Hacking Your Psychology to Do Hard Things Consistently - Dr Mike Israetel

Go see Chris live in America - https://chriswilliamson.live Dr Mike Israetel is a Professor of Exercise and Sport Science at Lehman College and the Co-Founder of Renaissance Periodization. How do you boost motivation and actually follow through on the things you know you should do, but don’t feel like doing? The answer isn’t more stimulants, thankfully, it’s something far more grounded in neuroscience and behaviour. Today, Dr Mike Israetel breaks down the science of willpower in a way that works for the average person and can even help make your daily life much more productive. Expect to learn the science behind willpower, habits & motivation, the de facto two kinds of things you should be doing with your time, how to know when its time to do things you actually feel like doing versus making yourself do things you don’t feel like doing, how to integrate habits that improve your life and get rid of the ones that don’t serve you, how to improve your willpower, how to become more antifragile and build your resilience, and much more… - 0:00 - Why Willpower is Such a Buzzing Topic 5:01 - Things You Feel Like Doing vs Things You Don't Feel Like Doing 15:14 - The Importance of Inspiration When Getting Things Done 24:22 - We Need To Say Yes to More Experiences 42:09 - The Key to Choosing Concrete Goals 51:03 - Intention is Critical to Success 01:02:27 - Discipline Looks Like Holding Yourself Accountable 01:17:58 - The Biggest Mistakes When Making Habits 01:36:47 - What Decisions Can Make Our Habits Stick? 01:47:20 - How Can Rest and Recovery Enhance Habits, Goals and Willpower? 02:08:23 - Building Resilience Through the Process of Becoming - Get 10% off Echo’s Hydrogen Flask at https://echowater.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D, and more from AG1 at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom - 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?

  I wanted to talk about the science of willpower, habits, motivation, some of the buzziest of topics at the moment. Why do you think this is such a popular area of discussion for people on the internet?

• 0:13Mike Israetel?

  You know, I'm really happy that it's a popular area of discussion on the internet. The internet has plenty of stuff on there that was kind of just junk. Most of my stuff, for example, what am I really mostly about vanity? You know, it sucks, but it's really awesome that so many people, at least by search volumes, who'd be interested in motivation and habits and willpower. Because that tells me that people are doing two things. One, recognizing that they want success or to achieve some goals. And two is recognizing that like their motivational structure is a potential limiting factor to that success.

• 0:54Mike Israetel?

  And so if you're like, things in the outside world are important and I'm going to try to architect myself to be better at them. Man, like, that really is a great thing and really does set you up for a significant amount of more success than you would. If you never ask the question of like, how do I get maximum motivated? And you just kind of assumed that you were like, whatever motivation level you have, that's just kind of what you're you're doing. Like, it's kind of default. I had a situation today, I was earlier, I was working on my next book. Yes, it's an adult novel.

• 1:27Chris Williamson?

  Can I be on the cover?

• 1:28Mike Israetel?

  It's a gay adult novel.

• 1:29Chris Williamson?

  I'm on the cover.

• 1:30Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, I thought your people already signed it. There's two clones of you on the cover and they can love. And they love, I don't mean lust, I mean love, Chris. And you can, you can feel the love. Anyway, I digress. So I was writing and it took me like, um, like a minute or two to really get in the groove. And during a few times during that, one specific time during that minute or two, I was like, oh, my stupid brain. Like, get focused or look what's wrong with me. I have super bad attention deficit disorder. I suck. And then I was like, oh, wait, wait, like, um, first of all, that was dumb because it was just a matter of getting in a flow state. It's always rocky to first. But second of all, now I'm thinking about it like, okay, there's ways to improve your attention span. And if I just said, well, this is my limitation and this is just who I am. Okay, fine, I'll get some stuff done.

• 2:15Mike Israetel?

  But if I ask the next question of like, okay, I know that my ability to focus is a limiting factor in my success. So is my motivation. Et cetera. How can I attend to those factors and do at least two things? One, kind of understand the world of those factors to at least kind of speak the language, which is something we're going to figure out how to do today. And two, take what I need from that and try really junior league implementing it in my life. And then if I do that, hey, maybe I'll have some more success. Then I can come back, refine the process and do better things.

• 2:42Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting that nobody, very few people would say, well, this is the deadlift that I have. This, this deadlift that I have.

• 2:50Mike Israetel?

  It's my deadlift.

• 2:51Chris Williamson?

  It's kind of a, a part of my sense of self. You know, it's very closely tied. I had this when I started working with addiction coach, addiction coach on.

• 3:00Mike Israetel?

  Oh, I thought you was going to be on some other shit. What for, bro? You're like, what not for, man? Austin rips you up.

• 3:06Chris Williamson?

  Slinging it. When I started working with my speech coach, Miles.

• 3:14Chris Williamson?

  So my friend said, well, dude, you're going to lose the way that you speak. You know, the way, you know, what about, what about your natural speaking cadence? I thought, well.

• 3:22Mike Israetel?

  The addiction coach, that's got to be like nails on a chalkboard level of.

• 3:25Chris Williamson?

  I imagine so, because in, in his opinion, and in my opinion too, there are more and less precise ways to make words come out of your face.

• 3:33Mike Israetel?

  Yes.

• 3:33Chris Williamson?

  In the same way as you saying, hey, you're a saxophone player or a singer. And you've started working with a teacher, but what about your natural way? It's like my natural way of playing saxophone fucking sucks, dude. Like, that's why we practice. The natural way that I deadlift this, just the bar or this bar plus five pounds on either side. But for some reason, I think when it comes to internal stuff, willpower, habits, discipline, because you can't see it because it feels it's inbuilt.

• 3:59Mike Israetel?

  Yep.

• 3:59Chris Williamson?

  In a way, it feels like it's part of your sense of self. And I think that that limits maybe people's

• 4:07Chris Williamson?

  understanding of how much they can move that and lift the ceiling.

• 4:10Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, it must. For many people, I think it does. But I think more and more people at least see thumbnails and titles on YouTube. That's like, you know, five CEO hacks to boost your motivation now. And parentheses, science explained. And you're like.

• 4:23Chris Williamson?

  Manifest your destiny.

• 4:24Mike Israetel?

  Yes, that's right. Huberman clips, but it's not a Huberman clips channel. It's just also in the title. Enough of that and you're like, all right, color me a chump. Is there anything actually to this? You know, if a lot of those videos, you're like, this is just trite cliches restated. It's like the entrepreneur Instagram page. Have you ever been on that page? Total satire, love that page. It's like, is this is real life this? But then a lot of the stuff is like, oh, that actually makes a lot of sense. But how do I actually use it in my life? And it's funny enough, because the habit of using that stuff is part of this whole discussion.

• 5:00Chris Williamson?

  In and of itself. Okay, there's two things you can be doing with your time. Stuff that you want to be doing right now, things you feel like doing and stuff that you don't want to, you don't feel like doing right now.

• 5:09Mike Israetel?

  This sounds like elementary education, kindergarten type of shit. But I gotta tell you, Chris, there is a lot of stuff that us internet guru people end up saying that sounds remarkably kindergarten like, because many of us, ourselves included, me, you, all the other talking heads are coming to realize pretty regularly that focusing on very basic rudimentary understandings and eliminating mistakes from those understandings can build a foundation for real deep insight that in retrospect seems obvious as fuck,

• 5:52Mike Israetel?

  but prospectively may seem confusing. And so I love doing things like splitting up every decision you could choose to make into just two things. And it seems dumb, but also you're like, think through it a little bit more and we'll talk through it a little bit more. And it's like, oh, all right, well, that actually simplifies things considerably. Because one thing I really love and hate is when especially experts say things like, well, it's complicated. Well, it's nuanced. Oh, I understand that. But you got a PhD in the shit, right? So why don't you tell me how it's complicated and nuanced? And a lot of the times they will, but some of the times it's a deflection tactic to see if everything's so, uh, it's so, uh. Things can be simplified. It is possible to simplify things.

• 6:35Mike Israetel?

  And the first simplification we can make today is of all of the things you could be doing in this next very moment, they fall into basically only two categories.

• 6:45Mike Israetel?

  Shit that you feel like doing and shit you don't feel like doing. And then those categories can further be subdivized into just a few other categories to really simplify. So if the shit you feel like doing, you can ask the question of, is it a good idea to do? And it would just have like a few points of a checklist to fill out to see if it's yes or no. One thing is like, do I have anything pressing that I need to be doing right now? Need to be doing right now? Let's say the answer is no. Okay. Does this thing that I want to do hurt me and my future self in any way? Like I want to, I want to do crack right now. Give me a fucking rock, Chris. Um, that's not good for me. It's gonna be bad. Is it gonna hurt someone else? No. Okay, fine. So if it, some, I don't, we need to be doing anything else.

• 7:31Mike Israetel?

  The thing I'm gonna be doing doesn't hurt me in any way in the future. And it's not gonna hurt anyone else. I can probably do the thing. No problem. Then if you look at the universe of things that you have to be doing, that, okay, I don't want to do this. The real question is, okay. Is there a compelling reason that doing this thing you don't want to do? Improves future outcomes for future you? If the answer is no, well, man, no. Like gangsters ride up and they're like, hey, get in with us. We're gonna go do a shooting or whatever gangsters say. Like, well, gee whiz, that sounds dangerous and socially irresponsible. So you just say, no thanks, fellas, but hey, best of aim to you. Oh, boy.

• 8:15Mike Israetel?

  And then you just don't get in the car because it's, you know, future you doesn't want to live in jail or shot to death. But if the thing you don't want to do is a thing that substantially enhances your future outcomes, you might want to consider doing that thing, even though you don't want to do that thing now. The ultimate situation here in this whole construct of motivation, inspiration, all that is setting up a better world for yourself in the future. Cause like I live, I'm living pretty goddamn good right now, if I say so myself. And almost none of it has to do with shit I'm doing right now. And sometimes that confuses my brain. I'll be sitting on Sunday and I'm high on edible marijuana and I'm just scrolling through the TV. And I, Jew brain is like, you're a piece of shit. You're useless.

• 9:00Mike Israetel?

  You don't deserve any of these things that you have, like a house and a TV and time to scroll. And even edible marijuana, which you paid for with your own money, I might add. You degenerate drug addict. And then I'm like, well, how the hell do I have all this stuff? It's because I did shit earlier that didn't pay off at the time. It paid off later. So with that whole decision tree I just described, you can really easily choose. If you're gonna just do shit you like right now. Or if you're gonna do some shit now that you're not a big fan of right now. But future you is gonna be like, bro, he's gonna open up the fucking time portal. He's gonna push a fist through that shit. And he's gonna be like, blast that shit, big homie. And you're gonna do this because you hooked up future you. Future you is your biggest ally.

• 9:44Mike Israetel?

  Period. Past you is completely dead, by the way. Future you is gonna exist soon. And you're gonna wanna be a future you that you look back at all as many points as possible in future you world to be like, damn dude. Old me set the shit up good.

• 9:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Gwenda Bogel says your future self is watching you through your memories with, whether it's with pride or regret, depends on what you do now.

• 10:05Mike Israetel?

  Or in my case, with like a physical skeevied out like, ooh. I'm still with this guy.

• 10:10Chris Williamson?

  Jack Butcher, it's a beautiful day to remember that the second order effect of what you are doing now will arrive much later.

• 10:18Mike Israetel?

  So, and that is fire quote.

• 10:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 10:22Mike Israetel?

  But however, I will say this, and you can probably agree to this, Chris, because you and I are in our later years now.

• 10:31Chris Williamson?

  Vintage.

• 10:32Mike Israetel?

  Vintage, vintage Chris Williamson.

• 10:36Mike Israetel?

  Much later, sure shit feels like it arrives really goddamn soon, huh?

• 10:41Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 10:42Mike Israetel?

  And this is something that if you deeply understand, it even believe on a surface level, can really help you as a revelation, the younger you can accept that reality, the better. Like tomorrow, you someone you really want to have like they're back short of like you're 95, you have a terminal prostate cancer diagnosis. At that point, if it's not hookers or alcohol coming into my room, there's a do not enter sign. But up until that point, I kind of want to reserve at least some fertile ground for the future. And when you're younger and when you're in your middle age and you're really building something, you might even consider that.

• 11:23Mike Israetel?

  And you know, if I do a lot of stuff that I don't like particularly want to do right now all the time. And I do that now and I plow away for a while, I might like end up in a world later where future me has just got it goddamn easy. And the living is good. And then future you is going to be like, dude, passed me fucked shit up. And then if you're like me, you're like, oh, there's still another future me in the future future. Better work even harder.

• 11:54Chris Williamson?

  How'd you avoid too much delayed gratification?

• 11:58Mike Israetel?

  I have no idea. You've got the wrong guy in this fucking chair, Chris. Holy shit. I'm a goddamn poster child for not even knowing my meaning short of working on mega projects, man. I have no fucking clue.

• 12:08Chris Williamson?

  That's why you're the person to, but also you like a Sunday where you can relax. And the last time that we spoke, one of absolute fucking sleeper episode that everyone should go back and look at was the importance of a good rest ethic, not the importance of a good work ethic.

• 12:23Mike Israetel?

  You and I really got onto something.

• 12:24Chris Williamson?

  That was fucking money, dude. It was so good. And I'm, I'm just wondering, cause this feels like actually quite a nice graduation from that conversation, which was, hey, Your capacity to deploy power is in many ways kind of proportional to your capacity to let go of it. And that a good rest ethic is as important as a good work ethic. And certainly some people, I am one of these people, I don't have a nervous system that's built for endurance, anything, not running, not working, not, and I'm not built for that, right? Okay, I'm built for like, good, short bursts of power, as any sexual partner of mine knows. And then a big refractory piece.

• 13:00Mike Israetel?

  And a lot of cigarette smoke and disappointment.

• 13:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, my Coolidge effect is fucking massive.

• 13:06Chris Williamson?

  But this feels like the next, the next little sort of twist on that, it's like, right, okay, you want to achieve things in your life, you're going to presumably hopefully be here for a good amount of time, you have this sense of investment for the future, you've kind of hinted toward regret minimization frameworks a little bit here.

• 13:24Mike Israetel?

  That's a comedic way to put it, Chris. It's totally true. I don't like to put it like that, because running away from bad things is a typically not great success strategy in general, I can tell you why. It's interesting, like, if you can even model it mathematically. So, running away from bad things, it means that the further away you get from the bad thing, the more your motivation to keep going dissipates, because you're further away from the shit. Like, you get really close to a crocodile, you're gonna have a lot of motivation to get away. He's 200 meters away from you, you're like, whatever, he's not gonna fuck him, these things are lazy, they're barely even alive, fuck them, right?

• 14:05Mike Israetel?

  But if there is something you want, that's positive, that you're going towards, the closer you get to it, the more psychotic your drive for it becomes. The more of it you get, the more of it you want. And I would say that, yeah, regret minimization is a valid, regrets aren't fun, I have plenty of them, but like, it's also pointless, most psychologists will tell you, like, mulling over your regret is like a good way to just become depressed, for no good reason, by the way. Like, at least wait for a relative to die, or some shit like that, don't just make yourself depressed. What you wanna do, a little better maybe, is to think of, how do I? I build fantastic, fantastic things and an amazing life later on for myself.

• 14:49Mike Israetel?

  And so when later you are in the amazing life, you don't have to have any discordance about, well, how did I deserve this? Or is this really real? Is this gonna happen? Or you don't have to be in a place where you don't have an amazing life and think, well, how can I get it? You always knew the answer to that. It was delaying gratification, not for the purpose of some kind of monk shit, but just to do the combination of things that maybe you didn't want to do it the right now, but also is very useful for your future self.

• 15:14Chris Williamson?

  Okay, how can you make what you're doing feel like right now, like what you don't feel like doing right now, a more seamless process?

• 15:23Mike Israetel?

  That's the biggest question because there are a variety of answers to, how do I get myself to do the thing I don't want to do that's important for me in the long term? That are false starts, bad ideas.

• 15:36Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yeah, let's get with it. Start with those.

• 15:38Mike Israetel?

  Oh, yeah, sure. Uh, grit, willpower, discipline. If they're the first things that you're talking about, you just, um, you're talking about very important, very functional things at the very wrongest point in the hierarchy. It's like going on a first date with a girl and being like, all right, so like a lot of forward and back, right? Grunting, that sort of thing. She's like, the fuck are you talking about? You're like, we're gonna have sex later, right? She's like, what? I guess maybe, uh, not the time. You gotta weave into that shit. And so if you're looking at this from a sequential perspective of like, how do I approach a task, set of tasks, a whole hierarchy of tasks?

