Christmas Special - Life Hacks, Biggest Lessons & Best Resolutions

I'm back on my old couch in Newcastle with Jonny, Yusef & George to catch up on what they've learned, their best hacks and new year's resolutions for 2025. - 00:00 Ninja CREAMi Hacks 06:25 A Trigger for Gratitude 08:39 Uber Black XL for a Special Occasion 13:31 The Kale Algorithm 20:25 Audible to Send You to Sleep 24:39 Use What You Already Have Better 28:05 Secure Your Curtains in Hotel Rooms 31:36 The Best On-the-Road Work Setup 35:00 Walking Pad With a Standing Desk 40:48 Only Do Voice Notes When You’re Walking 42:00 Chris’s Favourite Music & Deodorant 43:55 How to Learn Anything From LLMs 48:01 The Pain of Growing a Business 53:48 Stop Moving the Goalposts 1:01:03 Outcomes Matter Most From Inputs 1:06:46 Turning Bullshit Into Reality 1:10:18 The Problem With 75 Hard 1:14:13 A Framework for Achieving Your Goals 1:18:26 Chris’s Most Impactful Resolutions 1:23:22 How to Actually Succeed In Your Resolutions 1:27:45 The Happiness of Progress 1:33:08 Stated Vs Revealed Goals 1:36:40 The Socratic Method & Doom Loops 1:41:52 Merry Christmas - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. It is a Christmas special. For those of you who have only joined the show over the last year or the last few years, you might not recognise this room and it is my old living room in Newcastle, Pontine, where we first started the show, joined by Johnny, Newsef from Propane Fitness and George Mack, stopping off en route from Glasgow to Manchester, of course. This is a life hacks, lessons from 2024 and best New Year's resolutions episode. So if you haven't seen these, we'll go around in a circle, coming up with whatever we've discovered over the last year and then the rest of us will rip it apart or say that it's good. And maybe there'll be some ideas for you for what you can implement going into the new year. Also, if you haven't done

• 0:42Chris Williamson?

  a New Year's review, the exact template that I use and have crafted very delicately over the last decade or so is available right now for free at chriswillx.com/review. That's tradition. Something else which is tradition is you getting hot potato and going first.

• 0:59Jonny?

  Hot potato.

• 1:00Chris Williamson?

  A festive potato for you.

• 1:02Jonny?

  Festive potato.

• 1:03Chris Williamson?

  Jonathan Watson, what have you got for us? Is it life hacks first? It is.

• 1:07Jonny?

  So my life hack is a ninja creamy.

• 1:13Chris Williamson?

  So happy you said that.

• 1:14Jonny?

  Really?

• 1:15Chris Williamson?

  I've got.

• 1:15Jonny?

  I thought you, have you?

• 1:16Chris Williamson?

  I've got one.

• 1:17Jonny?

  Yousef's been thinking about getting one. I think hasn't got one yet.

• 1:20Chris Williamson?

  Thanks. What's a ninja creamy?

• 1:22Jonny?

  Do you know what one is?

• 1:23Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:23Jonny?

  It's.

• 1:24Chris Williamson?

  Educate me.

• 1:25Jonny?

  It's, um, it basically, what I use it for is making ice cream from a protein shake.

• 1:33Jonny?

  It's brilliant. So like skimmed milk, what do you, what do you use it for? The same thing or berries? I imagine you have berries in yours.

• 1:42Chris Williamson?

  Actually, no. Mine has been low sugar, high protein, ice cream made with the exact protein powder that I want.

• 1:52Jonny?

  Right.

• 1:53Chris Williamson?

  So pretty much the same thing that you're doing.

• 1:54Jonny?

  Yeah. Do you put topping in it?

• 1:56Chris Williamson?

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

• 2:16Jonny?

  Well, you put them on after you've, so you you cream it. And then you.

• 2:21Chris Williamson?

  You what? Sorry, I'm just writing instructions. You do what?

• 2:25Jonny?

  I don't see a pen, George. Doesn't look like you're making notes. It looks like you're trying to make fun of me, George.

• 2:29Chris Williamson?

  Go on.

• 2:30Jonny?

  You, um, you cream it. Cream it. And then once it's creamy, there's a mix in button.

• 2:36Chris Williamson?

  Oh.

• 2:37Jonny?

  Have you not encountered that?

• 2:39Chris Williamson?

  If I, if I'm being, if I'm being completely honest, it's not me that uses it.

• 2:44Jonny?

  God, what a bougie.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  So this is to distribute the chocolate chips throughout the height of the ice cream, rather than all at the bottom like a screwball or all at the top like a.

• 2:55Chris Williamson?

  Like a topping. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:57Jonny?

  Yeah, but it is a topping. Yeah, so so you make it first and then you, once it's turned into ice cream.

• 3:03Chris Williamson?

  You add the shit that you want.

• 3:04Jonny?

  A little bit of topping and then press mix in or I think it's called mix in or mix again.

• 3:08Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Uh, what is the best recipes that you've come up with?

• 3:13Jonny?

  I think white chocolate and raspberry way.

• 3:16Chris Williamson?

  From?

• 3:17Jonny?

  Uh, perform. It's like P.

• 3:23Chris Williamson?

  Just focus, carry on.

• 3:25Jonny?

  It's like P and then the number four RM or something like that.

• 3:29Chris Williamson?

  Okay. How many scoops?

• 3:30Jonny?

  Two, always two.

• 3:32Chris Williamson?

  With?

• 3:32Jonny?

  Skim milk.

• 3:33Chris Williamson?

  How much?

• 3:34Jonny?

  350 mil. 400 mil is what you want to use because that takes you up to the limit, the limit line. It's just not quite, the ratio is not quite right. Sometimes a banana improves the texture.

• 3:46Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. Have you been able to get the sort of gelatinous stickiness that you want? That's something that I've struggled.

• 3:52Jonny?

  Do you like it to be more sticky or less sticky?

• 3:53Chris Williamson?

  A little sticky, a little more sticky.

• 3:55Jonny?

  I think that's about how long it's frozen for.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Xanthan gum.

• 3:59Jonny?

  Yeah, I don't want to get involved with that stuff. I feel like that's a whole other variable to manage.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:05Jonny?

  Because how much xanthan gum?

• 4:07Chris Williamson?

  Well, you just experiment, wouldn't you?

• 4:08Jonny?

  But think how long it's gonna take to get that right.

• 4:10Chris Williamson?

  That's true, because you've got something that works sort of eighty percent now. Okay, so white chocolate perform.

• 4:16Jonny?

  White chocolate and raspberry whey.

• 4:17Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 4:18Jonny?

  With raspberries and white chocolate chips as the topping mixed in. So good. It's like forty grams of protein, or a little bit more if you include the milk. And like four hundred calories. It's brilliant.

• 4:30Chris Williamson?

  And you see one of those off in one go?

• 4:32Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 4:32Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 4:32Jonny?

  Dessert, lunch?

• 4:33Chris Williamson?

  I can tell you're not running it.

• 4:34Jonny?

  Usually, usually like last meal of the day.

• 4:38Chris Williamson?

  That's pretty dialed.

• 4:39Jonny?

  So good.

• 4:39Chris Williamson?

  That's very good. I'm a big ninja. I mean ninja are just between the air fryers, all of the different air fryers they've got. They've got this air fryer crispy thing now, which is a glass tray at the bottom. So you can see how it sort of crisps and you can make lasagnas, you know, where you have that sort of the filtering on the top.

• 4:58Jonny?

  I've not got an air fryer.

• 5:01Jonny?

  Do you have an air fryer, imagine?

• 5:03Chris Williamson?

  That seems like.

• 5:04Jonny?

  Yeah, I should get one, should I? Do you have one, George? Yes, but I never used it.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  You really value culinary appliances that allow you to eat low calorie foods and make them nice. So I think an air fryer would be high value.

• 5:17Jonny?

  And do you know what I think I value more than that?

• 5:19Chris Williamson?

  Speed, slow cooker.

• 5:19Jonny?

  Something that allows me to see whatever it produces as one serving. Ideally in a container. So what I think what I like about ninja creamy is I can't have more or less than it. I just eat the whole thing. And I don't have to worry about like, oh, how many scoops of this should I have? Do you not eat the whole thing?

• 5:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 5:36Jonny?

  Okay.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  That's that's Chris's way of life. Eat the whole thing. So it's a soury, a kilo of yogurt.

• 5:42Chris Williamson?

  Uh, I think an air fryer for you, I mean, this isn't even one of mine, but I think an air fryer for you would be nothing short of life changing.

• 5:49Jonny?

  What would I use it for?

• 5:50Chris Williamson?

  Uh, do you ever eat steak at home?

• 5:52Jonny?

  Yeah, but not like regularly though.

• 5:55Chris Williamson?

  But would you?

• 5:55Jonny?

  I have a ninja creamy every day.

• 5:57Chris Williamson?

  Okay, would you eat steak at home if you could have from frozen amazing steak in twenty minutes?

• 6:02Jonny?

  Is that is that your best suggestion steak?

• 6:04Chris Williamson?

  It's fucking unbelievable for steak. Yeah.

• 6:07Jonny?

  Okay.

• 6:07Chris Williamson?

  Uh, this is a this is a Peterson hack.

• 6:10Jonny?

  I'll get an air fryer.

• 6:10Chris Williamson?

  There's a woman who eats a lot of steak. She knows how to cook a steak.

• 6:13Jonny?

  If that's all you're eating.

• 6:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, which I am. So it's important.

• 6:18Chris Williamson?

  All right. I like that ninja creamy.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  So you're not having creamies.

• 6:21Chris Williamson?

  That's, that's a past, that's a previous Chris thing.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 6:24Chris Williamson?

  Got it. But what have you got?

• 6:26Speaker 02

  This is Ernie, actually.

• 6:27Chris Williamson?

  Is it? Fuck, I misgendered him.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Thank you, George. So I've, I've chosen this suit to introduce the most kind of serious point of the podcast, but I've been doing a lot of walking and journaling and reflecting. And I've actually been tuning an AI model using a few kind of different database structures to identify the optimal categorization method for life hacks. And

• 6:54Chris Williamson?

  You're doing it again.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  What I've come down to is physical and digital. So.

• 7:01Chris Williamson?

  You said this the exact same thing.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Actually, last year it was a team of operational analysts and yeah, but I think we're getting closer to the. The same conclusion. Yeah, same. It was. Wow. What a relief. I think we're on something.

• 7:10Chris Williamson?

  Increase the compute and still hit the same wall.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  So the physical life hack is to use things that annoy you, like mild irritations throughout the day as gratitude triggers. So you wake up in the morning, 7:00 AM, you hear a siren going past you like, oh bloody hell, like I I just want five minutes more sleep. And that's a gratitude trigger for, that could have been me in the ambulance.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Or like, you could be even the driver of the ambulance, still pretty rubbish, having to drive an ambulance at seven in the morning. Or you could be in the back of the ambulance. So it's like, okay, there's a little switch. You encounter someone who's a bit of a dick to you at the checkout in a shop or whatever. And you go, they're being a dick because they're miserable at their job. They're having a bad time. I can go home and eat my sushi and pot of mango or whatever. They, they have to be on shift until. So just having that little flip has been really valuable.

• 8:09Chris Williamson?

  I've been trying to think of something that you couldn't do that with, but I'm struggling.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  I'm sure there's loads. Yeah. But it's, I guess it's how flexible do you want to be?

• 8:18Chris Williamson?

  What are you trying to have empathy for the other person? Or are you trying to sort of do inversion on yourself? What are you prioritizing?

• 8:28Speaker 02

  Both are good effects of that, aren't they? I think it's it's like a nice side effect to have, just be be more happy. Yeah.

• 8:36Chris Williamson?

  It's pretty pro-social. I like that. Okay.

• 8:41Chris Williamson?

  This is one from George's birthday this year in Miami, which Dicky Bush decided to do. And it's Uber Black XL. So Uber Black XL, I don't know whether, I don't know how available it is in the UK, but especially in America and probably in the bigger cities in the UK. You can order, you know, a seven-person Escalade with a driver that's always dressed quite nice and formally. And it's basically you having a private driver, but you just order it on Uber. And it's about maybe two to three times the cost of a normal Uber. So it's, you know, special occasions only for the most part. But the way that you feel when you get into it and when you get out of it is lovely. And the experience is easily three times nicer than being in the back of someone's Kia Forte.

• 9:26Chris Williamson?

  Especially in America, this is a big America problem because it's less expensive. It's less more expensive in America. And the depths that your normal Uber X can descend to in America, as you learned firsthand this year. It's like the back of some Nissan Altima, the thirty-year-old that you're sticking to the seat. It can go really low. So if you've had a tough day and you want to treat yourself, a journey home in a Uber Black XL is nice. If you're out on a date and you sort of want to make something feel a little bit nicer. Big fan.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  Why do you think the standard of cars in America is generally higher? Is it more of a status symbol?

• 10:08Chris Williamson?

  It's lower.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  Is it that the, is it bimodal? Because I've, like you're saying that the Uber, some Ubers go real low.

• 10:15Chris Williamson?

  Correct, in America. The UK doesn't seem, I think Americans generally have lower standards for what they keep their cars to. If anybody's got a small dink in the UK, it's almost immediately taken to the.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  I've got a small dink.

• 10:28Chris Williamson?

  Always complaining about it as well.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  I know. It's terrible.

• 10:31Chris Williamson?

  But you take it to the like shop or whatever and you get it fixed. Most people would.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  I need to get my dink fixed, actually.

• 10:38Chris Williamson?

  Come back with an XL, make it bigger.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  Black XL.

• 10:42Jonny?

  Uh, I think, I think it's a, I mean, you, you, you've been a, a big proponent of that as well. Like using Uber Black XL.

