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

2023 has been crazy. I'm back on my old couch in Newcastle with Jonny, Yusef & George to catch up on what they've learned, their best hacks and plans for 2024. Sponsors: Get $150 discount on Plunge’s amazing sauna or cold plunge at https://plunge.com (use code MW150) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get an exclusive discount from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ Buy my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - 00:00 Intro 01:19 Jonny’s Morning Protein Drink 06:26 Pyrex Storage for Berries 08:42 Text Your Friends 13:48 Double Duvets 19:49 The Origin of Life Hacks 21:10 Importance of Sleep 26:58 Business as a Vehicle for Self-Improvement 32:07 Seeing Content as a Diet 40:54 Progressing From Being a Midwit 49:32 TickTick To-Do Lists 56:36 Alfred Computer Software 1:00:36 Hold Luggage is a PsyOp 1:06:31 Track Your Mental Health 1:11:31 10-Year Checkpoints 1:18:24 The Benefits of Therapy & Journalling 1:25:29 These Are the Golden Years 1:30:22 Asking What’s Not Going to Change? 1:32:59 The Opal App 1:35:35 Setting Multiple Alarms in the Day 1:38:04 Sleep Token 1:39:45 Using ChatGPT for Niche Knowledge 1:44:18 Create Your Minimum To-Do List 1:48:35 Fail Fast When Learning New Things 1:52:54 The New Kindle Scribe 1:55:33 Happiness Depends on Expectations 1:59:26 Apple Alarm Tones 2:01:12 Questions Are the Answers You Need - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a Modern Wisdom Christmas special. For those of you who are probably in the 99.5% that have joined within the last two and a bit years, you won't recognise this location. This is my living room in Newcastle. This is where we did the first ever in-person episodes with Jonny and Youssef. And we've got George Mack with us as well, over from Dubai, specially just for this, not for Christmas or to see his parents, just for this, just for this episode. Who'd have thunk it? And we're all in, for those that can't see, we're all festively adorned in Christmas jumpers. And Youssef is refusing, even though he's hot, refusing to take it off because...

• 0:39Speaker 01

  It may have to happen halfway. Thanks for the reminder.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  The microphone for the podcast.

• 0:46Chris Williamson?

  For the podcast, yeah. You may, because you complained that it feels like a hair shirt. So you need something to protect you underneath.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  It's a stoic torture device. Really trying to build up my willpower.

• 0:56Chris Williamson?

  It's resilience training. This Christmas jumper is resilience training. Anyway, we're going to go through some of our best lessons and life hacks from the last 12 months. For those of you that haven't heard the life hacks episode before, we go around in a little loop and go through some of the most, best way to make a toasted sandwich, some new app that we've become obsessed by, some new productivity system or a book or something that we've been watching. And as is tradition, Jonny.

• 1:19Jonny?

  There it is.

• 1:20Chris Williamson?

  Hot potato for you to go first.

• 1:22Jonny?

  Is the toasted sandwich one one you, because that was mine. Do you remember that one?

• 1:26Chris Williamson?

  Was it a Breville toasted sandwich maker?

• 1:28Jonny?

  It was a sleeve that you put bread in to a toaster to toast it. I mean, it's, it's average, to be honest, but I mean, remember it more than me.

• 1:35Chris Williamson?

  We've done hundreds and hundreds of life hacks over the last...

• 1:38Jonny?

  And that's the one you remember.

• 1:39Chris Williamson?

  There's one that I remember. Anyway, first up, what you got?

• 1:41Jonny?

  So mine's a, it's a supplement.

• 1:45Jonny?

  And it's one that I think you feel very strongly about. I don't know what the other two guys think. Clearway, specifically the raspberry lemonade flavour.

• 1:54Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:54Jonny?

  Mixed with either lemon or orange almond salts.

• 2:00Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting.

• 2:00Jonny?

  I would genuinely have that over anything else.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  That's a sophisticated blend.

• 2:06Jonny?

  It is. It's great.

• 2:08Chris Williamson?

  So you're using that post-training?

• 2:09Jonny?

  Just morning.

• 2:10Chris Williamson?

  First thing in the morning?

• 2:11Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 2:11Chris Williamson?

  Thirty grams of protein and some salt.

• 2:13Jonny?

  Sometimes two scoops.

• 2:14Chris Williamson?

  Two scoops?

• 2:15Jonny?

  Sometimes two scoops. Raspberry flavour.

• 2:18Chris Williamson?

  Raspberry, lemonade. And what's that, fifty, fifty-five grams of fruit?

• 2:22Jonny?

  I don't even know.

• 2:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:23Jonny?

  Enough.

• 2:24Chris Williamson?

  That's good.

• 2:24Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 2:25Chris Williamson?

  And why, why that?

• 2:27Jonny?

  It's just, I don't know, like, I mean, I'll get into this later in the episode and we talk about lessons, but I've been big on this year's all about set things to background, make something fun, align the, like, what you should do with.

• 2:40Chris Williamson?

  That was nice. I think, I was thinking about this the other day, that that Hal Mosey clip that I had with him or as explaining my love for pickleball, because it's 1,000 calories in 90 minutes and all you're doing is chasing a ball.

• 2:53Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 2:53Chris Williamson?

  So trying to get the thing, whereas the guy that sits on the cross trainer for 90 minutes, thinking to himself, oh, I'm so disciplined with David Goggins playing in his ear. The outcome for both of us has been precisely the same, except he's had to develop so much more and use so much more willpower.

• 3:09Jonny?

  If you take, like, I don't know, 2009 me, I'd be still trying to get protein and hydration and lemon and water and salt and all sorts of stuff first as soon as I wake up. But it's like, oh, egg whites. And whereas that's like a delicious way to wake up.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  So the principle behind that, that I think is that there's no moral virtue in white knuckling everything. So Ramit Sethi talks about that with just automating your saving. If you just have a direct debit or a standing order, whatever the international phrase is for that, for savings to just go out as soon as you get paid, you're then not having to think every month, oh, I really need to save or whatever. You just never see it. It's just.

• 3:48Chris Williamson?

  Well, they do that with, is it pension contributions? They realised that they could get people to increase the contribution to their pension easier when they ask them to do it at the time that they've got to pay rise. Because as yet, they'd never realised the gains from that new pay cheque. And as a part of that, people didn't feel anchoring bias largely. Like, oh, here's new money, but it's a little bit less new money than you were thinking you were getting, as opposed to old money now minus some.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  So is the key there that you've got to forget about it? You've got to be able, because if you save, if you're saving automatically and you aren't aware of it, that's the win, isn't it? Because you don't know.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Whereas if you think, I've got a pay rise, you just squander it before it even comes in. And usually people over correct. It's like, I've done 30 minutes of cardio, I'm going to have a couple of donuts. You've just more than corrected with the calories.

• 4:34Chris Williamson?

  It's also automation, right?

• 4:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:36Chris Williamson?

  Doing whatever the hard thing is.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  There's something in that, though, that you said then of the thing that you like with a pickleball, for example. And it's like Djokovic versus Andre Agassi. Have you ever heard that thing? So Andre Agassi became world number one, went all the way down to like 120, was doing crazy drugs, like hated tennis, loads of childhood trauma, but was constantly grinding it away. And then they asked Djokovic, like, what about you? And he goes, I just like hitting the ball. And you can find where you like hitting the ball versus having to go Andre Agassi mode.

• 5:06Chris Williamson?

  It's hard to beat that guy. So Aaron Alexander, who is my American equivalent of Yusef, is.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Literally is.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  I'd love to know what that means.

• 5:15Chris Williamson?

  No interest.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Andre, I'd love to meet you if you're.

• 5:18Chris Williamson?

  Very into, very into bodywork, very gamy. Like if I grab his lat, unbelievably gamy. Like, do you know?

• 5:25Speaker 03

  It's like a really tenderly cut.

• 5:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, does tons of, tons of bodywork. We were doing high side planks, you know, where you've got, you're up on that and then you've got your other hand up as well. It's pretty unstable.

• 5:36Speaker 03

  Is that where your arms?

• 5:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, like this. And he looked over at me and you could see I was gritting my teeth in the middle of this workout. And he just said, what would this be like if it was easier?

• 5:45Chris Williamson?

  What would this be like if it was a fucking awesome principle? And you're like, all right, like, I don't need to grip as hard to this thing. There's times when you should do that, you're trying to max out your deadlift, yeah. But for the most part, what would this thing I'm trying to achieve be like if it was easier? Like, if you don't like your morning walk, pick a better route? If you don't like the drink that you have to have first thing in the morning, find another brand or find a different flavour until you find the one that you actually enjoy. If you don't like getting your steps in, buy a dog.

• 6:12Jonny?

  Yeah. Well, I don't think many people like normal whey protein, just to link it back to my point. I think a loads of people drink whey protein with like, whereas clear whey, delicious.

• 6:24Chris Williamson?

  Don't change your mate.

• 6:25Jonny?

  Genuinely delicious.

• 6:26Chris Williamson?

  All right, Seth, you're up.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  So, life hack to begin with, I'm excited about this because I've been working with a team of accountants and operational analysts to develop the optimal categorisation system for life hacks. And what they've landed on is basically digital and physical life hacks. So I'm going to begin with a physical one, which I got from my partner, which is if you have.

• 6:55Chris Williamson?

  I love how you had to take the glasses off. Like, this is fucking down to business now.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  This is important.

• 7:00Chris Williamson?

  Getting serious.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  If you eat a lot of berries, like me, get yourself a Pyrex Tupperware with a sealable lid and they last days longer. Like, they're no longer, you know, you would be like a turgid plump blueberry that's not kind of a bit deflated and a bit crap. You just, it maintains that for five, six days.

• 7:22Chris Williamson?

  Because most of the packaging for berries has got little perforations in the top of the seal, right? Is that not there for a reason?

• 7:30Speaker 01

  So soon, I, I mean, I don't know what their reason is. I think because like, there's a difference between.

• 7:35Chris Williamson?

  You've just revolutionised the berry industry forever. Someone, someone from Kia Aura listening going, how didn't we think about this?

• 7:44Speaker 01

  So there's maybe a difference between the way things are stored in a supermarket for display versus at home. So eggs and things are stored differently, but berries, give it a try.

• 7:55Jonny?

  Do you ever get frozen berries?

• 7:57Speaker 01

  I do, but.

• 7:58Jonny?

  Not quite as good.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  They don't quite land as well, do they?

• 8:00Jonny?

  Well, they haven't got the snap.

• 8:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, agreed. I mean. Finding the right blueberries is a, it's difficult, a difficult challenge. I've found that you can go super small and they're tangy and take, take your face off. You make you go like, and then if you go too big, there's never big and turgid. And turgidity is what I optimize for.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  It's the triangle, isn't it? So you get to pick two of three. So there's taste, turgid and size. And you can only be on one of the vertices of the triangle.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  It's a real shame.

• 8:35Chris Williamson?

  This is the sort of thing you wake up and think about in the morning.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  I've got a model for it.

• 8:41Chris Williamson?

  All right, my one, so this is an old one, the OG listeners of which it's literally like points of a percent that will have heard this one before. So all of this is essentially new to everyone. But it's one that I really reinforced again this year and has just continued to pay dividends. I would probably say top five life hacks of all time.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 9:01Chris Williamson?

  Text your friends when you're thinking about them. Just it continues to pay huge fucking dividends. Why is everyone laughing?

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Is there a limit? So let's say you think about someone five or six times in a day.

• 9:14Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah, of course.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Because it's a self exciting process, isn't it? Once you think of someone, you're more likely to think of them again that day.

• 9:19Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  But if you keep texting them that day, they're going to be like, all right, Chris.

• 9:22Chris Williamson?

  This is the Yusef who at five years old organized all of his toy trucks in a perfect semicircle by size and then color coming out. Just, just to be sure, are we, is it every time that I think about? Evidently not, like use, use a filter of let's not be a crazy person.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  So if there's any programmers or developers listening to this.

• 9:43Chris Williamson?

  You've actually clarified a caveat, quite importantly. But no, just when you're thinking about someone, just send them a message, like whatever it is, you know, we'll do it all the time. Like remember that thing or even just a link to whatever it is that we did previously that's resurfaced somewhere. Cause you think about your friends way more than you're in contact with them. And they never get to benefit from it by sending them a text saying, Hey mate, just thinking about you, hope everything's good, or a memory about what it is that you're doing, or whatever it is that's surfaced in your mind, it makes them feel great because it's just nice to be reminded of that. It makes you feel good because you've unselfishly just bestowed some, you know, love onto whoever it is, and it keeps friendships ticking over. If, if your friends knew how often you thought of them, friendships would

• 10:28Chris Williamson?

  decay much more slowly than they actually do. And by doing this, you actually reduce that gap between the two things. I mean, this is something that you've done as well, right? This year, trying to do better. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. You are chronically bad with your phone, which is actually being very good with your phone.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, that, that is the tough balance with the one you've given there of, I try not to be on my phone too much. And then I'll end up in that sleuth of texting back and forth.

• 10:52Chris Williamson?

  But the reason that you try not to be on your phone is not because of texting your friends.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  No, texting is actually one of, if you had to like draw a graph of ROI activities, texting friends is on the top.

• 11:02Chris Williamson?

  It's the same as why you actually got me back into taking photos at events. I'd mistakenly thought that taking a photo was cringe, because the only reason to take a photo is so you could post it on Instagram. So I dissociated taking photos of things that you enjoyed with being a cringe Instagram poster. But it's actually, I can take a photo and not post it anywhere. And it's my memory for me. So I had to like chop that bit off.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Very important distinction. Yeah. I have a recurring reminder at different cadences for friends to check in on them, give them a call, et cetera. So it's like

• 11:37Chris Williamson?

  You have a geo tag as well, don't you?

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Geo tags. So if I'm in certain cities, it pings up with like, oh, I'm in London, get in touch with Ali, get in touch with whoever. So

• 11:45Speaker 03

  I'm immediately picturing Yusef, like actioning this life hack. And I'm going to get a text from Yusef's VA saying, Yusef's in the bath thinking about something like that very soon.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  At a very strict cadence as well.

• 11:56Speaker 03

  Very strict cadence, always at 9pm at night.

• 11:59Chris Williamson?

  I think I still need to reply to a message from you from like June.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 12:03Chris Williamson?

  Just do it live on the podcast.

• 12:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, we'll do it. Should we do it now?

• 12:05Chris Williamson?

  I wrestle with the worry that as soon as you message someone, if they reply straight away, now you're, that could be 20 minutes back and forth.

• 12:16Jonny?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 12:16Chris Williamson?

  Do you not like your friends?

• 12:17Jonny?

  No, I do. But I think-

• 12:20Speaker 01

  But you've opened up a bottomless task.

• 12:22Jonny?

  Yeah. So like similar to you, so I might, oh, I should text Chris. And you're good at it. You'll reply and then that's it. We've got our exchange. But some people are like, oh, hey, mate.

• 12:32Chris Williamson?

  Oh, there's post-coital pillow talk.

• 12:34Jonny?

  Yeah. Yeah. Like, I was just doing my task, man.

• 12:36Chris Williamson?

  Well, I don't know.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  I've got a final question for you on this because I know Johnny is very easygoing on this. If someone knows that you have an internal system for every time someone, every time you think of someone, you have to text them.

• 12:49Chris Williamson?

  Not every time.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Sure. But does that ruin the magic?

• 12:52Chris Williamson?

  I don't think so.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Should it seem spontaneous? Because I have a reminder for all my friends' birthdays and so on. And some people will be like, oh, well, that's not the same. You know, you're not just doing it out of your own cut. Whereas Johnny's like, oh, no, I think that's great because you've had the foresight.

• 13:04Chris Williamson?

  So I think you're one of having reminders is less emergent. My one is when you think of a friend, text them. Like that, there's no, at no point in there is there any deceit, right? I was just thinking about you, hope that everything's well. Like you've said what's happening. Your one is, hi, mate.

• 13:24Chris Williamson?

  Well, no, it depends on why. It's like, hey, mate, my reminder just came up telling me to message you. Do you say that?

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, good point. So if you say that, the magic's gone.

• 13:32Chris Williamson?

  Precisely. So your one-

• 13:33Jonny?

  It's knowing how you do the magic trick, isn't it?

• 13:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:36Jonny?

  I'm now just going to check my phone every day and if you've not messaged me.

• 13:39Chris Williamson?

  I haven't thought of you.

• 13:41Chris Williamson?

  Well, maybe I think of you so much that I can't do it.

• 13:43Jonny?

  Then it's more than one today.

• 13:44Chris Williamson?

  Right. George, you can't.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  My one's, my one is, um.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  Oh, it's thrown me. That's really impressive.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  You said no private jokes.

• 13:56Chris Williamson?

  That's not private. Everyone's seen Alan.

