Uber travel.

I mean Uber.

When you actually look at it, the number of different things that Uber can do is pretty insane.

You can get them to collect parcels for you.

You can get them to drop off, drop off different stuff.

Uh, i didn't know that.

I did not know that they did flies.

What's the difference between this and sky scan?

Because i'm a big sky scanner, stan.

As far as i understand sky scanner, you still have to get redirected to the um airline and then you have to fill in all your details, like four times and your passport number and all this stuff.

So like Currently I'm in Malaysia but I've gone via Singapore and then going Brisbane Sydney Vietnam Bali, through lots of little airports and stuff.

And these shitty little airlines that have websites that barely work and you're just trying multiple times to book it.

I spent 40 minutes trying to book something on Batik Airlines, couldn't get it working.

Uber 37 quid took five minutes.

Wow, free price freeze, oh yeah.

So they they freeze the price and they let you change the dates flexibly as well.

For like, the cost of the price is the cost of freezing, it's just 18 pounds.

Stay safe from price increases while you plan your trip.

All right, this is really good.

This is really really really fucking good.

Top tier.

I've hacked it.

They also have a thing where if you book, if you book a flight now and the price drops in between now and the flight happening, you get the difference.

Wow.

Big hug.

This is, this, this is, you've really come out of the gate swinging here.

Jesus Christ.

Well, this is proof.

Well, yeah, unfortunately Sam Harris isn't involved in this one.

Uh, okay.

Um, I, I'm going to go off the back of this one just because it makes the most sense.

Flighty.

Have you heard of flighty?

No.

Oh my days.

Okay.

So I learned this.

Are you flighty premium?

Of course.

You're fucking flighty premium.

Talking to a flighty veteran here.

So flighty is a flight tracking app.

And what it does is it automatically links in with your calendar, your email inbox and When you book a flight and the confirmation comes through, it automatically loads everything in and it tells you gate changes delays, where your luggage is going, to what terminal you leave, from what time you're boarding.

It can give you a history of the last time that the flight, all of the last 30 days of the flight, how much it's been delayed, for what reason.

If there's any adjustments that get made, it'll tell you immediately as well.

While you're in the air, it'll track your journey and then bring you back into land.

It tracks all of your previous stuff.

It's outside, so you never need to.

Once you start using Flighty, you will never check another airport board again because it's all there and it gets updated before the board, because the board usually takes a little bit of time, but this just comes through from whatever the central hub is that's giving all this information out is

And it's just, it's seamless.

The number of times that I have not missed flights, especially when you've got connections and it's outstanding.

So flighty, I think premiums, maybe 30 bucks a year, 10 bucks.

Super cheap.

You can also add friends.

So you can see when your friends are flying, where they're flying, if they're delayed as well.

So you can track all of your friends' flights also. and it automatically links in and then it gives you reports at the end of the year how long you've spent being delayed and so there's some like cool additional things but largely never check another airport board for what gate am I leaving from where's my luggage gone to what time do I need to get there it's got a little island a tracking island and it also pops up on your home screen so it's fantastically designed everybody that started using it i just can't believe it so you get the gate information before anyone else does basically that's the big the big thing is gate information plus live island that sort of tracks everything um but you just never have to think again and it's all automatically linked in with your emails has it changed how early you get to the airport not particularly my even for international now I'm typically getting to an airport about an hour before I leave.

That has been a high-risk strategy.

But in America you've got TSA and Clear and things that can fast-track you through security.

What's the spread of airport arrival times in this room?

I usually arrive about an hour before I'm going to depart, so usually about half an hour before boarding.

What about you?

Mine's like 90 minutes.

Okay, for me it depends where i am.

If i'm in the us a lot earlier, if i'm in the uk a lot later.

I feel like if you were at castle airport, you could arrive 15 minutes before, go straight through.

If it's heathrow, you need to get a bit more time.

Yeah, i don't always love because everyone's got like one yolo maid who just turns up like 15 minutes before and chances it.

Yeah, unfortunately america and Has much more flux between the size of the queues.

The UK is usually pretty consistent unless you're at Heathrow.

Whereas in Austin, sometimes the entire terminal has just been filled with people.

Hundreds of yards of people.

And then other times there's no one.

So I don't know whether that's because the airport needs a bit of work.

George, what have you got for us?

I don't think we've spoken about airlines enough.

Um, my one.

I'll go in with um something different, which is chess clocks.

Oh god, oh god no no no no i yeah, i know where he's gonna go.

So it's one of the ideas i got from uh, the writer, tim urban, who obviously did the amazing ted talk on procrastination and then ironically, i spent like six years procrastinating on his book.

And he said the biggest lesson from it was when it comes to deep work, which I've got another point I'll come on to in a second but particularly when it comes to deep work, if you can get four hours done in a day, I think you're in the top 1.

But a lot of people think, oh, I work eight hours a day, I work 10 hours a day.

And he found that when it came to writing the book, he would go to write it.

And then other little bits of work would come up.

There'd be a Slack message here.

There'd be an internet scroll here.

So the chess clock methodology is you essentially set it up where you have 16 hours in the day.

Okay.

And your goal is to get four hours on one side of the chess clock.

And whenever you're doing anything that isn't the thing, you have to hit it over.

So if you go to go to the bathroom, hit it over, go for a walk, hit it over.

Somebody comes in, hit it over.

So there's always an immediate price to bullshit or to distraction.

Um, and you realize, Oh wow.

First off, when you do four hours, like properly four hours, you're, that is a lot of time.

And then a lot of the time you'll be there at 12 PM going wow, like There's just all this kind of free time for the rest of the day.

If you don't have a chess clock, like the other, simple approach is to just literally set an alarm for four hours.

And then at any time you stop, you have to pause it.

So there's just always.

It hacks the kind of brain's circuitry that there's always some form of punishment for distraction, whereas previously there isn't.

And the amount of times you can convince yourself you're doing something that isn't the actual thing is significant.

I can see that working for like an external problem.

Like someone comes in, someone rings you, email, whatever.

But I think the main barrier to deep work is like an internal.

So you're doing something and then you're thinking oh, I just need to do this.

And then you open a different window.

Pause the clock.

But the problem for most people, I don't think, is like, i'm aware i'm distracted now, but i'll just be distracted.

I don't think people are aware that they're being distracted, do you not?

I think well, this is the thing about the clock, is that it's kind of they're ticking and you have to be a little bit more honest.

And even then i'll be aware of is this a clock worthy pause or is this?

Is this actually a justifiable use of time?

And so just having that there and that punishment there um, is pretty significant.

What are your most common debates about?

Whether it is or is not a clock worthy pause?

Um, filling up a glass of water can be on there um, just like, all girlfriends come in.

You know what i mean.

It's like little things like that, but i'll tend to i'll tend to pause the clock.

Yeah, so if you're like, if you're writing and you're like oh, i need to like go somewhere to get this reference for this thing, and yeah, that would be fine.

But then if i, let's say, for example, i need to go to to a tweet to find this specific thing, that's fine.

But if i then go on the news feed and start scrolling, clock has to change.

So that's where it works.

This is why the clock works really effectively, whereas other techniques it wouldn't work, because because this is great george, it is the.

The other thing that it separates out is if people think oh, it's a, it's a speed thing or it's an efficiency thing.

I need to be able to like work faster or write faster whatever, versus it's just a not spending enough time on task thing um Yeah,

That's a big point that you don't need to probably be more efficient or more effective or better or whatever.

You just haven't realized how little time you're spending doing the thing you're supposed to be doing.

Yeah.

This isn't a half, but it's related to this.

I have an app on my laptop that is like a blocker, that every time I go to like open email, it goes cold Turkey.

It's not cold Turkey.

It's similar to that, but it especially if there's someone else in the room and they hear how often it goes, and then you tell them why it's going.

You just seem like a baby.

It's like anytime I try to open email, iMessage, WhatsApp, and you just make me feel so stupid.

All right, Johnny, are we on lessons?

Yep.

Whatever you want.

Whatever I want.

Take whatever you want.

All right well, I'll do a hack that's similar to what we've just been speaking about, which is brick.

For iPhone.

You guys seen that?

It's a near-field communication thing that you've got to tap to unlock your phone.

Tried it?

I never knew what NFC stands for, Chris.

That's a lovely little bonus.

I didn't expect you to describe it like that.

But it's accurate.

Yeah, it's very detailed.

You've got to tap a thing to get your phone to work.

Yeah, so you, you set like a schedule on your phone, like we've all tried all these like app blocking things that you can just ultimately delete the app.

You have to, like go to where the thing is in the house, press unbrick and then tap the nfc device.

It's just been the most effective thing.

So I've had a year of trying to block myself from having to press the chest cloth.

And it's been the most effective thing, because having to stand up, go into another room press unbrick, go and then look at Instagram, it's just not going to happen.

Because I'm still using Opal from two years ago when you suggested it.

I'm on a constant wrestle.

It's just not quite as like... Because you can get round that, right?

Yeah, and there's nothing more, I think, humiliating than getting around.

I've seen people do that.

In front of others.

Yeah.

Let me just show you this thing on YouTube.

Oh, wait, no.

Hang on.

Can you wait for 27 seconds, please?

Pause session.

Did you ever get the box, Johnny?

No.

I think it was a Jordan original, wasn't it?

That's putting your phone in a box.

George and Kimberly have got a timed box.

Yeah.

That you locked both your phones in for a weekend.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, we did it on a Saturday, put the phones away in the box for the entire day.

It was fun.

You get incredibly bored.

And I just replaced it with a moleskin notepad.

He walks around with a fucking notepad.

He thinks he's Ernest Hemingway.

But that is one of the best hacks.

I don't even have this one written down, which is on the phone topic um, getting a moleskin pocket notepad so it can go in your pocket, because what's interesting is this thing here, this thing right here, this device.

It's always whispering to you.

Even now it's saying scroll, go on there, scroll on that, that's yeah, go on the, the gmail and make the sound right.

Not not george, not if it's bricked, not if it's bricked, but even then it whispers.

You can't access it, but it's still whispering.

It's still telling you to do it.

It's whispering.

Because you have the association.

You have the Pavlovian conditioning with this device.

What's interesting, as soon as you have the Moleskine notepad that you walk around with, is that that then begins to whisper to you.

So when you take it out and you go for a walk it's whispering.

Oh, check page three, that thing that you wrote down the other day.

So having a Moleskine notepad is... Can you sit with your thoughts?

You could do, but I'm going for a walk and then I can capture my thoughts.

So I can sit with my thoughts and then I can capture the best ones.

Can you think about a potential, just top of your head potential problem with going from digital to analog?

You could have written this down in your phone.

Obviously, lots of issues, phone's very distracting, all the rest of it.

Can you think of perhaps, an issue of having a single hard copy of of your most important thoughts?

I suppose losing it?

Well yeah, i mean because it's interesting.

You said that it's a very, that's a very sort of fortuitous prediction.

Um, because we went to dean's italian and, as you were extolling the virtues of your moleskin notepad, you left it at dean's italian and they binned it, so he lost all of his biggest thoughts.