• 10:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, um.

• 10:54Jonny?

  This is a hybrid.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  In Dubai, for example, all the Ubers are essentially Lexus's. They're all beautiful. It's only when I was in the UK or the US experiencing Uber, do you realize sometimes you could be going 70 miles an hour? And it's more dangerous to be out the car than in the car.

• 11:09Jonny?

  Right.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. Cause in Dubai, I feel like I was always like a Mercedes veto person in a suit. So, but is that, that's just a Dubai thing?

• 11:18Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  Right?

• 11:19Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  I've had some shockers. When I, in one I had in Munich where he just went rogue. Went, was trying to go to the petrol station, was going like different stop offs, was like, was texting. And then when I had, I said, Hey, can you not text on your phone? He just threw his phone against the window and then just started speeding faster and faster.

• 11:38Jonny?

  Wow.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  And I thought.

• 11:39Jonny?

  You had a guy.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  Paid the 20%.

• 11:41Jonny?

  Was it you where someone was trading? What was it? He was trying to show you a video?

• 11:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. So we were in one Uber and on a huge highway and I'm at the back. And I just go, what's he doing on his phone? Cause sometimes he may be doing a WhatsApp or anything like that. And I look and he was, there was like trading charts on and he was shorting the Japanese yen.

• 12:01Jonny?

  Nice.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  Like mid.

• 12:02Jonny?

  While driving.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  Mid drive. And I said, what, what are you doing? So yeah, you may face them shorting the Japanese yen.

• 12:10Jonny?

  I had an Uber driver in Croatia who had like a, like mini seizures while driving. And I couldn't work out whether it was like just something that happened to him all the time or whether it was serious. But he was like having a seizure and like pressing the accelerator as he was seeing. So we were like, we were coming up towards traffic and the car would like lung and then brake, but he just didn't acknowledge it. At all.

• 12:32Chris Williamson?

  He's the opposite of the of the guy that we had in Iceland. So driving back the final, the final coach out of the Blue Lagoon in Iceland, because the alternative was to stay there for nine and a half thousand pounds for the night. And some hurricane level winds were coming in and we managed to make it onto this bus and we're at the back of the bus and it's tilting up onto what feels like just its side wheels because of the strength of the breeze coming along. Johnny Solish, which was fucking genius, actually at the time, was, I'm going to go up to the front and look at the bus driver. And if he's not concerned, we shouldn't be concerned. He went.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Hands at the bottom of the wheel.

• 13:15Jonny?

  Because for him, it's just.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Chin retracted.

• 13:16Jonny?

  Him, it's just Wednesday afternoon.

• 13:18Chris Williamson?

  Another day, another day graph, isn't it?

• 13:19Speaker 02

  It was the worst storm that Iceland had seen in several years as well.

• 13:23Jonny?

  I think just that year.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  That guy is a source of inspiration to.

• 13:29Chris Williamson?

  He's Jocko. Jocko was the bus driver. All right.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  I'm coming in hard. So.

• 13:34Chris Williamson?

  Like Lily Phillips.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  Jesus Christ. The kale algorithm. So this is a custom built life hack, which I can put in the comments section. But me and Chris have had these debates for years that whether the platforms will ever change. So you have control over your own algorithm. And I've been convinced it's going to happen. But I kind of sat there waiting for years for it to happen. And particularly my, I don't know where your weakness is, where your Achilles heel is in terms of digital platforms. Mine is YouTube by far. And the most frustrating thing is YouTube is the library of Alexandra. You have all the world's knowledge. And if like Marcus Aurelius, Julius Caesar would trade everything to have access, not only

• 14:20Speaker 03

  to the best library, but then it turned into this magical video format where you can watch anything, learn, teach yourself anything. And every day I would turn up to that library and I'd get distracted by fights and fentanyl in the car park, right? That was my YouTube experience. Oh, Logan Paul's done what? Coffey's other is going to expose him for what shit coin? Click, click. And I remember once I went on the, and this is a, if you wanna stare into the abyss and have the abyss stare back into you, go youtube.com and press history and just scroll through some of the things that you've watched. And I went through quickly, like the last,

• 15:00Speaker 03

  maybe a hundred videos I've watched, and about 80% of them were regrettable in hindsight. So I had the best library of all time and I was watching absolute shite. So what was interesting though, I looked at the videos I did enjoy and the videos that I didn't enjoy in hindsight. And you could have built this whole complex algorithm, but there was one simple thing that the videos I did enjoy and didn't enjoy had between them. And it was over 30 minutes long. Any video that seemed to be over 30 minutes long, for the most part, I enjoyed in hindsight. And any video under 30 minutes long, I for the most part didn't enjoy. And I think there's something about the monkey brain that if you see a

• 15:45Speaker 03

  15 minute expose on Logan Paul's new NFT debacle, it's like, oh, I can do that. But if it's a two and a half hour one, it's a bit harder. A bit more discerning. It's a bit harder to justify.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  So is the conclusion to watch like 45 minute Feth Nill in the Car Park?

• 16:01Speaker 03

  I waste more time. So the conclusion.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Dash and compilations from Russia.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  I tried that, but the problem is you go on youtube.com thumbnail, title, you just don't have the willpower. Like, imagine if you had a social media feed, right? And they just showed you porn, like constantly, you would end up watching a lot more porn as a result. So it's not necessarily about discipline, it's about preventing that coming on in the first place. So what I built was, I built a script that removes any videos under 30 minutes. And it's now the full kale algorithm. And I've gone from about 80% of my YouTube time I regret to 80% of my YouTube time is now enjoyable. What's the script running on? So you want to download a Chrome extension called Tapper Monkey.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 16:46Speaker 03

  And then I.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  I've seen that.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  I've, okay. Sorry, go ahead. I've got a couple of things I want to challenge you on about this, but.

• 16:55Speaker 03

  It's a bit beanie. So you then I built the code using Claude or ChatGPT and I can share the code with people. You put it in and it's permanently there now. So I no longer see any video under 30 minutes long. And you go on my, my feed now and it's just like, Gletcher, stand up comedian, cool documentary.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  Does that not mean though, that you waste more time? Because the, the regret is about the video, but there's no regret about how long you spent watching the video.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  No, because, well, there's a, I'm sure if you looked at your YouTube time, right? There's a difference in quality of things that you watch.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, but usually I'm doing it instead of doing something else. So it's, it's rare that I like find myself on my phone and then a 30 minutes later, I'm like, oh, I'm so glad I watched that.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  But that might be because of this exact thing.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  But that assumes that the thing that I was, I wasn't doing because of YouTube wasn't more important.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  That's fair. There's always some kind of opportunity cost trade off. But for me, so this is particularly on desktop. And I would use YouTube end of the day as an alternative to TV.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 17:53Speaker 03

  And that's where versus, yeah, I agree. The kind of two minute quick scroll is, is different. That's the cocaine algorithm.

• 17:58Speaker 02

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

• 18:14Speaker 03

  You've done that on the propane.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Done on the propane one. And now I never procrastinate with YouTube. Like it just doesn't. Cause you have to then actively like, oh, what am I going to search for? Rather than having stuff like pushed onto you that you might want.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  That though, is there's still value I find in the algorithm serving randomness and optionality.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Okay. So you want, you want the upside of the.

• 18:31Speaker 03

  Yes. I want the upside of the randomness and the optionality without Logan Paul.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  In that case, you're trying to like fine tune it. The other thing that you can do is, and I think we talked about this last year. Using Readwise or Reader to establish that past George is the only one who can determine what current George is going to watch. So you're not allowed to consume any media unless it's on your. To read list or to watch list and you've made that decision ahead of time so that you've made the decision when you're in a position of strength, not when you're like, oh, I'm not getting this nine PM and I just wanna.

• 19:03Chris Williamson?

  Just to find a potential problem with that, a lot of the time, you know how in three months, I'm gonna have all of this white space on my calendar, I'll agree to that.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 19:11Chris Williamson?

  I really want to watch this thing. I'm sure that me tomorrow will want to watch it. I'm not convinced that me yesterday is the best.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you'll end up with like.

• 19:18Chris Williamson?

  Of actually what I want to watch today.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  The problem there is you end up with like a huge queue of stuff and then you either.

• 19:23Chris Williamson?

  None of which you think is interesting, but because you now don't have to pay the price, you tomorrow has to consume it, you kick the can down.

• 19:29Speaker 03

  Or you watch the relevant thing.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Looking in the fridge and you're, I've got, we've got no food in the house at all. And actually like, there's loads of food, but it's like lettuce and a bit of.

• 19:36Chris Williamson?

  Not stuff you want.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Tomato and yeah.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  You basically want an algorithm that's working nearer towards what your goals are and your long-term intents are, but it's not just purely like boring educational shit. Like if there's like long-form comedy on there, like long-form comedy podcasts, I enjoy those way more, but there's something about the, the shortness of it. And I think having that pre-built in to remove it, my sister little life hack to this is also on email. If anybody has, but just set up a filter that if it has unsubscribe in the email, it goes to a separate inbox and then you scroll through that and you've reduced about 80% of your email clutter. So just putting those systems in place.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Right, I'm doing that now.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  Is, is useful. Gmail has that automatically, doesn't it?

• 20:16Speaker 02

  Hmm?

• 20:17Speaker 03

  Gmail has that automatically with the promotions.

• 20:19Chris Williamson?

  It does.

• 20:20Speaker 03

  Loads of them.

• 20:21Chris Williamson?

  Loads of them still slip through, yeah. All right, Johnny, you're up.

• 20:26Jonny?

  This is linked to what you were just saying, Chris, about waking up at night. The, so there's two, two hacks in one. One is audible on a, so iMasq, one AirPod, 30-minute timer on audible, audiobook. It's life hack one. Life hack two is audible have like similar to Netflix original, like an audible original. Some of them are in Dolby Atmos. So it's like a film being read out, which is the most immersive thing I've ever heard on.

• 20:57Chris Williamson?

  How immersive can it be with one AirPod in?

• 20:59Jonny?

  Well, cause the other one's, the other one's pressed.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  Do you find that you turn, that you, you can just?

• 21:05Chris Williamson?

  Go full like monk mode and stay there because I'm a.

• 21:08Jonny?

  Even if you roll over though, even if, even if you roll over, it's just one AirPod, it's fine. You're asleep. Doesn't matter. The third life hack is Red Rising, the Red Rising series.

• 21:19Chris Williamson?

  But the.

• 21:20Jonny?

  Immersive audio version.

• 21:21Chris Williamson?

  Phenomenal.

• 21:22Jonny?

  So good.

• 21:23Chris Williamson?

  So fucking fantastic.

• 21:24Jonny?

  So that to fall asleep, it's a series by Pierce Brown.

• 21:29Chris Williamson?

  Pierce Brown. Sci fi, sci fi series, the most addictive set of novels, but they've redone it as a movie in your mind. And, uh, yeah.

• 21:37Jonny?

  Helps get asleep.

• 21:38Chris Williamson?

  Dolby Atmos, full audio cast, you know, they're not just saying what's going on back and forth to each other. They're fully acting it out. The sound effects.

• 21:46Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 21:46Chris Williamson?

  Beautifully soundscape. It's awesome.

• 21:48Jonny?

  It's brilliant.

• 21:48Chris Williamson?

  I'm glad, I'm glad you like.

• 21:49Jonny?

  So that to fall asleep. And if you wake up at night, like stick an AirPod in, I'm just. Because you just immediately, especially with racing thoughts, you're just immediately in another world.

• 21:58Chris Williamson?

  Manta eye masks make a Bluetooth eye mask.

• 22:03Jonny?

  Do they?

• 22:03Chris Williamson?

  That is built for you to, to sleep on.

• 22:07Jonny?

  I ha- I have a pair of headphones called like Philips, something that like called.

• 22:11Chris Williamson?

  Sleep noozies or some shit.

• 22:12Jonny?

  They're just not very good.

• 22:13Chris Williamson?

  But they're just not AirPods, are they?

• 22:14Jonny?

  Yeah, just one AirPod in, like, because you can have, you can have your head against the pillow with the side of the AirPod in. Still doesn't wake you up. I worry a little bit about like what it's doing to me. It's the sort of thing I think Yusuf would worry me about if I spoke to him about it too.

• 22:28Chris Williamson?

  Oh, but it's non-ionizing radiation.

• 22:30Jonny?

  Like, is that AirPod talking to the AirPod that's over there and like cooking my brain in the process?

• 22:34Chris Williamson?

  And there was a Chernobyl ear.

• 22:35Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 22:36Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, it's already going through. I mean.

• 22:38Jonny?

  But I've only got one in. So is that okay?

• 22:41Chris Williamson?

  Who knows?

• 22:41Jonny?

  Is it okay?

• 22:42Speaker 02

  I'm less concerned about Bluetooth earphones. As far as like EMF exposure, I think there are other things.

• 22:48Jonny?

  Somebody shared an AirPod thing where it was like the communication between one AirPod and another.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  Sending signals through your head. Yeah, but I think like.

• 22:56Jonny?

  But as medical advice, you're saying that's fine.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  The, the problem is, it's you've got to pick your battles, haven't you? It's like air quality, water quality, plastic exposures, you know.

• 23:03Jonny?

  Receipts.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Receipts. So for me, it's like, don't microwave plastic and don't be an idiot.

• 23:09Chris Williamson?

  Drive, drive with your seatbelt on.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  Drive with the seatbelt on and get any dinks in your car.

• 23:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, sorted first.

• 23:14Jonny?

  Straight away.

• 23:15Chris Williamson?

  I like that. Just to add another one on there from Lifehacks four years ago, you can bulk buy your Audible every year.

• 23:23Jonny?

  Can you?

• 23:23Chris Williamson?