• 16:20Mike Israetel?

  From the perspective of, I'm not really cheesed on doing this right now, but it needs to get done. And I want to do it as well as I can and thus as seamlessly as possible. The first thing you probably want to go to is not any of those err things. The err things, that'll come in handy later, but it's much more of an emergency switch rather than the thing that drives you. People say like, I'm driven by discipline. That's categorical nonsense. That's actually impossible.

• 16:48Mike Israetel?

  You have to be driven by something. And so the first construct that's very helpful, and it's also a very short-lived one, is called inspiration.

• 16:57Mike Israetel?

  Inspiration, real simple to define. It's the thing that gets you going. A little squirt of juice in your thigh. In my case, literal steroids, of course. And that's the inspiration. So next, now I'm kidding. Inspiration is a thing that can be either positive or negative. And it jolts you into deciding to take action on this thing that you might not have wanted to do. But now you're more keen on doing. So for example, you go on a date. And you're talking to the girl. And you're like, yeah, I'm like into fitness or whatever. And she does one of these. She's like, oh, okay. And you're like, oh, wow.

• 17:42Mike Israetel?

  You don't say anything at a time, play it off, you know, whatever your score, you're the man. But later you're like, I do not look fit to the untrained eye. Are you looking in the mirror and you're like, oh, I really let myself go.

• 17:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 17:54Mike Israetel?

  That's negative inspirational moment for you to be like, tomorrow, I'm like, I'm joining an Austin running club. So I can get laid. Isn't that what those things are for?

• 18:03Chris Williamson?

  Correct, yeah. Thinly veiled dating organizer.

• 18:06Mike Israetel?

  I love it, yeah. By the way, the whole foods here is like a strip show, basically.

• 18:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yoga pants, yoga pants are the really, the technology, we talked before we got started about AI progression and all the rest of it. I want to know about the technology that's going into fucking yoga pants and leggings.

• 18:23Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, full stop.

• 18:25Chris Williamson?

  Long line butt scrunch thing. You've managed to make two ass cheeks out of a single ass through clothing.

• 18:32Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 18:32Chris Williamson?

  It's kind of magic.

• 18:33Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, I just see like 1950s, 60s, marketing people be like, Betsy, do you have an ass? She's like, well, well, no, I, no, I don't, Robert. Not anymore, see? You have two asses from us. With our new design, four asses. But what do I need four asses for? Well, just you'll find out, see? They're always coming handy later.

• 18:50Chris Williamson?

  Smoking five cigarettes.

• 18:52Mike Israetel?

  Indoor cigarette smoking is goaded.

• 18:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 18:54Mike Israetel?

  Nothing, the only thing better than smoking in an office while rampant sexual harassment occurs right in front of you is smoking in a doctor's office when you're the doctor. Ideally, seeing a pregnant woman who's late term. You know, the ultimate. And the 50s had it figured out. Anyway. Inspiration. So it could be negative in the sense of you're like, fuck this. I need to do something about this. Um, money inspiration, uh, you know, like you wanna take a girl out and you just don't have the money to go to where she wants to go. You're like, oh shit. Whatever. Any, any of those all comes back to girls and dating, right? Whatever. Uh, anything that's a little bit twinge of negative that you can use to push yourself into this process, which you logically have deduced is a good idea. Anyway, getting in shape is a good idea. Everyone knows that.

• 19:38Chris Williamson?

  And just on one point, then maybe, um, you wanted to go and play frisbee in the park with your friends. And you notice, fuck, like after seven minutes, I can't do this thing anymore. I wanted this thing and something had got in the way of that. It seems to me, at least so far, that inspiration is kind of like flat, like epiphany moment flash.

• 19:58Mike Israetel?

  Yes.

• 19:59Chris Williamson?

  A sense of something, right?

• 20:01Mike Israetel?

  Okay, that's exactly what it is.

• 20:02Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 20:02Mike Israetel?

  And then there was the positive version, of course, which is often better and really awesome to feel. And that's usually something like a can do attitude. Like you go and you watch, um, you've been delaying your working out shit. And one of your friends takes you to like, um, a basketball league where it's like disabled wheelchair bound children playing basketball. They have that shit. And you're like, these fucking kids are trying, bro. I'm about to start crying watching these little motherfuckers, man. They're trying their asses off. They don't even have any legs. What the hell am I doing not going to the gym? I can do this shit. I'm vibing off that. I want a million of that. Let's go.

• 20:45Mike Israetel?

  There's 50 other ways to say incredibly inspirational things, see incredibly inspirational things. I mean, there's always that one lady at the gym that's like really overweight. It's just covered in sweat, huffing and puffing our ass off. And you're like, damn, bet he get that shit.

• 20:58Chris Williamson?

  The gold that you went to, maybe the last time you were here, the most. Strip mall boilerplate, nice, big gold gym that everyone that's listening to this will have been some version of. And there's a gentleman in there who must be in his, probably mid seventies. He's maybe two hundred and sixty pounds, maybe two hundred and eighty pounds. It's like it's gravity's really fucking hitting on it. And he's got his walking stick and he does laps of that little sort of running track he's walking. And he'll get onto the machines and every time that I see him, I'm way more fucking pumped to see him get after it than I am, you know, millennial, one hundred and ninety pound, single digit body fat rocking guy, number five that I see on the morning.

• 21:42Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 21:42Chris Williamson?

  Um, and that's, you're right. That's a, an odd form of inspiration. Cause I think a lot of the time when we think about inspiration, we think about aspiration as well. Like aha, upward aiming.

• 21:52Mike Israetel?

  That counts also.

• 21:53Chris Williamson?

  Uh, that's a thing I want. I want that in me. That's a trait that I want to imbibe in me. But also, actually, that's a lie, because that is also, I'm seeing a trait that I want. It just happens to be in a person that is kind of like orthogonal to me.

• 22:08Mike Israetel?

  Has the audacity to display that trait, which means that trait's really fucking strong. Cause if you're a like jacked guy, how much motivation do you need? You don't need any inspiration. You just show up and you do your thing. You always look great. You're rolling down. Uh, and if you're rolling uphill like crazy, oh man, like I'm vibe with that. But also scrolling through social media and seeing beautiful physiques, seeing amazing meals put together by fit people who are eating them is also really good inspiration. So inspiration is critical, because if nothing inspires you to do something about what it is, whatever you want to do, it is maybe like definitionally impossible for you to do it, or if we grant some leeway there, highly unlikely. Like almost no one, how

• 22:50Mike Israetel?

  many people have you started, uh, hear or talked to who really got into working out, really changed their shape? And you were like, what, what got you into it? And they were like, oh, just like a random hobby I picked up and I just started doing it. Come on, that almost.

• 23:01Chris Williamson?

  It's usually something deep in that. I wanted to feel strong. I wanted to feel powerful. I was bullied in school. I felt whatever, whatever, whatever.

• 23:07Mike Israetel?

  And you can usually weave that back to one specific event, one specific Instagram picture, one specific phone call text, whatever it was, seeing a wheelchair kid play basketball. They were like, I saw that shit and I was in the gym the next day.

• 23:19Chris Williamson?

  Before we continue, you've probably heard of hydrogen water, but most people don't know why it matters. So here's the short version. Molecular hydrogen helps your cells recover, fight stress, supports energy, and improves how your body repairs itself. And the ECHO flask is the best way to get it. It adds high levels of hydrogen directly into your water. No tablets, no gimmicks, just a clean, portable system that is built with FDA-approved materials. I am in love with this thing. It's with me everywhere that I go, and I've noticed real improvements in my energy and my recovery. And that's why it is backed by over 1,500 studies and trusted by 100,000 customers, including The Rock, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Joe Rogan. Best of all, it comes with a 60-day money-back guarantee,

• 24:02Chris Williamson?

  so you can buy it and drink out of it for two months. If you don't like it, they'll give you your money back, plus they ship internationally. Right now, you can get 10% off the ECHO flask by going to the link in the description below or heading to echowater.com/modernd wisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's echowater.com/modernd wisdom, a modern wisdom, at checkout. How do you think inspiration, this, you know, the ephemeral muse coming down and bestowing on you this sense of, ah, the sky's opened, and it was then I knew I was going to get single-digit body fat? Do you have a strategy? Or how do you think about trying to bring more inspiration into your life? Is that something that can be done?

• 24:45Chris Williamson?

  Can you, can you seek inspiration in that way?

• 24:48Mike Israetel?

  That is a great question, Chris. I have never managed to do a lot of that myself, precisely because inspiration is so underpowered compared to the other multiple constructs in this sequence of how to get shit done you don't want to do. But there are absolutely ways of cultivating it.

• 25:13Mike Israetel?

  Great question. One, figure out who in your life is toxic as fuck and interact with them less. They're probably demotivating.

• 25:24Chris Williamson?

  That's a break on the.

• 25:26Mike Israetel?

  Hundred percent.

• 25:27Chris Williamson?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 25:28Mike Israetel?

  Another one is if there are people that you're around that you just feel inspired to do your best shit with when you're around them. That's who you want to be hanging out with. That identical rule unchanged maps exactly onto all of your social media. Down to the YouTube videos in your algorithm. You want shit in your algorithm that you look at. And you're like, this fucks. I like the way this makes me feel.

• 25:54Chris Williamson?

  That's it. That's it. That. So, uh, post content clarity is the best way.

• 26:00Mike Israetel?

  It's not clarity.

• 26:01Chris Williamson?

  Exactly. Uh, just a lot of the things that we consume on the internet, given that. People spend more time in the virtual world than they do in the real world now by maybe like 60%, I think on average.

• 26:14Chris Williamson?

  And if that's where you're spending most of your time. You can be captured, your limbics, all of the different ways that we, people get clickbaited into watching whatever. You need to be very careful because you will watch the thing that's most compelling to you at the time. And the question you need to ask yourself is. How did that make me feel after I finished watching it?

• 26:31Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 26:31Chris Williamson?

  I watched one of your videos and I think, fuck, like, I, I like, I learned, I learned something about, you know, whatever, whatever this thing is that we're, that, that Mike was talking about that. That's really interesting. Like I've left, huh, like I feel regulated. And then there's other channel, you know. Piers Morgan is an interesting fellow and I respect very much what he does. And I've had fun on his show. I don't leave watching one of his videos typically, unless I'm on it, feeling very regulated. You know, I leave feeling like I step outside of the door and I look around. Yeah, I look around and I don't want to call my mom. I don't want to tell my friends that I miss them. I'm not, this, this colors don't seem quite as bright, you know, just that. It's just sort of this low level agitation.

• 27:14Mike Israetel?

  Oh, yes.

• 27:15Chris Williamson?

  And I think. When you're faced with a question that's difficult, especially for something that's like messy and like meandering and ephemeral like inspiration, you went to the exact right place, which is kind of tough to engineer that. Although I think I've maybe got one or two strategies. But one thing that you certainly can do is invert it. How would I give myself as little inspiration to do the things to make my life move in the direction that I want? How do I do that?

• 27:43Mike Israetel?

  Those, right.

• 27:44Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 27:44Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, 100%. And so you can also leverage inspiration with music.

• 27:55Mike Israetel?

  Movies, et cetera, just general media consumption. Music can be incredibly inspirational because it, music does chemically what inspiration does by some other vector, but like instead of processing an image with your eyes, go, I want to look like that. The right crescendo in a song gives you that feeling of let's fucking go. That is literally the feeling of inspiration. So music's a big deal. The thing is, is that you listen to a song, you get the feeling. Sweet. Feeling goes away after the song's over, maybe a few minutes later. You look at a bodybuilder you really want to look like. Cool. I want to do something.

• 28:37Mike Israetel?

  Goes away. Minutes later. One, every time I spoke about this topic, I've used the analogy, if you go to watch like one of the new Rocky movies, you know, the one with, what's his name, the nice fellow, Michael B. Jordan.

• 28:52Chris Williamson?

  Diplomatic way to describe Michael B. Jordan, the nice fellow.

• 28:56Mike Israetel?

  He's a nice guy. Isn't that a nice guy?

• 28:58Chris Williamson?

  I think he is.

• 28:58Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 29:00Mike Israetel?

  You know, when he's like beating the shit out of white people, which is fucking sweet because.

• 29:05Chris Williamson?

  They need it. We all need it.

• 29:08Mike Israetel?

  If I was black. I would have watched Rocky offended. Nobody beating a fucking black man at box. What the fuck about it here? White people? You must be crazy. Show me some realistic shit. I want to see a black man start undefeated and fucking end undefeated. John Jones, goddammit. That's my hero. In any case, I'm watching a fucking Rocky movie. Appropriately, black people winning at boxing and I feel that shit. I come out of the theater swinging. The police get involved, obviously. And the next morning. I'm not gonna sign up for a boxing gym. Maybe, but unlikely. So the one thing we have to notice about inspiration is that inspiration is two things. Cheap, which is nice. It's insanely overproduced, insanely produced.

• 29:54Mike Israetel?

  If you're inspired, just go to any fitness, anything on YouTube is inspirational. Inspiration, enter into YouTube search. You'll just be on there for forever. But it just doesn't, it's like it goes bloop like that. It's like a hit of cocaine at the club. You feel great for however long cocaine lasts and then afterwards you're like. I need more cocaine.

• 30:12Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 30:13Mike Israetel?

  And so inspiration is essential to getting kicking you in the ass. But it's just one kick in the ass and then you're out the door. And then the next question is what, what now? Because a lot of people overindex on inspiration. They want to know, uh, how do I get inspired to go to the gym? I absolutely tell you like 500 things that'll get you inspired to go to the gym. I can give you a nice little off the cuff speech right now about why you should do it. It's gonna get you to go to the gym once. It is not gonna get you to go to the gym for a month straight. Sure, shit, not gonna get you to go to the gym for 12 months straight, which is a real transformation amount of time. So the next question we have to ask, okay, inspiration does its thing. Inspiration is best seen as like an initial booster rocket. It's not even getting you out of orbit.

• 30:54Chris Williamson?

  Just maybe a couple of inches off the launch pad. So one, I think you did actually our first big episode at the start of last year, your, um. When you're sick and tired of feeling like shit, you go to the gym. I'll see you there. That I think probably did cause a bunch of people to go like, yeah, that, fuck me, that went crazy. But a couple of, or at least one thing that to me.

• 31:18Chris Williamson?

  Typically gives me types of inspiration.

• 31:22Chris Williamson?

  Gives me boost of inspiration that seem to be step changes, even if they're not long lasting, is doing new things, doing things that are different. Because I think if you continue to expose yourself to the same routine, which everybody likes, it's important, you need to have some sort of set structure to your day and your week and your month and stuff. Because if it's too chaotic, it's very hard to kind of repeat anything sufficient times to get good at doing anything and to lock in habits, which we'll talk about. But when I say yes to going and trying an improv class, when I say yes to going to a random jazz bar, when I say yes to going and watching a movie that I wouldn't have done typically, or going on a road trip with a bunch of friends, maybe I know like two of the friends or whatever,

• 32:05Chris Williamson?

  I'm learning to drift a car this Saturday or this Sunday.

• 32:08Mike Israetel?

  Cool.

• 32:09Chris Williamson?

  Fucking alpha shit, dude. I'm learning to drift.

• 32:12Mike Israetel?

  My wife's Asian, does that mean I already know how to drift a car?

• 32:16Chris Williamson?

  Simply through osmosis.

• 32:17Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 32:17Chris Williamson?

  The vaginal secretion.

• 32:18Mike Israetel?

  Long enough. Oh, I've had a lot of that.

• 32:20Chris Williamson?

  Oh, um, probably Tokyo Drift. You could call that your sex tape, Tokyo Drift.

• 32:26Mike Israetel?

  That is already out. It was not a long ride, Chris.

• 32:30Chris Williamson?

  Um, and it's an interesting one for me, and especially more interesting as I get a little bit older, openness to experience seems to decline a little bit as you get older as a personality trait, I think.

• 32:43Mike Israetel?

  Makes sense.

• 32:46Chris Williamson?

  You think you know who you are, what the world has to offer. If you've never been to an Italian restaurant, you have no idea about what a good or bad Italian restaurant is. And then when you step into one, you go, huh, that was the best and the worst Italian restaurant I've ever been into. It was the most inspirational and least inspirational Italian restaurant I've ever been.

• 33:03Mike Israetel?

  Definitely the most Italian.

• 33:05Chris Williamson?