• 13:57Jonny?

  You're right. Actually, it's on BBC.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  So enough with the Alan Park reference is my one is gonna, um, threefold one. I think it's gonna, um, add years on to men's lives, reduce the divorce rate, and it also killed my fear of dying alone. So, um, I had-

• 14:18Chris Williamson?

  Very low bar to get out of it.

• 14:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I had this simultaneous fear that for ages I wouldn't be able to share a bed with anybody because I would constantly get woken up throughout the night. And it's like, what point in the dating process do you bring that up of like, we're going to have separate beds? So I just assumed that it wouldn't work out. And it was this image on Reddit for people who haven't seen it.

• 14:39Chris Williamson?

  Dean will be up in the edit.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  Where a boyfriend and girlfriend tracked their sleep for like over a year. And both of them, the top two are very similar. So fasted in bed, uh, three hours before bed, um, is a 16% improvement in sleep. Getting in bed before 11pm, both of them, that was the two, two most beneficial factors. And then for her, a beneficial factor was sharing bed with partner. And then you go all the way down his list through all the good ones, all the way past alcohol, all the way past like everything bad you can think of. The single biggest thing, a minus 25% score was sharing bed with a partner. However, for her, it was plus seven percent.

• 15:20Chris Williamson?

  I hate this.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  She benefits from it. Meanwhile, he's dying. And for context, girls, her menstruating was minus 15%.

• 15:27Chris Williamson?

  So it was nearly double that.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  Him, yeah, him sharing bed with the part, with her was, was way worse.

• 15:34Chris Williamson?

  Careful with this.

• 15:34Speaker 03

  Oh, sorry. Was way worse than, uh, her menstruating. Is there a hackier, George, or is this?

• 15:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, mate. I know. I already know what's coming. I've seen the end of this movie.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  The fact you don't.

• 15:44Chris Williamson?

  This might change your life.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  You're screwed.

• 15:46Chris Williamson?

  This might change your life.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  Can I, can I ask around the room, do you sleep better or worse when a partner's in the bed?

• 15:51Chris Williamson?

  Way worse.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  What about yourself?

• 15:52Jonny?

  Worse.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  What about yourself?

• 15:53Jonny?

  I don't feel like my date is good enough to answer the question. I'd say it doesn't affect me.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 15:59Jonny?

  Well, whenever I sleep not with a partner in the bed, it's like in a hotel, traveling.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:04Jonny?

  And that's worse anyway.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  Okay. So there's, yeah, there's not enough there. I mean, the evolutionary explanation would be you naturally, men tend to sleep nearer the door anyway, on average for these relationships. You're then thinking if somebody breaks it and whenever she moves the duvet, your adrenaline goes up and her adrenaline goes down because she's like, oh, he's that. Double duvet is the life hack. Two duvets Scandinavian style. I tried it and it's, it is the best thing I've ever experienced.

• 16:30Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So we need to really dig into this. You sleep in a king, super king.

• 16:34Speaker 03

  Super king.

• 16:34Chris Williamson?

  Super king, which is actually only in real size, two singles side by side.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  I mean, it might be. That feels smaller.

• 16:43Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, it's not.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  It's how big's a king?

• 16:45Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay. I think a king is actually two singles.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:49Chris Williamson?

  Anyway, super king. So how would you do it? He has a super king bed.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:52Chris Williamson?

  You can't have two super king duvets. So do you get two double duvets?

• 16:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, size wise, you can play around with that.

• 16:58Chris Williamson?

  What's your solution?

• 16:59Speaker 03

  With just two.

• 17:00Chris Williamson?

  This is your hack, George.

• 17:01Speaker 03

  But I don't know.

• 17:02Chris Williamson?

  What size?

• 17:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it's like saying, oh, my iPhone. I don't know the exact iPhone case for your iPhone, right? However, just.

• 17:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but I've never had an iPhone before.

• 17:09Speaker 03

  So what?

• 17:10Chris Williamson?

  George's first life hack, he wasn't prepared for the level of autism that we're going to deploy.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Don't tie me up in legalese.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  What, what size bed do you have again?

• 17:21Chris Williamson?

  Super king.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  But just get two super king duvets.

• 17:23Chris Williamson?

  But then it's.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  George, that's ridiculous.

• 17:25Chris Williamson?

  Two super king duvets? It's gonna be on the floor.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  It's fine.

• 17:28Chris Williamson?

  Think about it. It's gonna be like a floor. It's gonna be so much baggy duvet.

• 17:32Speaker 03

  It's still, but we'll go king then, go king.

• 17:34Chris Williamson?

  Two kings?

• 17:34Speaker 03

  Getting caught up in the details.

• 17:36Chris Williamson?

  Well, this is details, details, for me with the details.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  Okay, okay.

• 17:42Chris Williamson?

  Unbelievable. I really think, I really think that this, this needs, I mean, we can put this out to millions and millions of people. I would go as far as to say probably two double duvets.

• 17:54Speaker 03

  If you have a super king.

• 17:55Chris Williamson?

  If you have a super.

• 17:55Speaker 03

  What we need is a PDF.

• 17:57Chris Williamson?

  Nice PDF.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  Okay, I'll get that.

• 17:58Chris Williamson?

  Can you supply supplemental appendices?

• 18:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:01Chris Williamson?

  Please.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  All the guys who sleep with their girlfriend or wife have to go listen to this episode and then sell it to someone, don't they?

• 18:08Chris Williamson?

  That's true.

• 18:08Speaker 03

  I think George said, because of my cortisol.

• 18:12Chris Williamson?

  So on that.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  That we need two duvets.

• 18:14Chris Williamson?

  And they'll say.

• 18:15Speaker 03

  How big are the duvets?

• 18:16Chris Williamson?

  I forgot to do the follow up, which was then when they track the double duvet, it was the single biggest positive thing for him.

• 18:23Speaker 03

  Oh, George.

• 18:23Chris Williamson?

  So the data seems to suggest that.

• 18:25Speaker 03

  Do you have two duvets?

• 18:26Speaker 01

  I've been in the process of negotiating this since visiting George and hearing his advice.

• 18:30Chris Williamson?

  Okay, what's been the issue with negotiation?

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Just that she thinks it's a bit antisocial.

• 18:35Chris Williamson?

  Antisocial.

• 18:37Speaker 03

  Antisocial.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think two singles will do. Because we're in a king. And if a king is truly two single beds, that's the perfect.

• 18:45Chris Williamson?

  I think you're gonna want, I think you're gonna want a little bit more. I think you're gonna, queen, I think you're gonna want two queens.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  Two doubles.

• 18:51Chris Williamson?

  Two doubles on a normal king is gonna be a lot.

• 18:55Chris Williamson?

  Is it double, not smaller than, is it a queen's smaller than double? The amount of bandwidth given to this. That's why I need to. It's important. Yeah, there'll be a PDF at some point. We need a matrix and a PDF. Yeah, I mean, this is another thing. It's how do you sell it to the partner? Hmm. Because if.

• 19:08Speaker 03

  On the same.

• 19:08Chris Williamson?

  It's weird, isn't it?

• 19:10Speaker 03

  My, my answer has just been buying the extra duvet and then just going in the duvet.

• 19:14Chris Williamson?

  This is the way we sleep now.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:16Chris Williamson?

  Because there's no benefit to the female part of it.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. And.

• 19:19Chris Williamson?

  Well, there's, there's a negative.

• 19:20Speaker 03

  I discovered it by accident because I read that data, didn't do it. Um, and then stayed in a hotel where there was like a blanket, like a duvet extra. And it was magical.

• 19:29Chris Williamson?

  I went from waking up five to six times a night to not. They were using Aura, I think. Aura. Yeah, they were on Aura. That is annoying. Make yourself a custom journal entry and let's split test this. Let me do that. In a year's time. No, you just use something that it isn't. Something, yeah. Like menstruating or something. Skiing, skiing. Uh, all right. So lessons, first one from you. Oh my God, I thought we were doing life hacks. I was ready for. One loop of life hacks, one loop of lessons. We can keep it variety. Okey dokey. Just before we actually got started with that, do you remember it was, I know exactly where I was at a set of traffic lights when I texted both of you this years ago. I wanted to do something, I think it was called like, um, like lesson, lesson hacks or like life lessons.

• 20:12Chris Williamson?

  It was life lessons. And I was like, why don't we do a series of life lessons as well as life hacks, which is kind of what we're going to go through here. And I seem to remember you saying something along the lines of like, that's a big shout to presume that we're sufficiently interesting to actually bestow lessons on anybody. And so I bailed out of doing that, but a couple of years later, all of the listical style episodes that I do, like the whole Mosey style one. The ones that me and George do, if it's a list of mental models, all of that, that is the progeny of originally what I was thinking about doing from life lessons. And, um, I think it probably wasn't time at the time, but I'm, I reckon now we've ascended to be. I thought that was. You're the most requested guest on the podcast as well. So.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  According to my brain.

• 21:03Jonny?

  You want to listen to me on the podcast the most.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  I would listen to you talking life lessons.

• 21:07Jonny?

  You get to talk to me all the time.

• 21:09Chris Williamson?

  It's getting hot.

• 21:11Jonny?

  So my first lesson is actually from you, Chris.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 21:16Jonny?

  Really recently, and it's linked to what George has just said. So if anyone's listened to life hacks from the very beginning, I've been on a real journey with tracking devices, Fitbit, Aura, Whoop, borrowed your Aura ring years ago, didn't like it that much. It was you summed up, I think, what the whole point of all these things is, which was, you said something like, it's not about how recovered you are or what your score is, it's just how much sleep you get. And I think the point, what I've learned from all that stuff this year, because as we'll get on to, we've had a fairly like jarring year where I've realised, like, if I don't prioritise the recovery side, I'm so focused on the

• 22:01Jonny?

  activity side, the training side, the step side, but I never, like the sleep and the recovery, like I was pushed to one side. But having something to just remind you every day, like, you should have a nap later, like you're taking the piss. Like, if you keep doing this, it's going to get worse and worse and worse. So having a recovery tracker or something external to prompt you to like, you are not prioritising this. And if you don't prioritise it, it's a problem.

• 22:26Chris Williamson?

  It's going to scupper you.

• 22:27Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 22:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you're gonna, I mean, this, I'm aware that I'm both a Whoop and Eight Sleep partner. So this is maybe not great for my partnership with them. But I can give you the only takeaway that everybody that has one of those learns, you're sleeping less than you think you are.

• 22:42Jonny?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:43Chris Williamson?

  You're sleeping less than, like, it's just, Whoop.

• 22:45Jonny?

  Constantly.

• 22:45Chris Williamson?

  You're sleeping less than you think you are, like.

• 22:47Jonny?

  And this is going to help.

• 22:48Chris Williamson?

  Sleeping less than you think you are.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  That should be the tagline.

• 22:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, honestly. And all that you get from tracking your sleep is.

• 22:56Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, I was in bed, I was sure that I was in bed for eight hours. Turns out it was actually sort of 7:15 and of that 7:15, my efficiency was 85%, which means I got six hours and 30 minutes of sleep last night and I thought I got eight hours. It's just that, over and over and over and over and over again.

• 23:11Speaker 03

  Well, you need to be in bed for nine hours, don't you?

• 23:14Chris Williamson?

  To get eight.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:15Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely.

• 23:15Speaker 03

  And now you're gonna have double duvet. Think about what 24 hours is gonna involve.

• 23:20Chris Williamson?

  Oh.

• 23:21Speaker 03

  But yeah, I just, it's such a, there's a good quote on that, which I think, I forgot who said it, but there's no such thing as being overworked, there's just underrest.

• 23:31Chris Williamson?

  So true. So true.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:35Chris Williamson?

  I'm yet to find, I'm yet to find a time where I've been overworked. If-

• 23:39Speaker 03

  Just under rested.

• 23:40Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Just under rested.

• 23:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. If I get a good night's sleep and train, there's pretty much no amount of work. Are you being serious?

• 23:48Speaker 03

  Have you finished that?

• 23:49Chris Williamson?

  No, no, I was just plowing through the- You just decided like, there's an obvious last thing to add there. Just was like-

• 23:56Speaker 03

  Just trying to make eye contact to do it at the same time. Cause do you guys, what do you guys do? Use whoop? Do you just, do you just wing it with sleep? I mix it up. I've used whoop, I've used aura. It depends on like different periods if I want to test things. But like, the one thing that can, the one thing that can happen is begin to have like a reverse placebo where if I have a bad night's sleep and then I check it, I feel like I've had an even worse night's sleep.

• 24:22Chris Williamson?

  I think for the whoop users, completely disregarding your recovery score is a good idea.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  So that, that was the quote. It's, you said, you literally said to me, we were walking to Egg Slut in London and you said, it's not how recovered you are, it's how much sleep you got.

• 24:35Chris Williamson?

  Hundred percent.

• 24:36Speaker 03

  And it just, I know it's so simple, but I'm so focused on like, oh, it's amber today. I've got eight and a half hours of sleep.

• 24:42Chris Williamson?

  Bro, I got, so I slept through my flight, sorry, I'd stayed awake through my flight from Austin back to the UK, which means that- Eight hours had lasted me for two days. Not good. Dying all day yesterday. I got tracked on whoop 11 hours of sleep last night. So that's probably like 11 and a half with a little bit of awakeness, but I'm only at 40% recovered. Like, hey, get fucked, right? I had 11 hours of sleep last night. I feel great today, regardless of where my HIV and my resting heart rates are.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  And then there's a self fulfilling prophecy that if you're told that you slept badly, you start telling yourself the story that, oh, maybe I, and then you perform worse. And there's studies that confirm that, that if you're, if people are told falsely that they've slept badly, they perform worse on cognitive tests than if they just

• 25:29Chris Williamson?

  They can no sleep

• 25:30Speaker 01

  No sleep

• 25:30Chris Williamson?

  No sleep

• 25:31Speaker 01

  No sleep No sleep So I, I think you, the way you've done, gone about it is great because you've identified what is the keystone needle mover, which is total sleep time. There's a lot, tracking devices have a lot of redundant data. Excellent.

• 25:48Chris Williamson?

  They do have a lot of redundant data.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  And so my medical training is very much drilled into me that you don't test what you're not looking for. Because if you just do a panel of blood tests on someone who's asymptomatic and something's out of whack, what do you do?

• 26:00Chris Williamson?

  That's not the thing.

• 26:01Speaker 01

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

• 26:30Chris Williamson?

  I like that. I like.

• 26:31Jonny?

  It's, yeah. So I suppose the summary is put less attention on tracking like the other side of the equation. Cause you probably do that. Well, depends who's listening, which is the problem with these things. But if you're the sort of person who wears a whoop band, you're probably handling the activity side. And you probably ignore, you're like, I'm green recovered, but I got six hours of sleep. And actually, the biggest change is just

• 26:54Chris Williamson?

  It's just volume of sleep.

• 26:54Jonny?

  Focus on sleep.

• 26:55Chris Williamson?

  Right, Seth, lessons?

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Lessons. So as Johnny said, we've had quite a turbulent year.

• 27:01Chris Williamson?

  What do you tell us about that?

• 27:02Speaker 01

  So both, the, I guess the main thing is that from this time last year to now, the team has gone from two people to 19 people. Which along with that comes a lot of operational complexity, a whole bunch of skillsets that Johnny and I just didn't have that we have to suddenly develop. We set up propane about 10 years ago, well, 14 years ago. And we're very much like schizoid introvert type characters that just like to be at our desks, doing our own thing. And we barely even communicate with each other. We're just like in the hall.

• 27:37Chris Williamson?

  You're annoying.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Well, so we just kind of in the hole, doing our thing. And suddenly it's like, oh, there's a team and we have to learn to let go of a lot of the processes that normally we'd be handling ourselves. So the lesson has been that when you're especially running a business, it's like an accelerated version of this. And I know you've been thrown into this is that it's, as James Clear says, it's a vessel for self-improvement disguised as a money-making enterprise. That it's the biggest driver of your personal growth because it comes in and just twists your nipples and finds all of the, the, the spots that you've got your trigger points and it will force you to level up and to learn those skillsets and to grow.

• 28:19Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's external to you. All personal growth is always done at your own pace. But the business isn't.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  So yeah, it forces you along.

• 28:27Chris Williamson?

  It's road running versus running on a treadmill.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're getting steamrolled and it's like a heat-seeking missile as well because it finds all of the things that would get you emotionally triggered or wound up. So a difficult client or getting working late nights or getting stressed about a potential, I don't know, a legal case or whatever it is.

• 28:46Chris Williamson?

  More agreeable or disagreeable, learning to disappoint people.

• 28:48Jonny?

  Fear that it'll go away, fear that it'll fail, feel you let people down, fear of how people think of you. They're all 10 out of 10, aren't they?