  So you don't need to pay monthly. You can pay yearly, annual, and you'll get all of your credits upfront and it's cheaper.

• 23:32Jonny?

  That's brilliant. Was that a life hack? I should really pay more attention.

• 23:36Chris Williamson?

  We've just done a lot. I mean, I reckon we've done a thousand life hacks.

• 23:39Jonny?

  That's like top tier, though.

• 23:41Chris Williamson?

  You'll save probably thirty or forty percent and you get all of your credits immediately. So you don't have to wait until next month. If you've got a bunch of book or you're on holiday and you want to download four, you've got all of your credits for the next twelve months ready to go.

• 23:55Jonny?

  Does Red Rising stop being good? Because there's like, there's several books, right?

• 23:59Chris Williamson?

  I'm on book six or seven now. I can't remember which one it is. And I'm still going. Everyone that I know.

• 24:05Jonny?

  Same storyline.

• 24:06Chris Williamson?

  Yep, same protagonist.

• 24:08Jonny?

  Wow.

• 24:09Chris Williamson?

  And everyone that I know that's got on to it is.

• 24:11Jonny?

  I think it, I think it crossed a point of like, when they're in the mine at the beginning, I'm like, it's a little bit, a little bit dull.

• 24:16Chris Williamson?

  As soon as you get out.

• 24:17Jonny?

  And then he's out, and he's like, oh my God, this is, you can see how it's just this world.

• 24:21Chris Williamson?

  Huge. Book two and book three are just obsessive. So Red Rising, you should go and download it.

• 24:26Jonny?

  Like the graphic, audio, whatever it's called.

• 24:28Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  There's a good rule of thumb, fiction before bad is amazing.

• 24:32Chris Williamson?

  It's kind of like that mind walk thing, right?

• 24:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:34Chris Williamson?

  Out of your own head, you're not thinking about your problems. Good, very good. All right, Seth.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  There's the heuristic of what can I remove? You know, so delete, automate, then delegate. But there's also, what am I already doing or using that I could be using better? So a few examples would be like, I'm already spending the time meditating in the mornings. Like, how can I make that time more effective? Or I'm already sleeping seven hours a night. How can I improve the quality of that? I'm already, you know, everyone's seen someone exercising in the gym, like every time you go to the gym and they're there and they're just kind of like, and they're like texting and just swinging their arms around, not really doing anything. You're like, they're taking all of the steps to get the result, but wasting the actual critical time in there.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  But this also applies to

• 25:27Speaker 02

  the decision of like, do I add something or do I just make what I'm already doing better? Get more use out of that, squeeze the lemon. So rather than adding in like a a red light box and an additional supplements and all this kind of stuff. It's like, well, what am I doing already? We often get clients that ask us like, oh, what's a good bit of software for this? Or what's a good software for this? And you're like, well, what are you already using? And you, like eighty percent of the time, the software stack that they're already using does the thing that they're looking for, but they're just looking for the next thing. And so.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  I'm always on about Tic Tic, but like the deeper I go with it, the more I'm like, oh, actually, like, there's no point looking for any other app to solve any of these other problems, because if you just really like dive into Tic Tic. And now my, my referral, my referrals are so much that I've got an account until like 2067 or something. So now I'm just like lifetime believer of Tic Tic. So yeah, like, and as I've applied this in the last few weeks, whenever I've like found myself trying to solve a problem, I always take a pause and go, hang on, what in what we already have, what software we're already paying for, what tools we already have can do the thing?

• 26:43Chris Williamson?

  Have you got another example?

• 26:45Speaker 02

  So this is a niche one, but we were looking for a way to convert Twitter threads or X threads into carousels. And I was looking at new bits of software and actually like we already use Hype Fury for scheduling tweets and they have a built in thing for this. But I think it's just the natural habit of like, wow, what's the?

• 27:04Chris Williamson?

  Shiny new thing. Something new to solve this problem as opposed to looking where you're already on.

• 27:08Jonny?

  What's your, what's your one of you don't need new lessons?

• 27:11Chris Williamson?

  You need to relearn your old ones. Yeah. I mean, most of the stuff that you already, that most of the answers to problems you have now, you already know, and you probably learned five years ago.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  So the ironically, we were talking about this just before the episode and last year on this episode, that life is a spiral curriculum and that you look back on your, yeah, you look on your journals from when you were like 19 and even you think was your 19 like idiot self was still telling you the same thing.

• 27:37Chris Williamson?

  It's the same problems, isn't it? Same problems over and over.

• 27:39Jonny?

  The day one feature of like today, a year ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, and you're writing about the same fucking.

• 27:44Chris Williamson?

  Well, you're the same person. That's why. Like the common thread between all of that is you. And lots of stuff changes on the surface, but fundamentally the same challenges that you have, the same emotions that come up, the same worries and concerns you do. Oh my God, so much has changed in life. You know, I'm a dad now, in a different country now, a different career now, whatever it might be. And you go, you're still the same person. So.

• 28:03Jonny?

  Experiencing the same things.

• 28:05Chris Williamson?

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

• 28:16Chris Williamson?

  I challenge anybody to take me on with that. You get into a hotel room and these curtains for no reason have got, you know, a three inch or a two inch gap between them. And you've tried to sort of do that weird thing where you push them and see, and then they sort of settle and they settle a bit better sometimes. And you're like, oh, is that good? Should I leave it? And you go, I'm gonna go again. You do it and it's further apart and you're like, fuck.

• 28:41Chris Williamson?

  Set of trouser hangers from the wardrobe, pin it at the top. If you've got two trouser hangers, one, two, and then three, four at the bottom.

• 28:50Chris Williamson?

  Pitch black, beautiful.

• 28:51Jonny?

  Why not just wear an eye mask?

• 28:54Chris Williamson?

  You could, but sometimes even with an eye mask, you're rolling around, it comes off.

• 28:57Jonny?

  Still a little.

• 28:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's just, I think you should always optimize for environment first and then

• 29:02Jonny?

  and then.

• 29:02Chris Williamson?

  Other stuff second.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Technically, the light receptors on the skin will also.

• 29:07Chris Williamson?

  The back of your knee can actually wake up. So that's that. And then I guess the other one, which is related to sleep. I've spent a lot of time on the road again this year, a lot of time in hotels.

• 29:16Chris Williamson?

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

• 29:38Chris Williamson?

  Don't want to those ones that fuck.

• 29:39Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 29:44Chris Williamson?

  My fucking sleeping or drowning here. And yeah, that's it. Pin the curtains together in a hotel bedroom and optimize for better pillows. And the way you can do that, what you want to do is find what pillow do you like? And then how available is it on Amazon Prime worldwide? And then if you can find one that you liked, it's available like that and it isn't an insane price, you can add, you know, 25 pounds or whatever onto a stay, but improve your sleep quality by maybe 30 minutes or an hour a night by just ordering a pillow to the hotel. You get in, you're like, ah, fuck, it's one of the ones. Get the order done, next day, get a good night's sleep.

• 30:21Jonny?

  There's a Kelly Starrett thing, like piece of advice from years ago, where if you lie on the mattress and you bend one leg, the mattress is the wrong like level of tergidity. So like if you, let's say you're going into extension, so you bend, you bend one leg to get out of extension.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 30:37Jonny?

  And I think that's if the mattress is too hard.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 30:40Jonny?

  That, that's the thing. So with the pillow versus mattress thing, I could sleep with no pillow. But if the mattress is bad, I wake up and I'm like tight.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  Your Kelly Starrett hack with pillows has changed my life as well.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  Wow. It won't even be a life.

• 30:53Chris Williamson?

  Using the towel roll.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  I think it's from a, it'll be from like a 2017 life hacks or something.

• 30:58Jonny?

  It's back when it was like phone video Kelly Starrett on YouTube.

• 31:02Chris Williamson?

  Is it the towel roll thing?

• 31:03Jonny?

  That's, and it's, it's lying like, it's, it's like tucking your shoulder back and then the towel sits here.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 31:08Jonny?

  And then you're, everything's in.

• 31:09Chris Williamson?

  So I followed that, but I just put another pillow in between the two top arms.

• 31:13Jonny?

  So the pillows are crossed.

• 31:14Chris Williamson?

  No, so one's behind my head and then I turn over to like spoon.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Make shift pregnancy pillow.

• 31:20Chris Williamson?

  But it's not for the legs because I found that if I had one.

• 31:23Jonny?

  Too hot.

• 31:24Chris Williamson?

  It just disrupt, if you've got, you've got to do this Brazilian jiu jitsu, you know, like sweep the legs and then pull it up and over. If anyone that uses a pregnancy pillow consistently, very impressive, but you can't move side to side.

• 31:34Jonny?

  Hmm.

• 31:35Chris Williamson?

  So normal pillow. Gee, what you got?

• 31:38Speaker 03

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

• 32:04Speaker 03

  Number one, this is a bit Tony Robbins, but my kind of contrarian take on the world right now, if I sit in that Peter Thiel interview, one of my contrarian takes that I give is,

• 32:16Speaker 03

  is that.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  It's very on brand credit.

• 32:23Speaker 03

  Very good.

• 32:23Chris Williamson?

  Solid.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  The contrarian take right now is if you had to picture a depressed person's body language in your head, what do they look like?

• 32:34Chris Williamson?

  Slouched over.

• 32:35Speaker 03

  Real contrarian. Yeah, slouched over, hunched, where's their eyes?

• 32:40Chris Williamson?

  Down.

• 32:41Speaker 03

  And people are spending eight to 10 hours a day like that, whether it's on their laptop or on their phone. So the boyata stand means that the laptop's raised like perfectly in front of you like that. Your shoulders are back on the mouse and you go, once you go to that, you can't go back. And you look at everybody else and you go, how are you spending two hours in this depressed posture? It's like, we've spoken about this previously, that I think a non, or a significant amount of people being miserable is just being in resting, serious face versus resting, smile face.

• 33:12Chris Williamson?

  I thought about that.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  And resting, serious body.

• 33:14Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  So I, I presented at the International Posture Summit, but even on us.

• 33:18Speaker 03

  Here we go. Come right up next to me in the orinal there. Come on.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  Did you know?

• 33:22Speaker 03

  You seen this?

• 33:23Speaker 02

  No.

• 33:24Chris Williamson?

  Been in Lily Phillips.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  Well, so this is, uh, there is a study that shows that your posture impacts how much you believe your own thoughts, which is interesting. So like, not so much mood and power pose and testosterone cortisol ratios kind of been difficult to, to re, reproduce in the results, but believing your own thoughts. So if you were sat up, barata stand, what does he call it?

• 33:49Speaker 03

  Boyata.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  Boyata.

• 33:50Chris Williamson?

  It's a bit of cheese in it, barata.

• 33:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  I've, I've got a couple of.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  Delicious.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  So, yeah.

• 33:55Speaker 03

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

• 34:14Chris Williamson?

  Posture pilled.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:15Chris Williamson?

  No, I'm a, I'm a big fan of it. I will say you're, the height that you have it at and the closeness that you have your laptop to yourself. I would come down the stairs when we were both living in the Colton House in Austin and you don't see a person. What you, what you see is this massive MacBook like this. And because it's spread out as well, it's covering his entire body. And then this, just a set of AirPod Pro Maxes poking out the top. You know, George is behind there somewhere.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  It's terrible for day game. If you wanna, if you wanna pick up girls at the coffee shop.

• 34:48Chris Williamson?

  You can't do any Kino escalation.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  It's good for network, the amount of people go, he must be hardcore. What does he do?

• 34:54Chris Williamson?

  Meanwhile, he's reading David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity with ChatGPT.

• 34:58Speaker 03

  For the 52nd time.

• 35:00Chris Williamson?

  Fuck. All right. Uh, should we do a lesson?

• 35:02Jonny?

  Bring it on.

• 35:03Chris Williamson?

  A lesson?

• 35:03Jonny?

  Oh my god.

• 35:05Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 35:05Jonny?

  Fine.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Are we out of hacks now?

• 35:07Chris Williamson?

  No, we can go back.

• 35:08Speaker 02

  Okay, so I've got two micro hacks, but we can.

• 35:10Chris Williamson?

  Do you want to do one more round of hacks?

• 35:11Jonny?

  I'm trying to sum them in.

• 35:12Chris Williamson?

  Do you want to do one more round of hacks?

• 35:13Jonny?

  I can do another hack.

• 35:14Chris Williamson?

  Let's do another, let's do another round of hacks.

• 35:16Jonny?

  I know that I had another hack chambered, ready to go.

• 35:18Chris Williamson?

  Fire it.

• 35:19Jonny?

  But now it's made me question my hack, the hack I've picked.

• 35:21Chris Williamson?

  Don't worry.

• 35:23Jonny?

  I am worrying though. I'm gonna say walking pad. Have we done that before?

• 35:29Chris Williamson?

  Walking pad.

• 35:30Jonny?

  Walking pad.

• 35:33Chris Williamson?

  It's like a under desk treadmill.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  Both just like.

• 35:35Jonny?

  Yeah, exactly. So you need a standing desk and then it's a treadmill that's like you can't run on. I mean, I've never tried, but it says don't run on it. So I figure like probably best to listen.

• 35:45Chris Williamson?

  Is that why you stopped running?

• 35:46Jonny?

  Exactly. Yeah. But the, just that as a way of, you just do like two hours of work while on that. You forget that you're on it. And you, I think it's like 2,000 steps every, like maybe 4,000 steps an hour.

• 35:59Chris Williamson?

  Can't be 4,000 an hour.

• 36:00Jonny?

  Why?

• 36:01Chris Williamson?

  Oh no, no, it could be. Yeah, you're gonna, at that pace, yeah, probably about 4,000 an hour.

• 36:05Jonny?