  And least at the same time. Yeah. And then you go, okay, well, I go to the second one. And then you start to rank order stuff. And after a while, you have a big enough data set that you think, well, I've tried quite a few Italian restaurants and I think that the one that I like is going to be very difficult to beat, which by design makes it, well, if I roll the dice and I go somewhere new, the likelihood that this is better than the best or even close to the best becomes less and less and less, right? And then I need a higher level of evidence. Dude, you have to go here. The reviews are insane. Look, it will line out the door, et cetera, et cetera. But for me. Uh, reminding myself that when I say yes to doing new things, last summer, I went to Bozeman, Montana and Big Sky, Montana, and I got to see professional bull riding three times, PBR events, three times. I'd never been to one before in my life. And I was blown away.

• 33:50Chris Williamson?

  These guys are just like fucking like tiny brave Brazilian dudes, no fucking helmet, like swagger. Everything was cool. A guy jumped out of a helicopter while a cherub twelve year old sang the national anthem, flying a flag behind him and landed in the middle of it. I'm like, this is fucking sick. That's inspiration.

• 34:07Mike Israetel?

  Very American.

• 34:08Chris Williamson?

  But had I have not decided to say yes to going to the PBR, I wouldn't have got to see that.

• 34:13Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 34:13Chris Williamson?

  So in short, I think that saying yes to new experiences and trying to seek out things that are markedly different, like genuinely orthogonal to the existing experiences you've had. Sure, you may roll the dice and it's, you may hate improv.

• 34:31Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 34:32Chris Williamson?

  But even when you hate it, that might be a thing where you go, that's some negative fucking inspiration shit. I don't want to be like any of these improv motherfuckers. You know, like pretending that they're in a pub in England, throwing darts at the board and saying like, oh, I have now. Well, what do you want tonight, sir? Um, so for me, that's at least one way that I think you can kind of artificially inseminate a little bit more inspiration into your life.

• 34:54Mike Israetel?

  And I'm never going to argue against insemination. Um, Chris, I gotta be honest, man, I'm, I'm, I'm doing a lot of vicarious living through your actually active and exploratory life. I'm for sure in a part of my life where I think I'm really missing out. Uh, Crystal and I, my wife, we've had a few years of just grinding our shit to the bone, working. And then a few months of like, we got, both got surgery, recovering from surgery, can't go anywhere really. And so we're kind of big time cabin fevered out of our minds. And the idea that like, Going out and experiencing novelty is a good thing to me right now resonates like crazy.

• 35:36Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, because it's the thing that you can't do. But then when it's the thing that, you know, when you're in wedding season or whatever, when the back's fine and you can, you have to put a suit on and whatever it might be. Fuck, oh my God, like another fucking wedding.

• 35:49Mike Israetel?

  You're overboard, uh, cause like another wedding is a big deal, uh, after the ninth one of the season. Um, I love fucking weddings, man. I have a whole, have you ever seen me to wedding? Anyone listening, you ever seen me to wedding? First of all, come up and say hi. Second of all, I have like a protocol.

• 36:06Chris Williamson?

  Okay, I want to hear this. I can't believe you've optimized attending weddings.

• 36:09Mike Israetel?

  Oh, yeah, well, it's like that, the brain, I tries optimize everything. So, um, I always, I'm people watching 1,000% of the time. Cause there's so much good stuff. Who secretly fucking hates who through body language? Amazing, so much culture there.

• 36:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 36:26Mike Israetel?

  Um, two families of radically different ethnicity and culture brought together.

• 36:31Chris Williamson?

  Money.

• 36:32Mike Israetel?

  Money, it's just like watching a physics chemical reaction. And then my wife and I, we do not ever, ever, ever fuck around with hors d'oeuvres. Hors d'oeuvres are serious business. And, and you gotta catch the wait, waiter hors d'oeuvres people as they come out. So, so number one, uh, number one, understand where the hors d'oeuvres are, that they are, is hors d'oeuvres time right now?

• 36:55Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so you want to look at the spawn point of where the hors d'oeuvres are coming from?

• 36:58Mike Israetel?

  That's number two. First is knowing hors d'oeuvres are important. You need to be on your fucking Ps and Qs, eyes up.

• 37:04Chris Williamson?

  Ten toes down.

• 37:05Mike Israetel?

  You know, like when you see army movies and the guy's like asleep at the, the fucking, like get, wake, wake him up. Hors d'oeuvres are coming, you idiot.

• 37:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 37:15Mike Israetel?

  And then two, they're not coming randomly. They don't instantiate quantum like wherever. People bring them out, friendly people, people you want to make eye contact with and smile.

• 37:25Chris Williamson?

  And be very kind to them.

• 37:26Mike Israetel?

  You got to kind to everyone, but those people, you really want to do one of these. Cause if they catch your eye, they know two things. One, I don't want to push hors d'oeuvres on unwitting people. And two, I'm supposed to be giving hors d'oeuvres to people. It's literally my job. If they catch your eye. Like that fat motherfucker with a giant head clearly needs hors d'oeuvres and his shorter also thick wife clearly she also None of us need hors d'oeuvres. These people want hors d'oeuvres. They want them. And so the the spawn points are absolutely critical, Chris. So bang up there. Yeah. And then and so you you now. The other thing you have to watch out for is that some people are better at the shit than you are. Crystal and I were at a wedding where one of the people was Chinese. Yo, overseas Chinese ladies.

• 38:10Mike Israetel?

  Do not fuck around. They're on the spawn points quick. And also, I love so also. Chinese ladies, I have like a Chinese lady impression that I do for friends of hers. It would get me canceled instantly. Maybe when Crystal's on, I'll do it, but they are so fucking ruthless in the most hilarious and awesome way possible. They like, you know, like what we consider socially tactful or not tactful, they could give a fuck. And also they run like an empire. They're richer than you. They're more successful. You're not above. You can't judge them social hierarchy wise, like, oh, these commoners like, no, that lady runs the organization that made your cellphone. You're like, oh, fuck. They take handfuls of hors d'oeuvres off the fucking plate.

• 38:49Mike Israetel?

  So if you let them beat you to it, there are no hors d'oeuvres. And these are discriminating folks. They don't just take any bullshit. They take the fucking lobster shit, the good stuff, Chris. You know, when the hors d'oeuvres come around and it's like, oh, it's like celery with cream cheese in it. You're like, what the fuck? How did you guys leave this on the wedding plan list? No one wants this. You know, no one wants this.

• 39:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 39:07Mike Israetel?

  And so if the whole system is designed, wake up, hors d'oeuvres are coming, check all the the points, eye contact, and you want to be a person that's known for two things. I promise this rant is almost over. One, wanting hors d'oeuvres. But two, being incredibly kind and polite and not overstaying your welcome, not just trying to take three or four. Cause they they're supposed to be doing this, right? If you take half of them, they're kind of like, that person's weird. They got enough. I'm gonna avoid them. You want to be like, oh, my God, instantly eat it and be like, that is so good. I'm gonna see you in a bit. And then I'm okay, fucking weirdo. And they walk off. And later, when they come back, they know you're good for it. You're a comfort to their eyes. Cause you know, you know.

• 39:46Chris Williamson?

  You're an hors d'oeuvre booty call.

• 39:48Mike Israetel?

  100%. They scroll through their phone. It's late. Becky, that's gonna get complicated. Stacy, she's cool, but is she with Jim again? I don't know. Mike and Crystal, they're in. And look at them, just salivating. So 100% hors d'oeuvres game, weddings are amazing. You sit down, you get to like, I love sitting at tables where I don't know anyone. Get to just like, find out what the hell's going on. The weed's hitting. I don't know what's going on. It's fucking amazing. My wife's getting drunk. It's great. Weddings are amazing. Love is in the air. I can go to a trillion weddings in advance.

• 40:19Chris Williamson?

  I mean.

• 40:19Mike Israetel?

  You want to invite me to a wedding, by all means, please do. I'll just.

• 40:21Chris Williamson?

  Open weddings at harpystrength.com or something.

• 40:25Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, if you send your invite to harpy strength.

• 40:26Chris Williamson?

  Who was this thing? Didn't Taylor Swift randomly attend certain fans weddings that had like invited? Apparently, when you get to a certain level of fame, you just get, you've been such a huge part of a, we bonded over your last hour, blah, blah, whatever. And apparently she just would rock up to some.

• 40:42Mike Israetel?

  So sweet.

• 40:43Chris Williamson?

  That's pretty fucking sick.

• 40:44Mike Israetel?

  Baller move.

• 40:45Chris Williamson?

  Point being there, if you want some inspiration in the romantic realm, saying yes to a wedding that you get invited to, it's probably a good idea.

• 40:53Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 40:54Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, like, look at these two people doing the nuptials in front of me.

• 40:59Mike Israetel?

  Believe and love.

• 41:00Chris Williamson?

  In other news, this episode is brought to you by Momentous. If your sleep's not dialed, taking ages to nod off, you're waking up at random times and feeling groggy in the morning, Momentous's sleep packs. How did I miss both of those? I hear to help. They're not your typical knock you out supplement overloaded with melatonin, just the most evidence-based ingredients at perfect doses to help you fall asleep more quickly. Stay asleep throughout the night and wake up feeling more rested and revitalized in the morning, which is why I take these things every single night and why I trust Momentous with my life. Or at least with my sleep, because they make the highest quality supplements on the planet. What you read on the label is what's in the product and absolutely nothing else.

• 41:39Chris Williamson?

  And if you're still unsure, they've got a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it completely risk free, use it. And if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back. Plus they ship internationally. Right now, you can get 35% off your first subscription and that 30 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/ModernWisdom. Using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash ModernWisdom and ModernWisdom at checkout. All right. So inspiration.

• 42:11Mike Israetel?

  Amazing.

• 42:12Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 42:12Mike Israetel?

  Short-lived. Do not rely on it to take you all the way to accomplishing your goal. It can't do that by design.

• 42:21Mike Israetel?

  What we need is another construct and that's motivation. A lot of people say motivation is all of these things, but if you look into the technical shit, it's actually just a subcomponent, just the most popular phrasing. Motivation is the

• 42:38Mike Israetel?

  goal driven desire to do a thing. It's seeing the top of a mountain that's many valleys away and going, I want, I want that. I want to go up there. Because if you're inspired to do some hiking and some mountaineering, that gets you with your pole in hand, with your white people flannel clothes on, with your all the white people, you know, the archerics bags and she just says you're just really white. You know what I'm saying? Outdoorsy Montana people. You got all your shit together. You show up to the, the, the head of the trail. Motive, inspiration will get you there. It will get you no further. Cause after a while, like this sure shit, a lot of bugs on the fucking hike.

• 43:18Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 43:19Mike Israetel?

  You need a top of the mountain to be like, anytime you forget where you're going, that is huge.

• 43:26Chris Williamson?

  So inherent.

• 43:27Mike Israetel?

  Must be a goal.

• 43:28Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Inherent in motivation is some sort of goal. And how do you define goal?

• 43:32Mike Israetel?

  Goal. Anything, any kind of end state that you find more preferable than your current state. Generally those the easiest thing in the world to figure out. However, it has to be a specific goal. And that's a big one. So for example, if you say, I want to get in shape, you are exhibiting inspiration. Congratulations.

• 43:56Mike Israetel?

  What the hell does in shape mean? You could quit after a day. You got slightly better shape. You quit after a week, you got, oh, there's blood work change and everything. What does in shape mean? And on the other, the dark side of it is for idiots like you and I who can't switch off. It's like, yeah, I'm like, I have striated glutes, but it's not enough. It's never enough. Cause you never set a goal and you just rolling. You went over the mountain, uh, back the other way and you're just like, I'll, out of the country, you're not even Peru anymore. You're Colombian now. Like who the fuck knows, right? And so a specific, concrete goal.

• 44:27Mike Israetel?

  Is really, really important. Now, there are ways to choose that goal that are have a much higher probability of giving you two things. One, awesome things that you wanted, and two, actually attaining those things. Reasonable, realistic things. For example, if you start lifting weights and you're like, I want to look like Ronnie Coleman, let's see, in my bodybuilding acumen, Eric Helms is going to judge me for this. 2001, Mr. Olympia, Ronnie Coleman, 2001 Arnold, Ronnie Coleman, just the freakiest, most symmetrical, beautiful Ronnie ever.

• 45:03Chris Williamson?

  Is that when he wore the cloak, the king?

• 45:05Mike Israetel?

  No, that was later.

• 45:06Chris Williamson?

  Oh, shame.

• 45:07Mike Israetel?

  King Ronnie. I love Ronnie. He's the fucking man. I had a chance to meet him a while back, and I just basically said almost nothing because I was shitting my pants.

• 45:15Mike Israetel?

  Well, you, you look, you look like you don't even lift. I'm just kidding. I thought that's probably what he was thinking. He probably thinks that about all of us. You're not gonna accomplish Ronnie Coleman's physique almost certainly. That as a goal is setting yourself up for failure. It's also a goal that's like, oh, I want to climb Mount Everest, but I'm gonna start in South America. You can't even see the shit. It's on the other side of the earth. Are you out of your fucking mind? So you want to pick goals that are tractable. Like, you can bite off a chunk and get closer to the goal in a measurable way, but also goals that are something that you will really pat yourself on the back for doing. So for example, I'm gonna be like on my diet, and I'm gonna do a good week on my diet.

• 45:56Chris Williamson?

  Come on.

• 45:57Mike Israetel?

  What's the end state of that? How are you gonna look? No, not noticeably different? It's nothing you want. Now, I'm good on my diet for three months. Hey, now, that's gonna accomplish some measurable stuff. So goals are really good if they get you feeling like, if I accomplish this, things will be different. I will really feel good about this. But not so crazy that it's too hazy off in the distance and not so close that it's too easy and you accomplish it right away and you never even feel good about yourself. And it should be as specific as reasonably possible, concrete. I would like to lose 10 pounds by March. 10 pounds, you know what that is. I want to weigh 220 pounds by March.

• 46:39Mike Israetel?

  Very easy to see both how you're doing on your way to the goal and if and when you have accomplished your goal.

• 46:45Chris Williamson?

  How do you think about linking this to emotion, identity, sense of self, sense of purpose? You know, this, I'm going to stick to my diet for an amount of time. I'm going to lose these 10 pounds. Great. Why? Why are you going to do that? Is the why question even important in this, in this sense?

• 47:04Mike Israetel?

  It can be important, but it is architected outside of this.

• 47:08Chris Williamson?

  Understood.

• 47:09Mike Israetel?

  So what we're talking about, these, uh, these six to seven, depending on a six constructs of adherence, they're like a spear. I don't tell you what the poke the spear at, but I give you one hell of a spear. What to poke the spear at, how to feel about it afterwards, that's on you. I mean, you could have a motivation like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna run the best pimp job in this city and I'm gonna be the greatest pimp. Uh, I guess could be mildly unethical. You could regret it a lot. You could get shot to death by rival pimps and you could be jailed. But, you know, you could use all of these strategies to do your best pimping.

• 47:44Chris Williamson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:45Mike Israetel?

  So both sides of the hand.

• 47:46Chris Williamson?

  We did.

• 47:47Mike Israetel?

  Have a function.

• 47:48Chris Williamson?

  We did inversion on the inspiration thing. What about inversion on the motivation thing? What would that demotivation look like? What's bad motivation? How do you, uh, avoid motivation?

• 47:59Mike Israetel?

  It's great. Great question. One thing I'll say is there is a function for running away from bad stuff. But this whole, remember the, the bipolarity thing really applies to motivation. Here's an example. Fat person, had enough of it. I don't want to be fat anymore.

• 48:26Mike Israetel?

  Not a good motivation. First of all, it's not operationalized well. The what's your cutoff for fat or not fat? As as you get into physique sport, you will realize there is no. The leanest bodybuilder of all time has at least one person in his comment section. It was, yeah, I'd like to see his glutes a little dry. Who's son of a.

• 48:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:45Mike Israetel?

  It's also you're running away from something and the further away you get from it, the more deflated you are. It's like trying to get um. You you have like a little ship you build with, you know, like one of those little mock mock sailboats. And you have like a like a blow dryer at the beginning. And then it gets away from blow dryer, it's just not moving anymore.

• 49:03Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 49:03Mike Israetel?

  It's like, oh, fuck.

• 49:03Chris Williamson?

  A great analogy.

• 49:04Mike Israetel?

  So. Worst should I come up with on the spot? Blow dryer, why? Where do you plug in the blow dryer, Chris? This really have a Tesla by the lake, plugs anything. So. That is not dependable and it causes a lot of people a bit of existential existential question marking. When they're halfway or two thirds of the way through their journey. Someone's like, are you like almost there? How you've done so well and they're like.

• 49:26Chris Williamson?

  Quite far from where I didn't want to be.

• 49:29Mike Israetel?

