Note Apps, Book Summaries & iPhone Tips - Life Hacks 205 | Modern Wisdom Podcast 341

Jonny & Yusef from Propane Fitness join me for another Life Hacks episode. Sit back & enjoy as we run through our favourite tools, apps, websites, strategies & resources for a productive and efficient life. Expect to learn how to crush singing happy birthday, why Yusef is leaving Evernote, the most fun way to spend £12, how to get YouTube Premium for 94p, the ultimate warmup routine, why Jonny is now the most interesting person in the room, how to sleep in Amsterdam Airport and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount on Reebok’s entire range including the amazing Nano X1 at https://geni.us/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Get perfect teeth 70% cheaper than other invisible aligners from DW Aligners at http://dwaligners.co.uk/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Automatically Turn On Low Power Mode Apple Notes instead of Evernote Happy birthday one octave lower Try Blinkist - https://www.blinkist.com/ Use your birthday as a benchmark target Aerobie Pro Disk - https://amzn.to/3j7AUQ3 Write an email to yourself for your birthday [email protected] Tesco Own Brand Stuffing 94p YouTube Premium via Argentina - https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM Commit to a warmup - https://youtu.be/SYumTpIYGbY All Krispy Kremes have similar calories Gate D2 in Amsterdam airport Buy protein powder on holiday Curio - https://curio.io/ Washable Lint Roller for dog hair - https://amzn.to/3h4jJfo Watch Marcella Watch Time Watch Mortal Kombat Watch Gangs Of London Watch Knives Out Michael Raduger - The Phase on YouTube - https://youtu.be/64_MvWQ25M8 Read Jed McKenna - https://amzn.to/2SThnZ1 Speech Central - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/speech-central-text-to-speech/id1223093645?mt=12 Watch Next Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #lifehacks #productivity #efficiency - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - 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?

  What's happening people, welcome back to the show. My guests today are Jonny and Yusef from Propane Fitness and it is another Life Hacks episode. If you're unfamiliar, we run through our favourite tools, apps, websites, strategies and resources for a productive and efficient life. Everything that we go through is linked in the show notes below. If I've managed to find discount codes or anything like that, it should be down there. So today, expect to learn how to crush singing "Happy Birthday", why Yusef is leaving Evernote, the most fun way to spend £12, how to get YouTube Premium for £0.94, the ultimate warm-up routine, why Jonny is now the most interesting person in the room, how to sleep in Amsterdam Airport, and much more.

• 0:42Chris Williamson?

  On top of that, the next couple of weeks are looking mad for guests, including Dr David Sinclair, one of the world's leading longevity experts, Rob Reid, talking about bioweapons, Rupert Spira, Ryan Long, the comedian, Daniel Schmachtenberg is back on for another episode, Danny Trejo, the world famous Hollywood actor, James Nestor, the guy that wrote Breath, JP Sears, comedian, Stuart Russell, the guy behind The Alignment Problem, and Ryan Holiday, back on for round two. It really is a jam-packed couple of months coming up. And the best thing you can do to continue to support the show, if you love what I do, share this with a friend. There's three buttons in the bottom, press "copy link", and just post it in a group chat or fire it on a work Intranet or something.

• 1:27Chris Williamson?

  That's the only thing that I would ask of you. That and making sure that you've pressed subscribe, obviously. But you've done that, haven't you? You've done that because you're a good human and you're not a waste of space.

• 1:38Speaker 01

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• 1:49Speaker 02

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• 1:55Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You start, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 2:02Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 2:10Speaker 04

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• 2:33Speaker 05

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• 3:03Chris Williamson?

  But now, it's time to learn some life hacks with Jonny and Yusef.

• 3:25Chris Williamson?

  Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome back to the show. It is another life hacks episode, tools, techniques and tactics for productive and efficient life. I tried to get some of the world's most productive people on to join me today, but none of them are available. Then I asked Dominic Cummings, he wasn't available. So I've settled for Jonny and Yusef from PropaneFitness.com. Welcome to the show, gentlemen.

• 3:47Jonny?

  Hello.

• 3:49Chris Williamson?

  It's a pleasure. What have you been doing recently, other than the first time that we've been out for food in a venue, post pandemic? So far, happened last night.

• 4:00Jonny?

  Not much. Well, it feels like I'm doing a lot, but that's just like occasionally leaving the house and going to places. Which feels like, oh my God, like I can't handle this.

• 4:09Chris Williamson?

  Novelty.

• 4:10Jonny?

  My calendar's really strained.

• 4:12Chris Williamson?

  Novelty.

• 4:12Jonny?

  But yeah, it's. I'm enjoying it. I'm enjoying like the slow. I'm pleased that there's like a, there's a roadmap of gradual release because I think if it had just been in your house for a year and then.

• 4:24Chris Williamson?

  Like features of Apple products, like you don't want the virtual reality headset right now. We want it to be drip fed to us over the.

• 4:30Jonny?

  That's a great way of looking at it. I don't think anyone would be ready for like augmented reality. So you need to phase it in, don't you?

• 4:35Chris Williamson?

  Fine. Yeah. Just push it back. Keep on pushing it back by four weeks. Anyway, uh, on this episode, if you're not familiar with life hacks, we go through whatever we've come up with to make life a little bit more efficient and effective over the last few months since our last episode. All the links to everything that we talk about, if there's any discount codes or whatever will be in the show notes below. And as is tradition, up first is a hot potato for Jonathan Watson. There you go, Johnny. What have you, what have you got for us?

• 5:00Jonny?

  Got it.

• 5:03Jonny?

  I have a, an automation, a phone, an iPhone automation. Uh, as we were just talking about, I just have, uh, an old, cheap, chatty iPhone XR. So I'm sure the new ones can do this automatically. But one of the automations I have set up is to automatically turn on low power mode at a low battery percentage, which just gives me peace of mind. A little bit. Gives you a nice landing strip, doesn't it?

• 5:31Chris Williamson?

  Hang on, is that not inbuilt already at 20%? Is there not an option that pops up and says, battery is low? Do you want to turn on low power mode?

• 5:39Jonny?

  I don't even get that. I don't get that. It just, it's already on. So when battery, battery 20%, when battery hits 20%, just turns on. There's an automation that runs that just turns on low power mode.

• 5:50Chris Williamson?

  So you've saved yourself from this notification that I'm talking about.

• 5:53Jonny?

  Cause the notification happens quite a lot, doesn't it?

• 5:56Chris Williamson?

  Moderately, frequently, yeah. So how do you do it? Where do you find the automation?

• 5:59Jonny?

  So it's in, you know, the, there's like a shortcuts, uh, app inside of your iPhone in there. So if you have it just to play around, uh, it's something that I've wanted to like, ask you both about whether you have any of these. Maybe there'll be some coming up today, but there's, there's loads of stuff you can do. You can like custom code things. The most advanced I've got is I have a shortcut to my inbox, um, in OmniFocus and it turns on low power mode. But it's just little things that you do all the time that you could, you can just make your iPhone do for you.

• 6:27Chris Williamson?

  I made one. I made one that turns that blue light on there behind the vertical bookcase in my bedroom and it's also hey Siri, enabled. So hey Siri, turn on the bedroom light.

• 6:42Chris Williamson?

  That comes on.

• 6:43Jonny?

  That's cool.

• 6:44Chris Williamson?

  Big pimpin'. Ali Abdaal's is, "Okay, Google, turn on Fire and Ice and all fucking hell breaks loose in the room where he records his videos. Things descend from the ceiling, this small woman comes up, then his consuela comes out of the floor and makes sure that she's swept everything and cleared it away, and then she descends back into the basement."

• 7:08Jonny?

  You've got to wonder why he's got a Google Home thing there.

• 7:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that was my first thought.

• 7:13Jonny?

  That kind of weakens the whole thing. Like, it's cool, but obviously.

• 7:17Chris Williamson?

  I'm pretty sure it's, "Okay, Google." I'm pretty sure it is.

• 7:20Jonny?

  Yeah, it is, yeah.

• 7:21Speaker 07

  Shortcuts are coming to Mac in November, which is going to be big.

• 7:28Chris Williamson?

  Will it? Because most shortcuts not already enabled by third-party applications.

• 7:35Jonny?

  Alfredo.

• 7:37Speaker 07

  Yes, but, so what shortcuts for Mac is going to be is an overlay of Automator, because Automator's a bit big and scary. It's like, there's Terminal for the real Navy SEALs, and then there's Automator for like, the infantry, and then there's shortcuts for the preschool.

• 7:55Chris Williamson?

  Kindergartens, yeah, precisely. Okay, cool. So automatically turn on low-power mode and you go into shortcuts for that. Yusef, the Smithmeister, what have you got for us?

• 8:05Speaker 07

  I suppose I've got to start with the biggest announcement of the year is that I'm leaving Evernote.

• 8:14Chris Williamson?

  Oh, okay.

• 8:17Speaker 07

  And so, Apple Notes, after all that, it was right under our noses.

• 8:24Jonny?

  Chris's sort of slowly emerging smoke face as Yusef's talking.

• 8:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, so, funnily enough, Apple Notes, over time, has just become more and more robust, stable, fast, and Evernote has managed to, I've never seen a software company manage to actively kamikaze themselves, like.

• 8:46Speaker 07

  They were doing so well.

• 8:48Chris Williamson?

  First mover advantage, huge customer base, really bought in, uh, community.

• 8:55Speaker 07

  And then they just pulled the pin. They were like, oh, you know, it would be great if we just nuke our building, just knock every, yeah. Just send all of our customers a poo in the post.

• 9:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Okay. So, um, what are the three things that have meant, made you leave Evernote? And what are the three things that have made you, uh, go to Apple Notes?

• 9:15Speaker 07

  Speed. So Evernote used to be fast, external brain, being able to quickly access anything, the command bar. And they got rid of the command bar and they made it slower. Now, those two things alone, for something that's supposed to function as an external brain, means it's no longer fit for purpose. You, you, your, your brain cannot have a lag, even if it's only a five or a 10 second lag. The mobile app can be up to 30 seconds and it's not acceptable for something. So even though there's a few features that you might lose, I think for the sake of Apple Notes with the Alfred shortcuts, so that it's basically, you can access a note from anywhere, definitely worth it. And there was a few exciting things coming to Apple Notes

• 9:57Speaker 07

  as well, which is tags and Quick Note. So you can just have like in the corner of a screen, a kind of working memory.txt that Cal Newport calls it, to just bung things in. So if you're in a webpage or whatever, you can keyboard shortcut, just send it straight to that Quick Note and deal with it later. Something that you can do now on iPhone is change one of the settings so that, you know, when you swipe in from the top, the control center, there's a note button and you can ask it to always open up the same one. And that can be your like.

• 10:30Chris Williamson?

  Brain dump.

• 10:31Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 10:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 10:34Speaker 07

  That's cool.

• 10:34Chris Williamson?

  Why, why not Notion?

• 10:38Speaker 07

  Notion's good, but it's not really a writing, it's not really a writing app. It's more of a workspace. Like, we use Notion with Propane. It's great for collaboration and tables and internal databases. And it's good for organizing, like, bits of information, content feed, that kind of thing. But it's cloud-based. It's not, you don't own your notes. And so if you're offline, you can't access stuff.

• 11:03Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 11:04Speaker 07

  Yeah, if, if they introduce offline mode, which they keep saying they won't. But if someone comes along and did that.

• 11:12Chris Williamson?