• 28:55Chris Williamson?

  A business is a vehicle for personal growth disguised as a wealth-making machine. That's fucking brilliant. Is that in Atomic Habits? Don't think it is.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Not sure.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  One of his tweets, I think.

• 29:05Chris Williamson?

  Is it?

• 29:05Speaker 03

  One of the biggest hacks I've found for that is documentation. So let's say if you write quite a lot about anxiety and all the stuff when you, when you got, when you get that fourth employee and you've doubled the headcount. And if you can now go back at 19 and review those thoughts of like how worried you was and anxious you was. And you go, oh, and you can see the evidence of you now going, I'm now almost five X that. It makes it a lot easier to then play that again, going, look how anxious I was then, and I figured it out. It's constant evidence, whereas in business, there's no like Instagram account for it. So like trying to create as much documentation is.

• 29:41Chris Williamson?

  That's so great.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  Especially between you two guys as well, to be able to share it is.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. We, we look back and think, remember that thing that we thought was a massive problem?

• 29:48Chris Williamson?

  You know what would be, you know, it would be a really good way to do this. A Slack chat, a private Slack channel that's just got you two in, where you can just brain dump shit to each other. Like dude, I'm feeling a little bit whatever, whatever about today. And that's all that goes in there. And that would be the journal between, especially if you've got a business partner, it can be tougher for the solo entrepreneurs. I remember it's in my day one. So day one for me is serious shit, right? It's like, there's been periods of three years where nothing's gone in. There's been periods of six weeks where I've documented three times. Day one is for like, fucking hell, like something really dramatic has happened. I remember this, it's still fucking in there.

• 30:26Chris Williamson?

  There's this one where the MC for room two upstairs in the R and B room of Voodoo, Saturdays at Riverside, told me that he was leaving to go to a competing club night in Sunderland. And I felt that that was salient enough to put in my fucking day one, right? That was the beginning of the thing that was going to be the snowball effect that would cause that. First off, the like Asian sock wasn't going to come anymore because he was their favorite MC. And then after Asian sock went, obviously all of the other dominos were going to tumble. And I was going to be homeless, alone on a street. And I was going to get gluten intolerance and live under a bridge.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  But that's perfectly appropriate because at the time you were just reacting to the circumstances as you found them. And it was a hot button for you. Like, that's the thing that tapped into this golden thread of like, I'm going to be under a bridge. I'm going to get gluten intolerance. I'm going to have all these. It's like, so that was like a real hot button then. And as you say, it's great to come back to that and be like.

• 31:25Jonny?

  Have you seen day one has this feature of the on this day feature?

• 31:29Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 31:29Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 31:29Chris Williamson?

  I don't have enough, I don't have enough entries.

• 31:31Jonny?

  So I try and use it. I just after I meditate, I just write what's on my mind. And if you just always what there's pretty much always, if you did it often enough as an on this day, on this day, eight years ago, 10 years ago, 12 years ago. And you're just like, God, there's so many like recurrent things.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  I'm going to have to bank both of those comments for my next round because you guys are front running one of my other lessons.

• 31:50Chris Williamson?

  So again, like one of the worst life hack episodes is when two different people arrived and had done the same life hack. And then you got nothing.

• 32:01Chris Williamson?

  All right. So my first one, it's cool that we've got this sort of human centipede of ideas coming on here. The, um, this is from you, which is max content razor. Would you consume your own content? If not, don't post it. And that inspired post content clarity, which is your content diet should be spirulina for the soul, not fast food for your amygdala. And, um, what I realized was that when you're consuming anything on the internet, it's almost always, it, it, it tends toward limbic hijack. Because if it didn't, you would watch something else, which was more limbically hijacking. You know what I mean? So during the moment of consuming pretty much anything, this podcast included,

• 32:43Chris Williamson?

  you are a bad judge of whether or not that piece of content is good for you or not, because it's just compelling. But what you can do is have a sort of pillow talk post title review of how did that particular session of YouTube watching or TikTok scrolling or Instagram browsing make me feel? And was there anything in there that is better or worse? And if there's stuff that continues to come in as worse, it's like unfollow, not interested in this channel. Don't recommend to me again. Does all of the, all of the social medias have a way of downvoting as well as upvoting, uh, channels? And you can get rid of them. You can hide them from your feed. You can do all the rest of the stuff. And if you hide something from your feed, it's tantamount to that entire worldview or that created just die. Right. It's exactly the same. So.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Unfollowing is great, isn't it? Like there are people who just, they always come up on your feed and they annoy you and then you unfollow them.

• 33:34Chris Williamson?

  It's like, oh. No, or even muting, you know, if you can't, if there's some, you know, interpersonal reason why you can't get away with the unfollow, just muting accounts that you don't like.

• 33:44Jonny?

  I had this when I, I always struggled with Instagram, delete it, download it, da, da, da, go back and forth with it. And I had this realization one day about this three, four question of like.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  Did this educate me? No, okay, move on to the next question. Did this entertain me or make me laugh? So it's like an Alan Partridge thing or a funny meme. It stays on. If no, moves on to the next list of, do I want to see this person in the next six months? If no, mute. And that, it takes about 12 hours of pruning, or like a day and a half of pruning, just whenever you're on. And immediately the newsfeed is infinitely better. That is the one thing about the, people complain about the For You algorithms, that they're filter bubbles, but you can also create a wonderful filter bubble. If all you do is like photos of docs, you will just have a feed of docs.

• 34:30Chris Williamson?

  Well, we're training the algorithms on what we actually want, but the problem is that what we want in the moment is not what we want to want after the moment. Retrospectively, we wish that we were watching more of X or Y or Z. One interesting thing I think that's happening with YouTube is, I think they have time-based recommendations, so at different times of the day, different things get recommended to me based on my viewing habits. So I tend to listen to World War II documentaries, which Shane Gillis calls early onset Republican.

• 35:00Chris Williamson?

  Getting interested in history documentaries is like, yo, if your man starts watching World War II documentaries.

• 35:05Speaker 03

  It's a gateway drug.

• 35:06Chris Williamson?

  It is a gateway drug. It's early onset Republican. But I do that, but it only recommends them to me at night. First thing in the morning, it's not. Middle of the day, it's always 10 minute to 15 minute videos that I can watch with my lunch. So again, just train the algo. But yeah. And then for the content creators or fledgling content creators out there, this is something that I'm battling with at the moment. There are ways to play the algorithm and there are ways to add value and there are things that you want to do. And between, within those three prongs is some balance of what you have to do. You have to play within the limits of the algo or else you're just going to be shouting into the ether, but you don't want to be completely controlled by it because that's just audience capture. There is ways of having impact, but you can sacrifice reach and what you want to do. And then that's also, that's kind of a more virtuous version, but still a kind of audience capture.

• 35:51Chris Williamson?

  And then there's what you want to do, which can be like just total solipsism, like self-masturbatory, congratulatory glory, but that's also not playing the game. So somewhere in all of them is where you want to be, but not leaning too far to just, what does the audience want and what will get lots of plays? Because if you wouldn't consume it, what the fuck are you doing? And I realized this at the live shows, I was doing this tour. I would happily go for a beer with any of the people that arrived. And I know for a fucking fact that there are tons of podcasters who couldn't say the same. Like they're not making an audience of people that are like them or people that are cool or people that are interesting. And every single person that came up to me, I was like, fucking like I'd happily like go train with this person or go for a coffee with this person or whatever.

• 36:34Chris Williamson?

  They're all interesting. They're all killing it. They're all in good shape. They're all like cool or whatever in some form or another. And yeah, would you consume your own content? If not, don't post it. It's just, it slices through all of the bullshit.

• 36:45Jonny?

  Do you think there's a, do you think the people who listen to your podcast are you, but like a previous version of?

• 36:53Chris Williamson?

  I think.

• 36:53Jonny?

  Like you have to make content for what would five years ago Chris listen to or watch rather? Cause I assume what you want to watch now is different. It's probably a little bit different, right?

• 37:03Chris Williamson?

  So, yeah, but I also think that if you were posting what you 10 years ago needed, it wouldn't be a few steps ahead of where you were. And so you can still frame things in the learnings that you've had, you know? All of us have been shaped by your time in a big four accounting firm, your time as a doctor, your time in a bunch of different agencies or moving to London to go do this thing. So you talk where you're at, but you frame it with where you've been. And I think that that helps people to get along in steps. This is an Ali Abdaal thing where he said, you don't want to teach people who are 10 steps behind you because you can't remember the problems that you had 10 steps ago. You want to teach people that are sort of three or four steps behind you because it gives them the path. It allows you to still be within that purview.

• 37:46Chris Williamson?

  But this is, you know, a reason for tracking the journey. Again, as we said about taking photos, about noting things down. Because if you don't track the journey, all of those learnings are just lost. And you can't remember the things that were only salient to you five years ago as revolutionary because now they're taken for granted.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  You see that with like wealth gurus, so that Grant Cardone saying, oh yeah, when you're buying companies, you really need to figure, you remember that this is it. And it's like for a regular person off the street or talking about how are you gonna rent your fourth holiday home in Andorra? Like it, it's stuff that's so far removed from.

• 38:22Chris Williamson?

  And it's like aggravated.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  His life. Yeah. Cause you're like, well, what do I do with that?

• 38:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Do you think that a possible pressure valve that, cause I see a lot of YouTubers that will have a second channel for that kind of monologue.

• 38:32Chris Williamson?

  Uncensored, unfiltered, whatever.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Do you think that's just for them to scratch the itch of content they want to create, but they don't want to post on the main channel?

• 38:38Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. Well, there's lots of second channels that are also dog shit. Like, like they still don't add value. I heard this term a little while ago. I probably need you guys to help spin this up. Growth hacking relatability or speed running authenticity. And a lot of people try to do that. It's like, what are the ways that I can make myself seem more authentic or relatable than I am? But it's one of these things. It's just, it's like the speed of light. It's like you are as authentic as you are authentic. And trying to growth hack authenticity results in you seeming even less authentic. The Brian Rose effect, right? Like fucking shadow boxing under a bridge with degenerate skateboarders looking for a bear market in a bush.

• 39:21Speaker 03

  He is.

• 39:22Chris Williamson?

  He is.

• 39:27Chris Williamson?

  Me and George, I will, can I tell them the story about that day we did VR?

• 39:31Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:31Chris Williamson?

  Right. Okay. So, uh, what were we here for? What were we in town for? Ark? No.

• 39:39Speaker 03

  I can't even remember.

• 39:40Chris Williamson?

  We were into, we came to London, we've been, we've been back and forth so many times. We came to London for some event and we had a day and I had some mushrooms with me, some magic mushroom capsules. So me and George decided to do two, we, we double bubble, bang banged the world's two most advanced virtual reality experiences. Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds at dot, dot, dot in London. And then the Tower of London virtual reality experience. Uh, we did those back to back on mushrooms. So if you think that mushrooms is crazy, mushrooms in VR with a full like cast of actors around you for two hours, twice in the same day was just fucking mind blowing.

• 40:23Chris Williamson?

  That's enough to induce a psychotic break, isn't it? Well, we, I think the dosage was pretty optimal. Like we, it was like a, like a 0.7, 0.8 kind of like, just like nice little fluffy thing. But it made everything seem so much more Did you plan to do both? Or did you do one and you're like?

• 40:38Speaker 03

  Well, I saw, I'm meeting with Chris today and I go, say, I go, what do I do today? Do you want to go like a walk? Maybe saw on a quick workout? And he goes, I've got some mushrooms so we can go to a VR world. I go, let's flip a coin then, right? So similar.

• 40:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it was fucking brilliant. It was a good day. What a day.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  Right, you're up. My one, so related to the chat so far, so the content razor that we spoke about then is very midwit. It's very, what is the simple answer that works? And the big thing for me this year has been the midwit meme. I'm quite obsessive about the midwit meme because I'm a midwit. I've diagnosed myself as a midwit. I'm a recovering midwit. I think you have to say it publicly to start recovering from it. And I did something that was quite midwit, but I think it ends up working, which is like trying to figure out an algorithm that moves you to the guy on the left, to the stupid guy on the left. Because if you try and be the genius on the right, that's what the midwit does. Whereas what you want to do is simplify it down of rather than a complex content strategy of scheduling at 2:30 PM every single day.

• 41:38Speaker 03

  And this editing strategy from Alex Hormozius, no, would I consume this? So the midwit algorithm is basically, it's what we spoke about in the first episode, but I've kind of completely neglected it, which is just basic inversion. So the biggest takeaway for me is, so let's say I've got like three examples here. So one is writing, one is writing, the other is e-commerce or like an internet business and the other one is happiness. So for like writing, like the obvious midwit thing would be to consume the best writers of all time and find out their specific morning routines and trying to reverse it backwards. Versus with inversion, you just say, if you was to make sure you was a terrible writer, what would you do? Well, the first thing you'd do is you wouldn't write, right?

• 42:23Speaker 03

  The second thing you would do is you would write inconsistently if you ever did. And then the third thing is actually what you said then, which is you'd write about things you didn't like to write about.

• 42:32Chris Williamson?

  I think this is a fool. You would, you would do things that make you feel like you're making progress toward writing.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 42:38Chris Williamson?

  That aren't writing.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. And all of a sudden, via just inverting, you found out what the guy on the left would say. It'd be like, write, write consistently and write what you like. And then even internet businesses where I see this a lot, where people have these complex dynamic flows to this chatbot that then moves them through this A B cycle. Versus if you went, okay, you wanted to guarantee an internet business would fail. What would you do? Well, one, you'd have like the world's worst margins. So you don't make like what like naught point one percent margin would give you the worst margins possible. The second thing is there's like no repeat purchase. So there's such little LTV. And then, and also the average order value is tiny. And then there'd be like a zero principle, which would be like,

• 43:24Speaker 03

  you're selling shit sandwiches. You're selling something that nobody wants. So you'd be selling shit with no margin, no repeat.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  Make it really hard to buy, make the site load, site page load speed really slow.

• 43:33Speaker 03

  That'd be later down the list, but it just right now, just shit sandwiches with no margin, no repeat customer.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Thing is shit sandwich has got a bit of a niche appeal.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  It's probably niche.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Like the Nazi milk.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  There we go.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Did we talk about that?

• 43:45Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 43:45Jonny?

  What's that?

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Uh, it was, uh, correct me if, if this rings a bell or you got it. So is a woman sat doing photo shoots with Nazi memorabilia all around her and she's got her feet in some milk. And she's bathing in milk and then bottles it up and sells it online as Nazi milk. And quite a decent markup on that. But again, niche appeal. You think, well.

• 44:08Jonny?

  Didn't Belle Delphine sell her bath water?

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know.

• 44:11Jonny?

  Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Bath in a bath.

• 44:12Speaker 03

  Those are both things that people want.

• 44:14Jonny?

  Actually wanted to buy. Anyway.

• 44:16Speaker 03

  Shit sandwich is something that somebody, we have to receive. Back off Nazi milk, this podcast sponsor. Um, so, uh, and then happiness is another one where people are doing such like complex strategies for that and going to Peru and taking, which again, there's a time and a place for, but if you had to make somebody miserable, terrible sleep, terrible diet and exercise and terrible people. And midwit, the way to find out what the guy on the left would be is just to invert things around and avoid the top three or four. So that's my big takeaway.

• 44:44Jonny?

  What is the opposite of success?

• 44:46Speaker 03

  Exactly. And then avoid, avoid those things.

• 44:49Jonny?

  What would someone that was going to run a terrible online fitness bit, like if you wanted to try and make the worst online fitness business you could, what would be the three things to try to do?

• 44:58Speaker 03

  Don't do them.

• 44:58Jonny?

  Yes.

• 44:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. Because and most, most, sorry just to put in, but most smart people will get caught up on the 16th smart thing for success and not avoid those things, including myself.

• 45:08Jonny?

  We, we have a phrase which is just stay stupid with the advice.

• 45:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:11Jonny?

  It's like, as soon as you start trying to make something complicated, like what would the stupid person do? They wouldn't understand the complexity. The difficulty is, I think, convincing yourself that the stupid advice is actually that, because there's, there's examples of things where it seems simple, but it actually is the wrong thing to do.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  What like?

• 45:29Jonny?

  And here you're going to ask me. Okay. So going and training chest every day. For example, I want to get in good shape. I'm just going to train chest every day. What do I like to do? I like training chest. I'll just do a peck deck every day. That's simple advice, but it's probably not the best.

• 45:42Chris Williamson?

  There's a level of being informed that you need to.

• 45:44Jonny?

  You need to like get just over the like.

• 45:47Chris Williamson?