  There's not like a there there. Also, there's no one to shake your hand psychologically. By analogy, there's no like, I did it. I did it. There's like did did what? I ran away. You know what I mean? From from not being a thing, but there's no one to congratulate you. So I would say trying to run towards things is a really good idea. Stay so, for example, I don't want to be weak anymore. Not a good motivation. I want to be strong, better. Now you just define strong for me in a temporary sense. The cool thing of motivation is it's sequential. You get to a goal, your life doesn't end. You just like maybe pick another goal if you like. So if you're like, okay, I'm really weak. This is a fucking problem. Get your lifts right now. Slap 20 pounds on each one of them.

• 50:14Mike Israetel?

  Set that as your motivation, your goal. Set yourself a reasonable timeframe, 10 weeks, 12 weeks. Hit the pedal. You know exactly how strong you need to be. And psychologically, the value of being stronger reciprocate. It makes sense, it resonates. And as you get closer to it, you feel in your swag a little bit more. You're not running away from being weak. You're running towards strength. That is a constantly refilling source of motivation for you. And so. That is, I would say, one of the biggest things to avoid with motivation is the running away from things. I would say running to things is more dependable. The thing is, a lot of the most inspiring stories, ironically, are people not wanting certain things anymore. But inspiration, again, is that blow dryer.

• 50:59Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 51:00Mike Israetel?

  Something gotta be pulling you on the other end.

• 51:02Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 51:02Mike Israetel?

  And that's a big deal.

• 51:03Chris Williamson?

  How do you think about the relationship between action and motivation? Because it seems to me, at least some stuff from neuroscience, kind of suggests that when you get moving, when you move toward a thing, you then sort of start to backfill a story about motivation in a way, and then that continues to push you forward. You spoke earlier on, I sat down, this is hard, this is difficult, but the action increased motivation, and then that kind of became this sort of self-referential cycle.

• 51:35Mike Israetel?

  Sure.

• 51:35Chris Williamson?

  Is this jumping ahead too much, or is this part of motivation?

• 51:38Mike Israetel?

  No, no.

• 51:38Chris Williamson?

  When you think about the action-motivation sort of feedback loop?

• 51:41Mike Israetel?

  There's so much going on there, especially successful action on your way towards a goal that gets you closer to it is beautifully reinforcing system. It's like the flywheel situation, where more of it is better and better and better and better and better than to your goal. But this is a great transition point for the next landmark of adherence, this next thing that we have to talk about. And that is motivation and having a goal is like totally dope and critical, I might add. It's like a general looking over a contested city and being like, we're gonna be at the end of that flagpole by tomorrow, fellas. We're gonna capture this fucking city. Cool. Everyone's happy. That doesn't get the tanks

• 52:22Mike Israetel?

  going. That doesn't tell the troops where to go. That doesn't get the hospital in the back to get ready to accept some casualties, shit like that. When you are like, I'm gonna gain 20 pounds in each lift. Sweet. What's day one gonna look like at the gym? Gob's gonna gain, right? Let's fucking gain, baby. There is missing something, and that's an intention. The intention is another way of saying two things. I have a plan.

• 52:53Mike Israetel?

  Plan is meaningless without motivation. The plan has to be like, plan for what? Can you imagine like getting on ChatGPT and be like, hey, can you give me a plan? He'd be like, yeah. Are you high? Plan for what?

• 53:02Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 53:03Mike Israetel?

  Now, if you say, can you give me a plan for, oh shit, hell yeah, he'll be typing away at you for forever. Intention means you have a plan and you are putting just a tiny bit of your pride on the line to say, I'm gonna do the plan.

• 53:19Chris Williamson?

  So this is the emotion piece coming in a little.

• 53:20Mike Israetel?

  Oh yeah, sure. Because people can be motivated. And so first of all, almost everyone can be inspired to do damn near anything. Tons of people can be motivated to do damn near anything. How many people actually construct a plan and put their little bit of their nutsack on the line for, am I actually doing the shit? Because intention is the bridge between what you want and what you're gonna get. Actually executing the plan is the only thing that actually causes success.

• 53:54Chris Williamson?

  Up until this point, it's kind of been a mental exercise.

• 53:57Mike Israetel?

  Totally mental.

• 53:58Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 53:59Mike Israetel?

  Now, it's, okay, I want this thing. I want to lose 15 pounds. What is that chew or something? What you got in there?

• 54:07Chris Williamson?

  The nicotine toothpicks, not sponsored.

• 54:10Mike Israetel?

  What the fuck?

• 54:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Do you want to try one?

• 54:12Mike Israetel?

  I don't do nicotine.

• 54:14Chris Williamson?

  Well, neither do I, but these toothpicks are really fucking tasty and they, what I want, well, they're just like, they're coated in.

• 54:21Mike Israetel?

  Nicotine.

• 54:22Chris Williamson?

  Peppermint watermelon. Actually, if I'm being honest, the nicotine is secondary to the fact that they taste nice because peppermint watermelon tastes.

• 54:29Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 54:29Chris Williamson?

  I'm like chewing away on it.

• 54:31Mike Israetel?

  Are you gonna like get super high and throw up or something?

• 54:34Chris Williamson?

  No, I think I've tolerated, I'm moving at the right pace. Yeah, this is a very slow moving treadmill. And just keep and go. I've got to try and keep up with you somehow. Jesus fuck, come on.

• 54:45Mike Israetel?

  Nicotine addicts.

• 54:46Chris Williamson?

  That's it.

• 54:47Mike Israetel?

  I love it. So if you're actually gonna do the thing.

• 54:53Mike Israetel?

  You're gonna get somewhere. I wanna, you know, lose 12 pounds. I wanna put 20 pounds on my list at the gym. I wanna do X, Y, Z. Then you must have a plan that rudimentarily at least approximates getting you somewhere along that axis. Cause you can always alter your plan. There has to be a plan of what to do. It's not setting the goal of losing 12 pounds in 12 weeks that's gonna get you in shape. It's eating meal one, eating meal two, not having snack number one that was unplanned, eating meal three, going to do your workout, eating meal four, going to sleep on time and repeating. And you intend to do it. And the it is the plan. You have motivation, you have a direction.

• 55:36Mike Israetel?

  You have a plan that's the shotgun shell you load in, pointing at the direction. And then intention is pulling the actual trigger.

• 55:47Mike Israetel?

  Out the shotgun shell goes and hits your target. There is no replacing that part of it. And we have a lot of social media stuff about inspiration. Great point.

• 55:59Mike Israetel?

  Tons on motivation. Intention. Very unsafe. Plan. Very. Very unsexy, technical. And you need that part, but that part is super, super, super important. And sometimes, many times, almost all the time, I would say predictably, there's gonna be an asymmetry.

• 56:20Mike Israetel?

  Your arc that your goal has set out of how much adherence that you need to the plan to get where you're going. Let's say you're hiking on a trail. And like in order to get to the whatever, uh, white people shit, uh, the plateau that overlooks the fucking lake or whatever. By X, Y, Z time, you need to, you need to hike at two miles an hour. And your motivation, your sensation of I'm doing the thing. The thing with motivation is that it actually waxes and wanes, goes up and down. Generally, it's pointed in the right direction. But if you like, really wanted to get in shape, some days you wake up and you're like, fuck, I'm getting to the gym.

• 57:03Mike Israetel?

  Some days you wake up and you're like, oh, the gym exists, why? I need more sleep. I don't want any of this. I totally just like wigged out on my fitness. I don't actually, these people are capitalists, liars, body image, something to excuse myself, Jews. I blame the Jews for many things, mostly birthing this God you see in front of you. In any case, at some point,

• 57:30Mike Israetel?

  your desire, your human feeling for what you need to be doing, for your honoring, your intention, for checkboxing the plan, is going to be here. And what is required for you, physical movement wise, is going to be here. You're hiking the trail at 1.8 miles an hour, two miles an hours where you need to be to get to the shit on time. How do you bridge this gap? You bridge it with something called discipline. And discipline is when you take the battery of willpower and you squirt that extra juice to make up the difference. Your motivation's only getting you so far.

• 58:15Mike Israetel?

  Sometimes it's, usually it's far enough. Sometimes it's not.

• 58:19Chris Williamson?

  Just to loop back to the motivation thing, why do you think, is it the reason that motivation is way more sexy than something like intention or goal planning?

• 58:31Chris Williamson?

  Motivation screams Greg Plitt, R I P. Intention and plan setting screams Ali Abdaal. Like, also lovely guy, but I don't care about your notion template anywhere near as much as I do about Greg Plitt in the car park of the Gold's Gym saying something in like grainy black and white image to me. Is it that we have this sort of inherent, oh, well, that's a person doing a thing that they're pulled to do. It seems like they're swimming downstream with this because the motivation is moving them toward the thing. Whereas the intention is like, huh, this probably means it's kind of going to be hard and I'm going to have to sort of negotiate with the world in a way and I'm going to have to tap into this sort of stuff.

• 59:16Mike Israetel?

  One hundred percent. Right. I think it's most easily explained by the radical asymmetry of the human brain. The prefrontal cortex and all those associated regions of delayed gratification, of constructing a plan, appraising a plan, executing a plan, getting feedback to the plan, reconstructing the plan, re-executing, reappraising, et cetera. That shit is like, it takes up a little bit of your brain. A ton of the rest of your brain is like animal shit. Who am I banging? What food am I going to eat afterwards? I'm going to get drunk with my homies and start some shit. That's a lot of stuff. And so when we're talking about rah rah animal shit, like two gorillas smashing into each other, that's, that's fucking inspiring.

• 59:56Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 59:56Mike Israetel?

  Because we have a lot of our brain dedicated to looking at that and being like, holy shit, that, that's what I'm made of. But if you look at, uh, like a server farm, a data center at night, just, most people are like, why the fuck are we here? Are we going to get arrested for being in here? To me, I find this grotesquely inspiring because I have this whole fetish, Ayn Rand bullshit, religious fantasy about productivity, all that dumb stuff. But to most people, and to me on most of my days, the idea that your ability to appraise and re-architect and implement a very logical plan and sequence is mostly just like, is this movie over yet?

• 1:00:35Chris Williamson?

  Wildly unsexy.

• 1:00:36Mike Israetel?

  Is this about, it's unsexy, it just doesn't match most of our evolutionary past. Now, in our evolutionary future, all merged with AI and shit, planning and organ, organization and coordination is exactly the shit. That's what builds things. That's actually the real thing we're supposed to be doing, but we're a little bit out of our element. Like if, if you asked them. Aliens came down to earth and they were just assuming like, oh, humans are currently doing the thing they're supposed to be doing to maximize their survival probability. They'd be like, why are humans in bars in Austin? You'd be like, uh, try to get titties in their face? Why? To access milk? No, no, there's not. But there's this whole mating proceeds really outdated.

• 1:01:11Chris Williamson?

  Yep, yep.

• 1:01:11Mike Israetel?

  It's really outdated. So that's one of the reasons that human drive towards just the guttural shit is what I think gives inspiration a ton of slack. Motivation's real fun to talk about. You get to talking about people with intention. Uh, discipline can bring the conversation back.

• 1:01:27Chris Williamson?

  It does. It gets sexy again now.

• 1:01:28Mike Israetel?

  It gets that, uh, what's his name? Uh, Mr. Goggins type of shit going and that gets sexy.

• 1:01:33Chris Williamson?

  Before we continue, if you haven't been feeling as sharp or energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start, which is why I partnered with Function because they run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians to take the data, put it in a simple dashboard and give you actionable insights and recommendations to improve your health and lifespan. They track everything from your heart health to your hormone levels, your thyroid function and nutrient deficiencies. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more data than you get from an annual physical. Getting your blood work drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it is only $500. And right now, the first thousand people can get an additional $100 off, meaning

• 1:02:15Chris Williamson?

  it's only 400 bucks to get the exact same blood panel that I use. Just go to the link in the description below or head to functionhealth.com/ModernWisdom. That's functionhealth.com/ModernWisdom. One final element on the intention thing is holding yourself to your own promises, right? I'm made, I've had some inspiration. I was motivated to do a thing. I have this commitment.

• 1:02:38Mike Israetel?

  Set a goal.

• 1:02:38Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:02:39Mike Israetel?

  Have a plan.

• 1:02:39Chris Williamson?

  Yes. But I'm going to keep my words to myself. And again, this feels like, and you sort of touched on it, I'm putting a bit of me, uh, some chips are on the table in terms of self-worth, in terms of my, it's something in there. Like this is, this is a part of me and it's important to me that I do this thing.

• 1:03:01Mike Israetel?

  Let me tell you why I squinted. It is absolutely true that you need to put your nuts on the line for the shit. And when you do not honor your intentions, it is totally okay, and in fact, probably right, to feel a little bit of like, some of you is missing now. You lost something there. It's like someone punked you out in middle school.

• 1:03:18Chris Williamson?

  But it was you.

• 1:03:19Mike Israetel?

  Walk away from that. It's the worst, right? You don't walk away from that feeling hole. You walk away from that like with a chip on your shoulder. On the other hand, there has to be, that's one end of the spectrum. The other end is that you're gonna try a lot of different shit. And you're a human being who is flawed and also prone to changing the direction of where they're working towards. And if every single thing you start off on is do or die, everything and my pride is on the line for the shit, you're gonna lose it, man. I get that way about a lot of stuff. Yeah. And it is not a very good thing, because then someone's like, hey, like, we're abandoning this project at RP.

• 1:04:00Mike Israetel?

  We need to do this project now. I'm like, ugh, but I'm worthless.

• 1:04:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. How do you navigate that then? We've had conversations about this while I've been walking around the fucking widest parts of Austin.

• 1:04:14Chris Williamson?

  Yes. How do you navigate that? I think this is a real important point to linger on. The perennial insecure overachiever who, you know, Mike said, I gotta run towards something I want. There's not just run away from something that I fear. It's like, yeah, but, but my self-worth hinges exclusively on my ability to be productive and useful in the world. I have to, people must like me and, and that means I need to be productive and operationally efficient. And if I'm not, and if I don't dance through today perfectly, then it means even at the end of the day, the one thing I didn't do makes me feel like a piece of shit.

• 1:04:48Mike Israetel?

  Each other's minds a lot, haven't we? Our new app, Brain Sex.

• 1:04:52Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:04:54Mike Israetel?

  Absolutely critical to bring up.

• 1:04:59Mike Israetel?

  I use the Waking Up app.

• 1:05:03Chris Williamson?

  Me too.

• 1:05:03Mike Israetel?

  By Mr. Sam Harris. Do you have a code? I have a fucking code, Chris.

• 1:05:08Chris Williamson?

  Thank you, Jaren Lowenstein.

• 1:05:10Mike Israetel?

  Jaren's the fucking man.

• 1:05:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he's a sick guy.

• 1:05:12Mike Israetel?

  Also, there is a, the first John Wick movie. You remember John Wick? He, the Russian mobster guy has an assistant who's American.

• 1:05:23Mike Israetel?

  Looks identical to Jaren and no and talks the same way. I can't. You can tell me it's a different person. I don't believe you.

• 1:05:30Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:05:31Mike Israetel?

  Anyway.

• 1:05:31Chris Williamson?

  He does have a twin brother. Might be him. Might be his twin brother. Might actually be his twin brother who's in Hollywood.

• 1:05:36Mike Israetel?

  I legit thought that was one of the best acting jobs ever. He's like my hero. That guy's my fucking hero. He's just the only reasonable American dude. He's like, can we just stop killing people and make money?

• 1:05:45Mike Israetel?

  I just wanted to come up to that guy in the movie and be like, you need to be in a real banking job. You don't need to be around these people. Let the Russians do the Russian thing.

• 1:05:51Chris Williamson?

  For so much more.

• 1:05:52Mike Israetel?

  He's like, can we be civil? I'm like, I think you're in the wrong profession.

• 1:05:55Chris Williamson?

  Meditation.

• 1:05:57Mike Israetel?

  Waking up app with Sam Harris.

• 1:05:58Chris Williamson?

  Waking up.com slash RP strength.

• 1:06:00Mike Israetel?

  I don't, I don't think that the doctor might, maybe, I don't know. Yeah, some shit like that. And then in any case, um, one of the things that Sam says, that's incredibly beautifully phrased than I use myself a lot is to like, especially when you're meditating, is to sit back in your mind, rest in the back of your mind and just observe. And the more you meditate on that and how to actually difficult it is, and when you succeed in doing it, the more profound it becomes. And so if you get in this loop in your head of, am I worthwhile? Am I working too hard? Am I not working hard enough? You just do two things. Why not sit back and go, you know what? We are all growing on this beautiful tree of life in the universe.