  I have to say, so for the people that aren't really into note-taking, as I really haven't ever been. I started on Evernote because you told me to, and I used it for a bit, and it was okay. It was more power usery, I guess, than Apple Notes. But I've just checked here, I have 1,824 notes on Apple Notes. Every set of notes for a guest for an episode is on there. All of the tracking for my adverts and stuff are on there. For the more power-based stuff, it really is far too unsophisticated because it's just a really slim-down Word document. But for the seamless stuff, like you're talking about, and the brain dumping stuff, it really is great. That being said.

• 11:48Speaker 07

  The synchronization as well between devices, like absolutely.

• 11:50Chris Williamson?

  Seamless. Well, I'll, I'll be outside in the garden, or I'll go for a walk, listening to a guest, noting down some things I might want to talk to them about. And then I can be finishing a note as I walk in the door and see it pop up on the computer as I walk toward it, which is, it's shit hot, right? When this is the advantage of going single architecture, single operating system, Apple across everything. But you can seamlessly link your AirPods between different devices and switch between the two and all the rest of it. What do you use, Johnny?

• 12:19Jonny?

  So it's, it's interesting hearing you talk about your Apple Notes volume. Because when Yusuf told me this, I looked at my Apple Notes and I have 1,529 notes.

• 12:31Jonny?

  And I was saying this to Yusuf that like, I try to use, um, so I tried to use, I tried to use Evernote.

• 12:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 12:37Jonny?

  And I tried to use Notion, then I tried to use Craft. Um, all on kind of use as Yusuf's evolved through this journey, kind of people.

• 12:44Chris Williamson?

  We're just lagging behind him, holding on to the coattails.

• 12:47Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 12:47Chris Williamson?

  The premium productivity guy.

• 12:49Jonny?

  But, but when, when I like need to write something down, I just, without even thinking about it, I open my phone, I open Apple Notes and I just make a quick note and then.

• 12:58Speaker 07

  But why is that? Cause it's, it's quick. It's just like, there's no.

• 13:01Chris Williamson?

  Lag.

• 13:02Jonny?

  Yeah. So like, I suppose with Evernote, like you open it up and then you make a note and then you've got to make sure later on that like you put the note in the right place. And it feels for some reason. Like it's not this just free form thing that you can put information into, whereas Apple Notes is just, it's literally just a list of notes.

• 13:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 13:18Jonny?

  It, it.

• 13:18Chris Williamson?

  Which is kind of what you need.

• 13:19Jonny?

  Now folders and stuff now and they've made it, they've made it better. But the original Apple Notes was like ju- literally just a list of blank documents.

• 13:27Chris Williamson?

  If they could, if they could have the main feature from Notion, which is pages within pages. So hyperlinking notes within notes and nesting them and organizing the structure. Of the folder system in that way, that would, that would be game over as, because that's the only thing that I'm really missing. It's such a, actually that and the toggle function. You know, to toggle down, um, those are the two main, like to think about that. It's not exactly a power user feature, but from a user, uh, interface perspective, it's so useful.

• 13:56Speaker 07

  So space efficient, isn't it?

• 13:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 13:58Speaker 07

  Like have that accordion. Yeah. And well, I suppose another one for people to check out then, if, if you want what Chris just described, but. You're kind of in between like not wanting to do like Rome research or obsidian is have a look at something called Nota. It's currently in beta, N O T A dot M D. Absolutely beautiful. Like it's, it's just amazing. It's a markdown editor though. So it won't work as an external brain because you can't put big files in.

• 14:23Chris Williamson?

  This is.

• 14:24Speaker 07

  But it, if it's purely for writing and yeah, linking your ideas.

• 14:27Chris Williamson?

  If you're just doing writing, what's the, is it Odyssey? Not Odyssey.

• 14:31Speaker 07

  Obsidian.

• 14:32Chris Williamson?

  No, there's another one. Um, there's Scrivener, which a lot of people use. Uh, and what else? Yes. Scriven is one of them, but.

• 14:41Speaker 07

  Oh, uh, Ulysses.

• 14:42Chris Williamson?

  Ulysses. That's it. Yes.

• 14:44Speaker 07

  So those ones are for like screen, writing screenplays and novels and that kind of thing.

• 14:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Interesting. Anyway, my first one. So this is from my, uh, speech coach, Miles. And he identified the fact that when you're singing happy birthday for someone. Everybody begins one octave higher than they should do. And then when you get three quarters of the way through the song and you need to do the key change, you get nailed by that high note. So, yeah, exactly. So what you really want to do is give it beans at the start, like, happy birthday to you. Like, and then when it gets to the happy, but you could just, you've easy, you've got it. Give yourself headroom above the happy birthday song, right? Start one octave lower than you think that you need to. And you, and then if the kids aren't impressed and grab their face, smash it into the cake and go,

• 15:34Chris Williamson?

  are you not entertained?

• 15:37Speaker 07

  Fantastic, especially the second part. So if you're, so you, you start off sounding like a bit of a willy, but you have the last laugh because you hit that high note.

• 15:46Chris Williamson?

  Key change, everyone, everyone else sounds like a 13 year old trying to speak. You.

• 15:53Jonny?

  Well, what, what people tend to do is just, just almost kind of mouth that section.

• 15:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 15:58Jonny?

  Or just mime it.

• 15:59Chris Williamson?

  Especially the men.

• 16:00Jonny?

  You're left, yeah.

• 16:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 16:01Jonny?

  You're left with kind of the few sort of strong people who can hit that note. But the, the worry is if you're still leading the pack and bellowing, you might be the only person singing.

• 16:09Chris Williamson?

  Doesn't matter.

• 16:10Jonny?

  Depends on how good you are.

• 16:11Chris Williamson?

  Everyone's going to be like, did he start one octave lower? Fucking hell, he must listen to Modern Wisdom Life Hacks. Um, yeah, but there's always, there's always a couple of people. I've always noticed this when you're singing happy birthday, there's always a couple of people that classically trained in theatre and belting out some operatic cello monster from the far side of the room. And you're like, just leave it to you.

• 16:35Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 16:36Chris Williamson?

  Leave it to you.

• 16:37Jonny?

  I really, I really don't like singing happy birthday, to be honest.

• 16:39Chris Williamson?

  What would you, do you, what's you? Do you prefer for he's a jolly good fellow or hip hip hooray? Hip hip hooray is.

• 16:46Jonny?

  Just do away with the whole thing.

• 16:48Chris Williamson?

  Really?

• 16:49Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 16:50Speaker 07

  It's, it's just a bit too long, like just awkwardly, especially if you're the one being sung to and you start with the cake.

• 16:56Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 16:57Chris Williamson?

  I think that's part of it. I think part of it is the cringe fest awkwardness that you need to endure. Because if it was easy, it wouldn't be a sacrifice by anyone.

• 17:07Speaker 07

  It's the birthday bumps, but the PC new version, isn't it? The social birthday bump.

• 17:12Chris Williamson?

  With jazz hands.

• 17:12Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 17:13Jonny?

  The slight social awkwardness that everyone has to endure, that you're kind of like seen as a bit miserable and grumpy if you don't like smile and play along.

• 17:24Chris Williamson?

  But it's his birthday. Yes, it's everyone's birthday once a year. Right. Jonathan Blobson, what you got?

• 17:31Jonny?

  Jonathan.

• 17:32Chris Williamson?

  Johan Sebastian.

• 17:34Jonny?

  So this, this one, I think you might both be, well, Yusuf won't be surprised about it because I've already told them about it, but I think you might be surprised at it, Chris, which is Blinkist.

• 17:47Chris Williamson?

  Okay, we've technically, technically already featured this.

• 17:51Jonny?

  Have we?

• 17:52Chris Williamson?

  Three years ago, but I'm more, more than happy for you to.

• 17:56Speaker 07

  You know what this is? The messy middle. Like he's gone from like

• 18:01Chris Williamson?

  the Just, just read book summaries to must have fully architected.

• 18:05Jonny?

  Read the full thing.

• 18:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, to just read book summaries.

• 18:08Jonny?

  I've got a reason.

• 18:09Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 18:10Jonny?

  So the, and I don't think it works for it. So what Blinkist is, for anybody who doesn't know, it is a book summary service where they and Yusuf has a better version that he'll introduce in a second called Short Form, I think.

• 18:26Chris Williamson?

  Optimize.me.

• 18:27Jonny?

  Um, but they, they summarize it into blinks, which is like, it's like a 15 minute audio of a book. Um, so the, what, what was happening was I had like 15 minutes in the morning where I would like, want to listen to something. So I would try and like, listen to podcasts, but it's like not enough to get into most podcasts. And I would try, listen to an audio book, but then you get the like, it was a cold winter's morning in 1985, you don't like, not really getting anything in 15 minutes. Um, so I thought I'd try it. I'd do the trial and it doesn't work for every book is the problem. So like books that are incredibly deep and complicated that can't really be done justice in 15 minutes.

• 19:06Jonny?

  I wouldn't advise it. But if there's a book that you like, have always fancied reading perhaps that's a fair, most, most like self-improvement books are a single concept that are padded out.

• 19:16Chris Williamson?

  What are some good examples of ones that you have blinkisted?

• 19:21Jonny?

  Essentialism, I re-listened to. So this was my test. So I wanted to see if I could get the sort of the gist of essentialism from the from the blinks. And you more or less can, I think, anyway.

• 19:35Chris Williamson?

  Have you read the full book to compare it to?

• 19:38Jonny?

  Most of the full book.

• 19:42Jonny?

  Not cover to cover, but most of the full book. So it's a if you want to kind of pick up concepts from popular books, but you don't want necessarily to commit to read the whole thing. I think it's a pretty good service. When I originally go on.

• 19:56Chris Williamson?

  Why not optimized.me? Because I tried both of these three or four years ago. And I compared and I came up with this, the synopsis of Brian Johnson does a better job of this.

• 20:09Jonny?

  You think so?

• 20:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 20:11Speaker 07

  I feel like Brian Johnson, all of his summaries are the same. It's always like, and this comes back to our fundies, brush your brain.

• 20:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, don't forget about me. Hi, chick said me. Hi.

• 20:21Jonny?

  So I think that's the reason why not Brian Johnson.

• 20:24Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yeah.

• 20:25Jonny?

  He's just a bit, he's a bit much, isn't he?

• 20:28Chris Williamson?

  Maybe, I mean, given the fact that not many people, especially in the UK, know about him. What he is doing, I'm aware he's got a business underneath him, but optimized.me is a fucking titan.

• 20:43Jonny?

  Does it still exist?

• 20:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, he's going towards his 1,000 philosopher's notes. He's getting to working, working his way slowly toward that, isn't he? Which is just ridiculous. What's your preference then, Seth?

• 20:57Speaker 07

  Honestly, I am still using, I'm still just doing full books.

• 21:01Chris Williamson?

  Same.

• 21:01Speaker 07

  I've never been able to get, and it's more because when you're listening to a book summary by Blinkist and so on, I'm sure Johnny might disagree with this, but what you're getting is not the summary of the book, but you're getting what the guy who works at Blinkist deems to be pertinent points of the book. And that might not overlap with what you think are pertinent points of the book. Now, that might be good enough for you to get the gist of it and then say like, okay, that's, that's a good idea. I think it's functioned as an advert for me to read the full book. So if you're using it as like a tapas to be like, oh, yeah, actually, I like that one. And I'll go deeper into this and then brilliant. But I don't think you can get the full time and attention.

• 21:43Jonny?

  With a summary.

• 21:45Chris Williamson?

  Completely in simpatico here, mate. Like, if you like to read books, you get sent lots of suggestions and you don't know what to read. That as a thin end of the wedge to work out, should I dedicate? Ryan Holiday talks about this. He reckons that the rest of his life, he's got about between 200 and 400 books that he can read cover to cover left. That's how much time he thinks he's got, like some particular figure. And he goes, when you think about it like that, you're like, okay, am I going to dedicate one of those to something that 300 pages in, I'm going to realise is total bollocks?