  Cause you thought that was too many.

• 36:06Chris Williamson?

  I originally, but now I've repurposed.

• 36:09Jonny?

  Realize you're wrong.

• 36:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I am.

• 36:11Jonny?

  Walking pad.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  And what kind of pace? Cause do you ever get to a pace where you're going too fast and you can't concentrate?

• 36:17Jonny?

  Yeah, the classic type A problem.

• 36:18Speaker 03

  Then you're like, all I'm doing now is walking.

• 36:21Chris Williamson?

  Looking at my screen.

• 36:22Jonny?

  Yeah, trying not to just slightly miss the walking pad and walk into the computer.

• 36:27Speaker 03

  What, what types of work? A, sorry, what speed have you found useful? And then what types of work have you found?

• 36:34Jonny?

  3.5.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  3.5.

• 36:35Chris Williamson?

  What's that? Miles? Kilometers?

• 36:37Jonny?

  It's just what it says on the screen.

• 36:38Chris Williamson?

  You've both got the same one, right?

• 36:40Jonny?

  I think we might have the similar one. We have the same one.

• 36:43Chris Williamson?

  Right, but your legs are longer.

• 36:45Jonny?

  Doesn't matter.

• 36:48Chris Williamson?

  I would imagine you walk quicker than these two.

• 36:50Jonny?

  Does that matter?

• 36:51Chris Williamson?

  Then you would.

• 36:51Jonny?

  We're talking about preferences here.

• 36:53Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh. But it actually means they're walking a little bit more quickly.

• 36:56Jonny?

  The question was, what's, what speed have you found?

• 36:58Chris Williamson?

  All, they, you all like the same speed.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  Don't ask me my preference and then tell me that I'm wrong.

• 37:02Chris Williamson?

  Fucking litigate me out of it here.

• 37:04Jonny?

  Tie me up. So yeah, 3.5. Next question.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  And what type of work?

• 37:10Jonny?

  So you would think it needs to be like email or, but it can be anything. I think it just helps you just drop into whatever you're doing.

• 37:20Chris Williamson?

  Well, there's that Kelly's threat thing about when you're on a phone call that's getting intense, you stand up and start walking around because we're meant to locomote while we think.

• 37:28Speaker 03

  I'm I'm picturing you Alan Partridge style with like a Bluetooth headset on, short shorts going 100K, it's going to Sky.

• 37:38Speaker 03

  I once heard a story of, you know, so Ari Emanuel, that's can't say it, it's not that bad. Ari Emanuel, who Ari Gold was based off on Entourage, so they own the UFC, WWE. He's like the apex lawyer in America for entertainment. And he's heavily dyslexic, so he just spends all day on the phone rather than doing anything that would use dyslexia, I guess. And I knew somebody who was in the office, walking past his room and he's on a full incline treadmill with like speaker on, just saying fuck him, fuck him for another million, fuck him for another million. We're not moving till we fuck him for another million.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  That's the gateway drug, isn't it? He's gradually stepped up.

• 38:22Chris Williamson?

  That's where you're going to be 12 months time.

• 38:24Jonny?

  I'll be on one of those.

• 38:25Chris Williamson?

  A trainer fucking people for a million.

• 38:28Speaker 03

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

• 38:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I knew a guy who, you've met him actually, who would do cardio and just have TikTok on like autoplay, because he said it made 45 minutes, just probably terrible for your brain, but.

• 39:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, only allowing social, only allowing social media usage when you're doing incline cardio is actually.

• 39:12Chris Williamson?

  That's not bad, but but like purposefully doing social media usage because you're an incline cardio feels like.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  You end up fitter, but also a bit like.

• 39:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, tweaked. Do you find, because Steve Jobs famously used to only do walking meetings or a lot of walking meetings. Have you found doing it for meetings useful? Or do you not want to be that guy?

• 39:32Chris Williamson?

  I mean, Johnny used to try and record podcasts whilst going on.

• 39:34Jonny?

  So I was gonna say that.

• 39:37Jonny?

  It's not really the audience to say like, well, I think I did better podcasting because Chris is quite good at podcasting, but I think it's you produce a better podcast while walking.

• 39:45Chris Williamson?

  Apart from the sound.

• 39:45Jonny?

  Apart from the sound, but who cares about the sound?

• 39:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 39:48Jonny?

  Meetings are the only thing I would struggle with for some reason. I think because you just feel like, you know, I'm that guy walking on the meeting.

• 39:56Chris Williamson?

  It very much depends what sort of a meeting it is as well. And like if it's, if it's you just, okay, you like recap me on this way. It's kind of sort of standard and stuff. Okay, like here we go. I'll have a little plot.

• 40:08Jonny?

  And if it's a really serious meeting and you're the only one walking and you're the one being really serious.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  The art of like perfectly level walking. So only your legs are moving, but you're just.

• 40:16Chris Williamson?

  Squat jog.

• 40:18Jonny?

  I think you'd have a little bit of.

• 40:20Chris Williamson?

  Shift.

• 40:21Jonny?

  Mm hmm.

• 40:22Chris Williamson?

  What brand did you go for?

• 40:24Jonny?

  Don't know, but I do know it's off stock. But if you go on.

• 40:27Chris Williamson?

  Oh, brilliant. That's two great things.

• 40:28Jonny?

  If you go on Amazon, but they cancel each other out, don't they? It doesn't matter. If you go on Amazon and search walking pad.

• 40:35Chris Williamson?

  Walking pad.

• 40:36Jonny?

  I pretty much any of them. They range from, I think you tried to find like a bean one, didn't you? For like 50, 60 quid.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  Up to.

• 40:44Jonny?

  Like 300 quid, 200, 300 quid. Got you a good one.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  All right, Steph, you're up. Great, a product promo there. Well, I don't know.

• 40:52Chris Williamson?

  Don't know what it is.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  And they can raise.

• 40:53Jonny?

  Well, yeah, 50 quid maybe.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  So this is also to springboard off your, and your hack, which is just to only do voice notes while I'm walking. So it's just to get me out the house because I know that if I got a desk pad, it would enable my screen time and I'd be doing it more. And so Dicky Bush, who.

• 41:14Chris Williamson?

  Twice now.

• 41:17Chris Williamson?

  Chris mentioned it before.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  There we go. Double Dicky, so.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  He just said, don't do any work that at your desk that could be done walking. And that includes like emails, voice notes. And to, to be honest, like most writing now with G P T, you can just dump a bunch of words into an audio file and.

• 41:38Chris Williamson?

  I mean, if you get a walking pad, it's all work, isn't it?

• 41:41Speaker 02

  It's all work, but then you're just at your desk.

• 41:43Chris Williamson?

  But still walking time. So what is it that you're looking for to get outside?

• 41:47Speaker 02

  To get outside.

• 41:47Chris Williamson?

  Or have environment change.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  And you can now walk with AirPods in, talking to yourself and people no longer think you're a nutter.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  It's great.

• 41:55Speaker 03

  Because they think you might be on a call.

• 41:57Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 41:58Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah, that's not bad. Good. All right. Um, which one am I going to choose next? Last year I said Sleep Token. This year I'm going to say Bertooth and it's going to make you very happy. Hmm. That I've finally come around to listening to Bertooth, really phenomenal, most recent album they just put out, the London Vlog. The song at the end that we had and the sort of the tune that was threaded throughout. Shout out to Caleb, the front man who sent me the stems from the track. So he sent me the track broken up into its individual component parts. So he could really, really dial that in. That was very kind of him to do. And I just, that they were my top play track of this year. I felt like important. That's alive. Alive. You had attention.

• 42:39Chris Williamson?

  Yep, of course. Good. Bit mincy compared, but it's all right. No, good. That whole album's, that whole album's fantastic. It only came out in October and I think they still managed to get into my Spotify wrapped, so.

• 42:53Chris Williamson?

  Place of, uh, I'll do, I'll do another one, given that that one was just music, uh, Mitchum Deodorant. So Luke got me onto this last year and, uh, there is no deodorant that's anywhere near as good. This isn't just like, the smell of it is fantastic. The price of it's great. The quality, it doesn't leave any white marks and everyone's sort of looking for what's the best sort of deodorant. And not fucking medieval peasant. I don't use roll on deodorant, but Spray Mitchum. And they also have in every boots of UK airports, they'll have the travel size. So you can actually take a 50 mil travel, throw that in your bag. Pretty sick. Mitchum and Bertooth. So what's good about it? Smells good, doesn't leave any white marks and you don't sweat. It just seems to be. All the boxes.

• 43:37Chris Williamson?

  It's, yeah. And as of yet, most of them have a lingering smell like Dove. Dove deodorant, you can smell somebody wearing it from like fucking a few miles away and I don't like that. It's like it basically odorless, but does the job. So.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  Unbeatable.

• 43:52Chris Williamson?

  Naughty.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  Naughty.

• 43:55Speaker 03

  Speaking of naughty, my one is not naughty. It's a prompt for AI. So either ChatGPT, Claude, whatever your, that's actually a life hack within itself is to be an absolute LLM whore.

• 44:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  If you can, is the following prompt. So do you know the Elon Musk quote? It's around how to learn. It's essentially this idea that you want to view knowledge as a semantic tree. So you start at the roots, then you go up to the trunk, then you have the branches, then you have like the secondary branches, then you have the leaves. Whereas often the way we'll approach things is, oh, I want to learn about the heart. I'll just put on this random Andrew Huberman podcast with the specialist about the heart and just kind of hop in, but you don't have any of the roots or anything there. So you never actually retain any information. Whereas when you treat knowledge as a semantic tree, you work all the way up from the base and then all the way there.

• 44:54Speaker 03

  And a big realization this year was it's kind of a bit of a Deutsch concept, but essentially this idea that the only thing, the only bottleneck that really exists is knowledge. And then you look at, okay, you have all these great people who are self-taught. So you can just teach yourself from Nikola Tesla to Leonardo da Vinci. You have access to the alphabet, so you can understand any concept with words. You have access to numeracy, which is only 10 digits, but you can access, you can understand any mathematical equation with numbers. Therefore, the only bottleneck to literally every single thing in your life, skill issue, knowledge. So placing that into Claude or ChatGPT and you realize I can learn anything, starting from there.

• 45:36Speaker 03

  So you start with the, you say the specific Elon quote and you say, teach me about X, but start with the roots and then work all the way up and don't move to the next layer until I say, I understand. And you're constantly just moving up and you realize, oh, I can literally teach myself anything.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  This is a nice development from your last year's one, which was treat me like a total idiot and start at zero until I say I understand and then go to step one and then step two.

• 46:05Speaker 03

  The step here is to really then you can then just move it into like a mind mapping software and literally just build the tree yourself. Then you have that semantic tree in your head of all the interweaving parts.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  Big mistake that I made when studying medicine was not doing that earlier. You have to have like a framework or a skeleton to be able to hang concepts on. Otherwise you are just learning raw data and it's so difficult.

• 46:26Speaker 03

  There's nothing connected and you're just memorizing like you did at school. You're never actually understanding.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  There's like a tipping point. If you just brute force, raw dog enough data, eventually you'll start to see the coalescing parts kind of join the dots, but it's not a fun way to do it.

• 46:42Chris Williamson?

  Rough going.

• 46:42Speaker 03

  Is there something you've used that for recently? I started yesterday with longevity. So I'm going to, because that's a topic that I've always wanted to learn about, but I just kicked the can down the road because I'm like, where do I even begin? So I started with that. With any kind of topic that will come up now, I will just.

• 47:01Chris Williamson?

  What you, for the LLM non-monogamous out there, what do you use each platform for? Have you found certain things better on certain?

• 47:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there's a huge asterisk here that this will be outdated by tomorrow because it's constantly, literally yesterday, they released the new, the new O version. And then you have X now getting the, it's like three times the number of super computer clusters with the Grok AI that's going to go live. So me right now, I vary between Claude and ChatGPT, but I would be shocked if next year I'm saying the exact same thing.

• 47:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it seems like Google is.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  Google's great. Yeah. The new Grok one now where you can be on Twitter and ask Grok to explain things to you. Grok has way fewer bottlenecks. It's way less politically correct as well. It has access to Twitter's live data.

• 47:53Chris Williamson?

  It's being updated much more quickly, but it's also being updated by people who are on Twitter. Highly dangerous data set there to use. Lesson, Johnny?

• 48:02Speaker 03

  Lesson.

• 48:03Chris Williamson?

  You got a lesson?

• 48:04Speaker 03

  I did.

• 48:07Jonny?

  So it's a reframe on hard things or a hard thing. So I think so something that um I think I've been guilty of is not necessarily thinking like when I achieve this, I'll be happy, but rather like when I achieve this, problem's gone, like solve that thing now. And actually, I mean, it's mainly a propane thing. So like propane's grown a lot over the last two, three years. And you always think like, we'll hit this revenue, we'll hire this person, we'll achieve this thing. No more problems. But actually, all that happens is the new, more thorny, harder problem. And reframing that as like, that is the thing where the development, that's the development opportunity.

• 48:48Jonny?

  Because the next revenue level, the next, the next achievement just always just feels exactly the same as the last one. Doesn't matter the size of it, exactly the same, but the, the who you become as a result of solving the problem at the level you're at. That's the, that's the gain. So the phrase that I remind myself of is for every level is a devil. And it's just the current, just the current devil you're facing. That's because we've had like a very weird year in business, like a very like lots of problems that I think we'd have never um expected. And you, your immediate response to that is like, oh, but actually, if you reframe that as like, that's where the, that's where the growth is, that's where the personal growth is, see it differently.

• 49:30Jonny?

  And it becomes almost like, not exciting, but like it's something, it's like, wow, there's something on the other side of this. So that's been my lesson for this year, probably the biggest one.