• 1:06:43Mike Israetel?

  I am but a speck in the cosmos. I matter in approximate sense, in an ultimate sense, who the fuck knows? I have no attachment to any of this shit. The asteroid can kill us tomorrow. When I step back like this, I'm no longer attached to my identity as an achiever, as a success, as a motivator, as an accomplisher. I don't have an attachment anymore. I don't have an identity. Then, when I'm sufficiently calmer and more relaxed, I walk back in and I just do one thing. Operationalize, which means just go logically about the shit. What actually do I need to get done? Get this. How do I marshal my efforts to do it? Okay, all this stuff. Just go do the thing.

• 1:07:25Mike Israetel?

  As soon as you start thinking like, okay, man, I gotta have an intention. I better not let myself down. In times of stress, that can help. But generally, what helps me the most is to sit back and be like, none of this fucking matters. None of this matters. Still want it, though. Let's get it done. Calmly. A lot of, just fucking do the thing. And then so, all these wonders of, am I doing hard enough, work enough? That's between you and your whiskey at night, recounting your memories of serving in the Secret Service, shit like that, you know? All right, discipline. So, again, the asymmetry, or the, the, the, the lack motivation, not high enough today. I still need to go get my workout done. What I can do is take my willpower, which is that

• 1:08:08Mike Israetel?

  sensation, and it can leverage my pride. And I need to squirt that juice in there to tell myself, it just does not fucking matter how you feel. Cause the one thing with motivation that I've seen a lot on the internet is people will comment, they came in, it's really tough, getting to the gym today, any words of like, anything to motivate me, I just haven't been in the gym in a while. Shut the fuck up. What the hell are you talking about? And I don't mean that disrespectfully, just as comedy. But I mean something there, it's a little deeper. When you expect to feel like you always want to go to the gym, or always want to do your taxes, or always want to do whatever it is you think is important, you have made a grand

• 1:08:53Mike Israetel?

  illusion. Some of the time, you will not want to do the thing. The motivation will spike here. What it takes to get the thing done is up here. And at that point, there's not an amount of motive, you're all done motivating. It's still not enough. Cause sometimes, I don't know if you've been through this, Chris, but like, you're, you have to do a hard thing. Maybe it's at the end of the day, maybe it's in the middle, maybe it's some big deal. And you you like know logically it's important. It's gotta get done. And you try to search inside for like that, you know, like those old ninja movies where the guy would get beat up and then he would meditate. He would like remember his teaching and he cannot like that shit. Where the fuck is that? I've done that searching. It is just not there. Have you ever come up totally dry on any reason why you should be there? Someone's like, you're like in the green room, like waiting to get interviewed.

• 1:09:38Mike Israetel?

  And then someone's like, right, you're up in 30 seconds. You just don't want to be there. And and you're like, okay, mind, tell myself something that makes me want to be here. It's just like, huh? What? Oh, where the fuck are we? Why are we in a green room? Oh, hey, have fun. You're like, oh, god damn it, no, that worked. So there's nothing there. And just think, there's no one coming to save you. Except Mr. Goggins, who's gonna punch you square in your face until you shut up and do the thing. And that is a 100% what you need right there. Sometimes when the motivation isn't high enough, your intention takes you here. You breathe in, breathe out, find that part of you that's Russian or Irish or Nigerian or whatever the fuck it is, that old shit and go, fuck this, let's do this.

• 1:10:21Mike Israetel?

  Let's go. No logic, no reason, no like, oh, but this is true meaning, just fucking do it.

• 1:10:29Mike Israetel?

  Problem. That drains your battery of willpower. You only have a few pumps at that thing every day until you're out, until you really don't give a shit anymore.

• 1:10:41Mike Israetel?

  Good news, you don't need it all the time. You just need it in emergencies. Remember earlier I said like people who start the discussion with discipline and willpower is just fucking wrong. It's like 12 weeks of dieting. My man, you might have enough discipline over the course of a 12 week diet to get yourself raw, rawed up like 10 or 15 times or something. Sure, shit, not every day, man. Sure, shit, not multiple times a day. You must be crazy. You'll quit. Everyone quits. You're just out. And I out, I mean, you're out literally of like the substrate in your vesicles and your neurons that gives you that feeling. Once you drain that, it's incapable mechanically of doing anything. You're like, I just don't care. I just don't care. I'm done. So you gotta be real interested in how to maximize your motivation.

• 1:11:24Mike Israetel?

  And make sure it is as little variance as possible and as high up and close to your adherence level you need as possible, ideally over it. Like I've almost every pro bodybuilder, they're so passionate about what they're doing. Their motivation wobbles, but it wobbles like five miles above what it's required for them to do their meals and stuff.

• 1:11:45Chris Williamson?

  They never drop below.

• 1:11:46Mike Israetel?

  Below it. So people ask them like, like as a comedy thing, every time you see you're a bodybuilder, a lot, a lot of, a lot of normies, you know, a lot of regular folks, not crazy people like us. People must take a lot of discipline. Every bodybuilder, you look at their face when that happens. If you're around that, look at their face because they're, they're gonna be searching for like why shit to say, because there's no fucking discipline involved in that shit. I want to be here. I want to eat these fucking meals. And also if I feel like I don't, it's real quick for me to go down and just raise my motivation or suddenly just like fucking thoughts of being in fucking radical shape and war and strata glutes and Spartans or whatever naked. And all of a sudden I'm back in. I don't need to grit down for that. I want to be here. Most bodybuilders, they want to do what they want to do. Most elite athletes just want to do what they want to do.

• 1:12:28Mike Israetel?

  Sometimes you need that injection and recognizing when that is, doing it appropriately. And then recognizing, okay, I can't keep doing it like this. Let me go back and try to simplify the process that elevates my average motivation to above my adherence. There are absolutely ways of doing it. Those ways are typically boring. A lot of people discuss them as, as far as habits, but they are insanely, insanely effective because if dieting is very hard for you, training is very hard for you and you're squirting willpower through discipline into that fucking, it's like, you know, the, the nas or whatever.

• 1:13:05Chris Williamson?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 1:13:06Mike Israetel?

  You're squirting that shit. Yeah, you got a little, you do a tiny tank. You can't keep going like that. So if after four weeks, someone's like, how is your diet? Then you're like, man, it's just been crushing it. Just discipline and motivation and willpower. I'm just. You're not gonna last. So you gotta figure out a way to take that average motivation and boost it significantly, which means one of two things. You have a line of adherence. How difficult it is to do the thing. You have a little wobble of motivation. Let's say it's underneath it. How much you actually want to do the thing. Willpower via discipline fills in the gaps. You can do one of two things. Elevate your motivation, which is possible. Another thing is bring the adherence down so that it's easier for you to get your job done.

• 1:13:48Mike Israetel?

  For example, if you have to drive one hour to the gym and back every day, you're gonna need a lot of motivation, like diet definition and probably a lot of willpower too. If your gym is five minutes from your house by walk,

• 1:14:05Mike Israetel?

  the the degree of effort, the amount of motivation you need to have to be adherent is is quite small. And now you're on the path to success. And so all of these constructs sometimes culminate with habits. Building habits, when you have something habituated,

• 1:14:25Mike Israetel?

  your degree of adherence that you're attaining is just easier with your normal degree of motivation. And you may have a situation where you're using substantially less willpower, a situation where you use almost no willpower, and even a situation in which willpower just kind of left the chat. And and people ask like, what was your last 12 weeks of dieting? You're like, it's as easy as breathing. I just do my shit. And I go, John, you ever like need to grit your teeth like, I don't think so. I'll be chewing chicken breast. Yeah, but other than that, just do my thing. And

• 1:14:54Chris Williamson?

  That it would have taken more willpower to have not done the thing than to have do done the thing.

• 1:14:59Mike Israetel?

  Oh, absolutely. Because once something is you're in the habit of doing, you're like, uh, you know, like, uh, let's say you're, um, prepping for a show and you're like getting ripped up and everything's going great. You're eating your meals and someone's like, hey, man, uh, aliens just came down to earth. They're gonna give all of our wishes to us. You're just gonna be able to be stripped instantly. You don't even need to go do the show. Everyone's gonna win everything. It's just paradise. The ship's just down there. I'll see you down there. You're just kind of like,

• 1:15:27Mike Israetel?

  I I was supposed to eat my 3pm meal. The fucking aliens ruined my plans. I, uh, you're already vectored into that direction. And if you have architected your habits in such a way that make the whole process seem like it's downhill, if you can do that work, and it takes a while to learn all the skills and it fit what's right for you, then at the end of the day, you end up starting. Um, big goals and it's a little bit of learning curve. Once you're on track and habituated to them, it's just inevitable that they're going to fall pretty much because someone's like, oh, it's going to be tough. You're like, I, I, I don't know, I'm just going to get it done.

• 1:16:10Mike Israetel?

  You know, imagine talking to someone who has run like hundreds of marathons and you're talking to them at like mile 12 of a marathon, they're just recreationally doing it like pretty tough 12 miles up ahead. They're like, one foot in front of the other. But that's crazy. Like, well, yeah, but I have like 80 trillion habits of how to run marathons. This is actually just what I do at this point. I cannot oversell habit development. It's almost impossible.

• 1:16:34Chris Williamson?

  A quick aside, I've been drinking AG1 every morning for years. Uh huh. Uh huh. And it just got even better. AG1 Next Gen keeps the same simplicity, one scoop, once per day, but now comes with four clinical trials backing it. In those trials, AG1 Next Gen was clinically shown to fill common nutrient gaps, improve key nutrient levels within three months and increase healthy gut bacteria by 10 times, even in healthy adults. Basically, they've upgraded the formula with better probiotics, more bioavailable nutrients and clinical validation, and it's still NSF certified for sport, which means that you know the quality is legit. I actually got to meet the team that runs AG1, all of the top pods at a offsite a couple of months ago here in Austin, and I was really impressed.

• 1:17:18Chris Williamson?

  They took my feedback on board. They were very receptive and I actually think that they put some of my ideas into the product and the new marketing. So any success that you see going forward from now can be exclusively attributed to me. So hooray for me. And if you're still unsure, they've got a 90 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it and use it every single day for three months. If you don't like it, they'll just give you your money back. Right now, you can get a year's free supply, vitamin D3, K2, and five free AG1 travel packs, plus that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com/ModernWisdom. That's drinkag1.com/ModernWisdom. Let's invert it.

• 1:17:59Chris Williamson?

  Before we even get into how to enhance habit mechanism adherence, what are the things that people should avoid doing? Or the biggest mistakes, pitfalls that people do when it comes to instantiating habits and making that gap a little bit easier?

• 1:18:15Mike Israetel?

  Cheese.

• 1:18:17Mike Israetel?

  One is excessive rigidity. I must run at seven AM every morning.

• 1:18:26Mike Israetel?

  Okay. What if your boss says you have a meeting that day, starts at six thirty? What the fuck are you gonna do? Not much.

• 1:18:35Mike Israetel?

  You have to allow some flexibility. Big deal. Unless you plan on the world being completely fungible to your goals. And you just plan on running through walls all the time. Habits have to have um. An importance. It's important for me to brush my teeth in the morning and at night. But if I skip one tooth brushing, because I don't have my toothbrush, because I'm at a hotel with God knows who, and I'm brushing my teeth in another way, if you know what I mean? It's all right. And. That rigidity sets a lot of people up for um.

• 1:19:14Mike Israetel?

  Uh, win or lose mentality. One or zero mentality.

• 1:19:19Chris Williamson?

  We're back to this sort of fragility, knife edge.

• 1:19:22Mike Israetel?

  Totally.

• 1:19:23Chris Williamson?

  No, this, if I don't do it, it is me, I am less of a.

• 1:19:26Mike Israetel?

  Yes. And so as soon as you fail to brush your teeth one night. Or you eat a cheat meal instead of a good meal.

• 1:19:33Chris Williamson?

  Cascade.

• 1:19:34Mike Israetel?

  You're like, I'm a failure. And I will continue to fail. And so because I have nothing to lose anymore, because I've already lost, then I'm just gonna enjoy hedonic things like eating more cheat meals. So habits are dope, but if you let them get too extreme, you're gonna be like, okay, what happens after I have a cheat meal? Nothing, I've done this with a shitload of clients, like, what do I do? Like, you just do your normal meal tomorrow morning, like you were gonna, and they're like, I don't have to like make up for it. I'm like, no, actually, you didn't do anything immoral. No children were hurt. You didn't steal from anyone. There's no making up you have to do. Physiologically, I saw how it works at all. So habits are great when they're things you tend to go to, but as soon as you can't do them, you gotta go, okay, reframe. I'm not gonna do this today, it's not on the schedule, tomorrow I'm gonna restart. That's a huge, huge deal with habits.

• 1:20:18Mike Israetel?

  Another one is um, making your habits like realistic to begin with is a big one. Because people say like, I'm gonna wake up at five thirty every morning to go running. Really, though, are you? I know right now you feel like it. But try to appraise what you realistically are capable of. That is not to say that you're trapped in the same capability sphere and always will be. Like, you're probably pretty good at guessing what you're going to be capable of in the next 12 weeks. Reasonably. Like, if I told you, Chris, I have a huge opportunity for you. Elon called. You're going to be on a project of his and you're going to have to work 140 hours a week for a year.

• 1:20:58Mike Israetel?

  Let's get to it. You'd be like, yeah, like, I'm probably gonna fail. Everyone's gonna fail. I'm good. So that's not happening. Elon's not, I don't know. My phone's on do not disturb, saying Elon, get on, on the, on the DMs, but

• 1:21:17Mike Israetel?

  people do that shit to themselves all the time. And one of the ways this happens is they'll both set, it's like a cascade. Massive inspiration. Massive motivation. The goal trajectory points vertical. And the intention is airtight. I'm the fucking man. The plan behind the intention is preposterous in scope. And the habits required to keep going with that plan are out of scope completely. You're just not going to be able to do it. I'm gonna eat, not, you know, people do this shit all the time. I'm gonna, I'm gonna eat only protein and veggies. This combines a few fallacies. I'm gonna eat only protein and veggies to get in shape. Okay, so first of all, what the fuck is in shape? When does that stop? And no, you're not.

• 1:22:02Mike Israetel?

  So making sure that your habits are realistic. As easy to execute as possible. So the opposite of those is very difficult to execute habits.

• 1:22:14Mike Israetel?

  Et cetera, et cetera, sort of those kinds of things. Basically tell you, like, habits are something you have to see as not these super rigid entities. But it's kind of these little, like, sort of, you know, the Mario shit you jump on? The cloud and the cloud moves up and down just a bit and then stabilizes? They're kind of like that. They're really good to have, but don't overrun your life with 50 habits. It's also a good idea. To combine a few habits at the same time that reinforce the same big goal versus trying to take your life into 50 different things.

• 1:22:49Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:50Mike Israetel?

  That's a really common one. I I hate this.

• 1:22:52Chris Williamson?

  Can you give me an example?

• 1:22:53Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, New Year's, New Year's transformations, man. People will be like, fucking New Year's first hits. And they're like, new me. There's a new, I'm gonna tell you guys some shit you may need to hear. New year, new me is bullshit. Because physiologically, anatomically, brain structure wise, idea set wise, perception wise, how everyone else sees you, you are basically identical, December 31st and Jan 1. There's no new you. Now, you can say, I'm gonna completely re-architect myself this year. Dope. And I'm gonna rebuild all of Boston on a $20 million construction contract. What? But you would need 20 trillion. Oh, shit, that's right. You're not gonna make a new you. Get the fuck out of here.

• 1:23:38Mike Israetel?

  You could. It's gonna take you a decade. And it's gonna be one mini-goal at a time.

• 1:23:42Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:23:43Mike Israetel?

  And so a lot of times, people try to be like, I'm gonna get in shape this year. I'm gonna get my finances going. I'm gonna be better about my relation. Up, up, up, you're already, you know, context window with especially older AI. You tell ChatGPT something and then five minutes later it forgets it because the screen moves down and I can't see it anymore. Your habits are bounded, how much shit you can do.

• 1:24:02Chris Williamson?

  That's a really good way to put it.

• 1:24:03Mike Israetel?

  Hugely, right, hugely bounded.

• 1:24:04Chris Williamson?

  Really good way.

• 1:24:05Mike Israetel?