• 22:20Jonny?

  So, yeah, I think it comes down to like, why, why are you reading the book? And so I think like, pick up the book and think, well, why am I reading the book? Like, if it's a, if it's a book that you want to read because you really like the author, or you really like the style of writing, or you really want to sort of bury yourself in a concept, Blinkist is not the right strategy for that.

• 22:38Chris Williamson?

  But even if you want to enact behaviour change, surely? Because let's say essentialism, right? If you listen to essentialism for 15 minutes, it's a very profound lifestyle change to become an essentialist, which I think both me and Yusef have sort of converted to the Church of Greg McKeown on this. So it's a good example to use because both of us are huge evangelists of essentialism. To absorb that message, which I agree, it is a book that has a single concept. Do less of the trivial many, do more of the vital few, focus on your highest contribution. There it is, that's the book. But in order to be able to take that insight and feel the discomfort and hear the stories

• 23:22Chris Williamson?

  and learn the examples and think, right, this is something I'm actually existentially bought into. I think you can only achieve that unless you are, and you're not, but unless you are someone that is very easily swayed. Like, if you can be convinced of an argument in 15 minutes for an entire book's concept, so much that you change your life around it, then maybe it works.

• 23:43Jonny?

  Well, so I think that depends on the strength of the concept. So like, I think some of, some of the most convincing things I've ever heard of, of not being like a five hour thing, have been like a, even like a quote, for example, like a snippet of Stoicism, you can read and you're like, oh, for fuck's sake, that's right.

• 23:58Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's obvious.

• 23:59Jonny?

  And then you, you remember it and you can sort of recite it and, and talk about it.

• 24:03Speaker 07

  You have to be in a receptive mind state. You have to have an empty enough mind to hear that and be like, ah, right. It has to like have enough space inside you for it to bounce around and echo and be like, oh, yeah, I need to do this. But certainly for essentialism, it was so far, I was so far down the bad habits of being a non-essentialist that even though it took me maybe four months to read the book, like

• 24:26Jonny?

  Longer, longer, I remember because I was tracking.

• 24:28Speaker 07

  Longer than that, but it's still like, that was just about long enough to be able to fully digest it.

• 24:35Jonny?

  Really?

• 24:36Speaker 07

  Not because of the complexity, but just because of the like, you, you need it in bits so you can be like, ah, yeah, okay, I need to do this and.

• 24:44Jonny?

  I think the, the way I look at it is like, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a single concept that the reality of it is just very hard to do. So like whether you spend 10 hours reading the book or not, like you don't, I don't think anyone's less, anyone's more effective at saying no to things they ultimately normally do because they spent the entire time reading the book. But, but anyways, like, a, another example might be like digital minimalism, digital minimalism, right? Like you probably don't need to read and, you know, I, I'm sure I'll get criticized by all the, the huge fans of these books, but like, I know a lot of people, and I'm one of them, who read the entire book, who still have a problem with that. Right? So like, I'm absolutely convinced by it. I was convinced by it 10 minutes into the book.

• 25:27Jonny?

  I've got the concepts of it, but like, did I need to read the whole thing to get the concept? Probably not. Could I have got the same thing from the summary? Probably. So I think it, it, there's a lot of books that kind of fit into that category that are sort of general self-development that are generally a single concept. And there's hundreds of them, thousands of them. And if you want to read a lot of them and explore these different ideas and like pick and choose from a, a menu of things of like, I might want to try these five things to improve my day or whatever. I think it's quite a digestible way of doing it, but.

• 25:55Chris Williamson?

  It certainly seems to fit into your daily routine as well. And this is a really important thing that if you have a particular block of time for an amount of time. Like the reason that most podcasts aim to be around about an hour to an hour and 20 of the longer ones. Is that you can finish a podcast to and from your commute within a day. The optimal length and why a lot of BBC World Service and all this stuff, their podcasts tend to be about half an hour because they just want to get one commute in. So what you need to do is find media types that match the blocks within your day with which you can consume the media types. And as we've seen, if you can just, you don't do the audiobook on the morning because you need to pay an inertial price to get over that momentum.

• 26:40Chris Williamson?

  So that you actually feel like you're enjoying it. So yeah, man, hey, if it works for you, I'm all for it. Seth, what you got?

• 26:46Speaker 07

  Speaking of birthdays, this is just something you can do as a target for each birthday as you get older. To set some kind of like, just something fun for yourself. So that the, my example, which is the most bro way to do this is bench press my body weight. For my age each year. And so something that would, I mean, doesn't have, it could be like, say, a physical target or whatever. That's associated with your age, just to keep you on your toes and be like, oh, okay, like as I get older, I have to have some measure of progress. Like, obviously it would be lovely to be benching like 75 kilos for 70 reps in 40 years.

• 27:29Speaker 07

  But I don't expect it's going to be achievable forever. But yeah, just having some kind of target so that you're not just like aging and crumbling away.

• 27:40Chris Williamson?

  What other things? Can you do that?

• 27:44Speaker 07

  I didn't do it this year, actually.

• 27:47Chris Williamson?

  It's a life fact that I don't adhere to, but you should try.

• 27:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, because the gyms were closed, so I didn't have a bench press.

• 27:54Chris Williamson?

  Mike, your housemate weighs similar to you. You could have just bench pressed him.

• 27:58Speaker 07

  Could have just, yeah, true, actually. Floor press.

• 28:00Chris Williamson?

  Floor press, yeah. Hotter as well.

• 28:02Speaker 07

  Oh, Mike, sorry, it's my birthday. Do you mind just?

• 28:05Chris Williamson?

  Lying on me briefly.

• 28:06Speaker 07

  Crossing your legs.

• 28:06Chris Williamson?

  What other ideas do you think you've got other than bench press?

• 28:09Speaker 07

  So a bench press is a bit bro, but you, I mean, a squat's very achievable. Like for most people well into their 40s, you could squat your body weight for that many reps. You could run for that many minutes. You could meditate for that many minutes. You could write that many pages or set it as like a monthly habit.

• 28:32Chris Williamson?

  I like that. I've got one that we have all used and all used together. And I'm surprised that no one's brought it up yet. So I'm glad that I've managed to take it. The Aerobie Pro Disc, which is a type of frisbee, I suppose. If you, it's technically a disc, as I was corrected by my coach. A couple of weeks ago, I sent him a video of me and said, I'm playing frisbee on a field. And he said, that's not a fucking frisbee, it's a disc. Apparently Americans take frisbee and disc very seriously. But yeah, the Aerobie Pro, it's the record holder for the world's longest disc throw, which is insane. This guy launches it out of, I think, a baseball stadium or something similar.

• 29:16Chris Williamson?

  And yeah, it's just having that or other similar sort of

• 29:23Chris Williamson?

  games that you can play with a couple of mates or one mate. Slack lining was another one that I got into a couple of years ago, which is awesome. Aerobie Pro, I got the same Aerobie Boomerang that you can use. Nerf, those sort of whistling Nerf, American football things with the fins behind them. Just having that, because it's, I think it's 11 pounds or 12 pounds. And the amount of sheer joy that even just us have got, let alone the times that we've used it separately, is ridiculous. Everyone should have one. Everyone should have one.

• 30:00Speaker 07

  There's a low learning curve, like slack line, you can't just be like, oh, let's just go out for a quick slack line with beginners. They have to, but Aerobie, like anyone can throw something. And if they can't, it's great fodder to laugh at them with.

• 30:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, we looked. The last time that I did it with you, Yusef, was we're on a field near your house and it was Saturday evening, 6pm, peak, David off Cool Water and barbecue on the ground with cans of Red Stripe time. And we just decided to find the longest straight line in a two football field long field and started launching this thing perfectly flat, really, because we've practised quite a lot. So we're quite nauseous when it comes to throwing the disc. And I'm sure everyone else thought that we looked like pricks, but to me, I felt like a king. Yeah. Felt like a king.

• 30:53Jonny?

  You don't want to get it in kind of bridge of the nose, do you? If it's kind of coming it because it's so flat, you can't really see it.

• 30:58Chris Williamson?

  Sometimes it disappears for a second.

• 31:00Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 31:00Chris Williamson?

  You, you have the most elegant disc form, Johnny, ever. It just appears. Yeah, it's so smooth, man. Honestly, it's like when you watch. Johnny is amazing at bowling. Are you really? Is that not long levers though?

• 31:17Jonny?

  I think it helps. There's a few things, like there's a few sort of niche things like that where, so with, with Frisbee or disc, there was a field in my first year of uni, there was a huge field next to it and we had a, we had a aero bee and we just spent hours and hours throwing it. It's like, I think anything like that, if you put a lot of time in.

• 31:36Chris Williamson?

  You get it.

• 31:36Jonny?

  So another, another example of that's Guitar Hero.

• 31:39Chris Williamson?

  No way. Are you good at Guitar Hero?

• 31:41Jonny?

  Really good at Guitar Hero.

• 31:42Chris Williamson?

  That is a skill that I didn't expect you to have.

• 31:45Jonny?

  Expert level Guitar Hero.

• 31:47Chris Williamson?

  Can you do, what is it, through fire and flame? Just about to ask. Oh, really? That's like the ultimate level, isn't it? Fucking hell. I need to see this.

• 31:55Jonny?

  So the difficulty with it is, like, I, I went into a game about two years ago and said, do you still sell Guitar Hero? And the guy laughed at me.

• 32:05Jonny?

  Just stood and laughed at me and apparently it's like this, the most sought after thing. You just can't get a hold of them. They've just stopped producing it.

• 32:13Chris Williamson?

  That's crazy.

• 32:14Jonny?

  But that's not, that guitar here is another example of like friends around and it's just in the corner and anyone can just have a go. And some people are naturally really good and some people are terrible.

• 32:23Chris Williamson?

  I guess a Nintendo Wii is probably kind of similar to that, right? It's.

• 32:28Speaker 07

  Have you played table tennis on your Oculus Rift?

• 32:31Chris Williamson?

  No, I sold it. I told you I sold it.

• 32:33Speaker 07

  You sold it? Apparently. So you can play table tennis and because it's, it's already quite a light game anyway. There's not much like resistance. It feels the most real out of all the things you can do in VR.

• 32:43Chris Williamson?

  Does it port across into reality? Do you improve your real world table tennis tabling?

• 32:48Speaker 07

  I reckon there'll be a few skills that you can port quite well, like probably surgery to some extent as well.

• 32:54Chris Williamson?

  Well, I saw, I saw during the build up to the Logan Paul Floyd Mayweather fight that Logan Paul was preparing with a virtual reality headset on and a pair of VR gloves. I don't know whether that was.

• 33:07Jonny?

  Do you know, do you know I have the Quest, the cheap one?

• 33:11Chris Williamson?

  Quest bars, Quest bars.

• 33:13Jonny?

  An Oculus Quest. They brought out a really like a low priced one.

• 33:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 33:17Jonny?

  Not the one that's a couple of grand. It's like 200 quid. Facebook make it.

• 33:22Jonny?

  I own one of those.

• 33:23Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 33:23Jonny?

  So I've played, I've played table tennis on it.

• 33:26Chris Williamson?

  We need to test it.

• 33:26Speaker 07

  Someone said, I didn't know you had one. Yeah. Someone said that the next step is that they take like a front and side profile photo of you and they can map it as your face. And because it has eye tracking inside it, you could have a chat with someone and be making eye contact with them fully digitally.

• 33:46Jonny?