  It's like a white belt mentality, right? Like the white belt actually does know. So all of the shit that you learn when you first start boxing. It's like, here is how to throw a good jab. Guess what you're going to throw most of during your entire boxing career? Jabs. But then when you get to blue belt syndrome or purple belt syndrome, the equivalent in boxing. And you're like, yeah, well, it's all about like my back off hand uppercut. Like that's really where I'm at. It's like, no, no, get fucked.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  This is the way to figure it out, isn't it? You look at what are you a black belt in now? And then think back, what was I trying to do when I was a white belt? And I've just come all the way back to basics and I'm just doing the basics consistently. Well.

• 46:21Jonny?

  Yusuf had one, which was someone asked Yusuf recently, like what's a, like what's his recommendation for pre-workout nutrition? And he was like, oh, like coffee and some like honey on toast or something. And he's like, that sits on both sides, the coffee and the honey on toast. It's the first thing you try before you do your first arm session. And then you go through all the like.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  Purple psycho.

• 46:43Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 46:44Chris Williamson?

  Nubri extract.

• 46:45Jonny?

  And you're like, oh.

• 46:46Chris Williamson?

  Algene bottle.

• 46:47Jonny?

  I'm going to train later. I'll have some honey on toast and a coffee. I don't know.

• 46:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 46:51Jonny?

  So it's trying to find the, but it's still informed enough that it's useful.

• 46:54Chris Williamson?

  What's mental about this is that the first ever episode that me and George did in your old, old, old, old offices at social chain, where we did inversion, how do you make, uh, it's hard to work out how to be happy, but it's easy to work out how to make a happy person miserable.

• 47:09Jonny?

  Yes.

• 47:10Chris Williamson?

  This is one of the most painful things that I've had to realize, which is many of the questions that I struggle with now exist in podcasts I recorded at some point over the last six years.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Getting front run again.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  But you know what, we're clearly, we clearly have had a very similar 2023. So.

• 47:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I mean, it's been, I think, maybe you just get disquieted by less stuff than us. Like you're, you're psychologically more stable, I think, than both of us.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  This is the trend I'm noticing that like, here we are coming up with these half-formed ideas. And then George is like, well, I've actually got an algorithm for that and a full process that I've thought about.

• 47:48Speaker 03

  There is something to be said, though, about making content, forgetting that you've made it and then it coming back to you. So like I said, so David Senra from Founders recently tagged me in something where it was, there's two kinds of people on the internet. One that doesn't understand the scale of the internet and the other, the other people that know they don't understand the scale of the internet. And he then quoted me and I was like, I didn't realise I said that, but I go, that's good.

• 48:16Speaker 03

  So they went back and found it. I go, I did say.

• 48:18Chris Williamson?

  Right. So there's two ways that this happens as well. The first one is you get quoted by someone saying a thing that you forgot that you'd said. That's level one. Level infinity is you get quoted by people who attribute quotes to you that you never said, because it seems like it fits. So I've talked all of you guys about this before, but Churchillian drift is the name of the phenomenon whereby unattributed quotes get attributed to Churchill more and more over time. And it's like, what you want is to develop like Williamsonian drift. Like you want to insert yourself into a niche whereby it's people that go, I don't know who said that. That sounds like a, like a Chris Williamson thing.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Like you've got to be very careful with the other Chris Williamson.

• 48:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Well, you know, this is also where it would be useful to have a Andrew Tate-esque army of Vietnamese repurposes, just starting to post quotes with like unattributed, but like supposedly attributed to Chris Williamson to create the trend. That's how you begin that tsunami. That's great. I really like that one. Is there anything else on inversion?

• 49:16Speaker 03

  That's it. Just think of the top three to five things, flip it around and you've figured out how to be the guy on the left. And you will forget those things time and time again.

• 49:27Chris Williamson?

  All right, Johnny.

• 49:28Jonny?

  Be the guy on the left. Am I on hack or lesson?

• 49:31Chris Williamson?

  Hack, please.

• 49:37Jonny?

  Tic Tic.

• 49:38Chris Williamson?

  Here we go.

• 49:39Jonny?

  Here we go.

• 49:42Chris Williamson?

  So I'm personally invested in this one. So this is, this is now an ad read for Tic Tic for me. Okay. Forget the fact that there's a few million.

• 49:50Jonny?

  In other, other news.

• 49:52Chris Williamson?

  Don't say that anymore.

• 49:53Jonny?

  Sorry.

• 49:54Chris Williamson?

  It's all right. Don't worry.

• 49:56Jonny?

  Is it now just news?

• 49:57Chris Williamson?

  Because I think we've done Chris dirty with Tic Tic, haven't we? Well, fucking left me out to dry.

• 50:02Jonny?

  Are you still a nominee?

• 50:02Chris Williamson?

  Hung me out to dry. Would you like to tell?

• 50:05Jonny?

  Are you still a nominee?

• 50:06Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Would you like to tell the story of what you did to me?

• 50:09Jonny?

  Well, I mean, I, I thought at the time, Chris, I was doing the right thing.

• 50:14Jonny?

  Okay.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  If only you'd just listened to my advice back in 2016.

• 50:18Jonny?

  The problem is that, and you know, we, we love you very much, but a lot of Yusuf's software recommendations come from a, like a niche.

• 50:29Chris Williamson?

  Bean mentality. They come from a very dry roasted bean mentality.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  So it's called. I'm what you would call an early adopter.

• 50:36Chris Williamson?

  You are an early adopter.

• 50:37Jonny?

  You're the early adopters early adopt.

• 50:38Chris Williamson?

  You early, you, you early adopt everything, which means some of it, some of it sticks and some of it doesn't. The reason it's called Bean is instead of like Microsoft Word, you used software called Bean, which, do you still use it?

• 50:51Speaker 01

  No, it was some really lightweight, open source text editor.

• 50:55Chris Williamson?

  Just to check, have you got YouTube premium yet?

• 50:58Speaker 01

  I don't need it.

• 51:00Chris Williamson?

  So no, no, no, what was the, what was the question that I asked?

• 51:02Speaker 01

  No, have you still got the Argentinian version for like 70p a month or something?

• 51:06Chris Williamson?

  Correct, through a VPN. But that's, that's it. You spend how much money per year on YouTube ads?

• 51:11Speaker 01

  Can we just say the Argentinian YouTube premium? Let's just not, let's not skim over that because, because that is beaning if I ever saw one. That is Syrian dry roasted.

• 51:25Chris Williamson?

  Don't you worry, Habibi.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Habibi is okay.

• 51:28Jonny?

  So all that is to say that when, when Yusuf says, I've got this bit of software. I think it's good. You just let it, you let it simmer for at least 90 days.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  Fair enough.

• 51:38Jonny?

  And then ask him again.

• 51:41Jonny?

  Tic Tic is one of those things. It's a calendar to do list, habit tracker, anything else?

• 51:49Speaker 01

  Pomodoro timer.

• 51:50Jonny?

  Pomodoro timer does stats, all these sorts of things. But the thing it's given me is, which is a little bit.

• 51:58Jonny?

  Going against, Yusuf and I have had a debate a long time about how you treat a calendar. Yusuf puts all of his tasks in his calendar and I just put events in my calendar.

• 52:06Chris Williamson?

  And then deletes them.

• 52:07Jonny?

  And then deletes them or defers them.

• 52:11Jonny?

  But I recommended I'm going to focus to you five years ago, four years and you've been using it since.

• 52:19Chris Williamson?

  I've been locked in. I've been grandfathered in. I even took Peter Aki's course on it. And then I brought Peter Aki's on the show separately.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  You know what I respect about you, Chris, is that like when you say, okay, I'm going to take on this recommendation, you really do it.

• 52:35Jonny?

  You are one of the least flaky men I've ever met.

• 52:39Chris Williamson?

  Well, you saw me doing Achilles rehab when we first went to Dubai, maniacally doing Achilles.

• 52:45Jonny?

  Like here.

• 52:46Chris Williamson?

  That would have been it would make this where I was laid with my foot up.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  Not originally boring.

• 52:50Jonny?

  With an upset tummy.

• 52:51Chris Williamson?

  We went to, we went to Dubai and George is laid by a pool like reading, like, like throwing Munga quotes at me. And I'm, I'm, I'm over there doing five second eccentric, like single legged soleus raises.

• 53:03Jonny?

  When you did the McGill big three, I used to, used to go to CrossFit.

• 53:08Chris Williamson?

  Thousands of hours.

• 53:08Jonny?

  Everyone else is doing the WOD.

• 53:10Chris Williamson?

  Thousands of hours.

• 53:10Jonny?

  You're just in the corner, just.

• 53:12Chris Williamson?

  Thousands of hours. I've done bird dog and side plank and McGill curl up.

• 53:16Jonny?

  Do you regret it?

• 53:17Chris Williamson?

  Not at all. Not at all. I now have a spine that, that functions.

• 53:19Jonny?

  That works. Yep. So the thing, I remember you saying to me, like, I'm doing my weekly review and I hate it and I hate it. And I just kept saying, like, just, just, just do it, Chris. It's good for you. Tic Tac makes that easier. So I basically just every, nothing, the hack is nothing leaves the inbox without a date attached to it. But it's not necessarily a date you'll do the thing. And then all you have to do is look at the today view on Tic Tac. And you go down at the start of the day, I look at, there's a batched box at the top. I either drag it to a time slot, I'm going to do it that day, or I review it, cancel it, delete it, delegate it.

• 53:58Chris Williamson?

  Do you have a group view on TikTok? Tic Tic, can you send it to like each other?

• 54:03Speaker 03

  You can email things to his inbox and he can email things to my inbox.

• 54:06Chris Williamson?

  You can't view each other's.

• 54:07Speaker 03

  You can have shared lists.

• 54:09Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay, that's pretty good. So if you're working on a project together, you could delegate tasks.

• 54:13Speaker 03

  Yusuf's convulsing, can you see it?

• 54:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 54:16Speaker 03

  Because he's just got so much to say.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Shared list. Well, yeah, but you, you're a good example of separating planning from execution. So you have the planning time and then you turn up on the day and you just work through.

• 54:28Speaker 03

  It's something I changed my mind on this year, big time. I thought it was terrible. Tried it, didn't like it, got rid of it, went back to OmniFocus. But you just.

• 54:37Chris Williamson?

  Then move to things three.

• 54:38Speaker 03

  I moved to things three.

• 54:39Chris Williamson?

  Period.

• 54:39Speaker 03

  Of course, I've tried everything. It's like, it's like whoop. I've tried the whole.

• 54:41Chris Williamson?

  But the gamut.

• 54:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:42Chris Williamson?

  Don't forget, don't forget, I was about to switch to things three. I'm so.

• 54:46Speaker 03

  And I made fun of you, didn't I?

• 54:47Chris Williamson?

  I'm on such satellite delay from you. I'm Douglas Murray in the Gaza Strip, like waiting for Piers Morgan, like.

• 54:54Speaker 03

  We've just got packet loss, haven't we?

• 54:56Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes. Thanks, Piers. I've got you. Like, that's me in a fucking flak jacket.

• 55:01Speaker 03

  On Tic Tic.

• 55:02Chris Williamson?

  Right. Well, I want you, you've both promised me that one of you will sit down and, and transfer.

• 55:07Speaker 03

  We have quite different flows.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  I've got a full guide on YouTube that.

• 55:10Chris Williamson?

  I've already watched it. I've already watched.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  You've watched it already?

• 55:12Chris Williamson?

  I watched the full thing.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Ahead of the curve.

• 55:14Chris Williamson?

  Of course. Well, I wanted to get the best in before you sit down and personally coach me through it. And I feel like, to be honest, I feel like it should be you because you cursed me with three years of the most advanced task manager.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Punishment.

• 55:25Chris Williamson?

  In history. Yeah, it is. It's just like recompense.

• 55:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:29Chris Williamson?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 55:29Speaker 03

  You're right. I put you right in the deep end. They have just launched the new OmniFocus.

• 55:33Chris Williamson?

  What's this?

• 55:33Speaker 03

  They've just launched a new one.

• 55:34Chris Williamson?

  But I don't care.

• 55:35Speaker 03

  It's quite interesting with like social networks or apps that are bad for you, they quite quickly get a moat, like there's Instagram, Facebook.

• 55:42Chris Williamson?

  Oh, he's gone.

• 55:42Speaker 03

  There we go.

• 55:43Chris Williamson?

  He's gone, he's bailed out. Right. Well, if you, you have to be at least partly Christmased. So there you go.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  You have like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and only recently has TikTok really come along. But with productivity apps, there's so, it's so, such decentralization and so much churn from product to product.

• 56:00Chris Williamson?

  People leave.

• 56:01Speaker 03

  But I do like what you said then about the life hack. I do think you, that's the problem I often have with life hacks is if a friend has just started. You need that cooling off period.

• 56:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 56:10Speaker 03

  Cause that's the time when they're going to be the loudest. But if you come back in 90, that's the meta life hack today, which is wait at least 90 days for all life hacks.

• 56:17Chris Williamson?

  I sent you that thing the other day that was Paul Bloom quote, quote tweeting someone else where it was like,

• 56:23Chris Williamson?

  I've just learned about the recency bias and I have to say out of all of them, it's my favorite.

• 56:30Jonny?

  Very good.

• 56:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. When someone says something to you, set a reminder in tick, tick.

• 56:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there we go. 90 days. All right. Seth, you're up.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  So the most enduring life hack, you guys will be no stranger to this, but I feel like since we've, this is a new audience seeing this, it's got to be Alfred.

• 56:48Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  So Alfred is one of the OG life hacks and I have got to be one of the heaviest users. So I've checked my stats. I've used it 400,000 times.

• 56:59Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  400 times a day.

• 57:01Speaker 03

  400 times a day.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  I invoke Alfred 400 times a day.

• 57:05Speaker 03

  It is like, it is him.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  It's a $20 piece of software like Spotlight that genuinely I would pay four figures for.

• 57:13Chris Williamson?

  Happily, happily.

• 57:14Jonny?

  Not five.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  Probably.

• 57:17Speaker 03

  He's got a mortgage on his Alfred app.

• 57:20Chris Williamson?

  I've read the paper on Klarna.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  That's it. They could have me over a barrel. So Alfred developers, please don't.

• 57:25Jonny?

  I remember when you changed laptops, you said the thing you were most concerned about was changing your Alfred workflow.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Preferences. Yeah. Like.

• 57:32Chris Williamson?

  It is a bastard. I had to go through it with you.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  It feels like walking through Treacle using a computer that doesn't have Alfred. And I've worked in the NHS and that's like, so.

• 57:42Chris Williamson?

  I come from a conversion rate optimization background. Okay. So Alfred is the hack. Let's say that no one, people that are listening don't know.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  So they describe it as Spotlight on steroids. So it's a.

• 57:54Chris Williamson?

  What's Spotlight?

• 57:55Speaker 01

  Spotlight is the little magnifying glass button on your keyboard on your Mac.

• 58:00Chris Williamson?

  Space, if you're watching this on.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  Command space opens up any webpage or file or app or whatever. But Alfred has a load of extensibility as well. So you can, I can control all of my lights, my Bluetooth, clipboard history, paste in text. Expansion. So if you start typing your mobile number texts that you often send quite a lot like hello, thank you for your inquiry, blah, blah, blah, best wishes. All that kind of stuff. You just have it at the tip of your fingers and it is saved. What do you use the most? The clipboard history. Same. And snippets. That's, that was what, that's.

• 58:34Chris Williamson?

  Clipboard manager.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  Huge.

• 58:35Chris Williamson?

  Anyone that doesn't have a clipboard manager that spends a modicum amount, any more time on the MacBook or the laptop. It's MacBook only as well, isn't it? It's so racist. I love it. So bigoted.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  I, I love that though as well. Cause it's like, if you're using a Windows computer, you've got bigger problems.

• 58:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Let me learn you. Let me learn you about this. Um, the clipboard manager is insane. So for the most part, you can only copy the last thing that you can only paste the last thing you copied. Whereas this is, you can set it up to basically infinity, but it's like, I think for me, it's the last 300 or 500 or something, things. Which means that you can go through a document or a webpage and find all of the different things that you need to copy. And then go on to where you need to paste them and paste all of the different things that you need to paste. Full clipboard manager. You can even do conditional formatting when it comes to the snippets, which is their text expansion. So I have an invite message. My invite for the podcast has got progressively shorter. Now it's, hi there. Can you direct me to whoever handles your podcast invites, please? Thanks.

• 59:36Chris Williamson?

  And that's I N V three. I N V two is when I need to show a little bit more, uh, how would you say, like reputational ankle, like a sort of.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  That's a little bit.

• 59:48Chris Williamson?

  And then.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  What skin?

• 59:48Chris Williamson?

  I N V one is, I haven't updated that in forever.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  Is that short shorts?

• 59:53Chris Williamson?