Hold on.

So how does that feel?

I saw Chrissy's counter move coming about.

I purposely held off and I'll explain why.

That wasn't a moleskin notepad.

That was like a real shit notepad.

So I think the way it was just binned it because it was nothing.

That's why I upgraded now to a moleskin notepad.

Because if you see a moleskin notepad.

Why do you keep saying moleskin notepad?

Because of this reason.

Is it made of moleskin?

I actually don't know.

It's a brand, isn't it?

Yeah, I don't know.

It's a brand. right so your your argument really hoping that george is bringing out like a this is why i have a carbon copy uh this is james smith taking down the creatine industry isn't it yeah yeah so you're hoping that waiters understand the value of a moleskin note i just i'm afraid to tell you i don't think okay but the point the point i think the point of these sorts of things is is remember like you bought a light phone didn't you years ago there was like that movement of buy like a nokia 3210 and live your life off that but then you need google maps and you need uber and you need you need to send someone a message or you need to ring someone having those features is useful if your phone's in a box you can't use your notepad to book an uber but if you just remove the things that whisper to you and to to get them active again you have to get up and go into the other room it's friction it's just increasing friction foods in the in the house that to prevent you from i do i do remember i had a a lockbox thing timed lockbox not too dissimilar to yours but it had a plastic see-through cover and there was little holes cut out of it so you could actually use the phone you could swipe through different things on the phone and kind of use it right but um yeah didn't you tell me that if you lock your phone in the box you have to ring customer service if you can't get it out you basically smash it with a hammer or ring customer service because you can accidentally put it on for 30 days rather than 30 hours i'm sure i'm sure somebody's done yeah mike smashed his with a hammer really so yeah it's just in his room with thing isn't it there's like a family and they all put their phones in the box and the kid ends up like smashing the box i haven't seen like coded bias or something all right so brick brick all right an nfc device for it's opal with a opal with a physical thing in it all right in other news you've probably heard me talk about element before and that's because i am frankly dependent on it uh and it's how i've started my day every single morning this is the best tasting hydration drink On the market, you might think, why do I need to be more hydrated?

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Seth, what you got?

Back round to me.

I really underestimated the potency of the attribution error and cognitive dissonance.

So what I mean by that is keep me right on this Chris, because I feel like this is your absolute wheelhouse that we over-attribute other people's behaviour to their character but we under attribute it to situational factors.

But then for ourselves, we over attribute situational factors and we under attribute our character, because it's too painful for us to just be like oh, just because i'm a just a shit person, rather than like oh, it was because the bus was late and because whatever.

But easy to be like oh, they were just dick and it can't have been that they were sleep deprived or looking after their toddler or whatever else.

Classic, the classic one is i cut that guy off because i'm late for work.

He cut me off because he's a bad driver.

Oh yeah, a great example.

So the the broader lesson that i'm seeing here is um, that people are a lot more emotionally driven than than i think i've really given it credit for.

Like outside of our extremely autistic bubble um, there is, There's so much more cognitive dissonance that drives people's behavior and thoughts and actions.

And so you know this thing of people buy with emotion and they justify with logic.

It's not just buying behavior, it's everything.

And the moment you start spotting this, you see it everywhere.

So everyone listening must have had an experience where you're speaking to someone who has a particular stance or gripe or position or something, be on politics, could be on a relationship issue, whatever and the more you start to kind of get into it, you realize that they're just rotating their complaints, or like they're moving goal posts but still being pissed off about something, until you're like ah, actually like the pissed off comes first and then the justification comes later.

Um, so it's that people don't actually want to get to this kind of rational, objective truth.

They just want to feel safe and they just want a hug and just want to be heard.

And so I don't know who said this, but it's a quote of, we only see what we want to see.

We only hear what we want to hear.

And our belief system is like a mirror that only shows us what we believe.

So the lens or the glasses that we see the world through tell us more about the color of the lens than they do about the world out there.

I certainly this year, since trying to do more emotions work, have sort of come to the belief that most of the thoughts that we have are bottom-up, not top-down.

You feel a thing and then you come up with a story that explains why you feel the thing, as opposed to you're accurately determining that that story from from your brain downward.

It's very convincing as well because it's what the brain does, like it's a sense-making machine, isn't it?

So the body goes oh, i'm anxious, all my parts going whatever.

And then it, the brain, has to quickly be like oh well, that's because this, and it just like pulls together random things and thoughts to create this, like to weave this narrative, and then it holds on to that and it becomes, it identifies with it.

It's such a like, such a weird process, but it just is happening in the background all the time.

How have you changed the way that you operate or have you applied this in any way?

Is it just an insight that's interesting philosophically?

Just realizing that um, there's there's no point trying to argue with what someone's saying or trying to like convince someone on the head level, and instead just like, just give them a hug and, like you know metaphorically, and speak to the heart and um, realize that it's the.

That that's the stuff to address first, before you get into any of the um what someone.

So rather, rather than listening to what someone is saying, listen to what they're feeling.

There's also this uh like side argument that people can go down when they touch that, which is that oh uh, people are irrational.

They uh, they're not logical, they're driven by emotions.

And there's this great uh account, chris larkin, and he has this great line, which is emotions are logical, you're just bad at logic.

And when you actually get deeper to a layer, well, why is that anger there?

Or why is that anxiety there?

We almost, we start with logic and then people kind of deny the emotional level.

But then even beneath that, there's this kind of logic for all of those emotions that exist that we don't even get down to the basement and then don't even get to the point where you realize there's a basement in the basement.

Mm, mm.

All right.

My next one.

Yeah.

My next one.

Seth, that's good.

Awala bottles.

Seen one of these?

Awala bottles.

No.

Seen one of these before?

You've seen one of these around the house.

I have this.

So everybody needs some form of water receptacle.

And I've cycled through quite a bit.

I've cycled through Yeti.

Yeah.

I've used steel protein shakers, which are good for the protein thing.

The reason that I like these Awala bottles, that's Mark Zuckerberg's Ranch's logo for you there.

The reason that I like these ones, they're insulated.

They have got this size in particular.

It's got a good capacity.

It's nearly 700 ml.

This spout thing here allows you to sip it like a straw, but also drink from it.

This can hook through something and hold on and it'll keep stuff cold for a few hours.

It doesn't look too, it comes in every different color that you can imagine.

You can customize the whole thing.

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And it's 20 bucks for one of these.

They're really cheap.

Uh, they're fantastic and i, i adore mine and i use it all the time and i think everyone, yeah pretty much everybody from the team's, got one and it's very satisfying, it's very, it looks nice.

Is it metal?

Yeah yeah, it feels nice.

Johnny, if you, if you watch the office, you know the christmas special where david brent's like a salesman And he's going around on the road and he's like doing the water off and he's giving the whole pitch.

It was literally like that.

And I was just expecting you to go at the end.

So who does your tampons?

Well, nice.

You know who does your hydration?

Let me go.

I thought everything was Yeti.

You moved away from that.

Why are they better than Yeti?

The sip, spout, the magic straw or whatever they call it is really satisfying.

It does make me feel a bit like a baby.

Which, yeah, it's okay.

Yeti's good.

They probably have better insulation.

It'll keep stuff colder for longer, maybe.

But the sizes of Yeti are a little bit more cumbersome.

You can either go from one that's definitely not big enough to one that's almost certainly too big.

And the smallest Oala size, which is this one, is really good and fits in the side of most backpacks.

It's our litre.

No, I think it's just over 700.

If you get over a litre even close to what a litre?

You probably don't want to drink the same thing for that long.

Maybe you want to cycle it out.

It gets heavy.

But 500ml is nowhere near enough.

So it's the optimal size.

Come back next year when I disagree with myself.

When I have a different phone blocking method and you have a different bottle.

Ha ha ha!

Ha ha ha, but i'll still be recommending.

Oh yeah, okay.

Well anyway, this was johnny's razor that we left last year's with, which was um, come back to me in six months after you've been using this hack, it's 90 and then i'll 90.

Yeah well, i guess people won't even know about that.

We did 20 30 episodes of life hacks back in the day, which is still like a non-insignificant amount of this entire podcast inventory, And one of the most important ones was that after a while, we realized someone would come in all full of beans because this brand new life hack that they were in love with

I must tell you about a way to get YouTube premium for free by getting it through the Argentinian VPN service.

And then you have to wait 90 days to find out that you get charged back for fraud online or whatever it might be.

I'd never forget eric.

Eric jorgensen taught us about that one where if you try and cancel your zoom subscription, they immediately offer you a 30 discount um, stuff like that.

But there's some second order consequence oh yeah, but it's downgraded.

You, you get ads on your own zoom calls now or something.

Uh, but yeah anyway, 90 days.

You, if a friend comes to you this is a meta life hack friend comes to you and says me you've got to try this new, this fun blocking method And you say okay, how long have you been doing it?

You go, two weeks?

You go okay, come back to me in another two months and we'll see if you're still using it or if it's broken your life.

I've had people complain about the Lifehacks episodes because they watched them in order and they would get like four or five episodes in

And the thing that they'd been doing- You've contradicted yourself.

We were like, no, no, never ever do that.

Do this instead.

And that's just the cycle.

But the issue is that the pace at which we drip fed Lifehacks episodes when we started- was appropriate.

It was every couple of months, every three months or so for four years.

If you just watch them like binge finishing game of thrones, you do speed run through our development.

Yeah yeah, which is probably quite dangerous.

Don't listen in reverse chronological order because you'll mess yourself up.

Oh god, that's the right way to do it, though let's start at the end.

It'll be.

The stuff at the bit in the first episode is probably the things we're all still doing.

It is.

Sleep with your phone outside your bedroom.

All right, George.

Mine's more of a lesson or a two-part lesson.

So one of the lessons this year was so when I originally wrote the essay on high agency, one of the bits of feedback that I got and other people gave me as well is that the concept's not necessarily new, but it gives you a bit of language to refer to a thing.

And I've had that for a while with that term.

And I was like, And then went one level above that.

I was like, hold on.

I don't have a bit of language to refer to when I need a bit of language to refer to something.

So I told a friend, Henrik, that.

And he gave me from Scott Alexander this he calls it an idea handle, which is when you create a term or a name for a thing and then you can kind of pick it up in the world.

And a big thing for me this year has been around language which, even where Yusuf is right now, which is beautiful, like side tangent, here in Malaysia they don't use plural.

So rather than say tables, they say table, table.

So you just realize when you study language, so much comes back to you.

But one bit of language I've been kind of playing around with is we've spoken about this before around forgetting things and how much we forget.

And i found this story um about a seven-year-old boy called henry, and one day he's out and about playing in his drive in connecticut and a cyclist doesn't see him and clatters into him, knocks him unconscious and he wakes up and the next few days he starts having a few seizures and by the age of 25 he's having 25 seizures per day, and this is in the 50s, So he's trying everything to get rid of this condition.

So he goes and signs up for experimental brain lobotomy surgery.

And he wakes up from the operation and he has some good news, some bad news, and some awful news.

So the good news is that the brain surgery has basically cured his condition entirely.

So he has no more epileptic fits.