  Well, they've just, they've just added this feature to it, which is hand tracking. So you know how there's normally the controllers? Now you can just use your hands.

• 33:56Chris Williamson?

  Does it have front-facing cameras?

• 33:58Jonny?

  Yeah, so you can pinch and throw and grab and it completely tracks. And the weirdest thing about it is like, why it sometimes feels real is you do that. And the hand responds how you would think your hand responds. And so I suppose there's a there's a moment where your brain thinks like, this is just reality.

• 34:16Chris Williamson?

  You've all seen that video of the guy doing the climbing up the side of the mountain in the middle of a GameStop or something. And he falls off that and crashes straight through, in the real world, crashes straight through the screen because his body tips him over thinking that that's what's happened. Anyway, buy an Arobi Pro Disc. Everybody needs one.

• 34:34Jonny?

  When we do a Lifehacks on a sofa next, I'll bring the Oculus and we'll film some examples.

• 34:40Chris Williamson?

  Remember when, before a Lifehacks, where I made you guys watch VR porn?

• 34:44Jonny?

  I do remember that.

• 34:45Chris Williamson?

  I thought it was a VR horror thing that you showed us. I showed Johnny the porn.

• 34:50Jonny?

  I was thinking like, if Yusuf and I watch the same thing, Yusuf's version of horror.

• 34:56Chris Williamson?

  Right. It was like a zombie thing. Johan, what have you got?

• 35:00Jonny?

  What have I got? Is it me? Is it about Yusuf?

• 35:02Chris Williamson?

  No, it's just me.

• 35:04Jonny?

  What did he say?

• 35:05Chris Williamson?

  Birthdays is a benchmark target.

• 35:09Chris Williamson?

  Benchmark target.

• 35:11Jonny?

  What am I gonna say? I've got one. It's also a birthday thing. And it was remind, I was reminded of it because it was my birthday like a week ago. And I got an email from myself on my birthday that I wrote a year ago. And the reason that I wrote the email to myself a year ago was because of, how's it called?

• 35:36Chris Williamson?

  Follow-up, Dan.

• 35:37Jonny?

  No.

• 35:40Jonny?

  Six Minute Diary.

• 35:43Chris Williamson?

  Happy Birthday.

• 35:44Jonny?

  Six Minute Diary.

• 35:46Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yes.

• 35:46Jonny?

  It's one of the like weekly challenges. So I had it on my to-do list for literally months to like write this email to myself. And I was like, oh yeah, I'll do that. Like, yeah, it's the Kabuki movement systems of moving it to the next day. And I eventually did it. And I got this email from myself and it was just, it was bizarre reading it.

• 36:03Chris Williamson?

  What did it say? Can you give us an excerpt?

• 36:05Jonny?

  It was like, it was just sort of, the way that I wrote it was like, what I was doing at the moment, so I was speaking about, so we'd just gone into lockdown in the UK, or like, we'd been in lockdown for a couple of months. And like, I was talking about how like, oh, I think it's going to be back open again for, you know, August and all this sort of stuff. And then, things that were going well, talking about things that were just happening in propane, like we were just about to hire Alex. Stuff I was doing in training, stuff that was like, stuff, plans we have for the rest of the year. Um, and then like, stuff I wanted to achieve, that I've done all of, which is really cool. And then like, see you in a year. And I got this email. It was so weird. You're like, read it. You think this is a scam or something. This is weird. And you're like, oh, no shit. I wrote this. And so it would really recommend.

• 36:45Speaker 07

  I, I did that for myself a while ago. It was a website that sends you an email in, in 10 years' time. So, so I did it at 18 and received it at 28. And

• 36:56Jonny?

  Oh my god.

• 36:57Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, there's people that do it with videos as well, isn't there? Have you seen like, there's a viral video of like, a conversation with my 12 year old self. And they've set it up like a back and forth conversation.

• 37:07Chris Williamson?

  That's cool. Yeah, I am. I've said for ages, it would be so fascinating to be able to take snapshots of your consciousness. And then be able to revisit them, because the things that consume your mind now, and the things that consume your mind two years from now, are so, well, they should be different if you're making progress. Right? You should be casting off the worries and the concerns and the anxieties that no longer matter. And you should be focusing on the things that do. We all should be moving toward an essentialist's life, I guess, in one for, both in terms of our thoughts and our actions. But yeah, even just thinking about, okay, so what am I doing at the moment? What are my predictions for the rest of this year? And then, stress testing those or comparing them against what actually happened. That's pretty cool.

• 37:45Jonny?

  I think I did like, what, what am I doing? What, what am I like? What's going well? What's not going well? What am I worried about? And what am I, what am I like, working on? And the interesting thing was all the worries, like, none of them happened. Not a single one. All of the things that I was working on, I got done. And then like, some of the things that I was like, clearly consumed with, just don't even, not even a feature anymore. So it is just this reminder of like, at the time, that was just my absolute, my reality, like consumed 100% of my day.

• 38:13Chris Williamson?

  Your world, yeah.

• 38:14Jonny?

  And, and now like, so little of it matters. So I use, as you have just mentioned, I use something called Follow Up Len. So you just send it, it's a service where you send an email to like one year at followupthen.com and it just sends it back to you in a year or you can set it a specific date or whatever. But really easy thing to try. Highly recommend giving it a go. Send an email to yourself.

• 38:36Chris Williamson?

  Is it the number one year or is it O N E?

• 38:39Jonny?

  One, number one year at followupthen.com.

• 38:44Chris Williamson?

  Awesome.

• 38:44Jonny?

  Or like the, the date as well.

• 38:47Chris Williamson?

  What you got?

• 38:49Speaker 07

  This is from Alice, who is a, a new member of Team Propane. And I feel like she's going to beat me up if we don't suggest this one.

• 39:01Speaker 07

  Tesco own brand stuffing. So the reasoning behind this is that when you're dieting, stuffing is a great kind of filler. It's pretty low calorie, it's very flavoursome, very rich with flavour. So it hits the spot with all of the like, when you have like a savoury kind of.

• 39:20Speaker 07

  But it's, um, it's very low calorie density. She said, if you're out of the Tesco one, then Lidl is also a pretty good substitute.

• 39:30Chris Williamson?

  You have to be in Lidl to get that though, don't you?

• 39:33Speaker 07

  You do have to be in, yeah.

• 39:34Jonny?

  That's how it works. Yeah, that's definitely how it works.

• 39:37Speaker 07

  So we were, she was like, I'm a bit reticent to say this because if I, if I do and then everyone goes on, buys it.

• 39:44Chris Williamson?

  She'll be struggling up against lower demand. I'm pretty convinced that a good portion of the net worth of Lindal's Kfag has been directed from this podcast. So Tesco, what are the macros on it?

• 40:01Speaker 07

  Pretty good.

• 40:04Jonny?

  So neither of us have tried it. She only recommended this to us like a couple of days ago. But she's a big listener of the Lifehack series especially.

• 40:11Chris Williamson?

  Got you.

• 40:12Jonny?

  But, um. I was saying that stuffing is one of those things that I feel like I am never given enough of in a meal.

• 40:21Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's such a rarity to even have it, right? How many times a year do you have stuffing? Maybe for me, it's easily sub five. Yeah.

• 40:28Jonny?

  Yeah. So and then, and then whenever you do, you never look at a plate and go.

• 40:32Chris Williamson?

  A bit much stuffing on there.

• 40:33Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 40:33Chris Williamson?

  Fucking hell, mate. What is this stuffing day?

• 40:37Jonny?

  It's really nice, isn't it?

• 40:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 40:39Jonny?

  Like, I really like, it's one of my favorite bits, but there's never enough of it. And it's never something anyone talks about.

• 40:43Chris Williamson?

  What if you, what if by using it as a dietary aid, you spoil stuffing?

• 40:48Jonny?

  Well.

• 40:49Chris Williamson?

  Is that a price that you're willing to pay? Is that really a price you're willing to pay?

• 40:52Jonny?

  I'm, I'm quite keen for just get it out my system once and for all and just have a big bowl of stuffing.

• 40:58Chris Williamson?

  Of the remaining, the remainder of your life's quota allowance of stuffing in one sitting.

• 41:04Jonny?

  It's like, it's one of those things that like, when you're a child, you think, well, when I'm, when I'm older, I'm going to be able to make my own dietary decisions. And if I want enough stuffing, I'm going to bloody have enough stuffing.

• 41:12Speaker 07

  Just come and wait for the conversation. Johnny, what are you eating?

• 41:16Chris Williamson?

  It's a bowl of stuffing. Leave me alone.

• 41:19Jonny?

  Been waiting for this for 15 years. Just leave me alone.

• 41:22Chris Williamson?

  My own man now. Uh, okay. Right. This is a life hack that I got that was submitted from Craig Davison. Um, he heard me talking about YouTube premium on the last episode, which everybody should get. Everyone needs YouTube premium. I am now four, five, six months deep. Michaela Peterson told me to get it and I do not regret it at all. Um, it is fantastic. Now, the life hack is that if you set your billing location to Argentina, you can get a

• 41:53Speaker 07

  You said this on the last one, I think.

• 41:54Chris Williamson?

  You can get a YouTube premium subscription for 94 pence. I didn't say it. Um, I might've told you about it separately. I might've messaged you about it. Um, anyway.

• 42:04Speaker 07

  It's a very Chris solution.

• 42:05Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's not a Chris solution. This is, this is the most you solution that I've ever seen.

• 42:10Speaker 07

  Well, no, mine, mine's to bypass all that and just use Ener like a sensible person.

• 42:15Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So Craig says, if you've got a VPN, you need to get a VPN. You can go to surfshark.deals-modernwisdom uh, and you need to set it to Argentina. Then when you get to the payment, you add a random Argentinian address, but include your UK postcode somewhere in address line one. Work for me with Starling Bank. No difference at all. And you only need to use the VPN as a one-off. 94 pence a month, YouTube premium. I can't think of a better way to spend 94 pence.

• 42:44Chris Williamson?

  There we are.

• 42:45Jonny?

  Okay.

• 42:46Chris Williamson?

  Silence as the crowd is stunned.

• 42:48Jonny?

  I just don't want to stir the pot. I feel like I'm fairly... Like, I'm fine with it.

• 42:54Chris Williamson?

  I'm not changing. I'm also not changing. But if the price, if price was the limiter, if you said, "Ah, £12, £13 a month for YouTube Premium", yeah, it's a travel tavern. If you said that it's too much, then here is your, here is your thin end of the wedge. Right, Johnny, what you got?

• 43:14Jonny?

  So I'll open with a question for both of you, which is, when you last trained

• 43:22Jonny?

  in the gym, did you do a warm-up?

• 43:27Chris Williamson?

  Very briefly.

• 43:31Speaker 07

  Yes, but that's a recent thing, as I start to face my mortality.

• 43:37Jonny?

  Interesting.

• 43:38Chris Williamson?

  Mano pause.

• 43:39Jonny?

  So that, so that basically the life hack, it's not, I suppose it's not really a, there'll be some people who listen, they're like, "Obviously, mate", but having like a, like a written down thing that you do each time, warm-up, makes such a difference in training. And it's the, it's the first thing I skip. It's like, it's, it's like year seven PE level advice.

• 44:01Chris Williamson?

  Arm circles. Do you do arm circles?

• 44:03Jonny?

  So I actually do arm circles.

• 44:05Chris Williamson?

  Hang on, hang on. Can we back up for a second? Hold on.

• 44:10Chris Williamson?

  Are you, as an international level powerlifter, telling us that a game-changing life hack for you is doing a warm-up?