  No, it's huge. That's, oh yeah, it is. Yeah, cool. That's only fans, only fans free member access.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  Very nice. Yeah. So I've got a full guide on that as well, that kind of to walk through, but just start playing around with it and you'll figure out so many.

• 1:00:07Chris Williamson?

  You get free trial period, I think with OmniFocus.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  With.

• 1:00:10Chris Williamson?

  With a, uh, freaking Alfred, sorry.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  There's a free version, but then the, the real juice comes from the $20. It's $20 once off, like.

• 1:00:16Chris Williamson?

  Power pack.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. It's lifetime.

• 1:00:18Chris Williamson?

  Five figures for that.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. The delta of price to.

• 1:00:22Chris Williamson?

  I think it's you'd pay five figures for use of setup.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:25Chris Williamson?

  I think our, our setup's probably worth in the like high four figure range.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Ethereum.

• 1:00:32Chris Williamson?

  All right. What have I got next?

• 1:00:38Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:01:23Chris Williamson?

  Your salon grade shampoo. We once went. Liquids is the. We once went to Iceland, not the supermarket, the country. Place. We once drove to Edinburgh while Yusuf had meningitis to fly to Iceland. And I tried to transport five kilos of Tresemee. Because I just hadn't thought, I hadn't thought to decant it into something smaller. Wow.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  You managed to sweet talk the Glaswegian person at the desk.

• 1:01:49Chris Williamson?

  He'll do that.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  To transport liquids as well. Mind blowing.

• 1:01:52Chris Williamson?

  Sweet talk Glaswegians into worse.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Into a national security threat for Iceland.

• 1:01:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Too much Tresemee. What is this that you've brought with you? So. Cheapest thing there. It was the cheapest thing there. But yeah, hold luggage is a psyop meant to keep you poor and late. And you can get away with hand luggage only quite easily. I have a lot of questions. Hit me. Liquids.

• 1:02:17Chris Williamson?

  Get travel size containers. And do you run out? Do you buy more when you travel? Up to 100, up to 100 ml, no. So I will caveat this. There's a couple of complications. First one is going to be. If you use spray antiperspirant, very difficult to find a 75mm of that. Very difficult. Lots of 105mm, which is fucking infuriating.

• 1:02:41Chris Williamson?

  Don't use a roll-on. Not a massive fan of a roll-on. Would rather go for a spray. That's, that's a challenge. Yes, liquids, but largely.

• 1:02:47Jonny?

  Do you buy an antiperspirant when you, when you, when you arrive somewhere?

• 1:02:50Chris Williamson?

  If, it depends how many stops you're doing. If this is one trip, yes. If it's multiple trips, no, because that's just you, that's intermittent, intermittent purchasing. So you can get, you know, like 25mm spray thing and just get like three or four or five of them and just throw them in.

• 1:03:02Jonny?

  And you, you must be doing, like, you must be washing your clothes regularly.

• 1:03:06Chris Williamson?

  I did, I did laundry while I was there, but I don't know about you. I, the, uh, how would you say, like, Overton window of acceptable clothing to me, isn't that broad. I don't have much more than about hold luggage worth of clothes that are like nice and cool to me at any one time. So for me to cycle through that stuff, I would probably be doing it anyway. And I would just have random surplus pieces of clothing that wouldn't get wonked. So I'm like, I don't like that T-shirt. Like, I really love that T-shirt though. So I'll get that one washed and I'll do it again. So probably do that even if I was in hold luggage mode.

• 1:03:42Jonny?

  And then what is the, what is the hand luggage recommendation?

• 1:03:46Chris Williamson?

  So before I started spending any amount of money on luggage, I would have said luggage is luggage. It's fucking pointless. Like, why are you even trying to do it? Then I upgraded and got an Away, which is pretty good. Uh, and that has sort of tie down straps that make things like much more organized. And then I started using Nomadic before I was a partner with them. So I bought their stuff and then became a partner with them. And it's just magical, like different sections, magnetic ties, so that you can lock things down and push things down, different sections for everything. They have a, it's called a, you got, you got the backpack. What's your backpack called? Travel pack? They've got two, one's a travel pack and the other's a, I can't fucking can't remember.

• 1:04:31Chris Williamson?

  It'll be, I'll link it in the show notes below. But it's just, it's, this backpack opens like clamshell from both sides and it's just phenomenal. So, Nomadix's website just has all of this stuff on there and it's really good. But it just changes, it changes the quality of your life, having genuine, high quality luggage. Even if you are going to go hold luggage, like there's ways that you can like lift different things up. And oh man, it's fucking, it's outstanding. Wow. Can it fit a spare duvet? James, James Smith managed to fit a pillow with him because he travels with his own pillow. What? Pregnancy pillow? No, like normal head pillow. He's bailed out of the pregnancy pillow life. Too hot. Lot of people flying long haul had brought their own pillows. I noticed that. I feel like that's probably going to be a future life.

• 1:05:16Chris Williamson?

  If I was to predict what my life hack next year is going to be, I reckon taking a pillow with you while you travel. Is it a blow up pillow? Or two? No, no, no. And he fits it on his luggage? Fits in hand luggage, bro. In hand luggage. Thin pillow. But if it's a thin pillow, it's. Squish all you want, is it? Squash down. Anyway, that's my, that's my thing. Hold luggage, bail out of it, get good hand luggage and backpack and roller. And you'll be able to get away with it. Also, one final one. If you are traveling and really struggling for space, whether it be hand luggage or hold luggage. If you want to just have like, let's say shoes, shoes take up quite a bit of room, aren't that heavy? And you usually don't have space for them. Just go into the airport, go to WH Smith's or something like that.

• 1:06:00Chris Williamson?

  Buy a bottle of water, put your shoes in the bag. No one ever complains about you taking retail on from within the airport. Where were the shoes before? Is this before you go through security? Yeah. And so like literally just. So you're walking into the airport, holding loads of shoes? Carrying shoes, yeah. Buy a bottle of water, ask for a bag. Yep. Put it in the bag because if they didn't allow you on with stuff that you purchased from WH Smith's or. WH Smith wouldn't operate in the airport.

• 1:06:25Speaker 03

  My mind. Fuck yourself, airports. Damn. Hack. Um, so my one, um, again, it's one I've done for a while. So I put it, it's been, it's not fresh this week. So it's been through the filter. Passed a 90 day filter. Pretty much. I wouldn't be surprised. Everyone who's listened to you as well as you two in the fitness scene, they've tracked like their lifts, they've tracked their nutrition, they've tracked sleep over the years, but very, very few people have ever tracked like their mental health or mood. So I created this idea, which I realized is quite a big therapeutic technique, which I didn't realize at the time. But essentially, imagine you have your mood. So you have zero here, which is worst day of your life. And then like 10 here, ecstasy pill in the system, serotonin, like maxing

• 1:07:10Speaker 03

  off the charts. And let's say you kind of each days varies between a four to a six, and maybe not a British four or six, because a British person, like their worst days are four and their best days are six, but um, a wider ranging one. So let's say you have a four to a six every single day. As soon as you go outside of that, so if you go sub four, for whatever reason, just have a little like Apple note table, like negative mood here, positive mood there, just drop in the date and what the cause was. And likewise, if you go above a six, just write down, oh, um, great morning, uh, slept eight hours, coffee's in the system, deep works, whatever it is that's caused it, write it down, two duvets, um, write it down. And then at the end of the year, you have

• 1:07:54Speaker 03

  like 70 different entries, or even at the end of the month, you'll have like five or six different entries that you can just be like, oh, okay, this thing's shown up multiple times. And it's one thing to have like a bad hangover and say, I'm not going to drink again, but you then forget come Saturday. But then let's say you look at the data and you go, hold on, 83% of my bad moods that were enough to register in this table, like was alcohol. And you can, you can then put it in a little Google sheet and just see that, that thing there, that hits so much harder. And likewise with the positive moods as well. It's basically whoop for mindset, isn't it, for mood?

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  Can I add a couple of things to that, George?

• 1:08:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, go for it.

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  So I love that idea. This is the new Apple, as my abysmal step count as well.

• 1:08:39Chris Williamson?

  Four.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  A thousand, 1,200 steps.

• 1:08:42Chris Williamson?

  Busy morning.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  But slightly pleasant or slightly unpleasant day, for example. So I think this is the journal or it's one of the recent updates.

• 1:08:50Chris Williamson?

  What are you having a slightly pleasant day?

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  So this is part of the new iOS. They have a mood tracker with tags. So you can do that natively within Apple Health. But also for something that's more sophisticated, you can use exist.io. Now that's it, log a mood. Can we show the, can we show that to the camera?

• 1:09:10Chris Williamson?

  Neutral. I'm gonna do this. Oh, it's unpleasant. Oh, slightly pleasant.

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  But the reason that I still prefer exist.io, it's about $7 a month or something, is that you can pass the data and do a lot of good stuff with it and figure out what.

• 1:09:25Chris Williamson?

  Doesn't sound like you.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  It'll put, yeah.

• 1:09:27Chris Williamson?

  It'll export to a CSV.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  Oh, lovely. And it'll, it pulls out correlations. Some of them might be a bit spurious, like on, on days that it rains, you have sex more or something, but I suppose that's, that probably makes sense.

• 1:09:38Chris Williamson?

  You see that thing about the, the correlation between the number of Nicolas Cage films released in a year and the number of people who dry from, die from drowning in swimming pools? It's like a really strong correlation.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know how you explain that.

• 1:09:51Chris Williamson?

  Ice cream and ice cream cells and murders, isn't it? Is this soundable? So have you learned anything from those correlations?

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I do it for a lot of the tests that we do. So when I'm testing out red light therapy or vagal tone methods or anything like that, I'll use exist to track what are the effects on different aspects of your life. Oh, and it connects with your Whoop and your Apple Health and everything.

• 1:10:13Chris Williamson?

  Well, you made a custom private webpage that exports to a Google Sheet. So you may, between Apple Health and exist.io, you may have found a, a way to do this.

• 1:10:26Jonny?

  There's a, there's a simpler one, which is just inside timer. We've seen that.

• 1:10:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:31Jonny?

  They ask you how you're feeling and you can, there's like five faces, like very sad.

• 1:10:36Chris Williamson?

  But you need to be able to have, why are you feeling that way?

• 1:10:38Jonny?

  There's that as well.

• 1:10:38Chris Williamson?

  But you need to have it in metrics and then you need to be able to track trends.

• 1:10:41Jonny?

  You can do that as well.

• 1:10:42Speaker 03

  Tried the, um, all the custom solutions, but I come back to again mid-wit, like the Apple notes.

• 1:10:47Chris Williamson?

  Google Sheets.

• 1:10:47Speaker 03

  Table, because I can then write, I can get quite specific about what the thing was that day. And then the ability to reflect back on that six months and go, oh, that then triggers the memory of that day. And I can go into a lot more detail versus if it's just purely a score and a tag. It doesn't ring the same because sometimes it'll be like a Lollapalooza effect as well. It'll be three or four things.

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  Imagine if you had it all connected where it says, when you tweet more frequently, your heart rate is higher. And then you're like, ah, okay.

• 1:11:13Chris Williamson?

  So that's pulling like whoop data.

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  It pulls everything in, like it connects to so much.

• 1:11:19Jonny?

  It's either really helpful, like really upsetting.

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  Well, again, I think it's about identifying the trends and then letting go of the tracking tools. Yeah.

• 1:11:29Speaker 03

  Right, Johnny, you're up.

• 1:11:30Chris Williamson?

  Lesson.

• 1:11:31Jonny?

  Lesson. Lesson is, uh, looking at things in 10 year windows. So we, as you've mentioned, we've gone from two to 19 employees. And the natural assumption would be, what did we do in January to make that happen? I actually think it's a decade of work that made that happen. And so the lesson is if you assume that if you just take enough swings at whatever it is you're trying to achieve, you'll eventually get there. And it will likely take a lot longer than you think. How focusing on how you can just be comfortable with the mundane repetitive nature of it.

• 1:12:11Jonny?

  And it, you mentioned this in your talk about how, well, when we were sat here, you're doing these episodes and no one was listening. So there was no reward, there was no, well, there was a little bit, like the episodes were growing, I guess. But there's a lot of repetition without much success. And then this year, vertical. So if it's going to take another 10 years, how do you make what you're doing now enjoyable?

• 1:12:36Chris Williamson?

  You know.

• 1:12:36Jonny?

  Detaching from the outcome.

• 1:12:38Chris Williamson?

  Homosy's got a bit about this where he says, uh, disciplined people aren't more patient. They just find something to do in the meantime.

• 1:12:46Jonny?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:47Chris Williamson?

  It's like, just find something to do in the meantime. If you assume that it's going to take a long time to achieve the thing that it is that you want to do, and presume that it's going to take twice as long as you want it to take, or that you realistically think it could take.

• 1:13:00Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:00Chris Williamson?

  How could you make it bearable that between now and then, life just takes over?

• 1:13:06Jonny?

  So there's two quotes that are like, one of them is a Churchill quote, supposedly.

• 1:13:12Jonny?

  The other one is a Gary Vee concept. The Gary Vee concept is being very patient macro, but impatient micro. So like allow something to take 10 years, but be very impatient this week, today, this hour, whatever. And then the Churchill thing is success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm, which I think is really, not to say we're a success, but I think the success for us has happened because we just didn't lose enthusiasm.

• 1:13:37Chris Williamson?

  But you also didn't, it wasn't like you had lots of failures. There wasn't a point where you guys were close to bankruptcy or anything like that.

• 1:13:45Jonny?

  I think behind the scenes, lots of failures, lots of things that we tried.

• 1:13:48Chris Williamson?

  Like mundane, boring failures, which were actually in some ways even.

• 1:13:52Jonny?

  Even worse.

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I suppose you only lock in a failure when you hear, all right.

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  Whereas we just ran into lots.

• 1:13:58Jonny?

  Lots of like just little nudges, like head against the wall, like really trying hard.

• 1:14:02Chris Williamson?

  Tried this thing and it didn't work. You tried this thing. But this is, I talk about this in the live show, the like unspectacular failures and how common they are, right? That like tarnish your entire experience of whatever it is that you're doing. Because you hear a rocky cutscene montage and he can't lift a log. And then he goes back and he still can't lift a log and he goes back and he still can't. And then he does lift a log and you're like, oh, all of those things with that. And yours is like, you're not even trying to lift a log. You're just trying to get your Alfred shortcuts to work right. Or you're trying to send an invoice through Quickbox and it just doesn't want to work. You're like, like it's, you know what I mean?

• 1:14:41Jonny?

  With no easy way out.

• 1:14:45Chris Williamson?

  Just you sending fucking Quickbox invoices.

• 1:14:47Jonny?

  Ivan Drago's got all the Alfred shortcuts.

• 1:14:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. His better touch tool is completely optimized.

• 1:14:54Jonny?

  Three duvets.

• 1:15:00Jonny?

  But yeah, I think so the lessons just assume it's going to take you longer than you think. And then focusing on like, how do I make myself okay with that? Cause I think everyone wants the, there's a lot of focus on, especially in our world and building, building business world where everyone wants it now. And if you said to those people like, okay, it's going to take 10 years. How are you going to make yourself comfortable with that? It's, it's trying to accept that and come up with a strategy where you still enjoy it. Finding something to do in the meantime, I guess.

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  You gave me instant nausea when you mentioned that earlier. If it's the idea of, you mentioned this, you get to the top of the ladder and you realize the ladder's against the wrong wall.

• 1:15:39Jonny?

  Oh, right.

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. So with the 10 year, are you now planning out things on a 10 year time horizon? Or how is it kind of tactically changed?

• 1:15:46Jonny?

  It's just looking, rather than thinking like, what's the goal this month, this year? Think like, okay, whatever we, we need to keep doing whatever we're doing for longer than we're planning to do. Instead of setting up something that feels unsustainable, how do I make it feel sustainable?

• 1:16:00Chris Williamson?

  So emergent success is something that I've been thinking about a lot. It's weird, like Jocko Willink said this before we started the podcast. I don't even think that we were recording when he said this, but he said, um, I asked him about plans, long-term plans, or it might be in the episode, I can't remember. And he said, five years ago, I'd never written a book, hadn't launched a supplement company, didn't have a podcast and was basically a grunt out of the army. If I'd had any plan, all of the optionality and exponential success just blew it out of the water. So I think having long-term plans might work for some people in relatively predictable industries or sort of predictable processes. But for me, I've almost largely dispensed with plans that are longer than a year.

• 1:16:42Chris Williamson?

  It's like, I can guess where we're going to be over the next 12 months ish, but most of it's just emergence.

• 1:16:47Jonny?

  So.

• 1:16:48Chris Williamson?