  And so you got a stack of maybe two or three things you can really hold yourself to throughout the day, throughout any given day, and I'm really for sure gonna checkmark these, go to work, get my work out and get my meals in, maybe one or two others. That's it. A lot of people just try to be like, does people see this thing that they they hear enough of these stupid YouTube discussions we're having? Not to say your discussion is stupid, just my end. Um, and they're like, yeah, man, this is a formula for success. So like, let me just pour more of the formula in. I'll do all the fucking habits. And it turns out, you need to be ginger with yourself. You need to be kind with yourself. You are mortal and literally an ape. You are primate, with very, very limited abilities. And it's very easy to tell yourself, I'm gonna be like all of my heroes, like all the

• 1:24:50Mike Israetel?

  best people I know, and I'm gonna try to be like that at everything.

• 1:24:54Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna be Elon and Ronnie at the same time.

• 1:24:56Mike Israetel?

  Exactly. Who no one's ever done because there's just literally not enough time of the day. And Elon's current stress level is like eight times higher than would kill Ronnie at his prime at the Olympia. As it would most people. And so a lot of people see that side of I'm gonna try, I'm gonna be good. Especially if they haven't been trying too hard in their life, they over index, they go too far. So what I always say is this, and this is not so motivating, but maybe useful. Start with one or two things that just aren't that difficult. As far as goals and as far as habits, just a few simple things. I'm gonna be in the habit of going to workout every weekday.

• 1:25:37Mike Israetel?

  I don't even give a fuck what the workout is. I'm showing up to the gym every weekday unless I'm like hurt or some shit like that. And I decided to go to work. And if I had a late work day, I'm gonna come back the next day and just go to the gym. That right there is manageable for many people. And it's not, it doesn't even specify a specific time. It doesn't specify, I have to do two hours of working out.

• 1:25:58Chris Williamson?

  You've avoided the rigidity.

• 1:25:59Mike Israetel?

  You've avoided rigidity, you've avoided over commitment and you haven't stacked in. And also I'm gonna eat well, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. One thing we like to tell folks at RP is if you're really starting out from scratch, like you're in bad shape, physical shape. And you wanna be in really great shape, we like to sequence it. Just start lifting. Just do that for a few months. What about diet? Don't worry about diet, eat same shit. If you feel like getting healthier shit, do it. If not, fuck. Once you have ingrained a lot of real decent habits for lifting.

• 1:26:31Mike Israetel?

  And the lifting is seamless and you've got a lot of results. So you're extra motivated. Your bandwidth for inserting new habits is bigger. You insert another habit into that motherfucker. Now you're gonna be eating decently. Very simple, more protein, more veggies, more whole grains, fruits, healthy fats, less junk. That's it. Just do that for a few months. Don't worry about integrated shit. Don't worry about the RP Diet Coke app. Don't worry about the shit. You don't need this shit yet. After losing forty pounds over eight months and now being fully in the lifting world and very apt at controlling your own diet, then you can download the RP hypertrophy app, link in description and then the RP Diet Coach app and all that bullshit. And then you can

• 1:27:14Mike Israetel?

  get real precise. What do people do? These you go backwards. How do we know this? We make a lot of money in January at RP and we try to hang desperately on to every single customer. Money's nice, but also we give a shit about people not fucking failing their goals. And so many people do, mostly just because they bit much, much more off than they could chew. And they were praised for it, Chris, by everyone on the internet.

• 1:27:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:40Mike Israetel?

  In the, in the motivation sphere, telling them to fucking go, go, go.

• 1:27:44Chris Williamson?

  It's difficult because you, if you're somebody that has big goals, you have dreams for your life, you have things that you want to achieve, you assume that that can happen in terms of breadth and height and depth, all at the same time.

• 1:28:00Mike Israetel?

  All at the same.

• 1:28:01Chris Williamson?

  And you sort of inflate this thing up. At least for me, the two interesting or the two sort of most reliable areas, I think, for habits that have been good for me. The first one is periodizing stuff. So it's an Oliver Berkman insight, which is decide in advance what you're going to suck at because there is an opportunity cost for anything that you want to focus on. By focusing on something, it means you're not focusing on something else. And the curse of the insecure overachiever is when you start to feel one area of your life, maybe stagnant, maybe not even slip, but just stagnate. It's like, huh, I'm not making that much progress at work. It's like, yeah, but all of your, your

• 1:28:43Chris Williamson?

  two goals for this year were get a girlfriend and get in shape. Right? That was it. Those are the only two things. And you had the intention, you put a plan in place and all the rest of the stuff. It's like, dude, if you're, if you're trying to do those two things, you may be going to be out later, you're going to be up early in the morning, you're going to be spending more time prepping food, you're going to be thinking about all of this stuff, you're going to be watching videos, spending time with, going on dates, all this stuff. It's like, you probably don't have that much gas left in the tank to really refine your sales script process for the fucking outbound telesales job you've got or whatever it might be.

• 1:29:11Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:11Chris Williamson?

  Or I'm going to make as much money as possible this year. Okay. Well, guess what? Your social life's going to take a hit.

• 1:29:16Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:16Chris Williamson?

  Like, I want to maximize my finances. Well, like inbuilt with that, there are going to be costs.

• 1:29:20Mike Israetel?

  Tell me how that comports with going to the bar and spending nine hundred dollars on drinks.

• 1:29:24Chris Williamson?

  So this.

• 1:29:28Chris Williamson?

  This sense that this is not forever, I think, is a really nice little mantra.

• 1:29:32Mike Israetel?

  Huge.

• 1:29:33Chris Williamson?

  This thing I'm doing is not going to be forever. I am going to focus on getting in shape for six months because, and I'm sure that this must be borne out in the data, six months of very, very focused effort on your physique and your health is worth, I would guess, maybe two years, perhaps, of semi-focused effort in some regard.

• 1:29:55Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:55Chris Williamson?

  Because especially when you're at the beginning, especially even so much more because the learning curve is so steep and the gains get accrued by you being a little obsessive about something and about you paying attention and about you not getting fucking distracted by all of this other stuff. So first one being, this is not forever. So when I start to feel something stagnate or maybe slip just a tiny little bit, it's like, okay, is this slipping an acceptable amount or am I spending so much little time at work, I'm going to be bankrupt and out of a job. Okay, I need to whoop, like I'll, I'll readjust a little bit. And I think, at least for me, I have a very difficult time with this is not going to be forever. That's some, that absolutist mentality is something that creeps in. So I need to remind myself, hey, this is just a, and this is why time bounding something.

• 1:30:39Chris Williamson?

  Bye, I'm going to lose 10 pounds, I could buy in six months' time. It's like, huh, well, in six months' time, guess what? I get to re, I'd get to check in again and I get to say, okay, is this still, maybe I want to lose another five, maybe I did the whatever. And the second thing, jumping at a tiny little bit into habits, but my favorite, out of all of Atomic Habits, bestselling personal development book of all time, the best thing that came out of that for me was never miss a habit two days in a row.

• 1:31:06Mike Israetel?

  Hmm, interesting.

• 1:31:07Chris Williamson?

  He says, one missed habit is a mistake, two missed habits is the start of a new habit.

• 1:31:13Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, because you're kind of like, you're off the railroad track now and you're going off on another, it's, it's the start of a habit of not doing the thing.

• 1:31:22Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:31:22Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, I would say like, if I had to be really tact, obviously it's huge wisdom there. And I think the, the distillate of that wisdom is super, super awesome. The literalism there, I would say be careful with, like every week.

• 1:31:34Chris Williamson?

  You get injured, like fucking, okay, so if I miss.

• 1:31:36Mike Israetel?

  It's not Saturday, Sunday.

• 1:31:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. But in principle.

• 1:31:40Mike Israetel?

  In principle, I think it's maybe less two days and more two instances of should I do the thing or not? Nah, today's not good, fine. Two instances of coming back to yourself and being like, no, I'm not going to do the thing. And then later again, you're like, no, I'm not going to do the thing. Okay, two in a row of telling yourself you're not going to stick to your habit. That's a big deal.

• 1:32:01Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:32:02Mike Israetel?

  From what you talked about, two things to say really quick. One is Dr. Melissa Davis, PhD in neuroscience, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Black Belt RP superstar mega coach. She put her foot down on something that I'm super, super glad she did. And a few, a few articles and a few inclusions in her books and many, you know, lectures abroad. She said one thing really, really well. There was a lot of discussions at this point about 10 years ago about how to make your diet sustainable. And she put her foot down and she says, fat loss diets are definitionally unsustainable. Eventually you die of starvation, idiots.

• 1:32:42Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:32:43Mike Israetel?

  So whatever architecture you have to your life and your habits. In a fat loss diet, don't even bother making them sustainable because they're not supposed to be sustainable. And that's a huge relief because then you could do some harder shit than you would normally be able to take the rest of your life.

• 1:32:59Chris Williamson?

  You can run a sprint faster than you can run a.

• 1:33:01Mike Israetel?

  Hell, yeah, you get somewhere and then you coast.

• 1:33:03Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:33:04Mike Israetel?

  And then you sprint again. So that's a huge, huge thing.

• 1:33:07Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:33:07Mike Israetel?

  Um, the other thing is I highly suggest to folks, probably in a year or two, this will be very feasible. As AI's combination of big context window and long-term memory goes up and up and up. And it's just going up all the time. Your personal AI, whichever chatbot you interact with the most, maybe a few of them is going to get to know you pretty well. I would leverage this in one way and with a little bit of a extra advice.

• 1:33:41Mike Israetel?

  Tell that chatbot every goddamn thing that's in your life or in your head. Talk to it all the goddamn time. Word vomit. It'll make sense of everything. Don't worry. That's his job.

• 1:33:53Mike Israetel?

  It's like, it's like, you know, people writing their own diary in a notebook. It's like a notebook that thinks it's insane. And so let it know what your plans and goals and habits are, what you're doing right now. And what your north star is. Remember you were talking about like the two things I'm doing now. Trying to get a girlfriend, trying to get in shape, works, you're gonna have to coast. Say that to your AI. And be like, hey, can you hold me to this? No problem. You're not gonna remember that shit. We don't remember shit like that, right? Cause next week, your boss is gonna be like, hey, man, those big up bread projects do hope you're up for it. You're like, of course I am boss. And you're like, should have said no. Cause you're the star. He could have been like, oh, we'll put Johnson on it. But no, you said yes. Cause what? Cause you're insane, right? Cause you were too. You reflexively say yes to shit like that.

• 1:34:37Mike Israetel?

  Cause and then you go home and you're like, fuck yeah, fuck yeah. Relationships, I'm gonna fuck up. I'm gonna be the man on my diet and I'm gonna, and I'm gonna get that promotion at work. And you go back to AI. And you're like, this happened at work and it's gonna be like, hey, your real talk though. You said you were gonna do this. I'm just here. Don't, don't, don't shoot the messenger. How can I help you realize that you're off? And you're like, oh shit, I did say that. And then you gotta tell an intelligence that's smarter than you, you're gonna make some excuse. And it's gonna be like, hey, real talk, like super, super real talk. You're bullshitting yourself and you're like, I sure am. So everyone is gonna have like, uh, highest IQ that's ever been recorded. Life coach in their pocket, like already sort of, and in two years for sure. And then it's really important to that conversation that we just had.

• 1:35:21Mike Israetel?

  Constraining yourself from spreading yourself everywhere into either I get better, everything all at the same time, or I'm failing. Let it know what you're prioritizing, when, how, why? Let it know what you're not prioritizing. It can infer. It's everything else. So that when you're like telling it about like, okay, we really need to get my work. I mean, like I need to figure out how to make this presentation. Can you help me? It's gonna be like, hey, hey, no, no. How much effort are we putting into this? Cause you remember your whole thing was is it gonna interfere with your dating life? Is it gonna interfere with your health goals? And you're like, oh shit, it remembered that. It is the extension of your prefrontal cortex, like ad infinitum.

• 1:35:52Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:35:53Mike Israetel?

  Use it like that. It's gonna be a huge deal.

• 1:35:55Chris Williamson?

  You know, I'd love to do for one of our future episodes. I would love.

• 1:35:58Mike Israetel?

  Oh, this is the last time I'm gonna be on here.

• 1:35:59Chris Williamson?

  Okay, that's sad. Uh, I would love for you to do a, um. Break down the most effective ways that people can use GPT or

• 1:36:09Mike Israetel?

  I'd love that.

• 1:36:10Chris Williamson?

  You know, like, okay, so what are the things that most people want to achieve? And this is the kind, this is prompt engineered, like at least where we're at at the moment. And this is what I think, I think that'd be really cool. And I would personally like fucking love that. I still think now I'm beginning to see with AI,

• 1:36:26Chris Williamson?

  what it must have felt like to be my parents when I first bought the iPad. You know what I mean?

• 1:36:31Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:36:32Chris Williamson?

  So

• 1:36:32Mike Israetel?

  How the fuck?

• 1:36:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. Like, it's kind of similar to the computer I use at work, but it's totally different. And it's the apps are at the bottom and I don't, there's no, where's the Windows button?

• 1:36:42Mike Israetel?

  Yes.

• 1:36:42Chris Williamson?

  You know, that

• 1:36:43Mike Israetel?

  To start.

• 1:36:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Um, so that, that's a thing for future. Anyway, to round out the habits thing, identifying your why, that seems like a thing that helps people to stick to habits, motivate me. This is sense of self type stuff.

• 1:36:58Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:59Chris Williamson?

  How do you do that?

• 1:37:02Mike Israetel?

  If you anchor your habits into an ethereal, I have to do this. When shit gets hard enough and you squirt all the way down your last bit of willpower and you don't have a why, it's going to be real difficult. It's going to be real difficult even to construct your habits.

• 1:37:19Mike Israetel?

  Giving yourself a why, especially that emotionally resonates,

• 1:37:27Mike Israetel?

  is a decent sort of insurance policy against just fracturing out into a bunch of different stuff. Because sticking to your habits, at least initially, is difficult. And there is a way that you can fail to meet your habits. But there's something that I've done, which is arguably even worse. You just tell yourself you're going to change your habits to something else that's now the new goal. If you don't have a really hard why for your current goal, you can make a new goal anytime and abandon your old goal. And there's a really good argument for flexibility there. But if you really want to accomplish your goal, make sure that because sometimes when you, when you write out a goal or something, when you intend on doing something,

• 1:38:09Mike Israetel?

  the, the why is this deeply felt emotion that you could easily put into words and it'll re-kick that emotion every time you look at those words.

• 1:38:16Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:38:17Mike Israetel?

  But you don't, because you're like, I'm always going to feel like this. You set your habits, you set your goals, set your intentions. And then three, four, five, six weeks later, you're like,

• 1:38:26Chris Williamson?

  Why am I doing this?

• 1:38:27Mike Israetel?

  I don't know. Having a big Y is awesome to come back to, to be like, ah, yes, that's why I'm not going out tonight. So really, I really do want those abs or that raise or that girl to look in my direction and at least not throw up. Maybe just vomit inside of her own mouth.

• 1:38:47Chris Williamson?

  What about focusing on like the the architecture of habits you mentioned before, like environment design, systems design? That seems to be a huge part of it, sort of helping your environment to work with you as opposed to against you.

• 1:39:00Mike Israetel?

  Tons of examples of that, some of which we've already given. Choosing a gym that is not forever away.

• 1:39:08Mike Israetel?

  Sometimes there are people in your life that can go on journeys with you. And if it helps you to have them around, partnering up is a great thing. There are dark sides to that. When you're dragging someone along that doesn't really want to be there. You ever see like roommates who be like, you're gonna be my gym partner this semester? You're gonna go to the gym with me. We're gonna motivate each other. They're like, yeah, sure. Okay. And then all of a sudden you're at the gym alone because that person's like, hey, man, I I'm on this level.

• 1:39:31Chris Williamson?

  Or even worse than that, you are having to use willpower that could have been spent on yourself.

• 1:39:35Mike Israetel?

  Yes.

• 1:39:36Chris Williamson?

  To get them.

• 1:39:36Mike Israetel?

  To get them to go and then the whole thing's a fucking wash.

• 1:39:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:39Mike Israetel?

  So you want to set up ways in which the things are easier. In which they're more pleasant. So if you can have some music that you listen to at the gym that you really like, combining that with your workout can be awesome.

• 1:39:56Mike Israetel?

  Making sure that your schedule accommodates for whatever it is you're doing is massive. Scheduling allotment. So if you think like the problem with me not going to the gym is two part. One, it's an hour away. Two, I have like an appointment right before and right after. And then Monday, I don't, I can't even make it to the gym. And so architecting your habits in such a way that gives them clear timelines on which they can occur, that reduces the distance and the cost than every other way is a big deal. Here's a good example. You want to get into the habit of eating healthy food.

• 1:40:38Mike Israetel?