• 44:19Speaker 07

  This, this is because the powerlifter's warm-up is empty bar for three reps, 60 kilos for three reps, 80 kilos for like, no, 100. You just go up in 20 kilo plates, but maybe a double. And then you work that.

• 44:34Jonny?

  It's either that or spending like 45 minutes doing all kinds of like weird hip activation. And then two hours later, you hit first, you work that. So I think the only thing that really matters is just elevating body temperature, like for most people.

• 44:50Chris Williamson?

  Did you listen to the episode I did with Dr. Sam Spinelli about how to create the perfect warm-up?

• 44:56Jonny?

  So I actually think I did.

• 44:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 44:59Jonny?

  It was quite a while ago.

• 45:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Awesome. Anyone that needs to design their own, just go back and listen to that. You can be within 10 minutes up to speed with, not 10 minutes of the podcast, yeah, it's 50 minutes. Podcast's longer than the warm up. But designing it makes sense. What's yours? Walk us through yours briefly.

• 45:17Jonny?

  So I do a like empty bar. So I train in my garage. So I don't have any like cardio equipment or anything like that. So I do an empty bar, like barbell complex. I've just like some basic movements for sets of 10. I do some light foam rolling. Just to sort of feel a bit more, bit less, bit less tender, bit more supple. And then things like, it depends what I'm doing. So I'll do like leg swings or like some dynamic stretching for lower body or upper body. It only takes like five, 10 minutes, but prior to touching a barbell, I'm, I'm sweating.

• 45:48Chris Williamson?

  Apart from the complex.

• 45:50Jonny?

  Apart from the complex. That's not, it is technically, in my defence, a different barbell. So prior to touching the main, the barbell of the day.

• 45:59Jonny?

  It's a, I'm sweating. And I think that's the key thing. And it's like, I know it sounds so, it's always speaking about last night, right? About how you start off doing simple things and you make everything immensely complicated. And then you come back to just like, it might be a good idea to just sort of get nice and warm prior to doing some strenuous exercise. But like, especially if you train for any kind of performance or you're doing, you know, compound heavy lifts. The performance of the session is better, the injury risk of the session is lower. You generally just feel better, but it's the first thing you skip. And I very rarely see people doing one consistently. So unless you do like a CrossFit class or something where it's part of it.

• 46:36Chris Williamson?

  Built in, yeah. So have you, you said, you said, was it write it out or prescribe it somewhere? Is it on a board somewhere in the?

• 46:43Jonny?

  So I actually have it in an Apple Notes file that's been turned into a checklist. And I don't know whether you've ever used this, but when you use a checklist function on Apple Notes, the thing at the bottom gets grayed out and gets shrunk to the top. So then the neck, so it basically just like

• 47:01Jonny?

  and then at the end I just don't check them all. So I just have it on the, on the ground on my phone, press through as I'm doing it. And then that's, I just make sure.

• 47:07Chris Williamson?

  You never thought about putting a whiteboard up in your?

• 47:10Jonny?

  I have, yeah, I have.

• 47:12Chris Williamson?

  I quite like going off phone whenever I'm doing programming that's been written for me. Constantly checking my phone, doing stuff, just, I appreciate for a powerlifter that's got all manner of gizmos attached to the bar speed and RPE and all that stuff. It's more difficult.

• 47:29Jonny?

  If I could show you the spreadsheet that I have to navigate to just do a training session, it's frankly ridiculous.

• 47:37Speaker 07

  It's pushing the limits of Google Sheets.

• 47:40Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 47:41Speaker 07

  Resource limitations.

• 47:42Jonny?

  So to give you some perspective, it's so big and vast, this sheet, that I will like enter what I've done. And it takes five or six seconds. Bear in mind, this is cloud based and Google takes five or six seconds to calculate what that means. So the idea of like just using a whiteboard instead of that might be a bit of a challenge. For the warm up, I could definitely do it for sure.

• 48:04Chris Williamson?

  Nice. Seth, what you got?

• 48:06Speaker 07

  I've stolen this one from Johnny. And I don't know if we discussed it on the last one. But the hack is, if you're ever faced with a office box of Krispy Kreme donuts, don't piss about. Don't go for the plain disc with the ring in the middle. Just go for the nice one, like the Nutella or the Biscoff or whatever. Because we looked at the calories and they're not that different between the plain boring one and the all, all singing, dancing, flashing lights one.

• 48:48Chris Williamson?

  I'm going to throw a spanner in the works.

• 48:50Speaker 07

  Oh, no. Okay.

• 48:51Jonny?

  That was such a great basic.

• 48:54Chris Williamson?

  I, I prefer the original glazed.

• 48:57Speaker 07

  Well, that's fine. If you prefer it, then, then, you know, you, because it's still slightly lower calories. It's just not that much lower than.

• 49:03Chris Williamson?

  But I resent your implication that it is of a lower caliber. I resent your implication that pejoratively for most people, they don't want you, the basic bitch ring thing. That is, that is my people.

• 49:17Speaker 07

  Your preferences. Not everyone's like, oh, I like the vanilla missionary.

• 49:21Chris Williamson?

  This is becoming very problematic for me.

• 49:23Speaker 07

  However. The the real thing to avoid is the mocha because that is the mocha from Krispy Kreme Donuts is similar calorie amount to any of the donuts. So just eat a donut.

• 49:39Chris Williamson?

  Why does it taste it tastes bad?

• 49:42Speaker 07

  Well, I I think it I'm sure it'll be all right because it's very high calorie.

• 49:45Chris Williamson?

  Bad mouthing a donut that you've never eaten?

• 49:49Jonny?

  What what what's the reason to avoid the mocha? Because of the calories?

• 49:52Chris Williamson?

  Oh, the mocha drink, not a mocha flavor donut. Right. Thank you. We are all on the same page now.

• 49:58Jonny?

  Right.

• 49:59Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so your your argument is when faced with a selection of Krispy Kreme donuts, the calories across the board are fairly similar. So just pick the one flavor wise that you're going to enjoy the most and don't really concern yourself with the calories.

• 50:12Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 50:13Jonny?

  Because from a from a percentage, like from the from the the amount extra, it's it's still a couple hundred calories a donut. So just enjoy yourself. Don't try and pick a low calorie donut because it's not going to happen.

• 50:26Chris Williamson?

  I like it. Uh, what am I going to do for this one? So this would have been really perfect if the government hadn't decided to wreck everyone's travel plans. Um, but I'm going to put this one in as people may be getting ready to a lot of people from America listening. Um, and people getting ready to start traveling around. It's a double up life hack. Uh, the first one is Gate D two in Amsterdam Airport. So Amsterdam Schiphol is a commonly used connecting airport for many flights going through Europe and and to further further on. Um, they have designed the entire airport very well. Um, but it's done in a manner that makes it incredibly hard to sleep if you can only sleep lying

• 51:10Chris Williamson?

  down because everything has those uh jutting up bars in between that are that masquerading as armrests, but actually they're just to stop people from sleeping. Um, however, Gate D two in Amsterdam Airport is almost never used. It's all in alcoves and they don't have any armrests on there. So you can go if you've got a Three hour layover, often coming back from somewhere you've arrived at 7am and you're waiting to get to your next place at 10am. You can go there, set an alarm for a couple of hours. If you've got a face mask and a pair of AirPod Pros, you're silent, dark, able to lie down. You're in a place that's so low traffic that your possessions are probably fairly

• 51:52Chris Williamson?

  safe and you can stretch out. There you go. Gate D2.

• 51:58Jonny?

  The other cool thing about that is at Gate D2 will just be a load of modern wisdom listeners.

• 52:02Chris Williamson?

  So you can just speak, it's like a real life Discord server. Yeah. I'm like, you listen to that?

• 52:07Jonny?

  You'll go there, there'll be loads of people lying down with an eye mask and AirPod Pros and you'd be like, this is weird.

• 52:13Chris Williamson?

  This is us. These are my people.

• 52:16Jonny?

  None of them will want to talk to you, but you'll just know you'll be in good company.

• 52:20Chris Williamson?

  I love that. And the second part of this was something that I did in

• 52:25Chris Williamson?

  Dubai last year, which I can't believe that I never did before. As soon as you arrive anywhere on holiday, just go to the nearest supplement store and buy a small pot of protein.

• 52:40Chris Williamson?

  No one ever hits their protein target when they're away. You're always just in between meals and struggling to get stuff. Buy, you know, whatever, Nitroflex or Maxi Muscle.

• 52:53Jonny?

  I made that mistake in New York. I bought muscle milk and then I looked at the ingredients.

• 52:58Chris Williamson?

  Sounds great.

• 52:59Jonny?

  It's nice, but it's

• 53:00Chris Williamson?

  Oestrogen?

• 53:01Jonny?

  Predominantly sugar. It's basically a weight gainer. With like a tickle of protein, but it's just big.

• 53:08Chris Williamson?

  What you really want is ideally like a weight concentrator and isolate or something, don't you? But it's easier than taking it out with you because that's got all manner of potential havoc to wreak inside of your luggage. You're getting stopped. Hello, sir. What's this? It's this big bag of powder that you've got here. But yeah, just go on holiday, get yourself a shaker, buy a, what is it? What's, is it like a two pound or a one kilo? Yeah, half, half kilo is not going to be enough. One, one kilo will get you through. That'd be like two shakes a day for a week. Not that you'd need that necessarily, but you'll hit your protein much more easily. It'll keep you satiated and you'll just feel less guilty. So.

• 53:43Jonny?

  Something that I was. Feeling grateful for the other day. So I I went on like a travel around the UK and was in a similar situation. Where like you're short on protein, you haven't had much fibre. And you think like, oh, it'd be great to have a couple of protein bars that'll sort me out. It takes both boxes. If you go back like to when we were navigating supplements for the first time. The thought of being able to get a protein bar from like any WH Smith you you go past would just be unheard of. You'd have to get them from like Predator Nutrition or, you know, and it would only be like Predator was the only place that has.

• 54:18Chris Williamson?

  Specialist store owned by a man with a face tattoo. Yes.

• 54:21Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 54:24Jonny?

  Exactly. And they've got like shelves in the back that are all just pro hormones and then some quest bars. Now we go to Boots and get like every grenade bar flavour and it's brilliant that that exists. So I used to pack tubs of protein and take them with me. The fact that you can just get them wherever you are now. Brilliant. Brilliant.

• 54:46Chris Williamson?

  Johnny, what you got?

• 54:48Jonny?

  Is me.

• 54:51Jonny?

  So this is another, this is similar to Blinkist.

• 54:55Jonny?

  But it is Curio.

• 54:58Jonny?

  You heard of it before?

• 54:59Chris Williamson?

  Nope.

• 55:01Jonny?

  Yusuf has, because Yusuf was, Yusuf saw the Curio product map two years ago when it was about to be released. And he knew.

• 55:08Speaker 07

  Signed up for the beta.

• 55:09Chris Williamson?

  I actually think that you enjoy pre-release products more than the full release. You're such an anticipatory being, aren't you?

• 55:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's just like, like the the greyhounds pulling at the leash. I just want to try the new thing.

• 55:25Jonny?

  You're one of the only people I know who gets actually excited about like apps being released and updated.

• 55:30Speaker 07

  It's so sad.

• 55:31Chris Williamson?

  But having, having you as a friend in our friend group is perfect because we're never going to miss anything because we were alerted about it eight months before. When it got, when it got leaked on Apple News.io, like you were sweet. Okay, so what's this, what's this Curio thing?

• 55:45Jonny?

  So Curio is.

• 55:49Jonny?