  For either of you. So we had a, we had a business goal at the start of the year. We, we met that in the first quarter. How did, how have you? The best, the best kind. Yeah. But so like, so the, the plan pointless. One of, one of our, the guy who used to coach me for powerlifting shifted, Mike Tushar, you haven't had him on the podcast. No, but you told. So he, he shifted like long, complicated periodization to just, why don't we just write a week of training? And then we'll just do that week of training until it stops working.

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  Well, just planning out a year gives, or five years gives people a sense of control, but it's completely.

• 1:17:20Chris Williamson?

  But you're still, you're still just reacting to circumstances and things changing.

• 1:17:23Speaker 03

  I think it's so dependent on the industry you're in. So like being a doctor, I imagine it's quite an easy thing to do a five year plan.

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. Because the whole path is laid out. It's very.

• 1:17:33Chris Williamson?

  I want to become a neuros, a pediatric neurosurgeon. Exactly. What is the path?

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  You've probably got a 15 year plan just laid out for you there.

• 1:17:39Speaker 03

  But particularly entrepreneurship or something that's very dynamic and kind of related to technology that's constantly changing.

• 1:17:47Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:18:21Chris Williamson?

  You're up, Seth.

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  I've been seeing a therapist for just under two years now, and it's been a fantastic decision. So I think there's a lot of resistance that people have to doing that because there's a kind of an implicit assumption that if you see a therapist that you're somehow broken or traumatized. And I think that keeps a lot of people away from growing. And you, you know, and it's become, I've noticed it's become rebranded a lot in the corporate world as like performance coaching or whatever, but it's just, it is just therapy, just rebranded under a new name.

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  What it basically is, and a true therapist is actually just a mirror to you so that they don't really, they're not forthcoming with advice, they're not, they don't kind of nudge you too much. You turn up and they just hold up the mirror and show you how much of a twat you're being in your daily decisions. And I very much think it's like turbo journaling. The difference is when you journal, you are writing within your own echo chamber and your journal doesn't call you out for being a twat, whereas a therapist will call you out on your bullshit. So that's been really valuable and I would very much recommend, like for the sake of 50 to 100 quid per session, well worth it.

• 1:19:41Chris Williamson?

  I've been in therapy as well. In Austin, so I found a friend who did an awful lot of therapy for a very long time and is superbly fucked up. And I figured if his therapist can deal with him, she can definitely deal with me. It's like I'm way less messed up than he is, at least that's what I thought. And it's been, it's been really, really great. And yeah, the mirror thing, what ends up happening, a lot of time is spent just thinking about your childhood and you just don't give yourself the room, any even marginally busy person just doesn't have the room to think about like that conversation you once had with your history teacher. I had Dr. Paul Conti on the show. He did that four episode

• 1:20:23Chris Williamson?

  series with Huberman a few months ago. Yeah, unconscious mind, trauma, all that stuff. Dude, I'm living in Austin, Texas. So the concept of people being sat in a sauna, whining on about their ancestral trauma, or like about how this thing from before affected them and all the rest of it, has really kind of put the wibbles up me about just not wanting to, like, oh yeah, all right, mate, like jog on, like this isn't the Goggins Jocko pill side of me just doesn't want to hear it. But. Dr Paul Conti's reframed my perspective on that, that there are things that you don't think about that are a part of your unconscious programming that your body takes completely for granted and just sort of grandfathers in as part of the landscape or the texture

• 1:21:06Chris Williamson?

  of your mind, the way that you see the world. It's just this unconscious assumption that you take as truth or fact, and it's not, and it wasn't before you had it, and you've whitewashed your entire life to believe that this is the way it's always been, and it isn't.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  And that shapes all of your micro decisions and the filter that you see the world and all of that, as you say, because of one way that you chose to interpret something early on. So I guess that I'd see journaling, meditation, therapy, they're all on the same spectrum. It's just that one of them's kind of assisted, like it's almost like you're you're using steroids to journal and you're getting more out of it.

• 1:21:43Chris Williamson?

  It's like a like a forced guided prompted journaling.

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:21:48Chris Williamson?

  The questions that prompt the like, oh, I hadn't thought about that before.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  And there's that like external accountability, isn't there? Like you, you, you then, because you can choose not to journal one day, or you can choose not to write stuff out in depth. But if someone's like, hang on, tell me more about that.

• 1:22:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  So on that note, and I guess this comes around to what you were saying before.

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  I consolidated about 12 years of journals. So from day one, I was a lot more, I used day one a lot more heavily than you did by the sound of it. And I went through, it took me two or three months of a lot of time every day to consolidate all of the lessons and journal entries and everything, turn them into a visual map, identify the emergent themes. This was before.

• 1:22:33Chris Williamson?

  Chat GPT could have done this in minutes.

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  I know it could, but actually I think doing it manually was quite useful.

• 1:22:38Chris Williamson?

  It's like revising. Yeah. You don't need someone else to summarize your notes for you. You need to summarize.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  So I and I mapped it out and it was phenomenal to see it just laid out in a very big spatial categorized way of like, okay, this is what 12 years of journaling has taught me. And the ridiculous thing about it is that 21 year old you knows all the stuff that you need to be doing now. Hmm. But you just keep cycling through those same lessons. And it's like 21 year old version of you is shouting like, just do this thing. And then a couple of weeks later, you know, you've had like the childbirth amnesia about it. And you go, that's fine. And then it keeps coming back around. And I think until you integrate and do those lessons, the same thing is going to keep bouncing back into your consciousness until you process it.

• 1:23:23Chris Williamson?

  One of the worst things to realize, we often get asked, all of us will, what do you, what would you 10 years ago wish that you'd known that you know now? And you look back and you think, oh, you know, there's this and this and this, and this is the way I see the world. Are these one of my patterns? Almost always, those things, when I answer those questions are still things that me in 10 years' time will be wishing that me right now knew.

• 1:23:46Speaker 01

  It's mid way. Once again, we're looking for the the higher optimization, the next.

• 1:23:50Chris Williamson?

  Oh, this is more nuanced. No, no, I'm more sophisticated than that. It's like, no, no, no, you are still you and your patterns are still your patterns. And maybe this is where the unconscious work comes in. Maybe some of the, you know, Dr. Paul Conti style, like unveiling the unconscious would break that. And you might genuinely have new or novel challenges that you need to change. But given the fact that you are still you, the things that you're that you were fighting with 10 years ago are almost certainly the same things you're fighting with now.

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  When did we do the things you would tell your 18 year old self podcast?

• 1:24:19Chris Williamson?

  Oh, fucking hell.

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  I bet we should, we should all go back and listen to that.

• 1:24:23Chris Williamson?

  It'll be almost, almost certainly, it'll be the same shit.

• 1:24:27Speaker 01

  I think it was buy Bitcoin and do 531.

• 1:24:30Chris Williamson?

  It was buy Bitcoin, do 531. That was it. Buy Bitcoin, do 531.

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  Maybe not the worst advice.

• 1:24:34Chris Williamson?

  If you had, in fact, if you had, if you can count 531 as a single word, that would be four words that you could just like text your last self, buy Bitcoin, do 531.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  I found a tool when I was like 18, that you can email yourself in 10 years' time.

• 1:24:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  Future me.org. Yeah, something like that. And I got the email the other day and it was like, hi, it's Youssef. I'm 18 years old. Yeah.

• 1:24:59Chris Williamson?

  What did he say?

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  Buy Bitcoin.

• 1:25:01Chris Williamson?

  You were still, you were still, you were still.

• 1:25:04Chris Williamson?

  You were still Muslim then?

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, very deep, deep in the Muslim. Yeah.

• 1:25:10Chris Williamson?

  Deep Islam.

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  Did you apply?

• 1:25:14Speaker 01

  I might have actually, I might have sent one for another 10 years. Honestly, I can't remember what I said, but it was really, it was quite emotional to see.

• 1:25:21Jonny?

  I sent one to myself in a year, a couple of months ago.

• 1:25:24Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:25:24Jonny?

  Looking forward to getting it.

• 1:25:26Chris Williamson?

  All right, are we on lessons? We are in lessons, aren't we?

• 1:25:29Jonny?

  Yeah, we are in lessons.

• 1:25:30Chris Williamson?

  All right, so this is technically one from last year and it was inspired by a conversation I had with Jake Humphries.

• 1:25:38Chris Williamson?

  He said, these are the golden years. You can't wait until you've got no stress or worry in your life before you decide to be happy. Because guess what? You will always have stress and worry and anxiety and problems and issues to deal with. So you have to decide now that happiness is something you're going to have. And it's that little throwaway line at the beginning, which I use as a mantra. These are the golden years. It's a great heuristic to always think that when you look back, these times right now will be the ones that you cherish. And to approach them with requisite joy. Only in retrospect can we see how beautiful the present actually was. Problems are a feature of life, not a bug. There will never come a time when you have no problems. What? Did you think that one day you're just going to wake up and cease having problems? Like completing a video game and leveling up to a map where there's nothing there?

• 1:26:24Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  In your talk, you say, everybody has this mantra of after this week, things will calm down. It's the diet starts Monday. And Naval talks about that as like, you assume that because your calendar has white space in three months' time, that, oh, I'm going to be full of excitement and willingness to just book in coffees with all these people that I haven't been doing for a long time and I'll, I'll be able to start these new hobbies and start fishing and I'll be full of jubilance and willingness to try, try new things. It's like, no, it's just you haven't.

• 1:27:27Jonny?

  Filled up your calendar yet with the normal mundane stuff? So from a time management perspective and from a happiness perspective, that's been a real.

• 1:27:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. If you wouldn't say yes to this proposed meeting for tomorrow, don't say yes to it for three months' time.

• 1:27:41Jonny?

  Cause it'll be exactly the same.

• 1:27:42Chris Williamson?

  It's gonna be the exact same. Yeah. You just have to presume that things are going to remain the same in terms of workload. And yeah, I think just, these are the golden years as like, don't, and, and you know, this is kind of, I guess, a little bit of a counter to some of the more Goggins, Jocko, Hormozzi-pilled, like Hormozzi-maxing philosophies, which are, you know, you can grit your teeth and, and, and now is the time to like go to war and like all of that stuff. But so many of the best outcomes that we've all got in life is when we found the intersection of something which is valuable and that we enjoy to do because it makes everything easy. And in the meantime, that's actually going to be fun. Like, what's the fucking?

• 1:28:21Jonny?

  It's the whole point.

• 1:28:22Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Like if you're going to sacrifice your enjoyment in the moment for success in the future, so that when you finally have enough success in the future, you can enjoy yourself. It's like, well, you, the bar stool's upside down. Given that most of all destination acquisitions can constitute journeys, like optimize for the journey, not the destination.

• 1:28:40Jonny?

  The Hormozzi thing of the, I think he calls it the grandfather frame. Have you heard that one? You haven't heard that one.

• 1:28:46Chris Williamson?

  It depends what it is.

• 1:28:47Jonny?

  What on earth? So it was, it's like a 10 minute YouTube video he has and I listened to it. While like, while on holiday, actually. And he talks about how he tries to look at life now, how 80 year old him would see currently. And you suddenly get an appreciation for like, I can like get up and go to the kitchen and like my back doesn't hurt, my knees don't hurt. I don't have arthritis, spending time with my wife who just got married. Like this is, oh, what a beautiful time of life. You like look at now and look, it focuses the things on, focuses his attention on things that you take for granted, but in when you're 80, won't be there anymore.

• 1:29:26Jonny?

  And I think that's like, everyone talks about like feel gratitude and keep, keep like, write down things you're grateful for each morning. But that, that single video was the biggest of like, oh, fuck yeah. Like all this stuff. Like I had to spend time doing a podcast. When I'm 80, I'll be sat there and.

• 1:29:42Speaker 03

  On my own, like looking back on now, thinking, God, that was so good.

• 1:29:47Chris Williamson?

  So much fun. Yeah, these are, these are the golden years. I think it's just such a good, such a good reframe. Just assume that now is the best that your life is ever going to be. And in retrospect, you're going to wish that you could be back here now. It's that whole, when I was 20, I wanted to be a millionaire. Now I'm a millionaire. I just want to be 20.

• 1:30:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like Warren Buffett is rich, but he would trade places with every like 18 year old. Yeah, time billionaires is what they call it.

• 1:30:13Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:30:14Speaker 03

  It's hard to make a profound statement with these glasses on it really, really.

• 1:30:17Chris Williamson?

  You'd be surprised. I really think it works. All right.

• 1:30:21Speaker 03

  So, um, one of my favorite ones from this year, which I think by definition it won't change because it's the Jeff Bezos-ism of asking what's not going to change. Everyone's obsessed with, oh, like what's going to happen with AI and what's going to happen in this industry? Like, how are things going to change? Got to take this off.

• 1:30:46Speaker 03

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

• 1:31:22Chris Williamson?

  It's the bloke at the electrical tower or the telecoms tower who's just got the lever. Like, he's not going anywhere unless electricity gets subverted by a new thing.

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  That's not going to change.

• 1:31:37Speaker 03

  A hundred percent, even like for the podcast, right? You could, there's loads of new things that you can try with Spotify and YouTube and things like that, but what is not going to change 10 years from now?

• 1:31:48Chris Williamson?

  People want to listen to a combination of guests that they already know and love, people that they never heard of and topics that they are interested in now, topics that they didn't know that they were interested in in the future, and they want to listen to it in an acceptable quality of audio and video. Like, that's podcasting in a nutshell. So, yeah, optimizing for those things.

• 1:32:09Jonny?

  And it's the point of that to get distracted less?

• 1:32:13Speaker 03

  Yes, to focus on the few things that matter.

• 1:32:16Jonny?

  Okay, so you put your attention on the core stuff and like let the changes and the technology or whatever come and go.

• 1:32:23Speaker 03

  Exactly, I mean, you can still play around with the technologies, you can still do that, but when people get so caught up, like, for example, if he was getting so caught up in a new technology, but then the delivery speed was getting slower and slower, or people were getting faster, or the prices were getting higher and higher, it's reminding of, oh, there's, there's an infinite dashboard of metrics for me to focus on here. What are the ones I should focus on?

• 1:32:43Speaker 01

  He lives that as well, like, he's now just building infrastructure on infrastructure, isn't he? Like, multi-generational, this is Amazon Web Systems, and now he's moving on to bigger things from the Lex episode.

• 1:32:55Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:56Chris Williamson?

  Right, Johnny, you're up. Hack.

• 1:32:58Jonny?

  Hack. This is a recent one, one I told you about recently, Opal Phone App.

• 1:33:03Chris Williamson?

  I'm on it as well.

• 1:33:04Jonny?

  Enjoying it.

• 1:33:05Chris Williamson?

  I'm careful about my recency bias, I've only been with it for like-

• 1:33:07Jonny?

  I'm in the 90-day window, so ignore this.

• 1:33:09Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:33:10Jonny?

  Well, oh, yeah, ignore this. No, but it's, it kind of, of all the, I've tried a lot of different, like, screen time, iPhone app blocking stuff, I think this one makes it the simplest.

• 1:33:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, agreed.

• 1:33:23Jonny?

  And it's cool how you can have, like, your friends on there. I think that's the best thing about it. So you can, there's just like a, it kind of taps into the, like, I quite like to be top of the leaderboard.

• 1:33:32Chris Williamson?

  I saw that you did four hours and 15 minutes the other day.

• 1:33:34Jonny?

  There you go.

• 1:33:35Chris Williamson?

  Immediately thought, I've got an extra three hours today.

• 1:33:37Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, did you get one hour, something like one hour 20?

• 1:33:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, a couple of times.

• 1:33:42Jonny?

  You see, I saw that and I was like, I feel like I do okay with my phone. Saw that and I was like, God, like, I've got-

• 1:33:48Chris Williamson?

  It's pretty robust.

• 1:33:49Jonny?

  I'm a different-

• 1:33:49Chris Williamson?

  So, yeah, Opal time blocking.

• 1:33:51Jonny?

  And they have, like, preset things, like, um- So I have like an automated one, which is like seven AM till midday is like deep work. And then there's one which is like, they do a lunchtime one, they do like a last hour of the day one.

• 1:34:06Chris Williamson?

  I've custom put mine together. It's pretty easy to do.

• 1:34:09Speaker 01

  I think I've seen that in action. Your status changing on iMessage.

• 1:34:13Jonny?

  Right.

• 1:34:14Chris Williamson?

  Does it?

• 1:34:15Speaker 01

  Switches to do not disturb.

• 1:34:16Chris Williamson?

  Do not disturb.

• 1:34:17Jonny?

  I don't think so, no. I think that's a separate thing.

• 1:34:19Chris Williamson?

  Oh, I wonder if you could create a shortcut so that when you're, when Opal triggers a focus block.

• 1:34:27Jonny?

  Put you in focus.

• 1:34:28Chris Williamson?

  It automatically puts you in do not disturb.

• 1:34:31Jonny?