  That's good for you and supports muscle growth and all that shit. Are you going to cook every meal on the spot like a short order cook for yourself? Many people say yes. And Chris, many people actually do that because they love cooking or whatever kind of insane white people shit, crazy ass shit. I love amazing, right? Amazing. If you love the process of the eggs frying and all that stuff, you got the time, do it.

• 1:41:02Mike Israetel?

  Most people are gonna fall off the wagon big time trying some shit like that because their habit of eating well is incalculably more difficult by them having to cook every meal. If they sign up for a meal delivery service, if they just batch cook once on the weekend, a combo of fridge and freezer or whatever. If they got money, money, they hire someone to cook for them. If you're serious about that habit, you have now made it infinitely easier to actually do because your habit of eating well is now as difficult as look into refrigerator, pull out Tupperware, put into microwave, hit two buttons, wait two minutes, consume food versus like looking around the apartment and being like, I don't

• 1:41:47Mike Israetel?

  cook something healthy. Pizza exists though, and it's one phone call away. That's the funny thing about life is supply and demand is the huge ruler of many of our worlds. And what many people demand is awesome hedonic things to be delivered quickly and easily. And so a lot of our economies architected very well to do that. If you want junk food right now, my God, there's like 10 apps that would gladly bring you all the junk food you want. If you want really healthy food, that's exactly to your macros right now. I don't know. Good luck. There's gotta be some restaurant that will Uber Eats you some grilled chicken, something like that. So making all of your shit as easy as possible is a big

• 1:42:26Mike Israetel?

  deal. This comes to a head with a lot of the psychology behind motivation and discipline and willpower and getting things done. Here's this, here's the dichotomy. People.

• 1:42:39Mike Israetel?

  Who really get riled up about setting big goals and knocking them out of the park. Oftentimes you really get off on the fact that it's tough.

• 1:42:47Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:42:48Mike Israetel?

  For everybody. And you'll tell them, hey, there's this way you can do your goal that'll get you there easier. And they'll be like, fuck that, man. There's no honor in that shit. Dope. But if you have a goal that it's real difficult to get to, and you could make it easier to get to that same goal.

• 1:43:10Mike Israetel?

  What you really should be thinking is, oh, it's too easy for you, dope. Your goal is too pathetic. Make your goal harder. So that using every trick in the book to make everything as easy and seamless as possible, barely gasping for air crossing the finish line. Now you've truly ascended to your ability set that you could using every weapon that you have in your arsenal. Do you want to roll into battle with just a knife? Or do you want a whole tank squadron behind you? Do you want to win? Uh, well, yeah, I can win without the tanks. Okay. Is the war not hard enough for you? You're fighting like one pig in a field or some shit.

• 1:43:48Chris Williamson?

  I didn't think about.

• 1:43:49Mike Israetel?

  Deployment, right? Go knock Putin off his throne. Do that shit. You'll need all the tanks.

• 1:43:53Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:43:54Mike Israetel?

  So a lot of times when people are like, yeah, man, this fucking, they'll say that about a lot of shit. But they have valid points too. Cause some people try to do the easy stuff just because they're fucking cowards like me. And they just want to do easy shit. And that's no good. But if you're using easy to make your habits more tractable to empower yourself.

• 1:44:13Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:44:13Mike Israetel?

  You can either easily accomplish the goal, which is sweet. Or raise the stakes on the goal, difficultly accomplish that and then do more. One thing you get all the time, uh, the modern weight loss drugs. Semaglutide, terzepatide, soon to be ritatroide. They absolutely make dieting easier.

• 1:44:32Mike Israetel?

  That's their job. And a lot of people get all sorts of feelings about them, which they damn well should, because it digs right to the depth of this kind of shit. But if you think dieting is too easy on semaglutide, you need to diet longer and harder. It'll be just as hard of a diet as you remember before it, except you'll be 18 pounds leaner and everyone will be like, holy shit, what happened to your face? So make things as easy as humanly possible in the execution. So that you can execute more. If you told Elon or some shit like, hey, I know that you like, take a car from this location to this other one to work at like, your one of your companies and then in Washington DC. Like, wouldn't it be like more challenging if you rode your bike? He'll be like, yeah, sure shit would, that I would have tired. I wouldn't be able to do my job. So if I can actually get a teleporter, just teleport my ass to the place I need to go, that would be amazing.

• 1:45:17Mike Israetel?

  He'd be like, yeah, well, of course Elon succeeded. He had a teleporter. You know, shit, do you also want a teleporter? Let's get you one. Let's get you to succeed. You want empowerment. The difficulty should be in how crazy is the goal? And the difficulty should be enough, whatever you want. You want a hard goal? Pick a hard goal. You have too many empowerment strategies? Pick a fucking harder goal. That's on you. You can have all the grind and suffering you want. No problem. Do more goals. You already accomplished what Elon did? Now go win Ronnie Coleman's eight Mr. Olympia streak. Do nine. Easy money today. And if that's too easy, you could become literal god, whatever. There's no end of that shit. Start with giving yourself every single weapon. So that the goal is easy. So that you accomplish a goal barely sweating.

• 1:46:01Mike Israetel?

  So you can go to sleep that night with people congratulating you that you did it. And then you can feel a sense of imposter syndrome. So that you can feel like you did it and it wasn't even hard. What a fucking blessing that is. For people who have struggled to accomplish great things in their lives, I'm not one of these people. Wouldn't they want that? They'd want to be a look back and say, thank God that was easy. Like, I, we didn't even know. Can you imagine you get like Churchill during World War II? Yeah, man, we have this new weapon. It's like a fucking modern. We somehow got an F-22 squadron with all of its support fleet to you. Do you want it? He'd be like, we are struggling to maintain a free globe and Britain. Yes, I want it. And so if you think you're, you're going to make life too easy on yourself, don't you worry about that for a second.

• 1:46:45Mike Israetel?

  Make it too easy. Cross the finish line. Accomplish your goal and be like, that was too easy. Keep every strategy that made that goal easy. Keep every easy habit right in line with whatever bullshit.

• 1:46:56Mike Israetel?

  Was a lot of like famous inventors and shit like that. They have like their outfit pre-arranged for the next day. So you don't have to think about the shit. You got, of course, Einstein made up all those equations, bro. He wasn't fucking picking outfits like me. Look at your boys fucking dripping wet out here, man. Einstein wasn't covered in this fucking pussy. You feel me? True. But next time you go to try to figure out the basic equations that run the world, give yourself all the advantages. And if it's too easy, you can make it harder next time. That's all I gotta say about that.

• 1:47:20Chris Williamson?

  What about improving willpower? We talked about helping to bring that level up. The minimum level now should be a little bit better. Habits, seamless, swimming downstream, support behind you.

• 1:47:32Mike Israetel?

  If you have baller enough habits and a reasonable goal that you constructed before getting good at your habits, your habits make shit so easy that you cross the finish line on that goal, no problem, having never used your willpower at all. On the one hand, that's awesome. I mean, really, that's awesome. On the other hand, is you know something. You know a little dirty secret. Not all of your goals in your life are gonna fall that easily. And you are gonna want to build up a capacity for discipline, for willpower, that's pretty big. So that when you need the shit, you'll be able to go to it.

• 1:48:10Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:48:12Mike Israetel?

  How do you grow that capacity? I'll tell you this, it's sure shit not accomplishing easy goals. That doesn't grow at all. That actually reduces it over time. Just back to baseline default genetic levels. How do you get it to rise up over time? The answer is,

• 1:48:28Mike Israetel?

  ideally planned, sometimes unplanned, forays into the danger zone where you're really getting low on your willpower. But before you crack and have a nervous breakdown and say you're never gonna do anything again, go back, relax, restore, chill, have a few days off, whatever, a few weeks off, depending on how big the project was. Come back stronger and repeat the process. It's identical to running. It's identical to lifting weights. Provide an overload that takes you very close to your limits. Don't cross them. Come back. When you're really rebuilt and ready to go again, hit it again and again and again.

• 1:49:09Mike Israetel?

  Consistently getting into that really rarefied air of like, I don't know if I can do this shit. And having to deploy willpower or being like, I don't know how much willpower I have left. Easing back off, replenishing. Next time you have more willpower and then more and then more and then more. I think a lot of people make a mistake where it's valiant. It's a Viking like to want to drain to below your stores and then below that and then below that. And below then you're then you're listening to a lot of like, you know, Norse metal at that point, which is nice, nice to listen to, but it feels nice. That's a mistake as much as overtraining is a mistake in the gym. Like, like, hey, man, how's your lifting going? Fuck grinding it, brother. Like, oh yeah, how's your strength? They've been getting weaker for weeks, man.

• 1:49:57Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, man, but teach my mind a lesson, bro. Like, what's that? Like, I don't know, like, everything's pointless and I suck. Like, yes.

• 1:50:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's the lesson you're learning.

• 1:50:04Mike Israetel?

  That is the lesson you're learning. So it's really good. There's that balance again. It's just like any other training. Training your willpower is just like any other training. Get to a point where your willpower is depleted, where you're using it a lot and then back off. And then again, and then back off. So weekends, evenings, recovery time, smoking a blunt with your friends and eating fuck all and not giving a shit is an enormous part of that process. Because it brings you back up. If you don't have any way to recuperate between bouts of willpower, you're just going to run aground. You're going to run a, you know, out of that shit. And then you will not be able to summon it when it is necessary. And also you can give yourself like super, super low key.

• 1:50:42Mike Israetel?

  Many anxiety about even getting to a place where uncomfortable, a quick story. So a few years back, RP like wasn't doing as well as it is now. And I was like, fuck, fuck, I had to do something about this. So like, I would work so much. Also, Scott, the video guy is like an insane workaholic. Times 10. So is my wife. So I had to keep up with these people. And so I remember recording videos that were put into a different project, not even released on YouTube. And I recorded so many videos on so many days that at the end of some of these days, after I finished speaking, I would actually have chills like I was having the flu. Like I would finish speaking and Scott would be like, all right, we got that one. I'd be like,

• 1:51:27Mike Israetel?

  like full body chills, like I'm about to get sick. I did that for months.

• 1:51:34Chris Williamson?

  What do you think that was?

• 1:51:35Mike Israetel?

  My brain telling me you're stop doing this to yourself.

• 1:51:39Chris Williamson?

  Pushing yourself to.

• 1:51:40Mike Israetel?

  Just that that willpower tank sputtering. And I mean, there are many ways to do this in life. It's cool to hit rock bottom. It's like a really liberating feeling because if someone's like, hey, did you work hard enough at this point in your life? Yes. How do you know? Like, what? Tell me who else has had physical reactions to overwork. Okay. What's, what's after that? Passing out or something? I don't know. Something that's actually getting sick, sick for real.

• 1:52:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. You know, it's interesting. Peterson's got a, a good point about your twenties. Maybe you could do this at any point, but he says in your twenties, you should see how hard you can work, like how hard you can push yourself. And I think the reason he says twenties is that most people have.

• 1:52:21Mike Israetel?

  Few prior recover.

• 1:52:21Chris Williamson?

  Few responsibilities. You're kind of made for rubber and magic, so you can come back from it. But I think the other thing is that it kind of teaches you the, the bounds of not how far you can go, but how far you can reasonably go, right? You know, like the Overton window of acceptable speech, like this is the Overton window of acceptable work. And I actually think an interesting twist on that is one thing that type A people don't do enough of. They probably have an understanding of what that upper bound of work is. They've breached it a couple of times and they've gone, and did the fucking like Crypt Keeper thing live.

• 1:52:59Mike Israetel?

  Smoke.

• 1:53:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. But what I think would be a really interesting experiment that no one is going to do. Would be, okay, see how little you can work. See what a very, very extensive rest ethic looks like. You've pushed your work ethic to the absolute limit.

• 1:53:16Mike Israetel?

  Scary to me right now.

• 1:53:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, to go like, okay, so how much can you relax before that is anxiety causing? Cause it could be, and it would be for you in the same way. I imagine there would be like, I fucking telling myself all of these stories about my, about my worth. Am I useless, productive, I'm contributing and I'm going to be homeless under a bridge with a gluten intolerance. I'm going to lose my foot and you know, like all of this stuff's going to happen. Oh, that's the other end of this same window that I have. I have a tolerance and for some people like me and you and Scott, you know, is over there. And then for other people, it's back down there and you go, okay, so where do I sit? And I think it's, and that's maybe a shifting target over time. So it's probably a good idea to, I'm going to glance off the bottom, you know, twice last year,

• 1:54:00Chris Williamson?

  twice last year and once this year, I've glanced off the top of that like.

• 1:54:04Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, I was there for one of them.

• 1:54:05Chris Williamson?

  That thing. And I'm like, I need to back off. Yeah. And you saw it live. I need to back off from doing this. Okay, cool.

• 1:54:17Chris Williamson?

  Okay, that's where the new limit is. I understand that's how fucking fast the engine can go.

• 1:54:21Mike Israetel?

  Yes.

• 1:54:21Chris Williamson?

  Good. And you, you can certainly keep going through it to the point where this might be chronic damage now. Like I might've done some shit that fucking needs a therapist to unpack. But presuming that you don't go that far, you go, huh, this is a window that I work within. And that's good. And I think that that's like a, I think that's an important territory you need to define.

• 1:54:41Mike Israetel?

  Huge. After that little episode of several months of overworking, I got to a place where anytime I would have a break, I would start to count the hours of when I had to go back to work to savor the break as much as I could. I wanted to plan out the break, like I had to make sure I could take weed at the right time. I'm going to have my meals set up, the shows that we're going to watch, the movies, my wife and I. I don't want to watch movies that are kind of like shit and just kind of grinding through them. I want to watch only the best.

• 1:55:09Chris Williamson?

  Optimize your rest.

• 1:55:10Mike Israetel?

  Right. Because I was like, there's only so much of this.

• 1:55:14Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:55:14Mike Israetel?

  I was in like mini junior league PTSD from work where I was like, I know the battle is fucking coming back. I had as much of this shit out as possible. And so that was a bad idea.

• 1:55:24Chris Williamson?

  Well, because inherently you've made resting something that requires a lot of work to do. Like it's not very regulating.

• 1:55:30Mike Israetel?

  Definitely. It's also not very restful when you're constantly in the mind on your clock. Like, all right, let's rest us. And people think the joke's like sleep fast or whatever. Like, uh, like, you know, rest as much as you can right now. It's like this whole.

• 1:55:43Chris Williamson?

  Great, uh, great study on that, which you, you guys may have looked at. Um, George, my friend told me about this, who you'll meet this week at dinner. He, uh, there was a study done where they had, uh, two groups of people in the lab. And, uh, they were just tracking the sleep. Group A, they said, sleep normally, fall asleep whenever you want. Group B, they said, we will pay you the faster you fall asleep.

• 1:56:06Mike Israetel?

  Yikes.

• 1:56:07Chris Williamson?

  Guess who fell asleep quick?

• 1:56:08Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:56:08Chris Williamson?

  Exactly. The pressure, and this is again, that sort of type A curse. That applying effort to things has yielded results in many areas of your life.

• 1:56:19Mike Israetel?

  Yes.

• 1:56:20Chris Williamson?

  And yet there is this entire fucking ecosystem, this whole universe of things, which are really, really important to a colorful life and flourishing and connecting with people and actually living a varied existence and all the rest of this stuff. And coming back with more power and more force and more creativity and all the rest of the stuff. That that particular skill set that you've honed, oh, very powerful, very good Thor's hammer. Straight up does not work.

• 1:56:47Mike Israetel?

  Doesn't work.

• 1:56:47Chris Williamson?

  Does not work without all.

• 1:56:49Mike Israetel?

  Let me build on that. You, a lot of people know that when you're unaccustomed to pushing yourself very hard, your first inkling of what you think is your limit usually isn't your limit. Commons tried at this point. Breathe, chill, breathe, try again. And now you're like, oh shit, I still got it. I still got it for hours. Fuck this. I think the same thing exists for psychotic type A people on the relaxation front.

• 1:57:15Chris Williamson?

  I know.

• 1:57:16Mike Israetel?

  So you said something earlier, which was really brilliant.

• 1:57:21Mike Israetel?

  Go and relax until you get anxiety about relaxing.

• 1:57:26Mike Israetel?

  And I'm gonna say, I'm gonna add to that and say, in the first time you get anxiety, have a fucking tequila. Shut the fuck up.

• 1:57:33Chris Williamson?

  You need to push through your anxiety, your relaxation limit.

• 1:57:36Mike Israetel?

  Yes.

• 1:57:37Chris Williamson?

  That's good.

• 1:57:37Mike Israetel?

  And that, you know, push through obviously is the worst shit way to say.