  So the first thing that actually drew me to them was that their Instagram ads are really impressive, I think. So their angle's really impressive, which is, and you may have seen them, there's people going down an escalator in like the London Underground. And everything's in black and white, apart from one person who's listening to something. Everyone's reading. And this one person's listening to something and they're in bright vivid colours and the angle is like be the most interesting person in the room. I was like, that's so cool. It caught my attention, clicked on it. So it's the same problem as Blinkist, which is like I have these windows of time where I just want to listen to something interesting. So Curio takes like articles from, you can ask it where to pick them from. So it's basically what you guys do with Pocket, where you're sort of self sourcing the information, but it does that for you and it's taking it from

• 56:33Jonny?

  like wherever you want to listen to stuff like The Economist, Financial Times, like stuff that honestly I would just never read. But I end up listening to, I listen to stuff about like AI or like the labour market or like stuff that is actually really interesting. It's not all just current affairs and news. It's like really detailed concepts and topics that are just narrated by people.

• 56:53Chris Williamson?

  Subscription?

• 56:54Jonny?

  It is a subscription.

• 56:55Chris Williamson?

  How much?

• 56:56Jonny?

  I think it's like forty pounds a year.

• 56:58Chris Williamson?

  That's not much, is it?

• 56:59Jonny?

  No, well, not when you consider that like what you get for that. I think it's pretty good.

• 57:03Chris Williamson?

  So Curio sounds like an audio equivalent of the browser, which I think I've mentioned to you guys before. Now, the browser is five articles per day hosted on Substack, but also delivered to your inbox, but also you can get an RSS reader and stuff like that. And they have the listener, which is five audio podcasts of some kind or another. But the main thing, I think that both me and you are getting out of Curio and the browser is just stepping out of our echo chambers. Like what you realise as soon as you start to listen or read stuff like this that's curated by someone else is how narrow your own vision of what you are interested in is. You think I am so much more interested in tons of stuff. I'm really going to enjoy all of this and I listen to the same six podcasters

• 57:48Chris Williamson?

  and read the same whatever. But the problem is, if you decide to venture into this new podcast world or new article world or whatever, and you get the wrong article. From that or the wrong podcast, you're like, that's not really for me. So what you need is someone to take the top filtering of the best stuff from the best channels and feed it to you. So yeah, I think, I think you've, I'm interested in curio. And if people prefer to read the browser is fucking, it's so, it's the only reason that I have things to talk about that aren't already from my kind of worldview.

• 58:24Speaker 07

  It's a very good point. Like you have to have the curation because it's like, you know, if you've got a friend who's like, oh, I don't like prawns. And you're like, when was the last time you had a prawn? Ah, 10 years ago. And you're like, right, well, try one of these. And then they try and you're like, oh, actually, no, that wasn't a very good one. But then they've already thought like, right, all prawns are terrible.

• 58:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 58:41Speaker 07

  And they've tarred them all with the same brush.

• 58:44Jonny?

  Well, you nailed it, which with like, all of these, all of these publications have some really interesting stuff in them. But none of us have like the time or the patience or the inclination to sift. And because there's so much stuff that we won't find interesting.

• 58:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 58:57Jonny?

  So if there's a service that just does that for you, and it's constantly varied and it's from different places. So like, there was an article I listened to this morning about Steve Jobs and some stuff he did at Apple. And then there was one about AI. And then there was one about how like bars and restaurants in the UK are struggling to hire people because of the way the labor market is changing. And it's like 15 minutes of time. You're like, that was like really interesting.

• 59:18Chris Williamson?

  To open your worldview in a way that you would have never been able to do yourself as well.

• 59:22Jonny?

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 59:23Chris Williamson?

  That's a, that's a really good one. I hope that the platform and stuff's good. Um, right.

• 59:29Jonny?

  It is.

• 59:30Chris Williamson?

  Seth, what you got?

• 59:32Speaker 07

  This is from Andrew Robson.

• 59:35Chris Williamson?

  Who are you arbitraging other people's life hacks because you don't have any?

• 59:40Speaker 07

  I've got loads, but we've got, I, my previous one. So I just, I don't know if you guys know this, but I have, I split mine into physical and digital.

• 59:50Speaker 07

  And so mine was digital, very similar to Johnny's previous one. I thought, ah, we could do with the physical one now. So Andrew Robson, lovely man who we've worked with, has suggested, he said, I have a life hack for people with dogs. Thanks for that, Johnny. Um, that I keep meaning to send you. You can get lint rollers, which you can wash under the tap and reuse. They take 15 seconds to wash.

• 1:00:14Jonny?

  So there's a, there's a macro level hack at a system level that removes the need for that, which is that when you're picking the dog, get one that doesn't molt.

• 1:00:23Chris Williamson?

  When you get a dog that doesn't molt, don't they need to be groomed more frequently though?

• 1:00:28Jonny?

  Correct.

• 1:00:29Chris Williamson?

  So you've jumped out of the frying pan?

• 1:00:32Jonny?

  Well, it just depends what which do you consider?

• 1:00:35Chris Williamson?

  Where do you want your battle to be? On the dog's back or on your floor?

• 1:00:37Jonny?

  Would you rather be? Well, would you rather be like having to Hoover a hairs constantly for the entirety of the dog's life? Or just have this one batched thing that happens once every six weeks?

• 1:00:49Chris Williamson?

  Um, do you know the brand of this, Yusef?

• 1:00:52Speaker 07

  It'll be like pound shop.

• 1:00:54Chris Williamson?

  But what's it called? It's called washable lint roller or something?

• 1:00:57Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:01:01Chris Williamson?

  For dog hair? Cool. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I'm all for that. Have you seen, um, I think it's Shark? The vacuum manufacturing co- have you got a Shark Hoover, Johnny? That's got the hair removal?

• 1:01:12Jonny?

  No, but I've seen I've seen what you're referring to.

• 1:01:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. Because if if you've ever had a Dyson stand up vacuum cleaner and hair or something's got caught in it, the sound that occurs, it it emanates a noise that is like what I imagine Judgment Day will sound like. It is so painful. Whee! And it just-

• 1:01:34Speaker 07

  So that was happening upstairs. I had to keep muting my mic about 10 minutes ago because the upstairs neighbors seem to be just like, I think they're deaf or something. They're just that Hoovering-

• 1:01:44Chris Williamson?

  The ones that used to have sex?

• 1:01:46Speaker 07

  Uh, it's the same flat, but they've rotated. So they've gone from sex to loud hoovering with lots of hair.

• 1:01:52Jonny?

  Was there a person who kept deferring their alarm by a couple of minutes every morning as well?

• 1:01:58Speaker 07

  Yeah, she would set the alarm for 5am and then snooze it every 10 minutes for two hours.

• 1:02:05Chris Williamson?

  Oh my god.

• 1:02:06Speaker 07

  And just because she must enjoy snoozing or something. So I, um, she knocked on the door because I had a parcel for it. And I was like, oh, by the way, you know, you're Alexa. Do you mind just? So what what happened was, um, every night you just hear like a mumble, and then an alarm is set for 5am, an alarm is set for 5:10am, an alarm is set for 5:20am, all the way up to 7am.

• 1:02:31Chris Williamson?

  What did she say when you asked her to stop being such a prick?

• 1:02:35Speaker 07

  Looked a bit surprised.

• 1:02:37Jonny?

  Well, because you've like, she'll feel seen and exposed because it's like probably her little habit.

• 1:02:42Chris Williamson?

  You know what a solution to this would be, Seth? It would probably maybe cost, someone will be able to tell us in the comments, but I reckon it would cost less than £1,500. And I think that you would be able to extend the cord of your lamp, put a layer of sound insulation in, put another board in, and then put a slightly lower ceiling in with more, with the same plastering over, and then put your light back in. And I reckon for 1,500 quid, you could, depending on how much sound from above you contributes to your life's misery, I reckon you could get rid of it for probably about a grand.

• 1:03:16Speaker 07

  Well, as in soundproof my ceiling?

• 1:03:18Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:03:18Speaker 07

  Not, not ask her to soundproof her floor?

• 1:03:20Chris Williamson?

  Alternatively.

• 1:03:21Jonny?

  Well, it's the same thing.

• 1:03:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's one and the same.

• 1:03:24Jonny?

  You could also just get some great earplugs.

• 1:03:27Chris Williamson?

  Or AirPod Pros.

• 1:03:28Jonny?

  I get like, you know, shotgun shooting ear defenders and then you'd be out like a lice.

• 1:03:34Speaker 07

  The, the more annoying things when you're podcasting, to be honest, because that just immortalizes it.

• 1:03:39Chris Williamson?

  We haven't picked, I haven't heard anything.

• 1:03:40Speaker 07

  That's because I've been tactfully, tactically.

• 1:03:44Chris Williamson?

  Right. As, as is tradition, toward the end of a Lifehacks episode, stuff that we have been either reading or watching on Netflix and such, and I am going to open up with Marcella.

• 1:03:59Jonny?

  I've seen it.

• 1:04:00Chris Williamson?

  What do you think?

• 1:04:02Jonny?

  It's all right.

• 1:04:03Chris Williamson?

  Oh, come on. Come on.

• 1:04:07Jonny?

  Have you seen all of it? Have you seen all of the seasons?

• 1:04:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, right up to the Irish season.

• 1:04:11Jonny?

  Really, really peters out towards the end, doesn't it?

• 1:04:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Okay. So it lags a little bit, but I just.

• 1:04:15Jonny?

  Strong opening.

• 1:04:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it was, it was different. It's a sort of a like an edgy line of duty, less about the actual storylines and more about the main character who is going through some dissociative psychotic breaks and you kind of see this get worse and then the end of season two is probably one of the biggest twists in a story that I've seen in quite a while. I just thought it was quite compelling. It's on.

• 1:04:45Chris Williamson?

  ITV, which annoyingly, unless you upgrade for £3.99 a month on ITV Hub, has inbuilt hardcoded adverts on TV that you can't get past. However, they have a seven day ITV Hub Pro free trial, no obligation. So if you really-

• 1:05:03Speaker 07

  And if you register in the Czech Republic, you have a postcode to somewhere in Russia and you can get it for £12.

• 1:05:09Chris Williamson?

  They can never catch you. But you can just, if you want to pound through three seasons of Marcella, you can do it within the window of time of that. But yes, that's my first one. Jonny, what have you been watching or reading or YouTube video in recently?

• 1:05:27Jonny?

  Time on BBC with Sean Bean and Stephen Graham.

• 1:05:32Chris Williamson?

  Blasted, blasted. You're blasted. I love it. Have you seen that mega mix, that supercut of all the time that Sean Bean said blasted? What's that show that he was in for millions of seasons? Not Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Was it like the Napoleon Bonaparte shit where it's from?

• 1:05:53Jonny?

  Oh, God.

• 1:05:56Chris Williamson?

  Anyway, that thing.

• 1:05:58Jonny?

  It's like a single word.

• 1:06:00Chris Williamson?

  Highlander or something like that. Frontier.

• 1:06:04Jonny?

  No. Sharp.

• 1:06:07Chris Williamson?

  Yes, thank you. Yes. Looks like it should have been called Highlander. But anyway, there's a supercut of him saying blasted all the different times he does it. Anyway, time.

• 1:06:17Jonny?

  So he has, he has his like, I think it's what his natural accent is like, excuse me, mate. It's brilliant. So it's a very, well, I mean, I don't know. I've not been to prison. So I can't. But I imagine it's a very, quite, so I'll normally watch things in the evening and like to wind down before I go to bed. This actually kept me up because it's so like-

• 1:06:43Chris Williamson?

  Intense.

• 1:06:44Speaker 07

  Yeah. Anti-advert, isn't it?