  I think just making the screen, screen time's hard, right? Like it's hard to use a phone properly or like without getting distracted. So turning it into a game, making it competitive. I want to beat Chris. How do I beat Chris? Like you start, you start thinking like, I could leave my phone. I mean, my screen time's getting trashed at the minute, but I could leave my phone away during this part of the day. I could not have it with me then. Like I, I struggle to think how I'm going to beat you, to be honest. It's impressive.

• 1:34:56Chris Williamson?

  I'm bad. I'm bad. Don't worry.

• 1:34:58Jonny?

  Did you just have like a good day?

• 1:34:59Chris Williamson?

  Give me time. Yeah, I've had a couple of good days, but it's also like new app effectiveness. Something new's come in that's just obliterated my ability to do stuff and I haven't yet found the.

• 1:35:09Jonny?

  I'll get you over like a 60 day period.

• 1:35:11Chris Williamson?

  Probably. Almost certainly. Yeah. As of yet, my, you know, like the path of a river, it's like, oh, we're going to divert it around this way.

• 1:35:17Speaker 01

  You're really good at typing in your PIN.

• 1:35:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it just. Yeah, exactly. So I'm going to burst the bank eventually, but right now I'm in this beautiful Goldilocks zone.

• 1:35:25Jonny?

  It gives you little gems each day as well, if you noticed.

• 1:35:27Chris Williamson?

  I've got loads.

• 1:35:27Jonny?

  Yeah. I've got. See, there you go. Look how excited we are about not using our phone.

• 1:35:32Chris Williamson?

  Opal.

• 1:35:32Jonny?

  Good hack.

• 1:35:33Chris Williamson?

  Good. Bro, you're up.

• 1:35:35Speaker 01

  Rian Doris, who I think you met a few weeks ago.

• 1:35:38Jonny?

  Yep.

• 1:35:38Speaker 01

  Has changed the way that I structure my day with the six alarms principle. So I set multiple alarms throughout the day. This sounds so stupid saying it aloud, but we, we've realized over the last few years that you have to treat yourself like a child to be able to get anything done. And I now set alarms at midday, just before shutdown, at shutdown, and then at like bedtime routine. So what they do is just create this kind of bookend or like a wall in the day where it's like, okay, this block of time is now over. You're into the next phase. You're into the next phase. And it stops me from just kind of running on and just working late or ignoring my own

• 1:36:20Speaker 01

  arbitrary boundaries. And I think when you're self-employed, that becomes so important, especially shifting from what we've done, which is going from full-time employment with a clear clock on and clock off into an office or into a hospital. And then it's like, the time is very clearly defined for you. But suddenly, when you're self-employed, there's no boundaries on your time. And you could just, if you, if you have the disposition like us, you would just work infinitely and end up working late and then stealing time from yourself because then you wake up late the next day and you're tired and then you work worse that day and you have to catch up. And then, so it just avoids all of that with a simple alarm.

• 1:36:56Chris Williamson?

  So why do you have six?

• 1:36:58Speaker 01

  I actually have four. Uh, Rian says you can, he, he says you can pick a number that's not, not so many that it divides the day into like a ridiculous number of blocks. But I think it's important just to pick times, time blocks that make sense for you, based on when you want to start working, when you want to stop and work backwards from there.

• 1:37:18Chris Williamson?

  So you start, start at the end of your day and then alarms to like bookmark that of like, where should I be?

• 1:37:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it stops you from then just being like, oh, I've got quite a bit to do today. I'll just work a bit later because it's like, oh no, there is a hard deadline to the day now. So it forces you to then filter things more aggressively and do.

• 1:37:36Chris Williamson?

  Everything gets Parkinson's Lord.

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:38Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah, that's nice. His anti-morning morning routine as well of just start writing within 90 seconds of opening your eyes is.

• 1:37:46Speaker 01

  I do that. I've been doing.

• 1:37:47Chris Williamson?

  Really good. It's really good. Yeah. This book, it looks like I'm going to be writing.

• 1:37:52Speaker 01

  Flow proneness.

• 1:37:53Chris Williamson?

  Flow, flow, flow.

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  Proneness. Uh, yeah, I, I like to, I like to switch between theta and delta as much as I can.

• 1:38:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:04Chris Williamson?

  What am I gonna go for? Alright, fuck it. Um, Sleep Token is my next life hack.

• 1:38:08Jonny?

  Ooh.

• 1:38:09Chris Williamson?

  That their album, they're a band, I guess halfway between, they're technically referred to now as cum metal.

• 1:38:16Jonny?

  Cum metal.

• 1:38:17Chris Williamson?

  Cum metal. It's like metal that you'd have sex with. So like them loathe, um.

• 1:38:22Jonny?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:38:23Chris Williamson?

  It's called cum metal. Uh, anyway, so Sleep Token are a band that have been around for quite a while. They managed to do at the start of this year, five tracks released from their album. Each one of them made it on to Spotify's most trending page. Each release, like every fortnight for three months or something as a metal band. But calling them a metal band probably does them a disservice. It's got kind of jazz in there. It's got rap. It's got R and B. And it is, I would say, the most complete album. Take Me Back to Eden is the most complete album that I've ever heard in my entire life. And it's just, they're phenomenal. And I was listening to them in the gym earlier on, thinking about life hacks for today. And I realized that across the last year, then all my top five songs from Spotify wrapped are all by, on the album.

• 1:39:08Chris Williamson?

  They're all by Sleep Token. They're all from Take Me Back to Eden. And listening to music that just makes you so happy and is useful for uplifting your mood, making you train harder, getting you into a good state, just that. So Sleep Token, Take Me Back to Eden, fucking, I'm up there.

• 1:39:24Jonny?

  You sent that album to me and I dismissed it twice. So I think it takes a couple of times.

• 1:39:29Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you gave it a crack and then bailed out and gave it a crack. Do you listen to it in full?

• 1:39:33Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:33Chris Williamson?

  Did you really?

• 1:39:34Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:34Chris Williamson?

  Just if, I think I was expecting something very different.

• 1:39:37Jonny?

  Yep.

• 1:39:37Chris Williamson?

  It's fucking awesome.

• 1:39:38Jonny?

  Very different.

• 1:39:39Chris Williamson?

  It's fucking brilliant.

• 1:39:40Jonny?

  But yeah, it's very, very good.

• 1:39:42Chris Williamson?

  Strong.

• 1:39:42Jonny?

  Very good.

• 1:39:43Chris Williamson?

  Gee.

• 1:39:44Speaker 03

  My one, so, uh, yeah, this is one that everybody knows about, but not to the level I think I'm going to suggest. So me and ChatGPT have developed quite an interesting relationship, to say the least. But basically, um, what ChatGPT has unlocked, which I don't think most people have realized yet, is you can basically go to like level one of every single video game. So what I mean by that is. I won't lie, there'll be things that people would speak about who are a lot smarter than me. So people discuss the laws of physics and they'd start talking, I'd be like nodding my head. But I didn't actually know what any of that meant. Or like any kind of rudimentary concept that I just zoned out at school.

• 1:40:24Speaker 03

  And they immediately, it's like level thirty seven, or it's like they're talking about level, sorry, season twelve, episode four of Friends, the six minute mark. And I have no context of who any of the characters are. And the ability to go into chat G P T, chat G P T isn't useful for any like dynamic, on the edge topics. So like if you were learning TikTok ads, it wouldn't be that great for it. But if you go on there, I'll give you two examples. So like David Deutsch's book, The Beginning of Infinity, read it and it's quite dry. I'm probably just below the I Q threshold where it would like the I Q market fit for that book. And what I would do is I prompt chat G P T and I go, okay. I want to know the ten most important concepts from this book, one by one, and do not move on until I say I understand.

• 1:41:09Speaker 03

  And I will just sit there, it will sort of prints the first one and I go, I don't get that word there. And I don't get what you mean by that. And then it just prints something else out and I go, okay, explain like a smart ten year old, da, da, da, da. And you get to the bottom of the basement and you go, ah, I get it. Whereas in the book, you'll soon, you'll be getting it, getting it, getting it. And then they'll say a concept that you don't fully understand. And then he moves on and then that concept is like the, um, the foundation for all these other stuff. And you just check out and the ability to use chat G P T for any kind of foundational topic and say.

• 1:41:40Speaker 01

  With an AirPod, you showed me the other day.

• 1:41:42Speaker 03

  You can use the audio version as well, so you can speak back and forth to it. You can, you, you look at it and you go, I can understand anything, that nothing is too intimidating if I use chat G P T correctly. So there's almost, there's no such thing as not knowing something is just not prompting chat G P T to the level and the personalization it can have. Cause I think that's the fundamental thing that where the education system breaks is, um, I think Naval spoke about it, but you'll be understanding, understanding, understanding, then you're off one day. You come back in and you didn't get that bit of algebra and they keep going on and on and on. But the ability to get any bit of nonfiction foundational text personalized to you. Doesn't move on until you understand it is absolutely phenomenal.

• 1:42:20Speaker 01

  Massive with that. I did a maths degree and if you if you zone out for a couple of minutes in in a pure maths proof, you are, yeah. That's it forever. So the fact that you can, the the AirPods thing, I think is massive that you should like, so ChatGPT have now introduced conversational AI. So you can have an AirPod in, go out for a walk and talk to it about, explain relativity to me and.

• 1:42:47Speaker 03

  I think the tonality that it uses is frightening.

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  Hey, would you like to know more about that?

• 1:42:52Speaker 03

  It's the, it sounds so human. It doesn't. It's only going to get more and more human. Yeah. But the the thing I'd say with this is for anybody, listeners, any topic now that you're kind of embarrassed to ask people about, or somebody says something that you don't want to ask because you assume every smart person knows that. A- any topic, you just say, explain the ten most important topics, don't move on until I say I understand and just keep asking why, why, why? Explain like a ten year old and you just realise you can understand any topic. If you leave it all in the same, if you have one big thread with all the stuff you want to learn, does it, can it just quicker? Yeah, so it then begins to learn as well. The fundamental problem is, is Google had a little bit of that, but with time, Google's only got worse and worse.

• 1:43:32Speaker 03

  Somebody said something recently where it's like, if you Google what disease you have, you don't find out what disease you have, you just find out which one has the best SEO. And that's, that's the fundamental problem, like Google. Which is always the most serious one, isn't it? Google as a product is getting worse and worse every single year and ChatGPT is getting better and better. It's just a matter of, until it goes. But it is so good for personalised education, particularly for historical or foundational topics, any moment of history, any book that's been around for a long time. So good. Or even if you're on holiday somewhere and you go, I'm here, tell me the ten most important things about this place. It's incredible. That's strong. All right. We've got about ten minutes left. Should we do one more round of hacks or one more round of lessons? What do you think?

• 1:44:15Speaker 03

  I've got a decent lesson, a weak hack. I'll do lesson. All right, lessons it is.

• 1:44:22Jonny?

  I think this is originally from the book 10,000 Weeks by Oliver Bergman. Defining something I struggle with a lot, defining done or defining a productive day ahead of time. So I had this realization that I very rarely, if ever, leave a training session with unfinished exercises. I finish the exercises, but I'm not in the gym for like stupid amounts of time. I've like thought about it and I've like planned myself a reasonable number of exercises and I finish them. But I almost always end a day with uncomplete tasks. So I like look at my to do list and then you finish the day feeling unsatisfied. So just slightly under egging, it's as simple as it is, just slightly under egging.

• 1:45:07Jonny?

  How many things are you going to do in a day? So create your to do list for like hungover, tired you. Cause you can always just borrow stuff from tomorrow. And if you, let's say you do eight things a day, every day. Today you, you plan to do six and you borrow two from tomorrow. You feel mint when you finish the day. But if you plan to do 10 and you only do eight, you feel terrible.

• 1:45:29Chris Williamson?

  There's a permanent dissatisfaction, I think, that many people, especially me, have with our to do list. There are more things that you have to do, that you have an infinite number of things to do. And even if you don't have an infinite number of things to do, you definitely have an infinite number, almost an infinite number more things than you can do today. Which means that there will permanently be, I've, it's not, it's like, uh, like bailing out. It's like, ah, and that's enough for now as opposed to I am finished. And that sense of I am finished is a degree of satisfaction that I think we should all be trying to achieve.

• 1:46:00Jonny?

  I have this, I had this resistance to it because I'm like, oh, well, but that means I'll do less stuff, but I won't. I'll get to the end of the to do list. I'm like, yeah, do some.

• 1:46:07Speaker 01

  Well, it's the calendar white space thinking, oh, well, I've got all this white space. If I'm not filling it all up back to back, ramming myself with tasks, then I'm. Falling short, but actually, if you do that and you have no buffer time, it just takes a poo that's two minutes too long to completely knock out your entire day.

• 1:46:24Jonny?

  Speaking of experienced.

• 1:46:25Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I remember this. When I snapped my Achilles, I had this very precisely planned weekend. So it was the weekend that a bunch of new tenants were moving into one of my houses. And I needed to get this new TV and drop it off. And all of the Ikea stuff that was in the back of my car so that the guy that would build it was going to be there. And he was going to be there the next day, but the TV needed to be collected today. And that meant that I had to go to the Sainsbury's, but I'd already planned because the Sainsbury's was next to the cricket pitch where I was going to play. Didn't account for the fact I wasn't going to be at the cricket pitch. I was going to be at the fucking Royal Victoria Infirmary, like having a boot put on. And then I realized, I was like, right, dad, I know that I've just had the most traumatic injury of my entire life thus far. But we now need to leave the RVI and go to Sainsbury's to collect this fucking television.

• 1:47:07Chris Williamson?

  Or else this very carefully put together house of cards is all going to come tumbling down. So, yeah.

• 1:47:13Speaker 01

  I've got a selfie with you in the hospital.

• 1:47:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:15Speaker 01

  You, you wearing cricket whites.

• 1:47:17Chris Williamson?

  Correct. I was still, I had to be cut out of my fucking cricket, my brand new cricket whites. My mum was, my mum was dead.

• 1:47:22Jonny?

  I still, you sent me a picture of it with, how's the bogey?

• 1:47:25Speaker 01

  Cause you're. So boggy.

• 1:47:27Jonny?

  Very boggy. A boggy that you squeezed where your Achilles should be in those.

• 1:47:31Chris Williamson?

  There was no, it was just flesh. It was just flesh. I left foot drove home from the RVI. So I snapped my right foot and I left foot drove home because I was like, I can't be bothered going to get my car tomorrow.

• 1:47:41Jonny?

  That's the better of, which is the variation where you overpress the brake.

• 1:47:46Chris Williamson?

  Left, left, left, left, left foot drove home, accelerator and brake.

• 1:47:50Speaker 01

  This is where life hacks, episode one has.

• 1:47:53Chris Williamson?

  Buy an automatic car.

• 1:47:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:55Chris Williamson?

  You're the real winner here.

• 1:47:57Jonny?

  That in a manual. Wow.

• 1:47:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's impossible. That's game over. Uh, all right. Yeah, that's good. I like that. It's just one thing, like tactically, how do you do that? Like, what does that look like on Tic Tic?

• 1:48:07Jonny?

  So just, so you'll learn in your private one to one, but you just, I, I generally will like stack the morning and then leave white space in the afternoon. Cause the morning stuff always takes longer than you think. And then I always, and almost always end up with a little bit of extra time at the end of the day. And you can just tick off a few bonus things. And if you leave with noth, if you finish today with nothing and you tick tick, feels great.

• 1:48:28Chris Williamson?

  That's nice.

• 1:48:29Jonny?

  So that, that's like a couple of hundred quid a day in happiness, I think, every day.

• 1:48:32Chris Williamson?

  So.

• 1:48:34Speaker 01

  So I've got a mini lesson from you and a mini lesson from you.

• 1:48:37Chris Williamson?

  None from me?

• 1:48:39Speaker 01

  Well, we've, we've kind of collabed on our lessons today, but.

• 1:48:43Chris Williamson?

  You don't have to try and make him feel more important to your lessons than you are.

• 1:48:47Speaker 01

  So I learned a lot from George, visiting him a couple of weeks ago. But one of the things that's definitely clear here is that whenever you run into a problem, you derive a principle from it. You write about it and create some content to kind of solidify that lesson. And you fail fast with figuring out like, how can I stress test this problem? So the midwit thing works very well. And the failing fast, so I experienced this because George took me foiling, which was excellent. It's like a motorized surfboard. And on the way there, he said, Yusuf, you're going to fall spectacularly in the water 40 times before you can consistently stand on the foil.

• 1:49:32Speaker 01

  So expect that so that you're not just always disappointed with how badly you're doing. And having the bar set there was great because then it meant that I, I'm not expecting to be good. I can have lots of spectacular falls. And then if you manage to stand on it any short, any less than 40, after 40 fails, brilliant, it feels like a bonus.