The bad news is that he won't remember the good news, because the awful news is It's destroyed his ability to form new memories.

So he lives from the age of about 25 to 85, not forming any new memories.

So every day his psychiatrist would meet him and get to know Henry well over the years.

And each day he would meet his psychiatrist for the first time.

But there was a specific bit of detail about Henry, which I call Henry's mirror, which is every morning he would wake up, he would look at himself in the mirror and he'd be shocked and perplexed at how old he was, because in his head he was always 25.

And i kind of call this idea henry's mirror, which is the problem with amnesia is not only do you forget, it's that you have amnesia of your amnesia, and it's this idea that all of us right now have some bit of henry's mirror in us.

You don't even realize it because, by definition, you've forgotten it.

So the classic example i use is okay Johnny, can you think of a clear sentence of thought from yesterday?

Bear in mind you had 10 to 70,000 on average.

Can you think of one?

No.

But when you're in these overthinking spirals, it feels so real, feels so tangible, and then it just fades away and all you have is a face that's getting older in the mirror each day.

It's very apocalyptic.

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How has this changed the way that you show up, if at all?

I think the big thing.

I've tried to change more, first off, when it comes to overthinking, trying to realize that as a thought loop happening, trying to stare in that mirror for a second and go.

Well, hold on how long.

How many times has this happened?

Because this could be the 60000th time this thought has happened.

But I can't remember anything from.

Yesterday is one thing.

The second thing is just very basic level, just trying to document more, take more photos, take more videos, journal more.

And without realizing it's such a an asset that's going to compound further and further in the future, even like today.

To be honest with you, it's fun that we get this for like 20 years from now we can go oh, what we was doing that day.

But otherwise, like the average person, the memory just goes and then your life just goes.

Yeah, if you use merry christmas, merry christmas, if you use day one for journaling, Do you guys use Day One?

No, you're such a Day One.

I do use Day One, and I've used it more this year than any other year.

It just gives you every time you go to make a journal entry.

It's like on this day, a year ago, two years ago, eight years ago, ten years ago.

How many entries have you got on Day One now?

I've been using it for, like, I think 15 years.

Wow.

But how frequently are you doing it?

I try and do it every day.

Really?

Yeah, just, like, contents of mind and a picture every day.

So you've got thousands of entries.

Yeah.

Holy fuck.

The main takeaway from all of it is like it's just the same stuff.

It's just the same, the same worries, the same things.

You're excited about, the same feelings.

Well, i think 10 years ago you're like what's the point?

Well, we assume that the henry's mirror thing is is true in as much as all of the problems that we're dealing with now feel fresh to us.

But when you look across the expanse of time In the same ways, you've got the same feet that you did 10 years ago.

Your psychological construction is made up of the same biases and fundamental fears, which I think Yusuf, to your sort of emotions point, is why that's such a powerful way to communicate with people.

And also it's why I've been trying to dig deeper, deeper sort of even deeper than just talk therapy gets you to by unpacking okay, and where are these patterns coming from?

And what?

What is this?

What are the emotions i'm unprepared to feel, because i think that is really the only way to get to the bottom of the etch, a sketch, and to fully, fully shake it loose.

Well you, you're right that you're the same, but you're obviously the same person that you were 15, 20 years ago.

But last year we we talked about this where you think that your journal especially in Johnny's case, we've got 15 years of day one journals is going to be useless in the very early stages.

What does my 19-year-old idiot self know about how I should be conducting my life now?

And then you look back on it, and it's just exactly the same stuff that you're like, oh, God.

And it's like life is a spiral curriculum and it'll keep spanking you with the same lessons until you finally absorb it, change what you're doing and then the world around you will stop like hitting you with that same lesson what's that?

Is it uh, young?

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate and we we see that often with other people more clearly.

You know, when you see someone who's always running into the same like style of problem and you like, oh yeah, it's because they're creating it.

So one one hack for this it was actually one of mine for today, but whilst it's on, the topic is kind of what I call, like this time technique.

So, So let's say, for example, you're going through insert difficult moment.

So let's say, I don't know, you're going through a breakup or you're having, in your case Johnny, maybe a difficult issue of a member of staff, or

What do you want to say about my members of staff?

No, you know what I mean?

Like running a business, you're going to have those.

Don't sue me.

You're going to have those issues.

So what I kind of recommend?

Or I've been doing this one for three or four years, which is I'll think of okay, so let's say it's a work conflict, right.

I will then go.

Okay, can I think of two or three times that are the most similar throughout my entire career, like this

So I kind of write down those events and write down the date.

And then I ask okay, if I could go back in time now, with all the knowledge that I have now, and if I could turn this event into like one of the best things that ever happened to me, what would be the three actions that I would take?

I go okay.

Then next to the date, i write okay well, what would be the worst?

Three things that i could do with all the knowledge that i have now?

Because you, you have this detachment from the event and you have like an extra uh, 20 iq points.

And then, once you've done that, just scribble out the date and replace it with today's date and pretend it's you from the future.

That's, that's come back and that's such a an effective way, because when you do, even though we do forget so much of the past, the real stuff that you do remember are the most emotional events, And even now you can look back at things five to ten years ago and have such detachment.

Well, the patterns are the same, which means that the solutions will probably still work.

If you can think of what you would have done previously in a situation that's analogous, and now you, in the present, are facing something similar.

I love the emergence.

Because that's what emotions are supposed to do, aren't they?

They're supposed to be a navigation tool. feedback for oh you took a wrong step there like here's how to change in future but we often don't and then keep experiencing the emotion yeah the the universe just continues to shout louder until you hear the lesson the goal is to get before it's screaming in your face the goal is to try and jump jump that a little bit sooner all right johnny what you got johnny johnny uh i have a lesson which ties in beautifully with this wonderful because one of the problems with having 15 years of journals is i can i watch i can see this like journey of me chasing all these little things so like i wanted to bench 100 kilos and then i wanted abs and then i wanted a 2-1 degree and i wanted a job and then i wanted propane to do well and i wanted certain revenue levels it's always just this next thing you can see it happening through the journal entries and you realize it changes nothing like this in those same entries there's still worries problems the same worries the same problems and you watch you through time achieve these things and you're still worried about the same stuff and that creates this feeling of like what is the point of doing anything But the thing that you realize woven into all of it is the thing that's changing the whole time is the traits that you and how your character is changing because chasing those things that are difficult require delayed gratification.

They require dealing with difficult emotions.

They require...

All of the skills that you have to build and all of the traits you have to build to build a business to a certain level or to diet for the leanest you ever been, whatever it might be, you change.

So it's this idea that the goals, I don't think they really compound.

They kind of do, but the dopamine you get from that doesn't compound.

But the traits that you get from chasing the hard things is the compounding.

And that realization immediately flipped back to like it's absolutely worth it.

Like listing out loads of really big, difficult goals and chasing them, because the I don't think there's any faster way to change who you are, to improve your and it's something that like being a.

My daughter is now of an age where, like she's, she's gone from being a baby to being like a little person.

I'm like, Oh God, like there's a proper like responsibility here to be the example.

And I think the best way to become the example is is chase the difficult things that require the traits to to come as part of the journey.

I love the um.

What your takeaway from that, johnny?

Because some people would be really nihilistic about that.

They'd be like oh well, there's no point chasing anything.

That's the first feeling.

The first feeling is like oh, that's the point yeah, whereas you're like actually, this is a way to play the game without having to be fully sucked into the game.

Well, you still need to be conned by the game into believing that the game is what you want to play.

Like this wouldn't work.

You would not be able to get yourself to do the hard thing if you didn't think that the other side of the goal of the hard thing was completion satisfaction self-actualization, rest.

But I think people think oh, when I get a million turnover I'll be happy.

That's not true.

But when you get a million, turn over the person that you've become yeah, and so you just change the thing.

The goal is kind of like the side quest to the thing.

But that's the goal, is the thin end of the wedge.

The goal is what gets you through the door.

Yeah, because you're not thinking i can't wait to feel dissatisfied in this goal, but happy about the person i've become yeah.

Like you achieve the goal, you get the little like it's the james smith thing, like all wins feel it feels exactly the same yep.

Then you're dissatisfied.

But you've changed.

The thing is, you don't know that at the time.

And the only way you can know that is being able to see what you two years ago, how you two years ago dealt with a challenge.

I think this is why progress feels so good and losing ground feels so bad.

This is great for you, somebody who's been on a relatively linear journey of getting better more often.

Mindful, more peaceful, more successful, more capable, more resilient, whatever.

But if the thing happens in the opposite direction, whether you've achieved your goals or not even, maybe worse, if you've achieved your goals, you say I got the thing I thought I wanted.

It turns out that just as you, I was a bit disappointed with how much that didn't satisfy me.

Oh, fuck.

And I'm now a worse person in some sort of a way.

You're a boxer who gets the Olympic gold medal, gets fucking head injury and now has to deal with that.

Also, I'm unhappy about the fact that the gold medal didn't make me as happy as I thought it would, and I'm now worse off.

Well, and Henry's mirror.

You've wasted time in the process.

You're now 85.

Just because of the brain injury in that example.

Yes.

Yeah.

The point being that the saving grace you have around goals being more unsatisfying than people think they're going to be, is that you have transformed yourself into something which is more evergreen than the goal and the brief drip of dopamine, which is all internal anyway, than that is.

You've got something more than that and hooray.

But imagine if you didn't get the progress.

So I'd argue that, aside from becoming like severely injured or disabled or something in the process, dealing with the hard things is where the trait changes happen, so that you can go through the thing that feels like i'm going backwards, and at the time yes, you're like objectively going backwards by the measure, by the revenue level, the body fat, whatever the strength level, but the traits are still improving.

Because i think anything extremely.

What about if you run out of motivation?

What about if you dumped all of your enthusiasm into something that it turned out wasn't, wasn't right?

That's assuming that that's the end point.

That might just be your your, your position here is that, given a long enough time horizon, you're gonna track and trend up and to the right.

Yeah, like if you look at, look at your journey to here as an example, like you sat on this sofa.

How many five years ago six eight, Eight years ago?

Eight years ago.

Like, if you watch the recordings back.

I do.

You seem completely different.

Very much.

And everybody would be like oh, Chris is.

You know what a fantastic existence Chris must have like being this famous podcaster.

But that's really the side quest to the development as a result of it.

It's a good part.

I mean, what was the first one that we filmed?

Love Island.

What's it really like to live on Love Island?

Episode 17?

14 14 episode 14 so uh yeah we were sat on a different couch but the same living room yeah in may april or may of 2018 uh different couch definitely a different yeah i remember getting this leather couch yeah um and uh yeah you're right you're right that that it's I want to be in a different country.

I want to not have to stay awake till three in the morning running nightclubs.

I want people that I respect to know me and respect my work.

I want... And then you go, okay.

At each of those junctures, they were satisfying, but the satisfaction was short-lived.

What was longer lived while the person that you became?

So do you think if you'd picked so, the goal you had was I know it wasn't like explicitly the goal of the time, but the goal was like I'm going to build a top 10 podcast in the world.