• 1:06:46Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, we did a podcast with a doctor who has just come out of prison after two years and his description was-

• 1:06:55Jonny?

  He sounded, so I've listened to that. He sounded fairly relaxed about the whole thing, I thought.

• 1:06:59Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, he got day leave to go and do a masters.

• 1:07:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that helps, isn't it? Do you think Sean Bean should have just asked to be transferred to this? They're doing masters. Bastards? Bastards. Uh, right, time. What's it on? I play BBC. Cool, I like it. Seth, where you go?

• 1:07:19Speaker 07

  The Mortal Kombat movie, 2021.

• 1:07:24Chris Williamson?

  You described this last night over dinner as the sort of movie that six-year-old you would have designed at the time, the

• 1:07:33Speaker 07

  Ten-year-old.

• 1:07:33Chris Williamson?

  Ten-year-old, okay.

• 1:07:34Speaker 07

  Ten-year-old me, like, the, yeah, the plot was written by a year nine, so thirteen-year-old, but it's, it's you. For anyone born around 1990, it was a cultural phenomenon. And so to see it realised in, with very good production value, and it's brilliant. It's, it's very much like satisfying you in a child. It's not the kind of thing to take your girlfriend to.

• 1:08:02Speaker 07

  Definitely would not be very popular, but it's, what it is, is the contrast. So they, because they did a, they did a film back in 1993 or something. And at the time, I remember watching it and being like, whoa, this is really scary, really graphic. And you've got like Scorpion takes off his mask and he's like a flaming skull. And looking back, it's actually a bit naff, like it's all like, you know, clearly a polystyrene that's been dipped in petrol and set on fire and things. But when you see the contrast against the current film, it's like, oh, this is good. There's lots of like silly little quips and the occasional gratuitous, like someone reaches into someone's, into this like big reptile's heart and pulls it out.

• 1:08:46Speaker 07

  And then says like fatality and all that stuff.

• 1:08:49Chris Williamson?

  So there's some cheese, kind of fourth wall breaking. I mean, you're watching a Mortal Kombat movie. It's a movie based on a video game that was cheesy. It was always going to be that. That, hey, if you, if you reckon it's good, I've just gone back and looked at what we suggested on the last Life Hacks. Did both of you watch Three Identical Strangers?

• 1:09:08Jonny?

  No.

• 1:09:09Chris Williamson?

  Oh, did you not? But you did, Yusuf.

• 1:09:11Jonny?

  I did.

• 1:09:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What did you think? Do you enjoy it?

• 1:09:13Jonny?

  Fantastic. Like, really, you come away with a real sadness about.

• 1:09:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's quite melancholy, eh?

• 1:09:20Jonny?

  Yeah, humanity's like, level of cruelty.

• 1:09:23Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. I think you're Johnny. It's the, I'm really surprised.

• 1:09:26Jonny?

  So I've just realised why I've not watched it. And it's quite, well, it's not embarrassing, but stupid. It's in my to-read list.

• 1:09:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, you see.

• 1:09:36Jonny?

  Struggle with that, I imagine.

• 1:09:38Chris Williamson?

  Apple Notes, yeah, it's gonna be difficult, at the very least.

• 1:09:41Jonny?

  It's now on the correct list. No one needs to worry.

• 1:09:44Chris Williamson?

  My next one is Gangs of London. I think both me and Johnny have watched this.

• 1:09:50Jonny?

  Film or a series?

• 1:09:51Chris Williamson?

  Series. It's.

• 1:09:54Jonny?

  Brilliant.

• 1:09:54Chris Williamson?

  Very shit hot. It's probably the best series I've watched this yet. Probably better than the most recent season of Line of Duty, which ended like a damp squib.

• 1:10:03Jonny?

  I, I think it might be the best series ever.

• 1:10:05Chris Williamson?

  It's really good. It's an hour long, each episode for six or seven episodes. Um, it's huge budget. Each individual episode looks like a movie. It's got full star-studded cast, including some new people that you won't be familiar with, a couple of guys out of Peaky Blinders. It actually, the first episode, watches like a Guy Ritchie film. You know, where they're fighting in the bar and it's all, all right, mate, you fucking, you want some, do you? Like, it's all kind of real cockney gangster shit. Um, and it just, everything gets wrecked and it's so good. It's so fucking good. HBO? I think HBO?

• 1:10:50Jonny?

  Yeah, so it's on, like, Sky Atlantic, yeah. So anywhere you can watch Sky Atlantic.

• 1:10:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, now TV or whatever.

• 1:10:57Jonny?

  Has it?

• 1:10:57Chris Williamson?

  I, I was.

• 1:11:00Chris Williamson?

  Superbly impressed.

• 1:11:01Jonny?

  How do you guys manage to span multiple networks? I feel like it's hard enough just trying to navigate like.

• 1:11:08Chris Williamson?

  Suggestions, same as this.

• 1:11:10Jonny?

  So what's a word of mouth and then you go, I'm going to get a subscription to these different things.

• 1:11:15Chris Williamson?

  Oh, no, no. So I have, I have a completely legal.

• 1:11:22Jonny?

  Of course.

• 1:11:23Chris Williamson?

  Amendment to my fire, my Amazon Fire Stick, which

• 1:11:29Chris Williamson?

  through using VPN is again completely legal via Argentina, but gives me access to a few more, a few more channels and movies and stuff than than might usually be typical. But the way that it works, you can favorite different movies on that stick to a central home screen. And both my housemates are quite big into films and movies. So we all, whenever someone suggests something to us, we just favorite it and put it in there. And then it means that we all have a pool of stuff to watch.

• 1:12:01Jonny?

  That's brilliant.

• 1:12:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So we're just crowdsourcing, we're three degrees of separation away from whatever, a thousand degrees of separation each of different things. And one of, one of my housemates is super into movies and, and series and stuff. And there's always something good in there, always. And Gangs of London was, was one of them. Oh, what's that? What's the guy that's just been cancelled for? Not, not Kano, who's the guy that.

• 1:12:31Jonny?

  Noel Clark.

• 1:12:31Chris Williamson?

  Yes, Noel Clark.

• 1:12:34Chris Williamson?

  The, what was it called? Viewpoint?

• 1:12:36Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:37Jonny?

  That's really good.

• 1:12:38Chris Williamson?

  That was really good, but didn't they not publish the final episode?

• 1:12:42Jonny?

  Because it's available on ITV player, but it never got aired on TV.

• 1:12:46Chris Williamson?

  Right. Okay. So I can go on to ITV player and watch the final episode.

• 1:12:50Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. That was good until he started touching all the cast, wasn't it?

• 1:12:54Jonny?

  Yeah. It's interesting that you said not Kano, because if you Google him, there's loads of articles about how they constantly get mistaken for one another.

• 1:13:05Chris Williamson?

  I think they were in a film together. I think they look fairly similar, similar ages, similar builds. They're always playing the same characters.

• 1:13:13Jonny?

  That's it. Like they're in, they're in similar films, similar series, playing a similar kind of role.

• 1:13:18Chris Williamson?

  Except one raps and the other one touches people.

• 1:13:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know who either of them are, but it's not, it's not ideal to be mistaken for professional toucher. If you're a professional rapper.

• 1:13:34Chris Williamson?

  Johnny, anything else? Any other ones that you've watched or read?

• 1:13:35Jonny?

  I don't know whether we've, I don't know whether we've mentioned this one before. It's a film. Um, called Knives Out. You've seen it before? Um, so it's a bit, like, it's a, it's almost like a, it's, it's a bit lighthearted. It's like a game of Cluedo. But a, a real, like, it, it's really hard to describe what, what sort of film it is, because it isn't like a true story and it isn't completely serious. It's based, it's like a Cluedo whodunit situation. Daniel Craig's in it and he does a Texas accent in it. Which initially is like, what the hell are you doing, mate? But then you start, then you, the, the, Daniel Craig is fantastic in it. Lots of very famous actors.

• 1:14:14Jonny?

  Um, it did really well. It got lots of, uh, recognition. It's called Knives Out. Would highly recommend.

• 1:14:21Chris Williamson?

  Where's that on?

• 1:14:22Jonny?

  It's a film, so like, I'm sure it, I mean, I watched it like a year ago. So I think it'll be on Prime or Netflix or something like that.

• 1:14:30Chris Williamson?

  Got you. Seth?

• 1:14:33Speaker 07

  I have been watching a seminar by a guy called Michael Raduger about, so he calls it the phase. And it's, if you've heard of lucid dreaming or astral projection or out of body experiences, it, it's basically all of these like hypnagogic semi-sleep states that he just calls the phase. And it's fascinating.

• 1:14:56Jonny?

  The phase, did you say?

• 1:14:58Speaker 07

  The phase, yeah, it's a three hour.

• 1:15:00Chris Williamson?

  R A D U G E R.

• 1:15:02Speaker 07

  Raduger, yeah.

• 1:15:04Jonny?

  Sounds like a pasta.

• 1:15:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, linguine, I think.

• 1:15:12Chris Williamson?

  Is, um, is this on YouTube?

• 1:15:15Speaker 07

  Yeah. I actually used to work in a pasta factory when I was younger, but I got fired because I made a few silly mistakes.

• 1:15:23Jonny?

  This is a joke.

• 1:15:27Chris Williamson?

  What did you do?

• 1:15:28Speaker 07

  I'm not, uh.

• 1:15:29Jonny?

  Ah, few silly.

• 1:15:31Chris Williamson?

  Oh, oh.

• 1:15:34Speaker 07

  One of the pharmacists came and said that to me when I was like mid, I think I was like mid cannulating someone or something. And I was like, uh, yeah, okay. And then like 10 minutes later, you're like, uh, right.

• 1:15:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:45Speaker 07

  Anyway.

• 1:15:46Chris Williamson?

  But yeah.

• 1:15:48Speaker 07

  So it's, it's basically a walkthrough of how to achieve these um, states where your body goes to sleep, your mind stays awake. And you're able to navigate the inside of your mind in a very like spatial way, which is pretty cool.

• 1:16:06Chris Williamson?

  Have you been able to replicate this?

• 1:16:08Speaker 07

  No, I've been, I've only been doing it for like two days. It takes like months of practice, but um, it's a very systematic method to doing it. So if anyone's interested in exploring that, that world.

• 1:16:21Jonny?

  I've had one, one lucid dream before. That like, well, I suppose you have to remember them, don't you? Otherwise that it's not a lucid dream. But yeah, I had one lucid dream before, and then as soon as you like realize what's happening, it jolts you out of it.

• 1:16:33Speaker 07

  Yeah, there's lots of practices to not get like excited being like, oh yes, I'm in the, and then you're like, oh, pulled back to your body. So.

• 1:16:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's funny. Uh, Jed McKenna, I told both of you guys about this over dinner last night. Uh, I got introduced to his book through Jim O'Shaughnessy when he came on the podcast. And I get tons of book recommendations, but for some reason this one stuck with me and I'm really glad that it did. He is a enlightened mystic, I suppose technically, although he hates the, the term mystic. And he's written a series of three books just about his experience as someone that's enlightened. Now you think, well, how many other people claim to be enlightened? You've got books from the Buddha and so on and so forth. But Jed McKenna is an alias and he's never revealed who he truly is. So you would say, well, why would someone claim to be enlightened?

• 1:17:22Chris Williamson?