• 1:49:55Chris Williamson?

  So what's the meta lesson?

• 1:49:56Speaker 01

  The meta lesson is pull out the principles, stress test them and fail fast, I think.

• 1:50:02Speaker 03

  Pricing in failure is so good. Because it turns into a video, whereas when I take people for, I give them technical instructions, they never listen because it's their first time. But that one thing always rings home because otherwise they try and stand up on the first go, fall off and go, I'm a failure. And then each rep reinforces that versus when you say you're going to fall off 40 times in a row, they then see each one as a rep that, oh, boom, done the third one, done the fourth one.

• 1:50:26Speaker 01

  I was excited to fall the next time and actually it took way less than 40.

• 1:50:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:29Chris Williamson?

  James Smith has a bit about this in his live talk where he says he was knocking door to door for N power and realized that every 200 door knocks, he got a sale. And then his sales manager was like, how many more sales do you need for today? And he said, two, he's like, how many doors does it take for you to get a sale? And 200, he's like, well, knock on 400 more fucking doors then. And it's just, okay, that's the way to bake it in. It's like just the price of business, basically.

• 1:50:52Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 1:50:53Chris Williamson?

  You say you had a second one.

• 1:50:54Speaker 01

  The lesson from you is pick a thing and take it seriously. So that's something, that's a monger. Idea, but this podcast.

• 1:51:02Chris Williamson?

  Peterson one.

• 1:51:03Speaker 01

  Okay, it's, this podcast is the testament to that. We, we started our podcast in 2013. We picked a thing, among many things, we didn't take it seriously. You did an episode with us in 2015, 2016. You were like, hmm, quite like this. And you were like, I'm going to go balls deep on this. Three episodes a week, well researched episodes, aiming for good production quality straight away. And you did the reps and you enjoyed the process as well. You didn't just do it expecting that, like, oh, I'm on episode four. Why hasn't this got more views yet or whatever? It was just, I'm doing this to master the craft and enjoy the process.

• 1:51:43Speaker 01

  And without being able to do that, I'm sure you would have given up way earlier than you did and way earlier than the.

• 1:51:52Chris Williamson?

  It's a lesson for all of the pursuits that we're all trying to do, that the person who enjoys walking will walk way further than the person that has to walk.

• 1:52:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So those are the two meta lessons, as much as I can say would apply to everything. What's difficult is giving a prescription without a diagnosis. And I think this is the problem with content in general, that without doing that, you're kind of scatter gunning stuff, you're shot gunning stuff. Because obviously in medicine, to use that analogy, you always have a patient in the room with a symptom, a guiding principle. And you do history, examination, investigation, diagnosis, treatment. And if you shuffle those steps around, you're going to have a really low hit rate. So the, the broader principles are as good as we can get.

• 1:52:40Speaker 01

  And then the, the fastest way to make faster progress is to work with someone to diagnose what is my bottleneck right now? And how can I then fix that?

• 1:52:53Chris Williamson?

  All right. I think I'm going to do one hack and one lesson quickly because I can do that. Hack is Kindle released this year, the largest, most expensive Kindle yet, which is the Kindle Scribe, which has got a pen that comes with it. And it's all advertised as, and you can use this, it'll replace your paper. It's kind of trying to compete with the remarkable, doesn't have the features of remarkable. Like it's not, it doesn't have a folio keyboard fold out thing. It's not as advanced as that. And like, how many times are you thinking, I do not really wish that I could like handwrite a note right now. They're also trying to say, well, you can hand annotate books, but you can't write on the margins or write on the words. You have

• 1:53:35Chris Williamson?

  to highlight, tag a note, and then within the note, that gives you an area that you can write. So for the writing area stuff, it's kind of bollocks. Also, if you haven't got a paper white or an oasis yet, and still found yourself wanting more Kindle, it's not enough. That being said, it is probably in terms of screen area, maybe even bigger than an A4 piece of paper. So you fit a ton of text. And I didn't realize how enjoyable reading long pages of text is, rather than moving through pages a lot. Each time that I move a page, there's a non-zero chance that I'm going to be like, I'm at the top of another page here. And there's something about it's very enjoyable. For me personally as well, I have a habit of spinning a pen through

• 1:54:19Chris Williamson?

  my fingers, and it helps me focus. If I do something small that distract a little bit of physical energy for myself, I focus a lot more on whatever I'm thinking about. So the fact it's always got this pen attached, can do that, and change page with the pen by tapping it. You can also highlight very accurately by using the pen, which is something I use, then that gets resurfaced through Readwise. But I'm like a power user when it comes to Kindle. Sent to Kindle is the way that I read articles. I don't read Substacks on the computer. I don't read blog posts on the computer. All of that goes through Kindle. And it's just a huge monster piece of kit with a pen attached to it that you can highlight and navigate with. And that's very enjoyable, super bright.

• 1:55:01Chris Williamson?

  Is it like an e Ink screen or is it like a?

• 1:55:03Speaker 03

  Same.

• 1:55:04Chris Williamson?

  It's not like an iPad.

• 1:55:05Speaker 03

  You can do like the flux setting as well. So for.

• 1:55:08Chris Williamson?

  Go super wall.

• 1:55:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, going super. I'm not at the 90 day mark for it yet, so I can't.

• 1:55:12Chris Williamson?

  You want to scratch?

• 1:55:13Speaker 03

  But it is, I'm 60% of the way through Elon's new biography and I'm not even thought about the charger. I've got like 86% battery. It's, the battery's insane.

• 1:55:22Chris Williamson?

  Mate, I'll tell you what's an even more insane way to do it. Turn it to airplane mode. Turn a Kindle to airplane mode and it, it's infinite. It's an infinite fucking energy machine. It's crazy. And then just a quick lesson, which is from Morgan Housel. Your expectations define your happiness more than your circumstances. If you presume that happiness is what you want minus what you have, like a lot of billionaires are broke. And that

• 1:55:51Chris Williamson?

  meta lesson of you can try and dial down your expectations, which is kind of hard. We're all type A people that want to achieve a lot and not leave it on the table. But always just looking for that reframe of, look, why am I even bothered about chasing this particular thing? Is it just because I once saw this guy that I used to go to whatever with, or that I used to know from this thing? Who's just done X or Y or Z or they're on in the Seychelles or he's got a Ferrari or the whatever. Like all of that bullshit just comes back to like, every time that you decide to bring a desire into your life, see it as a,

• 1:56:29Chris Williamson?

  it's like a Klaunner payment on happiness. It's like, I'm gonna, if I decide to bring this in, I'm withdrawing from an overdraft and I'm gonna have to repay that at some point. Like really, really carefully scrutinize desires and expectations because they're, they're delays on happiness.

• 1:56:45Speaker 03

  A great meme for that is like net reality. Same way you have net profit, like reality minus expectation, net reality. Like if someone has an incredible reality, but their expectations are greater, they're minus EBITDA.

• 1:56:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's.

• 1:56:57Speaker 03

  In terms of it.

• 1:56:58Speaker 01

  Something you skimmed over with. Consuming content mindfully was that you have a read later app, whatever that is, and you're only allowed to read from that app. So it stops you from reactively just reading an article in one of the 20 tabs you've got open. Instead, it has to go through your established system.

• 1:57:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, by doing that as well, the center Kindle thing, it makes you very mindful. It's like, do I want this on my Kindle library page? Do I really want this on there? Probably not. And there's always more stuff to read than time to read it in. So triaging what you have to read, send Kindle plus scribe plus pen spinning, plus massive battery time and big screen. Fucking, I have to say, I also bought another Oasis. So I now have Kindle next to my bed and I have a Kindle downstairs. So I have two Kindle devices. I found that moving them between the two, I would get into bed and I'm like, it's downstairs. Guess what? I'm not reading now. Like, I'll watch Netflix or I'll whatever. And the same vice versa for a morning routine. I'm like, oh, it's still upstairs. Yeah, I'll just skip reading today. It's like things in places.

• 1:58:01Jonny?

  I think just one final thing on the expectations thing, that like the TED Talk where paradox of choices and Barry Short.

• 1:58:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:08Jonny?

  Is it his TED Talk?

• 1:58:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:09Jonny?

  I think he talks about like the key to happiness is low expectations. I've always struggled with that, with actioning that. Cause the happiness, to increase your happiness, if you just decrease your expectations. Do you guys have any practical ways of doing that?

• 1:58:23Chris Williamson?

  Be careful about what desires you let into your life. Like, expectations are always going to be high for what you want. But there's ways that you can tune that up. I could definitely make your expectations higher. It's the inversion thing. It's like, how do you reduce expectations? All right, how do you increase expectations? I would spend tons of time on the internet looking at people that are doing better than me. I'd see things that I don't want and unquestioningly presume that I want to have those things because they're ahead of me in some form or another. Like, do you really want a private jet? No, but if I look at someone that has one, I go, oh yeah, I should have a private jet. And it just gets added into that.

• 1:58:54Jonny?

  But if you extend that, it's like, okay, so my, like, the people I spend all my time with should be like the least successful people I should find.

• 1:59:02Chris Williamson?

  Gad Saad.

• 1:59:03Jonny?

  You see what I mean?

• 1:59:03Chris Williamson?

  Gad Saad found in his book about happiness, his most recent one, that you need to have a minimum amount of sex per week in order to be happy. But the best way to be happy about your sex life is to be having a little bit more sex than the friends around you.

• 1:59:14Jonny?

  It's like the thing of like, you should be more successful than your wife's sister's husband.

• 1:59:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, correct.

• 1:59:20Jonny?

  Or whatever it is.

• 1:59:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:21Jonny?

  And like, as long as you're above that.

• 1:59:23Chris Williamson?

  Christie, gee.

• 1:59:24Speaker 03

  So I've got, I'll do a quick life hack and I'll blast through my lesson. So a quick life hack is most of people listening to this probably or significant amount will have an iPhone and the alarm clocks designed by Apple are all like Guantanamo Bay creations from the CIA. They are horrific and the thought that you'd wake up your sleep. I've tried that, like, if you go through them all, you press every single one. None of them are like, that's a nice soothing thing you'd hear at a spa.

• 1:59:49Speaker 01

  They've all got a really high attack on the sound, haven't they?

• 1:59:52Chris Williamson?

  Exactly. Shrill of a sympathetic cocktail.

• 1:59:54Speaker 03

  What you can do, if you go on the custom tune store and search binaural beats, it's 79p. So it is a big investment, but 79p, I found this like, and find the one that relaxes you. And it's such a better way.

• 2:00:06Chris Williamson?

  Why are you waking up to your iPhone?

• 2:00:08Speaker 03

  What do you mean?

• 2:00:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's, that's the big question.

• 2:00:10Speaker 03

  That's probably a question.

• 2:00:11Chris Williamson?

  That's a fucking awful.

• 2:00:12Speaker 03

  Sounds like you need more sleep, George.

• 2:00:13Chris Williamson?

  But you're sleeping.

• 2:00:14Speaker 03

  Kale phone, kale phone.

• 2:00:15Chris Williamson?

  Sleeping with your phone in your bedroom.

• 2:00:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I used to use an Alexa and then I'd ask the news.

• 2:00:19Chris Williamson?

  Radio alarm clocks have been around for nearly a hundred years.

• 2:00:21Speaker 01

  There's about three life hack contraventions that you mentioned.

• 2:00:24Chris Williamson?

  You've crossed all of the streams.

• 2:00:25Speaker 03

  I read this first time. A lot of people listening to this will be using their iPhone and that is a useful one.

• 2:00:29Chris Williamson?

  This is the midwitt meme. Don't use the phone. Don't try and repurpose the phone alarm to be more successful. Get rid of the phone and buy either sunrise alarm clock. You can get one on Amazon for 15 bucks or standard radio alarm clock, five, five pounds.

• 2:00:44Speaker 03

  You know, there's one called, I think it's called like clocky now that has wheels on it. So it's an alarm clock and then as soon as it sets off, it starts driving around. You have to get up to bed to pick up.

• 2:00:52Speaker 01

  There's one that's a mat and you have to stand on it and solve a maths problem.

• 2:00:55Speaker 03

  Fuck it. I'd be such a bad hanger.

• 2:00:57Chris Williamson?

  Does anyone, I don't use an alarm. I just wake up. My.

• 2:01:02Speaker 03

  It's not a simple, right?

• 2:01:03Chris Williamson?

  But like, just go to bed at the same time. It's easy. Yeah, that's not always. Anyway.

• 2:01:08Speaker 03

  Shut up, Johnny. Lessons, so so far I've done a lesson from a little, obviously throwback to Mungar, Bezos. This one comes from the Gallagher brothers, Liam and Noel.

• 2:01:18Chris Williamson?

  Nice.

• 2:01:19Speaker 03

  So they have a lyric which hits me every single time. I think it's the best lyric I've ever heard, which is, questions are the answers you might need.

• 2:01:29Speaker 03

  And it hits me hard. So essentially, even when I have people ask me for advice now, or even when I'm thinking myself, or even creating content, just having a recurring question that I come back to is so useful versus having a specific answer. So you avoid the prescriptions mindset. One of the things is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I don't know if you heard that. And they, within that, they create a supercomputer, which like, supposed to give them the answers to life and the universe. And it just spits back forty two. And it's like, because you didn't know what the question was. And so many things I come back to questions now. So have you read Elon's book yet? So, I mean, I can tell you it right now. This is what it is. Okay, it's basically him. He comes up with an idea. And

• 2:02:14Speaker 03

  then somebody works for him and go, that's not possible. And he goes, does it defy the laws of physics? And then they're like, well, not technically, but we still can't do it. And he goes, why? Why? Why? And then he hits the base level belief. He goes, fix that. And then he goes, also, do it by next Tuesday. And it's like, build a rocket. It's that. It's just him going, does it defy the laws of physics? And then they go, no, I go, I want it done by next Friday. It's just, it's just a question. Does it defy the laws of physics? And then deadline. That's, that is the 100 anecdotes is the book, just doing that again, again, again. So does it defy the laws of physics is a question. One of my favorite things right now is I have friends come to me for advice. And I'd often used to like, get super detailed and give them so much advice and people wouldn't listen.

• 2:02:55Speaker 03

  And I was like, okay. So what I do now is I'm just like, well, what would you advise me if I came to you in the exact same situation?

• 2:03:03Chris Williamson?

  You diddled me with this in Dubai. Diddled me with it in an Uber.

• 2:03:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it works. And they come up with something that's so profound and personalized that hits home versus me trying to give them generic things.

• 2:03:14Speaker 01

  The Tony Robbins, like, what will you do? And I don't know. Well, if you did know, what would it be?

• 2:03:19Chris Williamson?

  That works every time. Unbelievable.

• 2:03:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, it's what we said earlier, when we had a quick toilet break, that if you have bad breath, you're the only person in the room that doesn't know. But as soon as somebody else has bad breath, you do know. And it's the ability when you take them out of that frame and have a question, it's given them the answer that they needed all along. And then a few other favorite questions that I have at the minute, which is where if you meet somebody who's way smarter than you, asking them the question of, well, what question should I be asking you is a great one. Another one, which is kind of a test right now in. Where people often end up in super tribalistic thinking of team, this team over here or this team over here. I can tell whether someone's a full on NPC by whether they can answer this

• 2:04:01Speaker 03

  question, which is, who is somebody you admire? And you get them to answer that. But who's your kind of cult hero? And he goes, what do you disagree with them on? Or what's their worst point that they make? And then the inverse to like, who's somebody you strongly dislike? And what's a great point that they have? And you'll find people who are really high at critical thinking, or have really thought it through from both sides, can answer that really fast. But a lot of people just, but the thought of them conceding a point to somebody on the opposing team.

• 2:04:27Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 2:04:28Speaker 03

  Or being able to criticize their guru. The software just hits a 404 error very fast.

• 2:04:35Chris Williamson?

  Monna thinking. Gentlemen, I really appreciate you coming through. It's been a wild year for you guys and for me and for you as well, although you're less traumatized than we are. So you seem, you seem to be able to deal with it, deal with it more effectively. Goes without saying, everyone that's been tuning in for any of the episodes where you used to see us sitting on this couch. I really appreciate you for tuning in. I hope you have a fantastic Christmas. This is going to go out two days before Christmas. So we can say Merry Christmas to everybody. Merry Christmas. And, uh, yeah.

• 2:05:07Speaker 03

  You're just gonna finish on last Christmas. He's gonna sing the whole thing out.

• 2:05:10Chris Williamson?

  Is that what you're here for?

• 2:05:11Speaker 03

  That's what we promised. Put the glasses on.

• 2:05:14Chris Williamson?

  I appreciate you all. Have a Merry Christmas. We'll catch you soon.

• 2:05:17Speaker 03

  Merry Christmas.

• 2:05:18Chris Williamson?

  Bye.