It was not just, no.

Yeah.

Just to give a big asterisk there.

We, we was on a beach during COVID.

Um, and it's sort of been two and a half years into the podcast.

Yeah.

Not, not an insignificant amount of time.

And Chris just said, if I'm talking about goals and where he wants to take things, he goes, pauses for a second, he goes, i think.

I think a hundred thousand subscribers.

I think as soon as i get that, i'll just chill out, i'll be happy then.

I remember this whole production staff's uh, you've got a hundred thousand now.

I?

I remember when i was in the first year of university and i remember buying a tub of protein and looking at it and thinking after this one, i think i'll be done.

I was 18 and weighed about 76 kilos, but it was that it was no sorry, 69.

I was 69 kilos, fucking hell.

I remember when i hit 70 kilos when i was 20 years old and i was like i am fucking huge.

I i think if you picked an easier goal, your development would have been totally different.

This is a big, this is a big homosism, where he says um, the person that you become along the way, like how can you say that you're a man who can do hard things if you never did hard things?

Then jimmy carr repurposed it even better and it's yeah.

This insight, i think, is it is a saving grace to a lot of people who feel that their goals are hollow um, so i think that's a wonderful lesson, like a really, really lovely lesson.

All right, you seth what you got.

Yeah, think of how many bags of protein you've eaten since then, Chris.

You did the same with balloons as well, didn't you?

Where 1,000 subscribers, you and Dean had a cake and balloons and a party.

Each subscriber level has got bigger and less grand in its celebration.

Did we even do anything for 4 million?

For 4 million subs, we didn't do...

We did something for a billion plays, but yeah, for four million subs, I don't think it even registered.

Well, it did.

We were like, ah, well, we need to get a piece of artwork and do that.

We did for the eighth in the world.

Eighth in the world, I had what was supposed to be a red velvet cake, but it wasn't.

It was a carrot cake masquerading as a red velvet cake, and it was awful.

It was horrible.

I tried to eat it in Utah.

It didn't go well.

It's crazy to think.

It's crazy to think for like a hundred thousand, you did this mega party and then for four million, you probably just sent a bicep emoji on slack.

That's it.

Yeah, probably the pornhub, the pornhub emoji.

Yeah, on slack, yes.

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All right, Seth, what you got?

So just to piggyback off Johnny's there, because I really like the takeaway of the person that you become, I think there's another thing that you can draw from that too.

So I fully agree, but you were talking about chewing on the menu.

So mistaking the menu for the meal and ascribing that to your happiness.

And we're the ones that always move the goalposts for our happiness.

Every time we hit a particular goal, milestone and we renegotiate the contract with our brain so that we end up in this trap where you know your brain releasing little bips of some neurotransmitter but you raise the bar of oh, but it has to be.

I have to achieve an even higher bar to get the same little blurt of dopamine.

And a lot of it's because we almost feel like it's too simple to just enjoy the basic pleasures of life that are immediately available of health and relationships and nature and the sun and friends and things that um you would act like if they were taken away from you you would actually want to exchange everything for that so there's a there's a book by a media giant who wrote and he came out he was like the head of pc world magazine and a bunch of conglomerates called it's called felix felix dennis how to get rich and it's like a tongue-in-cheek book about like you know i'm sat here at the age of 84 um writing um this book to you dear reader who's um you know probably in your 20s or 30s and despite the billions that i've amassed i would swap places with you in an instant because you have the one thing that i don't which is time and i would still have the better end of the deal um so It's almost like the things that we're chasing, like most people listening to this podcast are probably in the top 20% of global wealth anyway.

And yet we think that if we get to the top 19 or the top 18 or whatever, that something's going to change.

I saw Ferris shared this quote from Marian Seldes the other day.

The hardest thing to teach a student and to believe consistently is that there is nothing out there to go and get.

There is no part career opportunity for which you should be searching and scrounging and coveting.

All of the preparation is within, and if you keep yourself mentally and physically fit and you remain generous with yourself and others and stay deeply in your study about your, your craft, whatever is yours, will then arrive.

So with that in mind, it's like there are basic pleasures that are always available and when they're gone like health, for example, another challenge.

We've all i think all of us have gone through some health challenge in the last like 10 years where we've suddenly been like, oh wow, actually i could really do with a bit more of that again.

Um, so instead it's like enjoy those pleasures and then organize your life such that you can enjoy the passage of time as you move towards your goal, and then you've got the best of both worlds.

I think this is it might sound to, it's probably almost certainly would have sounded to us eight years ago when we started the pod opulent, maybe entitled, detached from reality in some sort.

Why?

Why just get stronger bigger, more rich, more popular, whatever?

Um, why are you needing to make everything so abstract?

But this leads into my favorite, my favorite lesson from the entire year, which is that Unteachable lessons are unteachable.

And this has been the best.

I wrote it in January and then dropped it on Rogan a couple of weeks after that.

And it's still just.

It's a fundamental truism that there are a particular category of insights about life that you cannot learn without experiencing.

And money won't make you happy.

Fame won't fix your self-worth.

You don't love that pretty girl.

She's just hot and difficult to get.

You should see your parents more.

You should work less.

You should spend more time in a hammock.

You should enjoy a holiday without having your phone.

You'll never care about anything that you're thinking of apart from when you're thinking about it.

All of these lessons over and over, the next follower count won't matter.

The reason that people proclaim them with such like grandiose ceremony when they get there is that they can't believe that that was the case, despite the fact that generations of parents and media and literature and archetype and myth and songs and art have told us.

Here are the pitfalls to look out for.

And it's this weird kind of like cute narcissism that we all have, where we think that that might be true for them but not for me.

It's the classic, like, oh, shut up, granddad.

Like, I'll figure it out myself.

Yeah, my unique constitution would allow me to dance through this minefield of very well-laden, very well-described tripwires, and I won't trip on any of them.

So I'm working on the next build of this unteachable lessons thing, because I think it's so good.

So, first off, I guess, If you chase something that you were warned was hollow, to arrive there and find out that the warning was correct, you were in good company.

That's the first lesson of the unteachable lessons thing.

But the second one is that they are unteachable.

So the self-castigation of I should have known what I didn't know before I knew it.

Like, I should have seen this thing coming or whatever.

That is simply not the way... The unteachable lessons are self-reinforcing.

They are unteachable, which means you have to do them in order to be able to understand them.

And I think this is what maybe a good bit of us are reckoning with now, that unteachable lessons don't really matter all that much until you're at the stage where you've learned that the lesson... should have been realized in advance and you knew about it and then you get this guilt and you get the shame around oh fucking hell how could i not have seen did the guys not tell me did they not say that the four million subs wasn't the answer that the so on and i think what i realized was unteachable lessons is cool to point at but doesn't actually give anybody any sense of all it does is mark the way to the edge of the cliff that they are going to jump off of and on your way down you'll realize that you're in okay company so maybe you feel a bit less lonely but the next one is you can't realize this stuff before you've experienced it and because of that you shouldn't be whipping yourself into like pain and and saying what an idiot i shouldn't have done this it's a justification for self-compassion that way smarter way richer way more accomplished more worldly people who had more advantages than you knew more and did the exact same thing bigger for longer till the end of their life they died trying to do it and okay like it you dedicated however many weeks months years decades to this career relationship pursuit goal dream whatever it might be to find out that what was at the end of the rainbow wasn't a part of gold you're in good company what's that programming like you can't just take it on faith otherwise you'll be sat there with fomo yeah it's the naval thing it's far easier to achieve your material desires than to renounce them i think it's like the best reason to achieve them to clear them off 100 it's way easier and this sounds like a thing to say but demonetized um it's it's literally easier to buy a ferrari than it is to rid yourself of the desire to get a ferrari yeah it's either that that doesn't speak to how easy it is to get a ferrari it speaks to how difficult it is to be able to rid yourself of the desire for ferrari if you really want to become in being able to get the ferrari in the first place isn't it yeah but yeah i think like a really bad credit rating yeah true bitches the um i think like if if by big naturals gaining a certain amount of money you remove your desire to get more money fantastic the quickest route to getting rid of the desires to achieve it yeah yeah 100 um what if i got next uh you know one we've discussed before actually um not on the show so you spoke then about giving up desires um Another problem is envy or jealousy.

And one of the things I've tried to do, rather than give up envy or jealousy, is have a bit more of a stricter criteria of when I'm willing to be envy or jealous.

So what I kind of developed is this idea I call call of duty versus war.

So call of duty is kind of what I project Johnny's life to be like, right?

Like maybe some of the highlights that I hear and the wins and... all of that stuff.

And then the war is okay.

When I've actually been with you for a week and lived your life.

If I'm envious of the war, then that's fine.

But if I'm envious of this call of duty 1 highlight reel that doesn't exist, then that's a problem.

So I use, I mean, I use two examples.

I mean, one of them is, um, uh, is a business guy.

We both know super, super, super successful.

And he's got everything beautiful family, amazing business, um crushing it year on year and he's got to the scale now where we're talking.

It's a huge, mega business, as with him, you could easily feel envious.

He goes yeah, i've got um, i think it was 2 000 lawsuits this month, because when you, when your business gets to that scale, you're constantly dealing with litigation from so many different angles.

Wasn't he dealing with this personally as well?

I don't yeah, there was like jumped in on some email while yes yeah, and he's he, i mean he's one of my favorite people in the world but i go oh wow, like if i want to be envious, i've got to go to the war, i've got to be.

Oh, i also want the 2000 emails a month.

And likewise, i mean me and you were on the road trip and i think it's probably good for the viewers because i think a lot of people could look at you and go good looking guy um, super successful rich, knows loads of people, and that's the kind of call of duty model.

Me and chris are on a road trip in america and we're going to put the tunes on and blare through the roads and then Sky, your podcast ads manager, calls up.

And I think the way people assume the ads work for the show is probably oh, Chris just gets a load of free stuff and money, right.

That's what I think they think.

Whereas you kind of then get to sit there with the war and it's Sky going.

Yeah, they're just not happy with that Instagram story.

It's Chris going, I filmed that one four times now.

Why are they not happy with it?

And I go, oh, okay. my model before was the call of duty.

And now I'm seeing the war.

So unless I've seen the war, I'm not envious.

And if I see the war and I like it, I'm willing to be Napoleon.

I think when Mark Zuckerberg was on Joe Rogan, he describes like his morning.

And it's like he wakes up and he doesn't look at his phone, because when he looks at his phone, there's just loads of.

Oh, God, like that never goes away.

Like it doesn't matter how big the business is.

Just gets more.

Well, the emails are just worse.

It's the emails that like 15 people below you didn't have the answer to.

Well, that's another Sam Harrisism, where there will never come a day when you don't have any problems.

What did you think that you were going to wake up one day?

There'd be no problems like getting to a video game level where there's no more enemies to fight.

No, your problems will change, but having problems will never go away.

The line from your idea about Call of Duty versus war is nailed by James Clear here.

How many people love the idea of a thing, but not the reality?

It doesn't make sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it.

If you don't want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire.

To crave the result, but not the process, is to guarantee disappointment.