• 49:40Chris Williamson?

  I mean, that's really good. It's not too dissimilar to what we spoke about last year. And I think what all of us are kind of zeroing in on, which is accepting that things are going to be tough, but not necessarily white knuckling our way through it and not assuming that there's any additional nobility in white knuckling it and, and trying to i- i- increase the difficulty or sort of the hustle, pawning your way through things. It's like, look, if there's a way that I can make this simpler.

• 50:03Jonny?

  Find the gummy.

• 50:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. How can you, how can you have a creatine gummy for every different thing? And uh, yeah, I think.

• 50:11Chris Williamson?

  Assuming that one day you're going to wake up and there'll be no problems is.

• 50:14Jonny?

  I remember that, I think it was Mark Zuckerberg on, maybe on Rogan, where he was like describing his morning. Has anyone heard this? So like Mark Zuckerberg's morning was like, he wakes up and he goes and surfs. Because like when he looks at his phone, it's really all really shit bad news. And I was like, well, like, because like, that's my morning. And it's like, his bad news will be far worse.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  How many unread have you got currently on Telegram?

• 50:39Jonny?

  I don't know.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  The other day it was. Forty six thousand. I think you're on more.

• 50:43Jonny?

  No, I think the other day it was like one, two, three, four for me. And I screenshot it.

• 50:48Chris Williamson?

  Particularly satisfying.

• 50:50Speaker 03

  On this lesson, there's a beautiful, have you ever heard of the book called The Gap and the Gain?

• 50:57Chris Williamson?

  Benjamin Ardi.

• 50:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. So there's one line in that that's stuck with me and I still think about, and it's kind of a semi life hack related to this, which is, forget your current problem, whatever it is, just go back to a, maybe even a more severe problem in the past. Whether it's girlfriend cheated on you, fired from job, insert problem, whatever it is, right? And you go back and go, with the benefit of hindsight now, what would have been the worst interpretation of that problem? So, okay, girlfriend cheated on me. I'm a loser. I'm gonna binge a load of food. I'm gonna write a lot of angry Facebook statuses about her. Didn't work. That's the kind of worst interpretation of that problem. And you go, okay, well, what was the,

• 51:41Speaker 03

  now I'm detached from it, what would have been the best interpretation of that? It's like, okay, I'm gonna book this personal trainer for three months. I'm gonna book this trip with my friends that I was putting off because I was supposed to go on holiday with her, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you look at that now in the cold light of day, and which one did you, which one do you wish that you chose? It's so obvious. So you do that for the past problem. And then you just go, okay, now I'm a current problem. What, what's the current worst interpretation of this? Da, da, da, da, da. What's the current best interpretation of this? Da, da, da, da. Which one do you want to choose in the?

• 52:14Chris Williamson?

  What would you tomorrow, what you today?

• 52:15Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  The jocko, good.

• 52:17Speaker 03

  And then literally do that exercise and just refuse to get up until you've hypnotized yourself that it's the best thing to ever happen to you.

• 52:24Chris Williamson?

  The, Mark Andreessen was on the show the other week and he gave me this quote from Sean Parker that said, running a startup is like eating glass. You just start to like the taste of your own blood. And I think that's the acceptance that after a long enough amount of time, problems are always going to be there. You're not going to get to a point where there aren't any problems. As the CEO or founder of a business, your only job is to work on the hardest problems, the problems that nobody else can fix. And they always stop with you and there will always be pressure. Okay.

• 52:50Jonny?

  The more advanced you are in any field, in any pursuit, the problems are worse, aren't they? Or more complicated, more painful.

• 52:57Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 52:58Jonny?

  And it's just easier to be at the basic level of everything.

• 53:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:02Jonny?

  So if you're going to pursue the journey of like, well, I want to achieve the highest level in anything. It's like, well, the final level going from level nine to level 10 is going to have the worst problem attached to it.

• 53:12Chris Williamson?

  So that's the price. Is that the price that you're prepared to pay?

• 53:14Speaker 03

  I think there's some truth to that, but I think that's also the benefit of hindsight. You now look back at level one problems is so obvious because you're now a level nine person.

• 53:22Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 53:22Speaker 03

  But then as soon as you get to level 29, you look back at level nine in the same.

• 53:26Jonny?

  But that's the cost of the person you become by solving each problem. So that's a much more succinct way of saying what I was saying is that like, it's only, it's the, it's the person you are as the, on the other side of the problem of like, wow, that was so basic like two years ago. I was worrying about this thing. That's really easy now.

• 53:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Because if that challenge came back up to you again now, you're so easy. Fine. No worries. Yeah, that's very interesting. That's cool. I like that. Good one.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  We didn't coordinate this, but you've described the irony of the human condition, that we will always hit this spiral curriculum and still run into the same problems. And with our clients, we have the same thing. So we help coaches to move online and they often think that if I can just fix my lead generation, then my life will be sorted and it'll be absolutely, you know, I've, I've completed it. And then all that happens is like, very quickly from working with us, you know, we fix, fix that problem. It's not actually that hard a problem to solve. But then they end up with a sales bottleneck and then they fix that and they end up with a fulfillment bottleneck. And then they fix that and end up with an operational bottleneck. And they're like, oh, actually like, life isn't just sunshine and rainbows after this one thing that I can solve. So for me, very similar lesson, which was we

• 54:33Speaker 02

  are the ones that define success in our lives. And Yet for some reason, we have a desire, we close the gap somehow by fulfilling the desire, and then we move the goalposts, and then we keep doing that. And we're like, oh, why am I perpetually dissatisfied? And hearing your podcast with Andrew Wilkinson, billionaire, who's just like, his main conclusion from becoming a billionaire is, oh, I'm still the same miserable, dissatisfied person I've ever been, but with more money. And it's like, it takes somebody who's actually like smashed that particular stream to be like, ah, maybe the answers aren't hiding behind more money or whatever. And so ultimately,

• 55:11Speaker 02

  we defer gratification for, or we feel like we're suffering the most in the thing that we're most deficient in. So whether it's money, or time, or friendships, or whatever, that's like the thing which is like the alligator at the boat. And whoever has something like that, it's like the drowning man wanting air, they feel like that is the thing which, if they solve it, life would be complete. So like, incel forums, they're obsessed with like, if I could just get a girlfriend, then I'd be totally fine. And the weird thing about all of this, I think when I kind of reflect on this is that the domains of life that we have sorted, and most of us, like watching this, you know, if you're watching

• 55:55Speaker 02

  this, hopefully you're healthy, you have access to being outside, you're not in prison, you, you know, you have central heating, like, all this stuff, like, physical health, and time, and family, and sun, and all that stuff is just fully available in abundance, but we just go, ah, but I need another two grand, or I need another whatever. And so, I guess the lesson is to stop moving the goalposts, or if you do, recognize that it's just a game that we're playing, but you can still recognize that you are happy right now, and all that suffering of the gap is just caused by the mind. So Felix Dennis has a book called How to Get Rich, which is, he's, he's made it really like distasteful

• 56:39Speaker 02

  in the way that it's branded and stuff, and he's sat there like, like a maniacal, like monocle, and, you know, the kind of, because.

• 56:48Speaker 02

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

• 57:13Speaker 03

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

• 57:35Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 57:35Speaker 03

  For illiquid wealth, you're already a billionaire, which is a wild thought.

• 57:39Chris Williamson?

  The insight around the thing that you desire most is the thing that you assume will fix all of your problems. I came up with this idea the other day of unteachable lessons. And I think one of the unteachable lessons is money and fame won't fix all of the problems that you have in life, because the total addressable market for more fame and more money is basically everybody. And Andrew Wilkinson, this billionaire coming on, it's so done, it's so done that when he even comes on, there's a bit of me that thinks we can't go down that road. Because I know of the antibody response system on the internet. I also know that it just doesn't, it seems to not land. And maybe it wouldn't have landed with me and it probably still doesn't land.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  It never does. It's, as Frankl says, it's one of the three insatiable desires, money, sex and power. And you can keep chasing them. So, I mean, Wilkinson was talking about his mate who was like a multi billionaire and was like, oh, but Jeff, he's like really rich though, isn't he? And he was like, but what can Jeff afford that you can't? And they're like, oh, super yacht. Right, okay, so.

• 58:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, was it you, was it, who was it that taught us that lesson about how when you ask people what they want their annual income to be? It's always.

• 58:49Jonny?

  Sahil.

• 58:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. Do you want to tell that story? Can you remember it?

• 58:52Jonny?

  Yeah, essentially, whenever you ask somebody what would be your kind of goal income, where you would stop and relax a bit more. It's basically always 2.5 to 3X where you are right now. And then as soon as you hit that, it just.

• 59:05Chris Williamson?

  2.5 times 3X.

• 59:06Jonny?

  Re-baselines.

• 59:07Chris Williamson?

  2.5 to 3X. Yeah, it's so funny.

• 59:09Jonny?

  That thing going around social media where they ask someone, like, you can, I'll give you 10 million, but you can't wake up tomorrow. Would you accept? Or like, would you want 10 million? And everyone goes, yes, yes. But then you can have 10 million, but you don't wake up in the morning. Do you still want the 10 million? And everyone goes, oh, no. As you're saying, well, waking up tomorrow is worth more than 10 million.

• 59:25Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 59:26Jonny?

  And people go, ah. But if you really think about that, it is like, oh, right. So the most valuable thing is the thing that I take for granted every single day. Which is, I suppose, the, it's the youth, it's like the future that you have ahead of you.

• 59:37Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 59:38Jonny?

  But you ignore that.

• 59:39Chris Williamson?

  But a lot of that, a lot of that as well is framing, because you can't cash the future in right now. Like, the fact that nothing is promised beyond just this moment right now. And sure, your felt sense of it, as you're older, maybe you can do less, there's less you can do with this moment right now. But tomorrow at 80 and tomorrow right now are the exact same amount of time.

• 59:59Jonny?

  Mm hmm.

• 59:59Chris Williamson?

  Uh, so beyond the health impact of it, there is no difference. The only thing is, you remember when you used to go back to school on a Monday for me, it's a good example on a Monday. For me, I go to bed on a Sunday night, I reliably have good sleep and I'm fired up for a Monday because it feels like the whole week is ahead of me. But I get to sort of a Friday or a Saturday and I have this sort of retrospective energy to me where I'm thinking about the week. And then it gets to Monday morning again and I'm sort of excited. And it almost feels like that, but with age, it's like, there's no real reason, if you can do the full non-dual fucking attachment thing. There's no reason why a day now and a day in 20 years' time is worth any more or any less. In fact, you should, what?

• 1:00:36Jonny?

  We do it at all timeframes, don't we? Because I'm sure in our twenties, we were like, oh, but the thirties and then the forties, it's the same.

• 1:00:42Chris Williamson?

  At some point, it's going to flip, right? At some point, it's going to be like, oh, if you're not careful about it, that you're going to get older and start thinking wistfully about what was behind, not hopefully about what's to come.

• 1:00:51Jonny?

  Is it not multiplied by like physical ability?

• 1:00:54Chris Williamson?

  By a big margin.

• 1:00:55Jonny?

  Like, enjoying anything is magnified when you can walk, there's no pain, there's no, you're fully mobile.

• 1:01:02Chris Williamson?

  All right. My first one, that was fucking awesome. That was a good one too. That was a good one. This again from your birthday, outcomes matter more than inputs. You've been on this flex for quite a while, not too dissimilar to, I look for efficiency over, I look for effectiveness over efficiency. But outcomes matter more than inputs. A lot of the time, especially as you get sort of further into black belt territory on the productivity bro optimization world, you do this sort of weird rain dance, this sort of productivity rain dance of lots of things that maybe you needed them previously, or maybe they never served you, or maybe they did serve you, but they don't serve you now. But you keep doing them. You have these sort of odd attachments to ways of working and things that you do,

• 1:01:46Chris Williamson?

  or members of staff, or systems, or processes, or whatever it is. And what's that quote about people working so hard and achieving? So little. Who's that? Andy Grove. Andy Grove. There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  So is this, is this like, don't conflate suffering with productivity? Or is it more like, don't get attached to old systems that got you to where you are?

• 1:02:10Chris Williamson?

  The suffering thing is probably a part of it, but this is probably even more zoomed out than that, which is a lot of the time, people focus on how hard I've worked during the day, regardless of whether it was suffering or not. It's what I did all of this stuff. Look at all of the effort that I put in. He goes, what did you do on the back end of that? Because we've all had jobs, projects, things that we needed to finish. And the very thing that you're putting off is the most important thing that you're supposed to do. And you go, dude, I worked all day. And you go, track what you did today. You cleaned the kitchen. You had this huge email to write and you spent 45 minutes cleaning the fucking kitchen. Why'd you do that? Well, I worked really hard today. And it's like, yes, yes, yes. But what were you trying to achieve?

• 1:02:50Chris Williamson?

  And it's also, I think, just a reminder that effectiveness is really the only thing that matters. You can continue to put your foot harder and harder and harder on the accelerator. But if you've also got your foot on the brake, or if you're driving in the wrong direction, it kind of doesn't matter. So outcomes matter more than inputs, as in.

• 1:03:09Chris Williamson?

  A lot of the time, because you're, the feedback loop on when am I going to get the output is usually a little bit down the line. Maybe it's going to be tomorrow. Maybe it's going to be next year. Maybe it's going to be in five years' time or whatever. The only thing that you can bounce off is inputs. How much work did I do today? And then, for instance, you wake up on a morning and you're, you've slept in by three hours and immediately you feel like a piece of shit. You think I'm a piece of shit because I slept in. And you go, right, okay. You're looking at such a brief window, like the entirety of your life.

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  But I'm in the lower quartile of the window.

• 1:03:45Chris Williamson?