  If they're only using an alias, if they're not going to then repay themselves with the brand equity to a personal brand by being the person that is enlightened. And upon reading it, it's basically a 50% a journal, 50% a reflection on his journey to get to where he is. But he often just talks about discourses that he's had. He's just sat down with someone and he was waiting at a coffee shop and this 17 year old girl came over and started gibbing him for being the person that's supposed to be enlightened. And then they end up going on a bike ride and he talks about this experience, but he's very much no BS. There's some swearing throughout the book. And I've never read something that's made me so convinced through two dimensional, a two dimensional form that is plain words

• 1:18:05Chris Williamson?

  on a screen that don't move, that somebody is enlightened. Like the clarity that he writes with is outrageous. And it is three books and they all have the same cover and they all have the same like shit Windows 98 clip art photo of a border collie on the front. It's almost purposefully as if it's written to put people off from reading it that don't know what it is.

• 1:18:30Speaker 07

  So excited to read this.

• 1:18:32Chris Williamson?

  I wonder if that's part of it, man. It's awesome. You can't get it on Audible. It doesn't exist on Audible. He didn't get anyone to do an audiobook for it. There's no videos of him on the internet. There's some amateur done home narrations of the book over kind of nice images, I guess, but that's as far as you get.

• 1:18:51Speaker 07

  Well, luckily, I'm going to listen to it using Speech Central. Little bonus life hack there. It's a free app for iPhone that turns any PDF into a scrubbable audiobook.

• 1:19:06Chris Williamson?

  Speech Central?

• 1:19:08Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 1:19:08Chris Williamson?

  But you have to get the PDF. You can't just use it natively whilst browsing the internet or whatever, which is like Speechify.

• 1:19:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's not like it's done for like a library. So PDFs or and you can say you can export it as like a MP3 as well. And it reads the PDF? Yeah, you can even take photos of books. So like scan things and it'll turn into an audiobook.

• 1:19:30Chris Williamson?

  What are the voices like? Are the voices any good?

• 1:19:32Speaker 07

  Just like the Apple Siri ones.

• 1:19:35Chris Williamson?

  Okay, that Speechify thing, I haven't tried it yet, but I know that he's friends with Ali, the dude that owns it. And there, those guys seem to be really working hard to try and get whatever you call robotic voices as naturalistic as possible.

• 1:19:50Speaker 07

  I think that's that technology is going to boom over the next two years.

• 1:19:53Chris Williamson?

  I don't get how you can do deep fakes of someone and yet text to speech is still a bit janky.

• 1:20:01Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's true.

• 1:20:04Chris Williamson?

  I don't know.

• 1:20:05Speaker 07

  It's probably running ahead of what's commercially available. Maybe that's what the iPhone 13 is holding back to have something to to give us all.

• 1:20:14Jonny?

  To just take phone calls for you.

• 1:20:16Chris Williamson?

  Oh, God, imagine.

• 1:20:17Speaker 07

  Lovely.

• 1:20:19Chris Williamson?

  That's just our dream, isn't it?

• 1:20:20Jonny?

  You've both heard the like the Google, the Google AI assistant, like in a hair salon answering the phone and dealing with inquiries.

• 1:20:28Speaker 07

  That is incredible.

• 1:20:29Jonny?

  That, yeah.

• 1:20:30Speaker 07

  Well, you can say, Google, please book a haircut for me at two o'clock on Tuesday.

• 1:20:34Chris Williamson?

  Oh, no, this is the reverse.

• 1:20:36Jonny?

  Like the Google assistant is like works at the salon and answers the phone. And like someone says, like, oh, have you got any availability on Thursday? And it like.

• 1:20:44Speaker 07

  You could have Google being your customer support, basically.

• 1:20:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:48Jonny?

  I think they did. They not tested to see if people could tell whether it was a real person or not. And no one could tell.

• 1:20:52Chris Williamson?

  I've seen a video of it.

• 1:20:54Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, learn to code, hairdressers. Get on, get on Python and C, C plus plus. You're gonna have to learn the code.

• 1:21:04Jonny?

  I think this is one of Google's like black ops operations where it's like, yeah, it's a search engine, but we also have like 10 companies underneath us that I just developing all these

• 1:21:14Jonny?

  pretty worrying bits of software.

• 1:21:16Chris Williamson?

  Oh, here's another one. Actually, I don't know how anyone can access this because it's on my completely legal and totally VPN secured stick. But it's called Next. And I want to say it's on ABC or NBC in America. And it is about a misaligned, super intelligent, artificial general intelligence that gets released out into the world. And they then have to try and control it, but it's completely factually accurate in terms of the different ways that the architecture would need to be constructed. So it's someone that's read Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom and understands.

• 1:21:47Speaker 07

  Bostrom must have like consulted for it.

• 1:21:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, either that or they've read the book because they talk about recursive self-improvement. They talk about intelligence explosions. They talk about whole brain emulation. It's on this server. It's trying to get out. It's manipulating shit like it's very dramatized, obviously. And it's like, it kills this guy's father in front of him and all this stuff happens. But it's it's a pretty good watch, especially if you're into existential risk. It's basically like X risk dramatized. It's pretty cool.

• 1:22:15Speaker 07

  It's funny, I was talking to Ben the other day, who says that like 90% of his headspace at the moment is consumed by the singularity and the existential risk. And I was like, Ben, like 90% of my headspace is consumed by like the note taking app singularity, like when that's all, when they're all gonna converge.

• 1:22:34Chris Williamson?

  Someone, I didn't answer this question on the Q and A, but someone asked, how do you not become blackpilled when you're learning about so much existential risk? Like, how do you not just go full nihilism? And it is a good question. I think, I think my nihilism is defeated only by my sort of laissez faire approach to life generally. That my laziness is the, is the antidote to that. But yeah, I totally get why people go to the Future of Humanity Institute and completely dedicate their entire lives trying to solve these problems.

• 1:23:09Jonny?

  So that, I think that's my question with it is like, when does that happen? You know what I mean?

• 1:23:14Chris Williamson?

  What's the threshold that you cross?

• 1:23:16Jonny?

  Yeah, you get so, the more you read about it, the more you learn about it, you're like, okay, this is a problem. And oh shit, this is really a big problem. When do you just drop everything and go and like, go and get in the first trench and try and help out?

• 1:23:28Chris Williamson?

  I mean, none of us are working on the single biggest, most important problem that we have in our lives at all times. You know, we get distracted by things that are of lower priority. I think you actually need to be a very sort of unique and single minded type of person to even take that kind of an approach.

• 1:23:48Jonny?

  It's a very like selfless thing, isn't it, to say, I'm going to pursue something that like has no immediate financial gain for me, or it's just all about the future of humanity.

• 1:23:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, look at the effective altruism movement. Like, look at the people that are doing EA properly, like Rob Wibelin from 80,000 Hours. Like, he is spending his life trying to work out the best way to get other people to spend their lives in service to work. And if they can't do it in service to work, he's working out what's the best way for people to give some of their wage every single year toward the most effective altruistic donations that you can. Like, he is...

• 1:24:26Chris Williamson?

  Like orders of magnitude above being selfless. He's being selfless for being selfless for people being selfless.

• 1:24:34Jonny?

  The thing that Jordan Peterson said on your interview with him, where it's something like, you know, whatever you find yourself being interested in, that's the thing you should just absolutely double down on. And then as long as we have a broader, broad enough spectrum of people with interests, like most things are covered. So you end up, I can't. Someone was saying like someone had been researching influenza viruses and like had loads of research about COVID when it happened because it just was something that he was interested in. Was that one of you too?

• 1:25:02Chris Williamson?

  No, but it doesn't, it totally doesn't surprise me.

• 1:25:04Jonny?

  You end up with these like really niche situations because it's just someone's passion and they just decided to devote their entire life to it. And as a result, we end up with this spread of things. So there's also the counter argument of like, if everybody just did that, then there's a lot of things that suddenly get dropped and a lot of, a lot of life just sort of ceases to function anyway.

• 1:25:25Chris Williamson?

  We need, the, the, the way that it works is that the normal distribution for a reason, right? The fattest part of the distribution tends to be in the middle on the things that people converge on. And this is the topic of my TED Talk, right? Like, it's your duty to give the world, the universe, what only you can give it because only you can. And that's how we maximize human potential civilisationally.

• 1:25:45Chris Williamson?

  But you are right as well that as people get more and more opportunities to do something, if someone just becomes like a, a professional what's its eater, you know, just dissecting the minutia of how to eat a what's it in the most optimal way. You think, well, that's probably a bit of a waste of a life. But if you have to pay that price, you have to have the what's it eater for the influenza specialist, then I don't know, maybe.

• 1:26:06Jonny?

  But like people, you know, things still need to happen, don't they? Like.

• 1:26:10Chris Williamson?

  Lights still need to turn on. Yeah.

• 1:26:12Jonny?

  Yeah. So like if not, everybody can just optimize like that. Cause then unless some people are really interested in like. You know, driving a bus or, you know, and that's their absolute passion and things still run fine.

• 1:26:26Chris Williamson?

  Robots.

• 1:26:26Jonny?

  This has been, this has been quite a, quite a detail.

• 1:26:29Chris Williamson?

  Uh, anyway, I think we're probably about there. We'll leave it there. What's been happening in propane world? Is there anything new for people that want to become online coaches to know about with you guys?

• 1:26:38Jonny?

  There's a, the, the link, the training that we always promote is being updated.

• 1:26:45Chris Williamson?

  Cool.

• 1:26:45Jonny?

  It's now even better. It's just more, it's just more complete. So like the more people we work with, the more like stuff we test. We're always like, hey, we did this and it worked with this many people. So we added into the training. So the free kind of module that we give away, the reason we give it away is like people who don't want to work with us or the people who can't afford to work with us. It's like, well, this is everything you need to have, like a decent crack at it yourself. If you try it and you get stuck, press that button and speak to us. Otherwise, there you go. So that's just been updated. Same link.

• 1:27:16Chris Williamson?

  Which is?

• 1:27:19Jonny?

  I think you know it, Chris.

• 1:27:21Chris Williamson?

  Well, there's two. Is it propanefitness.com slash modern wisdom? Is that one?

• 1:27:24Jonny?

  Yeah, that's the main one.

• 1:27:25Chris Williamson?

  Cool. Well.

• 1:27:26Speaker 07

  And it's much more gooder than it was before.

• 1:27:30Chris Williamson?

  Better than it was before.

• 1:27:31Jonny?

  Yeah, better and gooder, both of them.

• 1:27:33Chris Williamson?

  I like it. Uh, so yes, if you're an online coach or a PT offline coach that's looking to transition online or just increase your revenue, that's the place to go. Propanefitness.com slash modern wisdom. Gents, until next time, maybe it'll be on my couch. I don't know.

• 1:27:48Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:27:48Jonny?

  If I. I think it will.

• 1:27:50Chris Williamson?

  Legally permitted, um, and vaccinated.

• 1:27:53Jonny?

  What was the last one we did on the couch? Was it the Sienna Day one?

• 1:27:57Chris Williamson?

  No, we'd have done some life hacks once since then.

• 1:28:00Jonny?

  Since then.

• 1:28:00Chris Williamson?

  I think, yeah, it might've been the Christmas one, um, that we did just before February, unless we slotted one in between then and, and the, the February, March shutdown. I don't know.

• 1:28:10Jonny?

  Probably the turn.

• 1:28:11Chris Williamson?

  Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, thank you very much for tuning in. Propanefitness.com slash modern wisdom. If you want to go and check out what the boys do. And if you need any of the links for what we've gone through today in terms of life hacks, they're in the show notes below. Feel free to submit your life hacks in the comments as well or send them to someone. Preferably not me, but send them to someone and they might appear on this podcast somehow. Gentlemen. Okay. Thanks. Bye.

• 1:28:48Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:28:51Speaker 02

  On October 2nd.

• 1:28:52Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:28:57Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:29:05Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:29:09Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:29:12Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:29:13Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9. Without parent.