Beautiful.

Nailed it.

Popper has this idea he's one of the founding fathers of modern science that essentially, life is problem solving.

And then David Deutsch builds upon his ideas, which is, I guess, a few things, but one one All problems, unless they defy the laws of physics, are fundamentally solvable.

So that's the optimistic note.

But there's a big caveat there, which is as soon as you solve a problem, it leads to another problem.

So solutions are infinite, but problems are also infinite.

So let's say we solve the problem of fire.

Okay.

Now we have the problem of smoke.

Okay.

We've solved the problem of smoke.

We've got a chimney.

Okay.

Now we've got a dirty chimney.

Okay.

We're going to solve that problem by getting some children in to clean it.

Oh, now we've got the problem of child labor, and it's just, and it's both the beginning of infinity, both for problems and solutions.

So life is problem solving.

Very good.

Johnny, what do you got?

I have another lesson, which is it's a dad based lesson, about being a dad.

Um, have you seen american beauty?

Seen the film american beauty?

No no, tom cruise uh no oh, um shows that i haven't seen.

That's my.

That's me verifying that i haven't seen american beauty, kevin spacey.

I'd recommend watching.

It's really good.

There's a scene in it where um, there's a guy watching.

He just sat mesmerized watching a bag blowing in the wind and he ends up in tears because there's.

He can't believe the amount of beauty in the bag floating in the wind.

And I've always been really jealous of that scene because there's a guy that's just absolutely mesmerized with something completely normal and ordinary.

And everyone's going around chasing the new thing, the novel experience, the new location possession whatever,

The thing that I've noticed that I wasn't expecting about being a dad is watching.

Watching your child see something for the first time completely reintroduces you to life, like little things before they just became part of the background, part of the scenery.

It's like the first time they watch a dog bark, the first time they see a bird flying, the first time they hear a noise.

You're just transported for that split second into like, oh god yeah, like that is that's crazy, that thing, and it's a complete.

I think you guys probably had this one of the challenges of you get older and you feel like time goes faster and faster and faster and it's just the same experiences on repeat.

It's a really nice pinpoint back to like, oh yeah, that cup's colder than I was expecting it to be.

Oh yeah, the moisture feels really weird.

And 10 minutes goes by.

So that's been a really cool.

Something I wasn't expecting to happen, but it's been a really cool experience this year.

That is so lovely.

It's been great seeing that in you as well, Johnny.

Over the year I've honestly seen your heart open and almost unlock this aspect to your personality that your daughter's brought out in you.

Thanks, man.

What is it that's going on with us?

Because you've had a kid. but none of us have a moleskin notepad.

You run a most moleskin notepad, but none of us, I just get this sense.

I don't know whether anybody else that's listening feels it, but 2025 was a very feely uh generally.

I think for a lot of people that were around me it was like a big emotions.

Yeah.

I think our lessons and realizations each time we do this on the being weirdly similar.

There's definitely, we're on a, trajectory that's sort of moving at a similar kind of pace you see that um when you have a load of girls around one another their menstruation cycles sync up so it's like a hack sync up yeah yeah even remotely interesting yeah that's that's that's cool man i mean look the the opportunity to revisit something old for the first time is just super cool and obviously because you're marrying this with a deep meditation practice that's consistent you're getting at this from multiple angles it's funny because you started the story then about the film i started staring at the carpet and i was in this gaze for the carpet for like five seconds because one of my favorite stories um that i read this year was from morgan housel's book i don't know the name of the chap but he um he's blind uh from basically birth to about 45 and he has this experimental eye surgery and he can see for the first time and he's after the surgery just at the opticians just staring at the carpet for like an hour and he's just fascinated by the details of the carpet and i realize i walk past carpet all the time and don't think about it yeah so wouldn't it be crazy to be alive for a long time but experiencing something for the first time.

Because you see those videos of babies that hear for the first time, but they're usually three or four or something.

And you go, well, how much life would you have experienced up until that point?

But if you're someone who has a sense of self and maybe a partner and a position in society and all the rest of it, and then you get reintroduced, this cosmic dose of novelty and wonder into a system that already is pretty well put together.

I think I told you about this ages ago, the elderly clout hypothesis.

We talk about the perils of fame too young, but never the perils of fame too old.

What happens if you're 60 and you become the most famous psychologist in the world?

Say, well, Jordan Peterson had to navigate that.

You get plucked out of obscurity.

You think you know who you are.

You think you know your place in society and now that you've been ripped from your moorings and you've got to try and work out who the fuck am i in this new world?

Yeah, and that like i think we all, we've all experienced that when we downloaded alfred for the first time, like everything we knew about the way we interface with technology, suddenly just like, oh my god, i've been driving with the brakes on, i've been seeing in black and white all my life There is a bit of me that thinks, because the growth of the show is so fucking exponential, so many amazing low-hanging fruit insights to me feel cheap to do because they've been done maybe multiple times before.

But because of the exposure that people have had to it, even within the same stream of content, which is Modern Wisdom and me, We probably do need to go back.

I think this should be like a required reading.

Like, mute the show.

Yeah, we've got to go through the OGs.

Otherwise, we're going to break the Alfred service.

Headspace, calm, and then arrived at waking up.

Trackpad speed.

ROM wads.

You need to sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom.

This is one of the problems.

Some of the hacks that we believed in, the companies are defunct now.

I'm pretty sure you can't get like sponsors.

The protein works, I think, actually went into administration.

They're in the show notes at some point.

Well, it was Romwod.

Then you were on Romwod.

I was a Romwod model.

Do you do stretching now?

I do none.

I don't do much stretching now.

George does loads.

Do you?

A little bit.

Stretching all the time.

Yousef, what have you got?

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Similar to Johnny as well, our periods have synced up.

I have taken a bit of a journey from head to heart over the year too.

And like massive amounts of of of gratitude for being able to like spend your guys' birthdays together, like to to travel with you all.

And like all of, all of that stuff, I really just really seeing an appreciation for it.

Like almost like Johnny was saying about his daughter where If you were transported I think Hor Mosey talks about this where it's like if you were transported from your 90s into today and you're like oh, I've suddenly got another, I'm suddenly 30 again.

I've got another years to live.

It's like you see it with a whole new level of gratitude.

But my big one is me becoming post-truth.

This is the beginning of a hard right-wing pivot from Yusuf here, isn't it?

Here we go.

The mirror only smiles when you smile has been my mantra for the year.

And it's just as concrete as it sounds.

You're sat staring in the mirror, miserable, and going, I don't like what's in the reflection.

I need to try and change that thing in the reflection.

And the mirror represents the world around you, whereas actually, like you, can never change the reflection.

All you can do is bring the positive energy to it and then everything else reflects it back to you.

So it's just moving from left brain overly empirical.

Have to get to some objective truth out there in order to give myself the permission to say that this is true, or adopt a belief or adopt whatever you know.

Actually no, like you, you can you choose your beliefs, like we choose them anyway.

So it's not by doing that.

Um, it's just being conscious about it and then bringing whatever energy you want to see reflected back into the world.

And, um, in doing that, it's just been, it's like opening up a different gear in my mind.

So, um, that's been a big shift in just how I'm choosing to see reality.

Very feelsie.

We're all very feelsie, which I love.

I, I think I'd.

You know what it makes me think.

It makes me think that the intuition that i had for most of the last 12 months was right.

It's like this is a big um uh, like my biases are being confirmed and uh, it's not just you.

Yeah, it's not.

It's not, and you know, i think certainly, at least from the show's perspective, a lot of what i've talked about over the last 12 months has been less hardcore hustle and grind goggins mentality thing.

I contributed to that.

You know the the industry of fuck your feelings bro, just work harder.

I had, you know, i served my time contributing to that.

But even fucking homozy started to make the pivot this year where He's thinking well, maybe I should pay a little bit of attention to what's happening below the neck.

Maybe I should care a little bit more.

You could say a good summary is that it's all vibes, ultimately.

What you're trying to do is construct some external situation or life or level of success or belief system or whatever externally to make yourself feel something internally.

There is a more direct route there.

Well, the post-truth idea yusef has um probably stems from i don't know yusef, but the derek sievers has this book called useful uh, but not true um, and he has this uh, i haven't read it, but okay yeah, very much, you can read it.

You can read it in a couple of hours.

So there's um yeah, sievers has this useful but not true um, and he starts off with this story of Obviously for people who don't know, he ends up being a quite successful entrepreneur, internet programmer, et cetera, et cetera.

But what a lot of people don't know is when he was 17, he crashed into a lady that was driving and broke her spine, and she was paralyzed for the rest of her life.

And he carries this from like 17 to 34 just like ruminating on it day after day after day, like what he did and how all his success is meaningless because he's such an awful person.

And one day he goes, well, I'm going to take some agency over it.

I'm actually going to go and see her and apologize.

So he turns up at a door.

She answers the door and he immediately starts sobbing like in tears and goes, it's me, Derek.

I'm so sorry.

I crashed into your car.

I paralyzed you.

And she's like, hold on, hold on.

She goes, come on, walk on in.

And she's walking.

So they both like sit down and he's kind of discovers that he didn't paralyze her.

Like she like broke a bit of a vertebrae, but she's been fine ever since.

And what's interesting is she's been blaming herself for the accident ever since.

So they both end up crying, realizing that they both had these kind of false memories in their head the entire time.

Yeah.

It's scary to work out that your worldview is incorrect.

Which it is.

Yeah.

And it's emoji.

But in how many other places do you think that you've hit a woman?

How many assumptions do you have about yourself, or about the world, or about the past that aren't that way?

And this is, I think, one of the problems that you have with going too deep into the therapy speak world without having action.

And I'm sure if I was to make, this would be cool.

If I was to make a prediction for next year, I get the sense that we will, or at least for me.

I predict that I'm probably going to keep moving through the emotions thing but realize it's made me less effective and actually try and come back out the other side into more action-oriented stuff, but doing it from a more embodied place.

Like okay, I've looked into the abyss and I've stared at the shadow a little bit and now I'm going to try and re-garner the fuck your feelings bro, just work anyway, but while actually feeling them and uh well, that's what you were saying while back chris where like, it's not that we're throwing out the idea of being able to do hard work, it's just not conflating the actual pain of the work with the progress.

Yeah, do you think that?

You know?

The thing i think we probably all had this before you like meditate or do any kind of self-improvement stuff is that will, will this sap my desire to work harder, or do you feel like that's happened?

You can get there.

I think I can get there, yeah.

Because I can not, in terms of not wanting the goals anymore and perhaps part of this is simply just achieving a lot of the goals, but at least a good bit of it for me comes out of well, how much of what I was doing was to hide from emotional states that I didn't want to feel.

Like, I feel lonely, so I'll work hard.

I feel frustrated, so I'll work harder.

I feel insufficient or inferior, so I'll work hard.

And in that, you hide, you artificially bolster your sense of self-worth. because you don't feel like without that, you're enough.

So you're chasing enoughness and you're injecting work rate into it.

And it's doing two things.

It's pushing you towards something which makes you think, well, I'm moving in the right direction.