  Sleep regularity. The entirety of your life and you've taken this one moment and be like, because of that one thing that I did. It's like, what if that allows you to get way more out of this week? What if this allows you to get closer to your goals much more quickly? Or what if this is just something that your body needs so that you can be happier?

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  And there's one way to guarantee that you won't get the best out of this week is if you just beat yourself up for it.

• 1:04:06Chris Williamson?

  For the rest of the day.

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  Piece of shit.

• 1:04:07Speaker 03

  There's a fun idea here, which is just only setting on your like to do list, the biggest thing that you have to do. And sometimes it might be like 10 minutes long. It might be send an email or fire this person or put this job ad live and then just give yourself the rest of the day off. I did that for a few weeks and it was fucking weird.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  You feel brilliant.

• 1:04:31Speaker 03

  You feel, but you also still have, to your point, that kind of constant guilt that I need to be working. Why you're not working, even though I've achieved more than I would do by doing the most important thing. There's then just this sense of anxious, I need to be busy. I need to be busy. So that's the first one. And then the second one is, yeah, if you don't know what the most important thing is, you've identified what the most important thing is. It's figuring out what the most important thing. So it's a beautiful loop.

• 1:04:59Jonny?

  There's a, like a really old Tim Ferriss article about this, about like how he stays productive. It's called like productivity tips for depressive people like me or something like that. But it's, there's loads of quotes in it, like doing something well doesn't make it important, which I think about all the time.

• 1:05:14Chris Williamson?

  Doing something well doesn't make it important.

• 1:05:16Jonny?

  That's it. I mean, like being, being busy is a form of like indiscriminate action and procrastination. Like busy people just don't know what to focus on.

• 1:05:23Chris Williamson?

  Your calendar is a better indication of your wealth than your bank account.

• 1:05:26Jonny?

  Yeah. And then write out, the practical thing is write out all your to do's. Pick like the top three that make you most scared, then pick one of them and just do it for three hours.

• 1:05:35Speaker 03

  Beautiful.

• 1:05:36Jonny?

  And that's, that's how he says productive or effective.

• 1:05:38Chris Williamson?

  Wrestling with theirs.

• 1:05:40Jonny?

  Would it be on your to do list?

• 1:05:41Chris Williamson?

  Fighting an axe.

• 1:05:43Speaker 03

  Legally representing Lily Phillips.

• 1:05:45Jonny?

  Jesus. It's always the thing that makes you.

• 1:05:48Speaker 03

  I want it to be Guy A Hundred.

• 1:05:51Jonny?

  If you look on your to do list and pick the thing you're like, oh.

• 1:05:54Speaker 03

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

• 1:06:13Jonny?

  So just do that thing.

• 1:06:14Speaker 03

  This flight.

• 1:06:14Chris Williamson?

  All I need to do is. Parkinson's law, the breakup out in the three hours long. Right. So we've got.

• 1:06:21Speaker 03

  Or I need to book this flight to this location and it might, or I need to set up this banking.

• 1:06:26Jonny?

  But if you've got three hours blocked out, you're definitely going to get it done, aren't you?

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  True.

• 1:06:29Jonny?

  That's, I think that's the point is like fence off, like, don't try to be this like, oh, just do 10 minutes later, I'll do like, the most important thing to do today is that thing. That's all you're doing until lunch, until it's finished. But it's, no one ever does it. And people write too many things on their to do list, don't get them done and push them over to tomorrow.

• 1:06:46Speaker 03

  Sure. Do you want me to?

• 1:06:46Jonny?

  You're up.

• 1:06:47Speaker 03

  Kind of related to this one, it's a, it's a good, it's a very cool one.

• 1:06:50Chris Williamson?

  So funny how all of the hacks and all of the lessons end up, we haven't coordinated this before.

• 1:06:54Jonny?

  No.

• 1:06:55Chris Williamson?

  We don't talk about doing it before.

• 1:06:56Speaker 03

  This is like a life hack slash lesson. They're both, both related. And I call it, um, turning bullshit into reality. And I'll do the exercise with you guys now, if only, if I only did this every day, whenever I've done it, I've gone, that's a great day. So we start with bullshit. What are your values? Do you have any that come to mind? And it, and if you don't have like, I've thought through like my values, blah, but that bullshit. Any values that you just immediately come to mind of things that you'd like to do more of, Johnny? There's no wrong answer. Physical challenge. Physical challenge, Yusuf.

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  Pass.

• 1:07:35Speaker 03

  Just come on. Come on. Come on. Just give me something that you value, like that you. Or personal gratitude. I don't know.

• 1:07:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, gratitude.

• 1:07:41Speaker 03

  Gratitude. Okay, cool. Adventure. Adventure. Okay. So you create an Apple note and you put that value at the top. Now you have to creatively brainstorm 10 ways you can do that. So for example, physical challenge, it could be. Run. But like run 5K, right? Run 5K. It could, what was yours again?

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  The gratitude trigger.

• 1:07:59Speaker 03

  Gratitude. It could be write a thank you letter to ABC and yours was. Adventure. Adventure. It could be message to group chat to arrange this holiday that we've been putting off. Okay. So just write down 10 and then just go through, do, go through, do, go through, do. And you've taken this kind of esoteric bullshit value that you've always wanted to have.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  To next action.

• 1:08:23Speaker 03

  And from neurons to atoms.

• 1:08:25Speaker 02

  That's very cool. The reason I struggle with the values thing is that I think you've got to be very cautious about what you say are your core values.

• 1:08:32Speaker 03

  Got to go your values. You can mix those up though, like.

• 1:08:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. But so I was reading Patrick Lencioni recently and he said a lot of companies will go like, oh yeah, we'll do our values statement and they say our country values honesty and in tech. And you're like, okay, but unless you value honesty above the market baseline, you don't actually value honesty. That's not one of your core values. Because everyone should value honesty by baseline. So he's like, the only time you should say you have a company value is if you are actually like above the market trend.

• 1:09:01Speaker 03

  Ultimately, the only thing that matters with values is did you do the thing? Because even if you didn't think of the values, but you did the thing, then you actually valued it more than saying, I have values. So even there. That's unless you whip yourself into doing a thing that you didn't want to do. And then after the fact, you did.

• 1:09:17Speaker 03

  The reason why this exercise I think is actually useful is because what ends up happening when you do it is it's a load of things that have been rattling around your subconscious in the shower or before you go to bed that begin to percolate you someday. And as you guys know, as you mentioned earlier, as you move up levels, levels, levels, the thing that seems to happen is you get way more urgent, but not. Still important, but not super important stuff. Whereas this is time to moving from like just being reactive each day to being proactive. Like, for example, the gratitude one. When would you really go, I'm going to write this thank you letter? You might have been putting off this thank you letter for four years that would take you 10 minutes to do.

• 1:09:59Speaker 03

  But with this, and, and then when you actually reflect on the year, it's one of the few things that you actually remember.

• 1:10:03Jonny?

  You've also brought yourself in alignment with the person that you want to be as well, which is quite a nice side effect too.

• 1:10:09Speaker 03

  Exactly. And then you, and then if you can just move that to another note, you just keep storing, storing that I am that person.

• 1:10:16Chris Williamson?

  Nice. Should we do some resolutions? Uh, I basically had this idea that, uh, coming up with resolutions for yourself, a lot of the time, whatever it is, by March, some ungodly percentage of people have already stopped doing the thing they said was the most important thing at the start of the year. A good part of that is maybe habit change or behavior change is difficult to do, but maybe a bigger part of it is, well, they chose the wrong things, like the stuff that I've chosen that stuck with me for the rest of my life. And I figured, I don't think I've ever seen anyone do this before, but what are the highest ROI resolutions or new habits or behavior change things that you've done, simple things, given that, you know, this is going out on Christmas Eve, Eve and people are going to be thinking about it.

• 1:10:59Chris Williamson?

  This might actually be a nice little finger food buffet that people could go, actually, the boy said that this one really stuck. So I'm going to go with that. So have you got any?

• 1:11:09Jonny?

  I do.

• 1:11:09Chris Williamson?

  Cool.

• 1:11:10Jonny?

  I, for the last, I didn't do it last year. I did like three years in a row of a version of 75 hard. Didn't anyone ever done that before?

• 1:11:20Chris Williamson?

  Adapted 75 hard.

• 1:11:21Jonny?

  Just because like when you look at actually 75 hard out of the box, there are things in it that I think are

• 1:11:25Chris Williamson?

  Too hard.

• 1:11:26Jonny?

  Too hard, far too hard. No, just there for, I think maybe slightly destructive in some ways. And also I just don't want to do.

• 1:11:33Chris Williamson?

  Which ones did you find?

• 1:11:34Jonny?

  So like training twice a day, every day. I don't, I just don't think there's any, I don't think that, I think there's ways to, to pursue that sort of goal without those things. It's like Drinking a gallon of water, like Stony adulterers.

• 1:11:47Chris Williamson?

  It seems like an arbitrary.

• 1:11:48Jonny?

  Yeah. And I realize it's there because it's hard, but I think the thing Claire Holy War, like the few of those. Not for me. The thing that's hard about it is you have to do the things that like the habits you set to do for 75 days in a row. And if you miss a day, you go back to the beginning. And I think as a like, just trying to do that, you realize how hard that is and how many like new little bullshit reasons come up and how you have to kind of like go out of your way a lot of the time to tick off the box. I think it's a good lesson.

• 1:12:15Chris Williamson?

  Can you regale us of our friend who set himself a target of having a banana every day?

• 1:12:23Jonny?

  Yeah, I mean, yeah. So our friend Ben, um, one of his things was have a banana. I think because he'd read it was something to do like good for bowel health. Um, and it got to like 11 o'clock at night. He was staying in Cambridge, didn't have a banana. So was driving around Cambridge, trying to find a banana. He's also like meditated. So one of his things when we were doing it was meditate an hour a day. He's meditated at a wedding before, like gone out.

• 1:12:49Jonny?

  I'm sorry.

• 1:12:50Chris Williamson?

  Was he the group?

• 1:12:50Jonny?

  Sorry. He, he went out and sat in the car, sat in the car, meditating in the car, just to tick the box. I don't, it's not something to like sustain for the rest of your life, but I think you learn, you learn something about yourself when you're doing it.

• 1:13:03Chris Williamson?

  Well, one of the problems of it is that it doesn't agree with a varied lifestyle.

• 1:13:07Jonny?

  Exactly.

• 1:13:08Chris Williamson?

  Seventy five hard is brilliant for the first sort of autistic two, two and a half months of the year. But as soon as you get into it's wedding season.

• 1:13:16Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:16Chris Williamson?

  So good luck, mate.

• 1:13:17Jonny?

  Yeah, we have to go.

• 1:13:18Chris Williamson?

  Like finding, finding what are, you know,

• 1:13:21Chris Williamson?

  me and the boys flew to Australia. You're on a plane for 17 and a bit hours, but where's the banana? Well, you couldn't plan the banana in advance. You're like, fuck.

• 1:13:30Jonny?

  It's more that you just, you don't view any like personal habit change or behavior changes difficult. If you've been able to stick to something for 75 days without interruption, any other change you want to make is easy.

• 1:13:40Chris Williamson?

  So it's the meta lesson, not the individual.

• 1:13:42Jonny?

  It's got nothing to do with the, as long as you don't pick like ridiculously easy things.

• 1:13:47Chris Williamson?

  So you would, you would basically say that a good resolution is to do some version of 75 hard, but adapt it into stuff that you really, really value.

• 1:13:54Jonny?

  Yeah. And it can be anything, like anything you're trying to do, but keep putting off or something you're inconsistent with, just commit to. It also doesn't have to be 75 days, but like committing to a period of time of, I'm not going to miss a day. I'm going to like move heaven and earth to not miss a day. And you you get to the end, you're like, oh, like, what an achievement. Anything else would be easy.

• 1:14:11Speaker 02

  So, yeah, there's so many adulterers and sodomites that need stoning. And if you just commit.

• 1:14:18Chris Williamson?

  Where's that from?

• 1:14:19Speaker 02

  Oh, it's the, you know what it is? It's the like a wispy memory from the guy who I think you spoke to, Chris, who lived the Old Testament for a year. Like

• 1:14:31Jonny?

  Jesus Christ. I thought I would have heard about that.

• 1:14:34Chris Williamson?

  I don't think

• 1:14:35Speaker 02

  I spoke to him.

• 1:14:36Jonny?

  I think it's just something you've read.

• 1:14:37Chris Williamson?

  Old Testament or New Testament.

• 1:14:38Speaker 02

  This is a guy. Yeah. So he set himself different challenges each year.

• 1:14:42Chris Williamson?

  Lived inside of a whale. Built a big, build an ark.

• 1:14:46Speaker 02

  So he he had to visit, he had to grow out his, his, um, his hair and like throw pebbles at sodomites and adulterers. And yet, like, he, he, he tried to live, like, to live the life of that, like, verbatim for a year. And then he, like, his other challenge was, uh, read the entire, um, Encyclopedia Britannica. And he said it really pissed off his wife because is this ringing a bell?

• 1:15:07Chris Williamson?

  No. He wasn't on the show.

• 1:15:09Speaker 02

  Did you know that the Byzantine period, she's like, ah, stop it with your trivia. But, yeah, anyway.

• 1:15:15Jonny?

  He did anything.

• 1:15:15Chris Williamson?

  Throwing pebbles.

• 1:15:16Jonny?

  You interviewed somebody who did, like, early on.

• 1:15:20Speaker 02

  It was, yeah, very early.

• 1:15:21Jonny?

  They did maybe something each month for a year, a different thing each month for a year.

• 1:15:25Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. But it wasn't.

• 1:15:27Speaker 02

  Not the Old Testament.