It doesn't matter if I don't love myself today because tomorrow I'll be better.

And you have this sort of permanent manana, manana, manana ring of that.

But the other thing is by being so busy it drowns out the fleeting thoughts that make you doubt stuff.

In any case, a busy calendar is a hedge against existential loneliness and if you just stack your day back to back, i'm moving in the right direction.

So the long term like i'm doing the thing thing gets sorted, plus the immediate.

I've in insulated myself from being able to hear the thing thing is also happening.

So i think it can.

But ultimately, if the reason that you work so hard is so that you can finally feel good about yourself or be happy or have good vibes, and if in the process of doing that, you destroy the vibes and you don't make yourself feel good about yourself, if you can just access the vibes directly, it doesn't matter.

Like you have actually managed to find a shortcut through the mountain by tunneling straight through the middle of it and um, it's still wet clay for me like, all of this stuff is still really really really fucking wet clay.

But uh, i think it's the, i think it's the right way to go and i think that a lot of people realize this as well and it's, there is kind of two worlds.

There's the, the people who are still like, looking at the top of the mountain, and then some people who have done a little bit of stuff, maybe got to some kind of an altitude and like oh, don't think that i need to go any higher, i think i actually need to go down and reassess my route.

And the people who are still on the climb just do not understand the perspective that the people who have gone a little bit higher up got.

And that's fine, because eventually they'll get there and it's the unteachable lesson and so on and so forth.

But it does lead to um, it sounds much more like uh, upward aiming and and and supportive and noble to be on the climb.

And it sounds like privileged bourgeois to say you know man, I'm just like working on my vibes dude.

But I, I get the sense that anyone who's sufficiently mindful is going to end up there in any case.

So I think this is a path that everybody's on, just at different stages.

The best analogy I've heard for this is that it's not about whether work hard, work laziness, whatever.

There's no moralizing of the thing itself.

It's about.

If you're using feelings of insufficiency to drive your work, then it's like you're using dirty fuel which will eventually destroy the engine.

So it's not hard work is bad.

If the dirty fuel is the thing which is driving you to do it, then that's going to collapse.

Why are you working hard?

It's weird that you said that, because I've been thinking about this a lot of the feeling that you have achieved a thing you've been chasing a long time and you kind of feel the drive going away a bit.

What I think the next step is is like you've just completed Call of Duty on hard and now you need to start again at level one, but on veteran.

And you kind of know like oh, it's this level, that guy's there and that guy comes out that door and shoot him.

So you're kind of going through that you pick a different thing to chase.

Go on, Josh.

This sounds very technical, which it shouldn't be.

But do you think it's playing Call of Duty again in a hard level or do you think it's playing a new game?

I think it has to be the same game.

Because that's then you're like navigating the new goal, but kind of knowing like, oh, this happens.

Because I think the problem with like the first goal with the I want to bench 100 kilos is you.

That is the beginning of the journey of this, is it?

It's the tub of way.

I just need this tub of way.

I just need 100,000 subscribers.

But when you pick like, if Chris picked 10 million subscribers, you'd be like, all right, well, yeah, here we go again. same journey so to use the 100 kilos one do you think it's okay now i'm going to do 110 120 or do you think it's oh now i want to get my resting heart rate down to this or i want to get greater pilates or whatever it is it's so i think like that's the it obviously it can't be the same goal so the quality is just an analogy do you see what i mean yeah so the reason it's like it's it's picking a new goal that that challenges you in a different way but you know that like this is just the this that's how you get the fuel that's how you get the drive back so it doesn't matter if it's the same thing or a new goal it's just a bigger thing than previous essentially yeah but it's the um it's like because i think when you have those feelings of like oh you know i've just kind of i've reached this goal and it was just fulfilling this thing and i think that just means like you've arrived at the tail end of that like if that particular arc that's the final level well you think you think in arcs a lot i remember one of the insights from relationships 101 that you had which i think is still true is a lot of people restart the same cycle with a new person assuming that they're going to get some more longevity out of it whereas it's not this relationship will be different yeah no it's it's largely the same arc from excitement to familiarity and And people think that the familiarity is an indication that they should switch to get someone who the excitement lasts with for longer.

Yeah.

But it's not.

That arc is pretty locked in.

And I think that you're true.

This is certainly true for me with the live stuff.

You know, it's sufficiently similar to what I do, but sufficiently different that it's a new territory, a new video game to try and conquer.

And it feeds into the main thing.

And kind of starting from zero again.

But I'm starting from zero.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So...

I mean, I guess the tighter and tighter spirals thing Yusuf said before is so true as well, because in the micro, or if this is done too frequently, what this looks like is a non-essentialist worldview.

It looks like you're trying to do lots of things at once, which means that you're not good at anything.

It can be anything you want, but not everything.

But you can be lots of things as long as you periodize when you're focusing on them.

I couldn't have done live tour writing podcasts or the rest of the move to him.

I couldn't have done that all at once, but if I chunk them into sufficiently dedicated, sufficiently long durations, we'll probably get away with it.

Uh, all right, we'll do, we'll do one more, one more little round.

Um, and if there's any absolute slammers, just do a couple.

Um, This is a new one for me, which I haven't written about yet.

Just because you can lift it doesn't mean you should.

And this is the inverse of the region beta paradox.

So most people.

If things get sufficiently bad, it galvanizes them to get out of a situation, something that's challenging or painful or difficult.

But if you have an unusually high tolerance for discomfort and are pretty resilient, then you become like the David Goggins of suffering.

Like, fuck the boats, I'll carry the whole fleet.

And what happens is you're able to put yourself into a situation where you can sustain discomfort or a wrong path, or a challenging position, or a job that you shouldn't stay in, or a lifestyle that you need to change, or whatever.

You can continue to push yourself through that because your capacity to hold on and to just keep going is so strong that you go way.

You find that the basement's got a fucking cellar with a trap door in it, below the bottom of the line that most people's region beta would have kicked them out, the bottom of.

It's like, Oh, this was already bad enough.

And most people would have been galvanized into action.

But for some reason your capacity to like just keep going is so great that you do, and you do, and you do, and you do, and you do.

And um, It's strange because the things that you get praise for in public are often very damaging in private.

The resilience that you need to get yourself through work is not the sort of thing that you're supposed to have in your friendships, for instance.

If a friend continues to misuse you or take advantage of you or isn't there or is just bad, bad influence or whatever it is, if that's in work And you're trying to get this particular piece of coding or website to work and fit together.

Fuck, the Zapier integration won't do this thing.

I'm trying to get this client.

I'm going to fly across the world and do all the rest of it.

That's fine.

But if it's you trying to regularly chase down a friend that's self-destructing, there is a limit.

There is supposed to be a limit to that.

And yeah, the realization just because something's heavy doesn't mean you should lift it.

And the reverse of that is just because somebody carries a weight well doesn't mean it isn't heavy.

So from the outside, a lot of the time people that listen to shows like this one and read your guys' stuff and George's stuff they're usually the most put together person in the room.

Typically they're the one that their friends turn to for advice, because you listen to.

You read that psychology stuff, don't you?

What should I do about my relationship with my mother or whatever it might be?

And what that causes is for a lot of people to never ask the question of the person who usually answers.

And go, hey, how are you doing?

Can we check in?

No, no, no.

I really mean, let's turn this around.

And it takes a real brave friend.

It takes a real sort of impactful friend to push through the competence defense mechanism that everybody has up.

And in some ways that's another curse of competence that people don't see you as someone that needs help, reassurance or steps in to check on you.

And i think yeah, beware of using what you're praised for in public your resilience in your private life.

And just because someone carries the weight well doesn't mean it isn't heavy.

I think it's great, it's rpe.

It's rpe for personal life.

Yeah, it is.

I think the i think this is kind of the same thing you're talking about.

But like, if you're a person um, that is like in charge, responsible for things you're, you're by default the person that people come to for like advice or what do i do?

How does this work?

I think that straight away makes it harder to be like i'm struggling, because that that you i think the feeling that that creates is like if i admit i'm struggling, they then have no one to ask like what, i'm the guy, i'm supposed to be the guy or the girl.

So i think that that i've definitely felt that feeling of like when you're supposed to be kind of holding all the everything together, you sort of have to maintain that like facade to a degree, even if you'd like i don't know what to do if you say that suddenly the whole whole thing, that's an interesting one.

I remember reading um endurance by alfred lansing, and he's talking about shackleton's diary entries.

Versus what, everybody else's diary entries are right and shackleton's diary entries are just racked with self-doubt and uncertainty and the whole experience is him just swimming in melancholy and fear.

But the soon as he puts the diary down, he steps outside and he just, you know, galvanizes this entire group.

So I do think that in a professional context, and if you are a leader, this is a price leaders pay that nobody else gets to see.

But this is the reason that you're supposed to have a fucking supportive spouse or good friends who don't work for you, or a therapist that you can talk to, or whatever.

Whatever your you know outlet of choice is.

But somebody who's there and with whom you can go, I don't fucking know what I'm doing.

I don't know how to get out of this.

And I think that's the value of multifaceted social group.

Napoleon has this line that a leader is a dealer of hope.

Could be Churchillian drift, but I'm pretty sure it's Napoleon.

And my literally takes me onto mine, which is perfect.

So to do a very much like a Christopher Nolan reveal now, I'm going to criticize my previous one.

So then you come in here.

It's been a setup all along.

So the reveal is, I think, right now, in 2025 2026, that deep work, which is kind of sitting there focused, without any distractions, is extremely useful.

But it's currently overpriced relative to the amount of people that probably listen to your show and do that.

And what I call deep sparring is significantly underpriced.

Which is kind of what you discussed then, right?

That you can't say to people oh, I'm struggling with this, particularly people that are relying on you.

But I've realized now there's probably about three to five people in my life where we can sit down, go for dinner.

I did this on Friday with my friend Harry in London.

We went for dinner, spoke everything through, had our laptops there.

And he was going through issues he's facing.

I was going through issues he was facing and vice versa.

And there's this Nick Camacho line of when I advise other people, I gain 20 IQ points.

And when I advise myself, I lose 20 IQ points.

So you essentially gain 40 IQ points because they get to come in and look at all your problems.

And they're a super smart person.

And then you get to go in and look at their problems.

And then the next time you come back, because you've been together, you're kind of endlessly smarter.

It's like what we spoke about at the start of the just before we recorded, which is the film Oppenheimer.

You needed that deep sparring time in person.

If Feynman was in South America and fermi was over there, like it wouldn't happen.

So there's something that yeah, that.

And what's beautiful about the deep sparring idea is you probably need like three to four hours a quarter and then you stack up all that deep work on top of it, versus you sitting in your own little cage ruminating, coming up with the most absurd conspiracies about yourself and then working on top of that.

Um, i think it's a huge negative.

Do you think the other people in this in the deep sparring need?

No, should they have no context?

They have to be kind of completely separate?

Um, i know, i think you probably want somebody who you don't directly work with, but you want somebody who you really, really respect.

Um, like a good rule of thumb i've i've tried to take this year, which is ignore like all criticism from critics and like listen 100 or criticism from creative people or people that are doing things.

Um, So I think, in that regard then, I mean you probably could think of four or five people that you could sit down with.

And the thing is, it's kind of they call it a live straddle in poker, which is when you go in, other people start going in.

And I think there's some truth to that as well where, if you go in and say hey, I'm struggling with this, what do you think?

If you was to take over my life with a VR headset on, what would you do?

They come up with gems and then they immediately go, well, I've got this thing and it's beautiful.

It's licensed to go there.

I think especially for guys.

And this is one of the problems, upon reflection with a lot of what's happening in the UK, I think, because you kind of have a multiplier effect of already a British allergy to earnestness and sincerity plus the male allergy to earnestness and sincerity and they kind of stack on top of each other.

But if you can find somebody who is prepared to go there and you open the door, that typically is reciprocated.

The problem is when you do it with the wrong person and they go.

What the fuck do you mean, mate?

I was laughing because uh, harry is the absolute master of that.

He's the antidote, because he will just drop in an absolutely wild take on something and just be like prove me wrong.

And I don't think I can even repeat any of those takes.

But yeah, it's the perfect thing.

You have to have a sparring partner or friends that you can drop absolutely anything with, put it on the table in front of you and everyone just goes all right, let's let's dissect this.

What's interesting as well is if you study history, this is so common.

So you had the lunar society in the UK during the industrial revolution, where all these um like pioneers.

So Erasmus Darwin, who was Charles Darwin's grandfather, James Watt and about 10 other leaders of the industrial revolution or poetry at the time would meet during a full moon.

Because this is obviously pre-electricity, James Watt's still working on what he's working on.

They know during a full moon, they'd meet in somebody's garden and they would all discuss.

So the whole foundation of the Western world was built on that.

You then have Benjamin Franklin in the US, where he'd have these like junto societies that he would host and he would mingle.

I was literally reading the other day The book about the start of Uber.

So Uber starts because one guy's frustrated that he can't get a taxi.

So he's doing what I occasionally do, while I order from multiple taxi companies at once and the taxi arrives.

So he's then banned from all taxi apps.

And one day he's watching Casino Royale and he sees James Bond with his GPS technology and he goes hold on because that's an idea.

And Travis, who's the other founder of Uber.

He hosts these jam parties at his house since he sold his company, so he can just mingle and meet people.

And they're playing table tennis.

And that's where the idea of Uber comes from.

So this idea of kind of sitting by yourself, I think, is just a fallacy that is a very modern thing.

The deep sparring is so significant throughout history.

The lone genius theory for sort of how history gets moved forward is so bullshit.

It's so fucking bullshit, dude.

I guess that would be another lesson from this year.

I put it in one of the vlogs that came out recently, which was you can go pretty fucking fast and quite far on your own.

And even if it's not as trite as like if you want to go fast, go on your own.

If you want to go far, go with other people.

I don't know.

You can probably, with enough resilience.

If you're the David Goggins of suffering, you can just fucking grit your teeth and make it to 80.

And you'd have done fine.

But it'll be way less fun.

Like if you want to have fun, do it with other people.

So not only are you more effective, it's also more fun.

And it's easier.

So let's say that you can get it done, but you would have it be done with more discomfort, more self-doubt.

And yeah, you get to celebrate this fucking thing.

You get to celebrate whatever it is that you're doing with other people.

There's a great line of the whole Gladwell concept of 10,000 hours, which has been debated.

But even in that context there, if you meet with a smart friend and discuss these issues, you've now got 20000 hours.

Because you've got their 10,000 hours.

If you have 10 people, you have 100,000 hours.

And you can see where this is going.

So you can be as friends with as many people as possible.

Okay.

You got any assignments to finish off with?

You got anything that you really wish that you'd said?

I have a little hack that I've found useful.

Run it.

So it's being more practical with gratitude.

Practical ways to engineer that feeling.

Because I've always struggled with that.

I don't know about you guys.

The whole like write three things you're grateful for.

You end up writing the same stuff.

So one's a question that you can ask daily and one is a thing that you do one time.

The one time is ask ChatGPT or whatever your AI choice is.

So say, I am 35.

I live in this city, this whatever.

Describe a Monday 100 years ago.

And the level of, you just need to read it once and you're like, oh my God, like heating.

Not having to eat like spam for dinner, not having to navigate through like a world war and all these things, and you just suddenly see like little things in your day that you can a microwave completely take for granted.

You're like wow, you sent me that passage.

Is that what you've just got up?

No, i was which passage you can refer to.

Uh, where water, like i had a shower, i woke up in a comfy bed and i did something else and you compared it to a queen, an emperor and yeah just, i mean i could do a six hour series on this, right.

But even just study any part of history and you realize everything's so much worse than it is uh now, and also everybody's always complaining.

So you kind of realize, no matter how much better it gets, everybody's going to always be complaining.

I mean, you study world war ii it's not even that long ago and you go Most of the people we would have been on the front lines.

Here's a crazy stat.

The average age of the Luftwaffe that were bombing the UK was 26.

The average age of the RAF pilots.

The reason why this isn't modern wisdom is the reason why we're not all speaking German.

You'd be fine with the blonde hair, blue eyes.

Is the average age of an RAF pilot, 21.

And you know how averages work.

There's going to be a few of us blokes that are bringing that age up, like the, and you just kind of go oh, my god, like it's, it's never ending um, how much better it's gotten um, but how much people will still keep complaining?

I have a just a little twist on the gratitude thing because i did in that bedroom there the time capsule from you know, the last decade of my life.

There is nine or ten six minute diaries and they're six months each.

So it's a lot of daily writing and the gratitude never got below the neck for me.

And that sounds great.

And I'm sure that it, you know, it's shocking.

The question I would ask, that I would get you ask yourself is does this feel like I'm feeling it, or is it just another sort of cognitive thought experiment?

So this is my second one.

Beautiful.

So that, that's the, that's how I teach you without knowing.

Yeah, that's like the, the, you know, shift the canvas.

It's like, Oh, All these things that I take for granted.

How nice that the second question that you can ask yourself every day is, which I think I might've mentioned before.

It's just what would, what would 80 year old me have appreciated about my day to day?

And that's stuff like I got to walk to the shop and buy a drink and walk back again without nothing hurt, or like I'm at this part of my relationship with my partner and we got to do this and we've got all these plans and all these things to be excited about and we have a holiday coming up and I get to go with whatever.

That's the stuff that I feel.

I think that's the way that I really struggle with.

Write three things you're grateful for.

But I find that question you pick the stuff you would ignore, because it's the stuff that when you're 80 just won't be there anymore, that you overlook, which is that's what, 80 year old, you will be grateful for.

What do you think those biggest things?

8 year old Johnny will be thinking.

I think it's the.

I think it's the feeling of excitement about what's still coming that, like my daughter's a certain age and getting to see her grow up, like watching people achieve things.

There's so much to still be excited for.

And not to say that goes away when you're 80, but I think you're facing a very different 10 years when you're 80 years old.

Have you heard that quote?

The quote from A.N.

Whitehead.

Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking of them.

So like Johnny from 100 years ago doesn't like what Johnny from now, doesn't have to go up the mountain and milk the goats and then like wash the clothes in the the wooden pot and all this kind of stuff.

And therefore can do stuff at much higher orders of operation.

But that famous email from Steve Jobs, I grow little of the food I eat.

And of the little I do grow.

I didn't breed or perfect the seeds, I didn't make any of my own clothing.

I speak a language I didn't invent or refine.

I did not discover the mathematics that I use.

I'm protected by freedoms and laws I didn't conceive of or legislate, et cetera, et cetera.

And then it's like, at the end, it's sent from my iPad.

Like, just a little hat tip of, like, we're standing on the shoulders of giants.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's good.

The gratitude thing is hard to get right.

Certainly.

Try the genre stuff.

Give that a go.

The panic attack of happiness.

Yeah, panic attack of joy.

See what happens.

It's Michael, the guy from earlier.

I'll put you in touch with him.

What do you guys think 80-year-old you will be grateful for?

For me, the obvious one, I was reading this... Chess clock.

It's called alfred.

Yeah, the i was reading.

There's this book called ken.

It's by ken lu um, so he does these short stories and there's one called paper menagerie and kind of the ending is um, he's reading a letter from his mom after she's died, and it's a chinese family and they say the saddest, the saddest feeling in chinese culture is to grow of an age where you're ready to take care of your parents and realize they're no longer there.

So that's probably the one that I think I'd be like oh wow, my parents are still here.

Oh, that's cool.

That's cool.

I like the song by Ken Liu as well.

Like, Ken Liu, Ken Liu, you know that one.

No, but it's going to be Christmas number one after that rendition.

Jesus Christ.

Wow, okay.

Yousef, anything beyond that?

I don't know how you're going to top it.

Yeah, so I've got... And sorry for derailing your hack there, Johnny.

I've got some micro ones, but obviously Johnny and my hacks are so similar that, in knowing we'll have this episode coming up, I went through my Obsidian which has definitely passed the Watson filter already, still using it and looked at my George folder and thought I just need to celebrate a few of the hacks that I've stolen from George and have served me well.

So the boardroom exercise, which is basically you're sat at a boardroom in your mind when your mind is too busy and you go.

Okay, I've got different versions of myself all around the board.

So you might have like the finance accountant version of you with the green cap and the cigar, or you have like the romance version of you with the rose in their teeth and the um, the gym version of you, whatever all these different kind of mini personas, and you just give them all a chance to have their say, so everyone else shut up you.

You've got five minutes, take the floor, voice what you need to say and as you work your way around, you just clear out the pipes and it's just the quietest that your mind will ever be.

So George, thank you for that one.

Framing decisions as experiments.

Big one I've learned from him this year of rather than deliberating over a decision that is a two-way door, you can just treat it as an experiment and then it just gets rid of any sense of like, oh, I've got to get this right. final three i'll take them unless there's any uh comments or questions on on those so far okay this is difficult because i've just for people's reference i've got no like visual feedback so i'm just like talking to myself having a great time we're loving it so if you like coffee but you're weaning yourself off you can go decaf but also hojicha is roasted matcha it's got that kind of caramelly chocolatey type taste but with much lower caffeine same level of theanine as matcha tea so becoming more popular lovely drink very uh very wholesome especially in the winter time or you can have it cold iced so hojicha um using voice notes as a trigger to go outside either listening to or recording voice notes i've just set myself a rule where i have to be walking around to send or receive a voice note just stops me from being a slug at my desk and you know it just gets me up and out um final one's a little bit long so i might however um all right i'll uh i'll steamroll through my last view uh take a photo of the room key slip with your room number on it when you check into a hotel good one just as you get it just have your phone out take a photo of it then i've been on tour a lot i've been through oh god 50 or 100 hotels maybe in the last couple of years and uh you especially if you're going back to back to back there is no way you can remember your room number i've been lost i've had to go back down to not lose my room key but to just be reminded of what room i'm in um and that's a particularly embarrassing one so just take a photo of the room key uh uber black xl in america they don't do it in the uk uber black xl is so nice if you're in the states it gets a big escalade or a ford explorer or something with a guy in a suit and it's usually maybe twice the price two and a half times the price of a normal uber So probably not good for big journeys.