• 1:15:28Jonny?

  Nothing to do with that.

• 1:15:29Chris Williamson?

  No, he didn't build an ark and try and get two, two by two. Hi, it's, welcome back to the show. This episode, we have a man. A sect to learn. Licking pebbles. An M and S. Bummers.

• 1:15:42Speaker 02

  What a derailment. So

• 1:15:44Chris Williamson?

  Old wisdom.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  The process that we use for goal setting each year is stolen from Garrett J. White, who probably stole it from someone else and so on.

• 1:15:52Chris Williamson?

  He's got a lawsuit at the moment.

• 1:15:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, big style.

• 1:15:55Speaker 02

  Wow. Interesting. So it's splitting your year into quarters and then splitting that into four domains of your life, body, being, balance and business, or health, wealth, love and happiness. But I quite like the alliteration. And you then basically look at, okay, what's my three year vision? Directionally, where do I want to go? What's my one year target for that? Divide that into quarters. What is, what does each 12 week sprint look like in each of those domains? And then how can I do a weekly action? Or a daily action to hit a weekly checkpoint to hit that quarterly target in each domain? And it's designed so that you're not like blasting it, grinding your face off with stuff. You're just turning up and just hitting a single each day.

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  So that you move towards your goal and you're fully aligned. You don't end up out of balance with like overweighting one domain of your life. So the idea is to kind of counteract people who just like double down on their business. And they end up like overweight, spiritually disconnected and divorced and all this stuff. But they, they got the million. And so that framework's been really helpful for me. Um, it also gives me one thing to focus on in each domain. Um, the other, the other big thing that's had the most impact, I think, is single tasking. For years, I drunk the Kool-Aid that I can multitask.

• 1:17:20Speaker 02

  And that because I've got like Alfred installed and keyboard shortcuts, whatever, I can just like flip between windows and tabs. And it feels more productive because your brain's like, oh, great. There's loads of like things happening, but the quality of that work, the attention residue, all of that stuff isn't worth it. And so like you said about deciding what's the key thing this morning and just blast three hours on it. Blinkers on, noise cancelling headphones, whatever, and just do that one thing. Um, and then to create a loop, a feedback loop with that, you have something that is a visual or a tactile reminder of this is what I'm working on right now. And it sounds like overkill, but I think our brains are so

• 1:18:03Speaker 02

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

• 1:18:22Chris Williamson?

  The only reason you're here, the only reason you're here is to do that. That's cool. I like that. So I had two, um, I guess you brought up sobriety, which is one of those ones that's so sort of taken for granted now that I've forgotten about it.

• 1:18:33Jonny?

  You know that that used to be quite contrarian when you first started that. I remember, yeah.

• 1:18:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah. It was fucking crazy.

• 1:18:39Jonny?

  Give it five years, Old Testament will be writing.

• 1:18:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:42Speaker 02

  You're getting stoned.

• 1:18:46Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Um, okay. So my two highest ROI resolutions that I've done, they've stuck with me. Number one, sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom and number two, go for a walk first thing in the morning. Like.

• 1:18:58Jonny?

  I've always wondered about the phone thing. Is it something specifically to do with the phone being in the bedroom or is it just next to your bed? Is it like the fact that it's near you and it's emitting radio waves?

• 1:19:09Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:19:30Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:20:01Jonny?

  Terrible thing.

• 1:20:02Chris Williamson?

  Issues.

• 1:20:03Speaker 02

  Well, that or it's Alexander's library. So, oh, well, there is Alexander's library on the other side of this room with infinite.

• 1:20:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Whether it's good, whether it's framed well or badly, the, what's your one task now? Go to fucking sleep. So go to sleep. Uh, and then the morning walk thing, just, you know, this was something that I'd started doing probably from some shit I'd learned from us researching things forever ago. And, uh, I just noticed that if I woke up and I was feeling a little nervous or sort of anxious energy or whatever, whatever I was feeling in the morning, by the time that I'd done a 15 minute walk, by the time I came back. I ju- it just felt less strong and less important. And there's all manner of Huberman explanations about whatever it is, the ventral dorsal stream and you're locomoting through while you're doing lateral eye movement, which down regulates the way blah, blah, blah. It's like I like the midwit, the guy on the left says morning walk makes me feel nice.

• 1:20:49Chris Williamson?

  And those two things, I think, you know, the two that I've done. In every different hotel, every different place that I've stayed, every different country that I've gone to. Those are two things that I really, really try and rely on. The phone outside of the room when you're on the road is difficult. It's like, plug it in in the bathroom and then like go into the bedroom. But morning walk, phone outside of the bedroom has been two of the highest ROI.

• 1:21:12Speaker 02

  Do you still do no caffeine first thing?

• 1:21:15Chris Williamson?

  Uh, yeah, yeah. So I'm avoiding that.

• 1:21:17Speaker 02

  Your point about Huberman is great that he's been able to pacify the midwits by providing.

• 1:21:24Chris Williamson?

  Legitimating scientifically.

• 1:21:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, to for people to just follow the guy on the left stuff.

• 1:21:28Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:21:29Speaker 03

  We have this joke that so Huberman did a, and I do love Huberman, but he did a five part podcast with Matthew Walker on sleep. And I think it was like 20 hours long. And I joke that I'd be willing to bet nobody who listens to that sleeps as good as my mate, Quinny, who's just like, just shut your eyes, lad. You know what I mean? Like, he just doesn't overthink it.

• 1:21:49Speaker 02

  He deliberately doesn't optimize it because he's like, if I mess with it, then I'm going to sleep worse if it's not.

• 1:21:54Speaker 03

  Sleep is one of those perfect examples of. One of the reasons a lot of people have insomnia is trying to overthink sleep. There was a famous study where they took two groups, one that were paid to go to sleep as fast as they can. And the other group that wasn't paid anything and the group that wasn't paid anything fell to sleep three times as faster as the other group. So outside of all the sleep science, the number one part of the semantic tree is don't put too much stress on yourself.

• 1:22:21Chris Williamson?

  Oh, because they don't, don't take money for it.

• 1:22:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but it's, it's an, it's an interesting realization that.

• 1:22:31Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:22:53Speaker 03

  So that's why I brought up caffeine. Cause I, I'm not sure on like my personal experience of that, I'm not sure I feel much of a difference.

• 1:23:00Chris Williamson?

  By not having the caffeine first?

• 1:23:02Speaker 03

  Or having caffeine first, yeah. And I'm sure the science will tell me differently, but I think that's a good example.

• 1:23:07Speaker 02

  You're like a heavyweight boxer that can just take slugs with caffeine, you're just like.

• 1:23:11Speaker 03

  No, I think I just, I have like the appropriate amount and then I stop.

• 1:23:14Chris Williamson?

  Lots.

• 1:23:15Speaker 03

  Lots.

• 1:23:15Speaker 02

  Just don't get silly with this.

• 1:23:17Speaker 03

  And not before, not after midday.

• 1:23:19Chris Williamson?

  Good rule.

• 1:23:20Speaker 03

  Gee. So I, I do have one, but to go like meta New Year's resolutions to begin with, the first thing is to kind of question the question. So I found this stat when I was researching New Year's resolutions last year and it's said, or it said that 91% of New Year's resolutions fail. So quick little thought experiment for you, Christopher, right? Let's say you come to me and you go, oh, I need to get this flight to Paris, Wazza is gone. I go, I don't worry, Chris, I've got this airline. It's got a 91% failure rate. Are you going to get on it? No. Or let's say you, if I know what you're like, you've been out on the town, you've been out with

• 1:24:02Speaker 03

  Mr. Old Testament, you're having fun, you've met a lovely lady, you go back to the room and you go, fuck, I've got no condoms and you knock on my door and I go, oh yeah, yeah, take this one. And it just says on the seal, 91% failure rate. Would you do it?

• 1:24:15Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:24:15Speaker 03

  So if something has a 91% failure rate, you have to look at it before I think you do it. So then you look at things like Alcoholics Anonymous, that seems to work.

• 1:24:24Speaker 02

  Question something?

• 1:24:25Speaker 03

  Go on.

• 1:24:25Speaker 02

  I think the failure in those examples is.

• 1:24:28Jonny?

  It's like saying 91% of people fail to make the flight on time.

• 1:24:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:33Jonny?

  Or 91% of people can't get the condom on.

• 1:24:35Speaker 03

  So you've gone meta about my meta. So can I go meta about, no, no, no. We will end up in infinite labs like Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson. What do you mean by truth, Johnny?

• 1:24:44Chris Williamson?

  You mean by condom, exactly.

• 1:24:46Speaker 03

  So basically, I would first look at things that actually work. So I'd look at Alcoholics Anonymous, where you have a group. So you have kind of social shame. You have a recurring theme. You have, basically, New Year's resolutions operate like the psychological version of North Korea. Versus you kind of want to move towards Singapore. A system that actually works versus a horrific failure rate. So even small things of, okay, whatever the thing is, like, I'll sometimes do this whenever I have a deadline that I'm being a bitch about, is I'll just message my mate Harry and say, hey, I'm going to bet this uncomfortable amount of money that I will do the thing. And as a result, I will do the thing. There's the scene in Fight Club where Tyler Durden goes into this random shop.

• 1:25:31Speaker 03

  And he finds this Asian guy behind the counter, takes him outside, gun to his head and says, tell me what you want it to be, Raymond.

• 1:25:37Jonny?

  Raymond.

• 1:25:38Speaker 03

  Raymond. And he's like shaking, unsure. And he goes, I want it to be a veterinarian. And he goes, if I'm, I'll come back here in 30 days. And if you're not a veterinarian, you'll be dead. You can bet that he, he didn't have a 91% failure rate. So I think first off, questioning the question, which is pretty hardcore. But then the real soft call, nice thing that I would recommend is journaling.

• 1:26:01Chris Williamson?

  All of that is said.

• 1:26:03Speaker 03

  Journaling is.

• 1:26:05Jonny?

  So don't bother with.

• 1:26:06Speaker 03

  So this one is less about, it is essentially, you don't appreciate, writing a journal now, it's kind of like investing in the S and P. You go, I could be doing all these activities, but a journal five years hence, the value of that is so significant. It's like, even now, if I go on a flight and I can go through exactly how I thought 10 years ago or what I was doing. Cause you forget so much. And going back to your point earlier, it's just the same problems over and over again. I had a friend of mine who I think had his journal stolen. And because he left it in his suitcase, it got stolen. I go, how much was that worth to you? He's like, probably like 15% of 15 or 20% of everything I have. It's so valuable. Jim O'Shaughnessy, who's one of the smartest guys I know, older gentleman, he's about 60.

• 1:26:49Speaker 03

  And he was telling me about journals he has from when he was like 21 and the value that that has to him.

• 1:26:53Speaker 02

  Have I told you about this, George? I took a journal every day from the age of 13 to 19.

• 1:26:58Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:26:59Speaker 02

  On a Microsoft Word document. And then one day I opened it, file corrupted. Just like, oh, well.

• 1:27:05Speaker 03

  Did you never back it up?

• 1:27:05Speaker 02

  No, I was like, well, that's the end of that and just stopped.

• 1:27:08Speaker 03

  Not backing up that up is the least you thing ever. Or is that, is that where it starts?

• 1:27:13Speaker 02

  This was when I was transitioning Windows to Mac. So it was in that. However, I've still got the file. So I could maybe uncorrupt it now with modern, modern technology will be able to.

• 1:27:22Speaker 03

  Like whether it's, you do this very well. You take a lot of photos, videos. I don't do that. I'm trying to do it more. But more photos, more videos, more journals, because the value of it is so significant. 10, 20, 30.

• 1:27:33Speaker 02

  Day one.

• 1:27:34Speaker 03

  Day one.

• 1:27:35Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:27:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can use, you can leave audio messages. You can photos, videos.

• 1:27:40Chris Williamson?

  She's big Apple Notes for everything.

• 1:27:41Speaker 03

  One size fits all.

• 1:27:42Speaker 02

  Apple Notes. It's frictionless.

• 1:27:44Chris Williamson?

  One size fits all. Should we do, what have you got left? Should we do one more round of life hacks? What have we got?

• 1:27:48Speaker 02

  I've got a lesson and a fail.

• 1:27:50Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:27:51Speaker 03

  I have a lesson. Are we doing fails?

• 1:27:53Chris Williamson?

  Uh, I, we can do, let's do, let's do another lesson and then we'll see where we come in at.

• 1:27:57Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:27:57Chris Williamson?

  Have you got another lesson?

• 1:27:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:59Chris Williamson?

  Beautiful.

• 1:28:00Speaker 02

  So I'll take the potato.

• 1:28:02Chris Williamson?

  You're up, potato.

• 1:28:03Speaker 03

  Oh, you're potatoing me. Yeah.

• 1:28:04Speaker 02

  You looked to him, but.

• 1:28:05Chris Williamson?

  It's all on you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:09Speaker 03

  Trying to find the micro plate equivalent in happiness.

• 1:28:15Chris Williamson?

  What's a micro?

• 1:28:15Speaker 03

  Micro plate is a, it's a plate that's less than 2.5 kilos usually. So it's like half a kilo, 0.25 of a kilo. So in, when I was doing powerlifting, you realize really quickly that like.

• 1:28:30Jonny?

  200 kilos, when that's your one rep max, that feels the same as 210, feels the same as 220. It's just always your one rep max. But what's, what makes it engaging is the fact that it's slightly more than you did last week, last month, last year. And I think whenever you go like the steroids equivalent in anything, there's just always the debt to pay. In hindsight, so in business, again, like most of our lessons are business wise, we grew really fast. And you're like, fantastic. We like, was it really this really steady growth rate? And then like 300% and you think phenomenal, like next, next thing, next thing. But actually like going back, I'd have taken a way slower growth rate year in, year out.

• 1:29:10Jonny?

  Because that, the experience is way better and finding the like, just take the PB. Like just take the extra rep, just take the extra kilo week in, week out. Because I, for me, I think the only thing that matters is the feeling that you're making some kind of progress. Something's moving in the right direction. It doesn't actually matter what the absolute number is. And that's a, because now we're further on, it's harder to find the, the half a kilo. Then if we just thought, hang on a minute, this is growing way too quickly, let's slow down.

• 1:29:42Chris Williamson?

  I, I, I'm gonna have to leapfrog ahead of you because it's my lesson.

• 1:29:46Jonny?

  Add your podcast.

• 1:29:47Chris Williamson?

  True, yeah. Trajectory is more important than position, uh, which is a Jimmy Carrism. But that being number 300 in the world, but last year being 350 feels better than being number two in the world. But last year being number one, uh, because you're so tightly attuned to what is the direction that I'm on? Not what is my absolute position? Happiness is relative, it's not absolute. And, uh, yeah, I'd spoken weirdly enough, got this theory co-signed by Dan Bilzerian before he went all antisemitic. And, um,

• 1:30:20Jonny?

  Old Testament Dan.

• 1:30:21Chris Williamson?

  Old Testament Dan, that's what he calls himself, Old Tea Dan.

• 1:30:26Chris Williamson?

  He, I basically said, like, he's sort of gone to the top of the hedonic mountain, so to speak.

• 1:30:32Chris Williamson?

  In some ways, do you wish that you'd? Dragged out that progress a little bit more because it would have allowed you to have had more places to go to that basically every new record you set, especially big step changes in terms of success is just a new higher bar for you to now.

• 1:30:48Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:30:49Chris Williamson?

  So, uh, what you would say, success isn't more, uh, success isn't a better vantage point to have a view from, it's a higher point to fall from. Uh, and it becomes increasingly difficult to get those, you know, to improve your lifts when you're first going to the gym by five percent is maybe five kilos. But after a couple of years in the gym, it's a significantly larger amount, it's significantly higher level of pressure. So yeah, trajectory more important than position.

• 1:31:15Speaker 02

  So Chris Sparks-ism as well, direction over speed. Oh, is it?

• 1:31:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I don't know whether that's quite the same.

• 1:31:24Speaker 02

  Trajectory over position.

• 1:31:25Chris Williamson?

  Trajectory, uh, trajectory is more important position in that your growth is more important than your absolute location.

• 1:31:31Speaker 02

  Actually, that's housed within direction over speed.

• 1:31:34Jonny?

  So going from a 220 deadlift to a 225 deadlift versus a 395 to a 400 kilo deadlift, it feels the same.

• 1:31:40Speaker 02

  As opposed to.

• 1:31:40Jonny?

  It's way harder to operate at the higher level.

• 1:31:42Speaker 02

  As opposed to like, I want to get stronger.

• 1:31:44Chris Williamson?

  And also the 400, so James Smith says all wins feel the same.

• 1:31:48Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:48Chris Williamson?

  But there's no Uber surcharge for going 395 to 400 versus going 210 to 210.

• 1:31:53Jonny?

  Any, any revenue level, any bank account number, it's all.

• 1:31:56Speaker 02

  Dopamine is dopamine, isn't it?

• 1:31:57Chris Williamson?

  But how, so the problem is, are you suggesting that you purposefully throttle?

• 1:32:01Jonny?

  Yes.

• 1:32:02Chris Williamson?

  How?

• 1:32:03Jonny?

  It's difficult, but like anytime you notice yourself progressing in something, just accept the, accept the slower rate. Cause everyone's always trying to make things faster. They're always trying to get leaner quicker, get bigger quicker, make more money faster. Like that's the world, right? But just look, accept the smaller rate of growth or the smaller rate of progress.

• 1:32:19Chris Williamson?

  How do you, to Chris's point, how do you do that now? Are you intentional of go, okay, I want 15% this year and then I'm capping it at 15?

• 1:32:26Jonny?

  Aim for a steady, steady improvement in something rather than going for big targets. Obviously it's, it's, I don't have all of the answers, George, I'm sorry.

• 1:32:33Chris Williamson?

  Existentially very difficult.

• 1:32:35Jonny?

  But like as a concept, as a, yeah, cause it, you would take, if I offered you 200% growth in something, you would probably, your immediate response would be like, yeah.

• 1:32:43Chris Williamson?

  But why?

• 1:32:43Speaker 02

  In business, like Gina Wickman talks about having growth phases and then consolidation phases where rather than just like, cause if you spam the growth in scale, you're going to end up with like unrickety foundations. Whereas if you take some time where you go, actually, I'm just going to like focus on internal growth for a while and like solidify the foundations before the next sprint. You're going to create a more sustainable. You just always have to pay the debt off, don't you? Yeah. Always.

• 1:33:07Chris Williamson?

  Good insight. Nice. Seth?

• 1:33:10Speaker 02

  Have you ever had a chat with someone who says that they want a goal? And then you start giving them solutions and they'll keep coming up with rotating reasons and excuses for not doing it. So this is, I think, a nihilism. Correct me if I'm wrong. If information was all that was needed, we would all be billionaires with perfect abs. So something I've really learned over the last couple of years is there is somebody's actual goal. And then there is the story that they tell themselves about what they think their goal is. And often it's not the same, someone's actions versus their words. So George got me a book a few years ago called The Courage to Be Disliked.

• 1:33:55Speaker 02

  And it's basically a summary written by Parable about Adler versus Freud. So Adler was one of Freud's contemporaries and he's kind of the lesser known, you know, Freud, Jung, Adler, like those kind of original psychologists. His view is the teleological view rather than the etiological view. So Freud's view is something happened to me when I was a child and it's caused me to behave like this. So past event produces current behaviour. Adler is the teleological view, which is future goal impacts current behaviour. So the example given is somebody is always getting rejected by people and they've made themselves repulsive to other people.

• 1:34:41Speaker 02

  So that they can tell themselves the story that, oh, no one likes me and everyone finds me whatever. But the goal baked into that, the hidden payoff of that belief is that it keeps them safe because they can reject themselves before other people can reject them. So they construct a certain identity that allows them to fulfill that goal and meet the payoff. So we, we run a programme to help people grow their business in a specific niche. But quite often you'll see that the more barriers and the more guardrails you put up to make failure absolutely impossible.

• 1:35:18Speaker 02

  What's happening is you're kind of backing someone into a corner where it's like you're removing the technological friction, you're removing the blueprint friction, you're removing the what to do and how to do it and the process until suddenly there's nothing left but you as the bottleneck. And so you mentioned this with GPT, I'm glad you did, which is that now like we have infinite access to the best computational models working at like super PhD level and all information at our fingertips and people haven't suddenly become infinitely more productive. All that's done is like take away another excuse and another objection to the point where you're

• 1:35:56Speaker 02

  like, ah, like now it really is just me. And so someone's willingness to actually show up and do the thing is still always going to be the the final frontier.

• 1:36:09Chris Williamson?

  How would you summarize that lesson overall?

• 1:36:12Speaker 02

  What people tell themselves the goal is, isn't always the goal. So look at actions versus behavior and don't think that you just have an information bottleneck and that'll solve everything.

• 1:36:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I guess it's weird to think, how can you say that you value a thing if your actions show no indication?

• 1:36:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, actions versus words.

• 1:36:28Chris Williamson?

  In that way, yeah.

• 1:36:30Speaker 02

  Look at your calendar to find your priorities.

• 1:36:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's all shit that we learned fucking 10 years.

• 1:36:35Speaker 02

  10 years ago, yeah. But now you're like, oh, yeah.

• 1:36:37Speaker 03

  Gee, lessons or life hack or?

• 1:36:39Chris Williamson?

  Lesson, please.

• 1:36:40Speaker 03

  Okay, have we got more after this or is this the final one?

• 1:36:43Chris Williamson?

  Last one.

• 1:36:43Speaker 03

  Okay, cool. I'll try and get through as much as I can. So first one is going back to Old Testament for a second is the Socratic method. So one thing I would do.

• 1:36:59Speaker 02

  What do you mean by that, George?

• 1:37:00Speaker 03

  There we go, matter about that. What do you mean? What do you mean by truth?

• 1:37:03Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean by Socratic?

• 1:37:04Speaker 03

  What do you mean? So one thing that I would typically do, being an idiot, is whenever somebody would say something I disagree with, I would just stop listening to what they're saying and then just start. Processing the dunk I'm about to do in my head. And then as soon as they stop talking, I'm dunking, but I'm noticing they're just doing the same thing. So now, just rather than disagreeing with people, just asking questions. And not only do you actually not necessarily ruin relationships or have emotional issues with other people, you actually also sometimes change their mind quite a lot as well.

• 1:37:44Speaker 03

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

• 1:38:26Speaker 03

  And he's just paused for a bit and he goes, yeah, you might be right. Versus if I would have tried letting them come write the code in their own head and being a Seeing behind the curtain.

• 1:38:37Speaker 03

  Socrates calls it being a midwife. You're helping them give birth to the new idea rather than trying to push it into them is a is a big thing. And then the other one, so I've been quite fascinated by doom loops this year. So a doom loop would be, I'm feeling anxiety. Fuck, why am I being anxious? Why are you criticizing yourself for being anxious? And it's just anxiety. You get anxious about your anxiety, which leads to more anxiety and it's boom, boom, boom. Or why am I so depressed? And so you had the initial stimuli that's kind of, you don't really control. And then it's your reaction to that. And getting a little bit deeper into meditation this year, there were two things that I found useful.

• 1:39:20Speaker 03

  One is to, I call it the Pilkington fork. So Carl Pilkington, who, the philosopher K. Pilkington once said, he's telling a story to Jevése about when he got mugged in the center of town. Some guys came over to him and like, give me your phone. And usually there's two ways you react to that. It's like punching them or it's like running away. Yeah, sure, sure. And he goes, but I love this phone. He goes, it's my favorite thing. And he starts like being very strange. He goes, how are you, by the way? He goes, we've met before and just like completely freaks them out that he doesn't know how to react the mugger and he just walks away. So using that on my own brain. So if I get super, if I get, there's a few things. One, asking my brain, what's the next thought you're gonna have?

• 1:40:04Speaker 03

  And it just stops. And then sometimes a random thing will appear and then you go, well, was that me? Because I didn't try and bring that up. So you have this natural detachment as well as when I hear anxiety. So let's say I'm anxious about an event I've got going up and then I'll start going, I'm being anxious. And I go, I get it. I get why you're anxious. And it all of a sudden, because you've not had the cortisol reaction to the cortisol, it kind of, the Pilkington fork occurs and you break out. So those are, those are my two ones.

• 1:40:33Chris Williamson?

  Awesome. Yeah, I think I called them second order emotions.

• 1:40:37Speaker 03

  Oh, I like that.

• 1:40:38Chris Williamson?

  That like infinite regress of resentment to your frustration about your bitterness, about your anxiety.

• 1:40:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. Final one, because we did it. You guys might like this from a business perspective. My friend, Harry Dry, phenomenal human being, he gave me this nugget, which is positioning is arranging information in the customer's head.

• 1:41:00Speaker 03

  So do it again. Positioning is a rain, I'm arranging, you see, I'm arranging, you matter again, right? Positioning is arranging information in the customer's head. So example would be Loom used to be record your screen, record your screen. Whereas then they didn't change the product, they just changed the positioning, how it was structured in the customer's head to removing meetings and it explodes and separated from the rest of the competition. And then I thought, okay, frame is how you arrange information in your own head and frame itself is positioning is completely underlooked and frame is completely underlooked as well.

• 1:41:38Chris Williamson?

  That was brilliant.

• 1:41:39Speaker 03

  Cheers, mate.

• 1:41:40Chris Williamson?

  You're on fire, mate.

• 1:41:41Speaker 03

  I feel like my, the information's been arranged differently in my head. I feel really nice. We've got so much energy, we need to go to like the local M and S and just throw stones at people.

• 1:41:48Chris Williamson?

  I actually, that was exactly what was next. It's that and then chicken. Boys, I love you all. I appreciate you.

• 1:41:53Speaker 03

  You too. Merry Christmas.

• 1:41:54Chris Williamson?

  I'm sad that we don't get to spend as much time together as we used to.

• 1:41:57Speaker 02

  You said we've got another hack.

• 1:41:58Chris Williamson?

  No fails. Uh, why don't we save, why don't we save them for next year?

• 1:42:02Speaker 02

  We'll save a fail for next year.

• 1:42:03Chris Williamson?

  We can keep everyone coming back. But no, I really do. Uh, I'm so happy and so proud of what all of you have done. It's fucking fire. It's great. I'm very glad that you're in my life, even though we're apart from each other.

• 1:42:12Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. What a year it's been as well.

• 1:42:14Speaker 03

  What a year.

• 1:42:14Chris Williamson?

  Fire. Ladies and gentlemen, Merry Christmas. I'll see you next time.

• 1:42:21Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:42:22Chris Williamson?

  Should we, uh?

• 1:42:23Speaker 02

  Peak stage. Oh, yeah. I actually can't raise my arms, but.

• 1:42:28Chris Williamson?

  Ready?

• 1:42:29Speaker 02

  Very salty.

• 1:42:30Chris Williamson?

  Are you gonna take us through this?

• 1:42:31Speaker 02

  This isn't my thing. This is yours, eh? Okay. And arms overhead.

• 1:42:46Speaker 04

  Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:42:55Speaker 05

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Ravenhead.

• 1:43:03Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there. That's what.

• 1:43:07Speaker 05

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:43:10Speaker 04

  I'm not the first, daddy.

• 1:43:11Speaker 05

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.