But if you're out with some friends, if this is a Dickie one from your birthday in Miami that he used, it's just such a nicer experience.

If you've got four people, four people will go in an Uber X, but it'll be pain.

Uber XL, you've still got bags of room.

We use two Uber XLs as our tour vans, basically for all of tour, with the soundboard and everything else that we needed to take.

And then the last one is a quote from Franz Kafka in 1912.

And it's basically a summation of all of the life hacks that we've ever done.

It's a distillation of everything that you need to do in your life.

So Franz Kafka in 1912, dearest, I beg of you, sleep properly and go for walks. think it's so great the single sentence for how you can probably get most things better in your life yeah well everything's better with those two things sleep properly and go for walks that's the first entry in his in his day one that he's looking back on 20 years later and be like you still haven't slept properly you're gone for enough walks you got anything left uh yeah i'll speed through we're doing a little speed round then um number one um is i told you about my um if i become the chancellor of the exchequer how i would increase the gdp by three percent overnight i would install large whiteboards in everybody's home so i think just having a large whiteboard always there there's that like it's kidlin's law of them if you could if you can state a problem clearly you've already solved it by 50 and my kind of uh twist on that is When you have a whiteboard, it's actually 70% because it kind of stays there staring back at you and eats part of your subconscious.

That's number one.

Number two, and I want to make sure that I get a bit of context here, because it does sound stupid this one.

But let me just test the room.

One thing I discovered during COVID I would do a lot of text messages, a lot of voice memos and a lot of scheduled Zoom calls.

How often do you just randomly ring a friend?

I actually do that quite regularly.

You do it quite a bit.

Yeah.

Never, never.

And I find myself I think there's probably a lot of people listen to the show that do that as well where it's like Hey mate, do you want to chat tomorrow at nine?

And it's that, you know, that meme of there's two guys, one's trying to stab the other.

And it's like me and like one schedule call my entire day, versus I will just randomly pick up the phone.

That's been my thing, like this year, is to just randomly ring people um whenever, like a nutcase, and just check in on friends, because you just stop doing it.

I've not actually had a phone call with a friend for 18 months.

What's your pickup rate?

What's the pickup rate on the calls?

About 30, 40 percent okay yeah, and then when you factor in dial backs, it's like 70 to 80 percent And you just end up having conversations that you wouldn't have.

And it leads to that kind of deep spark.

This does create a deep, deep anxiety in Johnny, though.

It's the reason he doesn't text back too quickly.

Yeah.

Well, that's a separate conversation.

The hack for the hack.

Go on.

Double dial.

What do you mean?

Ring him again straight away.

Oh, okay.

That makes it feel like emergency.

Exactly.

So I'll answer.

So if I rang you once.

But it's not an emergency.

But it doesn't matter.

Right.

So you've got to assume one of two things i'm either actually not available, in which case the double dial isn't going to work, or i am available but i'm busy, which means that the second one just pushes through a threshold to a level of severity that is inappropriate for what you're trying to do, and all you've done there is optimize your pickup rate on the first time you call them, but future times they're gonna.

Oh, that's double dial, johnny Yeah.

Meanwhile, his house is on fire.

Yeah.

Okay.

So you're worried about boy who cried wolf because, okay.

And also you've, I think it's, it's more, it's more a fun conversation, right?

That's the whole game there is to have more fun.

Don't start me off with your autism.

I don't need to like optimize my conversion rate on a chat.

But you want to speak to more people than I should.

Then you just pick, they can ring back.

Yeah.

They'll ring back when you call somebody else.

Just go, I go in the area manual style.

I think this has touched a nerve in you guys.

I feel like if you're going to ring someone, ring them twice.

If you're going to ring them, you want to speak to them.

Do it properly.

You're sounding very entitled.

Well, I think it's entitled to ring someone.

I'm going to call you so many times after this.

Do it.

If you double dial.

The point is, right, you ring someone because you're trying to get in touch with them.

So act like you're trying to get in touch with them.

But this is not like a formal conversation.

It's very like, what's up?

What's going on?

Fine, fine.

You guys are inferring that if I ring twice it's an emergency.

But I'm just trying to speak to you, which is the purpose of the first quarter.

Always be closing.

Always be calling.

Anything else?

Let's do I mean, Yousef mentioned it then you can do some fun ones of just creating your own language.

Sorry, no one else speaks so you need subtitles on for the rest of this part.

But no um, just like changing words.

So um, you mentioned not using decision, using the word experiment, and you realize oh, when you use that you're light on yourself.

But also, the best part about it is you tell everybody else you run an experiment.

You say hey, i'm going to move to this place oh, it's a big decision.

Everybody kind of reflexively acts like it's a big decision.

It's kapil got to stand up.

Comedian who goes on stage.

One version of him immediately apologizes after the offensive joke.

The crowd picks up on it.

The other version just kind of laughs it through and goes, what are you guys worried about?

It's not a big thing.

Have you considered though, that there might be some decisions that warrant you taking them seriously and also warrant sort of a serious reception, and your making light of it may cause your friends to be a bit more blasé than is warranted.

Perhaps you shouldn't try and base jump for the first time ever off that cliff.

Yeah, I mean ah no, it's vice and it was gonna be fine.

So he was having a laugh.

Yeah, i mean it's, i'll chat to that about my 20 children i've just had.

No, i mean there's a little bit of a.

Okay, i always find these, these conversations a bit like it's like somebody's so far this way right, somebody's sort of overthinking, like what they're going to order from a dinner menu to then like oh, maybe don't just have three kids with three different women.

It's like it's like the you know the classic thing of you have a female friend who says oh, i don't want to go to the gym, i'm gonna get too bulky, and it's like I've been trying that for years and I can't do it with 10 times the testosterone.

So I don't think you've got to worry about somebody going from not being able.

This is specifically for people that are struggling with decisions like the decisions that are reversible.

Labeling them as experiments is useful.

Um, other one is if I say the word problem, what's the kind of emotional reaction that you get?

Constriction, constriction, pain, frustration.

If I say the word puzzle excitement, pain.

Yes, i'm working on a new one for the news i've been thinking about because like, the news is just because of all of the news that you can see, even record, the gel mans, because you know gel man amnesia yeah, or the uh, the currents, all the uh wrongs, because it's just remember, when you tried to remember, because you've been, you've been doing this for as long as i've known, you've been doing this for nearly eight years now remember when you tried to rename the un toilet bowl, hit p no, that drops on the seat.

I didn't try and rename that, i tried to give it a name because it didn't have a name.

Okay, because what was it?

Can you remember the name?

Yeah, it's catchy right okay, so it's fly dripping rather than fly tipping.

It doesn't have a name.

Think about, I've got an Amex in there with 16 digits on the front.

I haven't been able to recall it.

Must have used it 200 times in the last couple of years.

I can recall fly dripping.

The fact that my brain has decided to hook itself into the name for piss on a toilet bowl.

But not the 16 digit number which is in between me and maybe getting out of a third world jail cell.

It's also the name for piss on a toilet bowl that three people in the world would recognize.

Many more now.

So there's just, I mean, probably a good one to finish on is book recommendations specifically around language.

So there's a book called The Etymologicon, which is where I got a lot of this stuff from.

There's a blog he's amazing, so he has this line in here where he's talking about milton, and this guy invented the following words right, this is how generative this man was impassive obtrusive jubilant loquacious unconvincing, satanic persona fragrance beleaguered census undesirable disregard damp criticize irresponsible love lawn exhilarating sectarian unaccountable, incidental and cooking.

He created all those for his words.

So Fly, dripping.

You've got to keep churning them out there.

Have you seen Shakespeare's equivalent?

No.

Insane.

The number of words that Shakespeare created, which are part of common parlance now, is wild.

But it's weird.

We just accept language as it is.

A fun one is from that book is where the word and it's Christmas related is where the word turkey comes from.

So we think it's basically because it came from Turkey.

Interestingly, in turkey they call it um, essentially uh hindu referencing to india.

So it didn't come from turkey and it didn't come from india, but it's this whole chain that exists.

So turkey did not come from turkey.

I remember in that book because i've got the paperback of that same book next to my bed after you recommended it and um, shit comes from uh german words, is it scheisse um?

But there's a couple of interesting potential explanations for it.

One of them being store high in transit.

So if you had manure and you were taking it on a ship, you wouldn't want it down low where people could smell it.

You'd want it in one of the higher storage units, store high in transit.

It's one of these situations where I guess you get kind of a Churchillian drift explanation.

That's culpable but wrong, because posh is port out starboard home and it was also to do with the sides of the ship that uh, the upper class were going to be put on, but still high in transit.

Uh, mark volscyth on the show soon.

So if you got anything before we leave, are you gonna join us in saying goodbye in malaysia?

Yeah, i wish i could be with you guys, but i'm glad to at least have a seat on the laptop.

You've been sat on a.

You look really comfy.

You've been on one of the the cushions in the corner for the entire, the entire episode.

That's it, ladies and gentlemen.

Merry Christmas from us here.

This is cool to be able to do this again every wintertime back in Newcastle, where we first started doing this podcast, coming up on eight years ago now.

Have a good period.

Eat everything that you can.

Take some time off and do a little bit of reading and review in between now and the new year.

I know it's super duper intense, but I think if used right, it's a really nice period.

Some people get sad around this time of the year.

But it's the shortest day of the year just went, 21st.

So it's like typical.

Stuff gets dark and then it gets lighter.

I hope that our touchy-feely life hacks and lessons has kept you appropriately festive.

All of us except for Yusuf because he's selfish and in a different country.

We dressed up appropriately.

So anything to say?

Or are we done?

We're done.

Merry Christmas.

Give some love to your family members, or if you're in Malaysia, family member, family member.

Excellent.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Merry Christmas.

Unreal.

Let's go.

If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom reading list.

It is 100 books that you should read before you die.

The most interesting, life-changing and impactful books I've ever read, with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them.

And you can get it right now for free by going to chriswillx.com slash books.

That's chriswillx.com slash books.

[Modern Wisdom: Lessons, Life Hacks, and Reflections on a Year of Growth]-[#1037 - Life Hacks: A Christmas Special (2025)]

📋 Summary

Navigating Life: Insights, Hacks, and the Philosophy of Growth

The Meta-Hack: Waking Up from the Dream

Efficiency and Deep Work: The Chess Clock Methodology

The Fallacy of Goal-Oriented Happiness

Deep Sparring and the Value of Community

Unteachable Lessons and Self-Compassion

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Modern Wisdom: Lessons, Life Hacks, and Reflections on a Year of Growth]-[#1037 - Life Hacks: A Christmas Special (2025)]

📋 Summary

Navigating Life: Insights, Hacks, and the Philosophy of Growth

The Meta-Hack: Waking Up from the Dream

Efficiency and Deep Work: The Chess Clock Methodology

The Fallacy of Goal-Oriented Happiness

Deep Sparring and the Value of Community

Unteachable Lessons and Self-Compassion

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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