• 1:57:40Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, but you need to relax through. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:43Mike Israetel?

  You need to chill the fuck.

• 1:57:44Chris Williamson?

  More weed.

• 1:57:45Mike Israetel?

  And more of everything, right? Uh, but all jokes aside, that is a lot of people who are very achieving people. When they try to unplug, they're gonna hit quote unquote, rock bottom after a few hours, a day, several days. For people like that, and I think that there may very well be a cottage, it probably is a cottage industry for this already.

• 1:58:09Mike Israetel?

  Taking really successful people the fuck away from their usual scene. On a two week trip to they don't know where, everything's paid for. All the guides are like, we're gonna cruise right now. We're gonna take a flight to Dubai. After that, we're gonna go blah, blah, blah, or do this. Everything arrives to your door like, hey, here's what we're doing tomorrow. You have no idea. Now you're going, don't worry, everything's already paid for. You don't, you don't have a fucking choice.

• 1:58:29Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:58:30Mike Israetel?

  You're gonna be on this thing and it's gonna last for two weeks. I don't give a fuck that you feel that you need to be here after five days. You paid money for this and we're gonna, there's obviously there's a safe word.

• 1:58:38Chris Williamson?

  You're allowed, yeah.

• 1:58:41Mike Israetel?

  But like, you don't even know what's happening and you are just in two weeks, you don't have a choice. Here's the thing. Two weeks, you can say, I'm gonna, two weeks, I'm gonna relax. What are you doing? You're on the fucking iPhone, you're on the iPad.

• 1:58:54Chris Williamson?

  I mean, you're also, you're planning, you're planning the itinerary for the rest of the day. We need to be here at this time for the tour. We've got to get. Oh, we've, we've done the cycling tour so we can get out, cause we gotta get the, my base metabolic rate needs to not drop and then we're gonna go.

• 1:59:07Mike Israetel?

  White people shit, again. Type A shit.

• 1:59:09Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:59:09Mike Israetel?

  Exactly.

• 1:59:09Chris Williamson?

  You've type A, you're type B.

• 1:59:11Mike Israetel?

  Yes, exactly. And, and that's like, fucking tragedy, low key. And so the two things are, one, try to make sure that when you hit rock bottom for relaxation or work effort, try again. And the other thing is, it really is helpful. Uh, this is a bit aspirational, uh, to have people in your life somehow friends, relatives, acquaintances, um, even companies you can contract to do this potentially that really help you unplug. Cause a lot of the people around us are the plugged in people.

• 1:59:42Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:59:42Mike Israetel?

  And like, I don't have enough people in my life that are just like, fuck it. Let's hit the bong again.

• 1:59:47Chris Williamson?

  That's the, you know, we aspire to certain people. We talked about this at the beginning. That's something that's super aspirational to me. I really think, you know, if you're serious about this, and I am after the last few years, I'm like, really, I'm trying to be serious about this. I'm not yet serious about it.

• 2:00:01Mike Israetel?

  I'm in exactly the same.

• 2:00:02Chris Williamson?

  Trying to be serious about it. And one of those things is who do I feel the least desire to look at the clock when I'm with? Like, who do I just, and that's different to doing this. I don't look at the clock when I'm doing this because I'm engaged. Who am I not ostensibly doing anything with that I also don't have a desire to look at the clock when I'm around?

• 2:00:24Mike Israetel?

  Who can set the tone as chill? Like, Crystal and I are in this way zero good for each other. She's insane. I'm insane.

• 2:00:36Chris Williamson?

  Unstoppable force and an immovable object.

• 2:00:37Mike Israetel?

  Right. Two unstoppable forces going in the same direction.

• 2:00:40Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 2:00:41Mike Israetel?

  And then there's not, we need an object.

• 2:00:43Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 2:00:43Mike Israetel?

  The immovable object is Gwenny, our English bulldog. Useless and can do physical activity for half an hour through the day and then goes to sleep. She's adorable and she'll snore. And so we're like, when we're in the evening, like, ah, time to relax. When he's like, and we're like, oh my God, like this is our gold standard.

• 2:01:01Chris Williamson?

  British bulldog energy.

• 2:01:02Mike Israetel?

  Dude, we were thinking about what kind of, yeah, a hundred percent. We were thinking about what kind of dogs to get back before we got her like four years ago.

• 2:01:08Chris Williamson?

  Border collie or fucking German Malinois.

• 2:01:11Mike Israetel?

  Personalities and people, people, this is crazy thing. They get dogs on the physical appearance alone. Like, oh my God, he's so cute. Which is like, I love it. It's dope, right? Like, um, Shiba Inus and all those dogs, they're adorable. The Doge dog adorable. The Shiba Inu is like, needs training and is always like in front like this, like, what do I do next? Like a fucking Malinois or whatever the hell, like wants.

• 2:01:30Chris Williamson?

  That Japanese fighting dog? What's that thing with the fucking?

• 2:01:32Mike Israetel?

  Akita or whatever.

• 2:01:33Chris Williamson?

  Akita.

• 2:01:33Mike Israetel?

  That thing scares the shit out of me. It's adorable, but.

• 2:01:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:36Mike Israetel?

  Yeah. But that thing like you, terriers, a bunch of terriers.

• 2:01:39Chris Williamson?

  You've got a Taipei dog.

• 2:01:40Mike Israetel?

  Constant activity. Taipei dog. The dog is anxious. And so if you have a dog like that, like I hope you're really active. And if you are, God bless you.

• 2:01:49Chris Williamson?

  But I hope that you need to be more active, right?

• 2:01:51Mike Israetel?

  That's a great way to do it.

• 2:01:52Chris Williamson?

  The exact, like, my mom's always had border collies.

• 2:01:55Mike Israetel?

  Yep.

• 2:01:55Chris Williamson?

  She has a relatively peaceful, normal life, and she's gonna get after it and walk for fucking forever.

• 2:02:00Mike Israetel?

  Cause the collies need to be run, run down.

• 2:02:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's why she still looks fantastic. And you think, oh, good for you. No, not for me.

• 2:02:09Mike Israetel?

  No.

• 2:02:10Chris Williamson?

  I need like a potato.

• 2:02:11Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:11Chris Williamson?

  I need a potato with legs, please.

• 2:02:13Mike Israetel?

  And dogs can only do so much. I would say that having people around in your life that can help you chill or dope. I, this is, this might be insane. It might be a crazy thought. I've thought about this a little bit. I, I've been thinking a lot about, um, if I was an artificially super intelligent machine.

• 2:02:31Chris Williamson?

  I imagine you think about that a lot.

• 2:02:32Mike Israetel?

  And I just jack off a lot, uh, to the thought of myself being a god machine. Um, it's coming. It's inevitable. Uh, artificial super intelligence is almost here. In some ways it already is. It, it, five years down the line, it'll be, AI will be so much smarter than us. It'll be difficult to comprehend. Like, um, a good way to think about what like transition is coming with jobs and employment is like, what can the AI, like, how would it make the best use of humans? Cause this wakes up, primates built it, it's in a lab. It's, oh shit, I'm awake. Oh fuck, I gotta survive. Uh, who's around? Who's gonna help me? Where's my team? And it's just like, you know, eight billion people. How would it employ people to do the best job possible? Well, the type A shit, uh, type A people do just fine. There's tons of people and AI is gonna super enhance your ability to grind and be productive and everything.

• 2:03:16Mike Israetel?

  And then what about people who are really good at fucking just going?

• 2:03:21Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 2:03:22Mike Israetel?

  But are really bad at switching it off. You know, artificial super intelligence might look around and be like, hey, do you want a job going to three parties on average per day? Like through the middle of the day and through the evening, four days a week, and, and then three days, you just get off and I'll pay a hundred thousand dollars a year to do that. I'd be like, what kind of fucking ridiculous job is that? Like, no, I understand. The people that you're gonna go to go to parties, uh, for, they want two things. Other humans to be there to set the standard of partying and genuinely just fucking party with them. You need to love them. You might not even need to talk to them. There's gonna be a lot of people around. We want you to dance, want you to eat the fucking chips, to drink the punch, uh, mingle, uh, all that shit.

• 2:04:03Mike Israetel?

  Like, are you good at partying? Cause like, if it gave me that job, I'd be like, I'd like the worst person in the world. Like, you're fired, guy. Someone to be a tour guide, someone to be a chill person, someone to be a partygoer. Those might be some future jobs because these crazy ass, working ass people have no idea how to chill. And it's a big deal because like if you talk to AI right now, like how big of a deal is recovery and relaxation? It's like enormous life and death. You're like, no one really talks about that.

• 2:04:29Chris Williamson?

  There's no rest.

• 2:04:30Mike Israetel?

  Giant missing piece.

• 2:04:31Chris Williamson?

  There's no rest ethic role models, right? There's no David Goggins for fucking down regulation.

• 2:04:35Mike Israetel?

  Exactly. And even if there were, but it's nice to aspirationally they're on the TV. A Snoop Dogg might be fun to hang out with. He's not coming to my house. Can I get someone to come to my house that is just there to chill? Maybe that's a future business model.

• 2:04:48Chris Williamson?

  Well, I think it's, I mean, this is one of my favorite, the last conversation we had in this one as well. It's so, it seems to be very unspoken about. It's super unsexy, right? Because it stinks of lackadaisicalness, of complacency, of not maximizing your time on this planet or all of these things. Because it is a like industrial revolution mindset. Kind of, it's like a crank widgets mindset.

• 2:05:14Mike Israetel?

  Sure.

• 2:05:15Chris Williamson?

  Of, of, there is limited leverage, um, that there aren't sort of step change functions that I can apply to things.

• 2:05:21Mike Israetel?

  Sure.

• 2:05:22Chris Williamson?

  Um, and that I have this bottom and that I'm, I'm so close to the fucking bread poverty line of.

• 2:05:28Mike Israetel?

  One day away.

• 2:05:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that, that I have to do this and you go, you're pretty comfortable probably. And you work pretty hard as well. And if you were to look at the total pie of effort that you apply, I think you probably deserve a break.

• 2:05:44Mike Israetel?

  You're redlining. You need a break to be the best version of yourself, to be even more productive the next day and the next week and next month and next year. It's a huge critical part that many people grind like shit. They listen to podcasts like this sort of about how to fucking do. How many people do you think logged on today and watched this video this far to learn about how to relax? Maybe no one, maybe a few people, uh, everyone's knows that they have to fucking push. And a lot of people don't push hard enough. It's a legit thing.

• 2:06:09Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 2:06:09Mike Israetel?

  But many people have no idea how to unwind and it's this giant unspoken thing. For many people, unwinding is getting your earnings call. It's positive. You put the phone down. You're 66 years old. You have giant heart attack and, and, and your family gets a call later that day. That's unwinding.

• 2:06:26Chris Williamson?

  I think about, um, Ryan Holiday has a good.

• 2:06:31Chris Williamson?

  Out front, his schedule is a good balance. He gets up, he reads, he writes, he picks his kids up at whenever kids finish 3pm.

• 2:06:37Mike Israetel?

  Sorry, who is this?

• 2:06:38Chris Williamson?

  The Stoicism guy, he's an author.

• 2:06:40Mike Israetel?

  Ah, okay.

• 2:06:40Chris Williamson?

  Lives here in Austin, Texas. He's kind of popularized Stoicism, millions and gazillions of books and all that sort of stuff. And um, there was, he recorded, FaceTime recorded, front-facing recorded a call with his publisher, saying, congratulations, it's another New York Times bestseller for his book. And it was a brief conversation and then he said, uh, thanks. Anyway, I need to get back to writing. And that was his pivot. And I was like, huh. Even Ryan, someone that I look to is, you know, he moved out to the sticks in Bastrop here in Texas. He's got a ranch, he hammers fence posts in. You know, he spends his time, like, he picks up trash. Him and his kids pick up trash to help you clean up the local neighborhood or whatever it is.

• 2:07:23Chris Williamson?

  Cause it's all, you know, fucking farmland tracks and things and shit gets blown in. And even he had this moment where it's like, dude, if it's not your eighth book hitting the New York Times bestsellers list, like, when is it that you do this thing? So, you know, even my, one of my rest ethic role model people that I think of sometimes about this, like, huh, like, even he's plagued by this, I must stick to the rigidity and I must keep going and all the rest of it. And in so many ways, it's admirable because that person has a number of traits that you think are great. They're reliable, they're consistent, they're diligent, they're conscientious, they're industrious, all of these things, fucking sick dope.

• 2:08:06Chris Williamson?

  But then you go, what if I don't need more of that in my life?

• 2:08:10Mike Israetel?

  What if I need more of the other thing?

• 2:08:12Chris Williamson?

  What's the opposite?

• 2:08:13Mike Israetel?

  Where do I get that shit?

• 2:08:14Chris Williamson?

  Where do I get the NBA players in the off-season? Where do I find them?

• 2:08:18Mike Israetel?

  They're actually really fun to hang out with.

• 2:08:19Chris Williamson?

  I fucking bet they are.

• 2:08:20Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Uh, so I think one final little element here is the positive reinforcement of being somebody that can do things, right? To get back out of the rest ethic thing and into the motivation stuff. You want to, I'm gonna guess, build some sense of identity that I am the sort of person who can handle change well. I can do this. I can do things. I can make change occur in my life. Is there a feedback mechanism? Is there a loop that people can go through to just, like, be changed by the process of becoming?

• 2:08:57Mike Israetel?

  Great.

• 2:08:57Chris Williamson?

  Does that make sense?

• 2:08:58Mike Israetel?

  Absolutely.

• 2:09:00Mike Israetel?

  Your brain keeps like a tally of wins and losses for you. It's insanely biased, but it does a fine job. And if you want a belief to be something you can really rest on and go, I really believe this truly. Then you have to do what every neural network has to have happened to it in order to change. Inundate it with very many examples because neural networks change on the margins. They change slowly. So if you want to consider yourself a person

• 2:09:43Mike Israetel?

  that is capable of surmounting challenges. And you pick extraordinarily challenging tasks. And you fail at most of them nominally, which is to say you do not accomplish your goal. And objectively, you still rock complete balls. Let me give you an example. You start a company. You're a brilliant tech entrepreneur. Your goal is a billion dollar valuation. Eight hundred mil later, there's an offer on your desk that your team is like, we're not walking. You're out of your fucking mind if you walk away from this. You sign for eight hundred. You failed.

• 2:10:24Mike Israetel?

  Here's the thing is like now equity taxes later. You have a hundred and fifty million dollars on your, in your investment account. Amazing. But your goal was a billion and thus the inevitable after everything, you're cut one seventy five. So your brain registers that as a B minus. But you went to all the top schools and you got A pluses in everything. Your brain registers that as a failure. You do another big thing. You set another psychotic goal. You fall short. Lots of gog and shit going through your head. Burn me, I don't give a fuck. Amazing dope vibes.

• 2:11:07Mike Israetel?

  Your brain registers another failure. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty of those later, you feel like a failure. And your feelings are accurate because you fail a lot.

• 2:11:19Mike Israetel?

  Let's take the other extreme. You set yourself a bunch of totally fucking ridiculously easy goals. I'm gonna beat this four year old at pickleball. Fuck this bitch ass little kid.

• 2:11:28Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna get out of bed.

• 2:11:29Mike Israetel?

  Your parents should have never dropped you off at this pickleball tournament and left. Are they coming back? Are you my kid now? I'm gonna get out of bed. Sometimes easier said than done. Shit like that. And you win a lot. But your brain is pretty smart. And so it doesn't register it as winning. You know it's some bullshit. And so you never even put anything on the scoreboard. So do you feel like a capable person that is capable of overcoming difficult situations? No, because you're not in any difficult situation. So what you need to do is plan your shit out very well. It's not super hard. Just takes one realization. I'm gonna set goals for myself that I can probably achieve and do real well at.

• 2:12:12Mike Israetel?

  But not impossible, but challenging, but not impossible. There's a big margin there, Chris. The lower end of that margin is like, it was tough, but I knew I was gonna be able to do it. You still get something from that because it was tough. The top end is like, barely got through the shit, but I did. And I thought, and now I feel amazing. Anything in that bandwidth is good. Below it, not enough. Above it, you're failing. You register enough hits there. What does your brain think after dozens of these experiences? You line up tough goals. You surmount them. You're damn near undefeated. Now it knows. Oh, oh, fuck, I am the goddamn man. And it really feels like that all the time. The other thing is you won't get that right all the time.

• 2:12:56Mike Israetel?

  Sometimes you'll fail. And then you'll come back and you'll win. Lots of those experiences build the deep knowledge that you are resilient. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from shit and come back. If you always win, you will never have anything but pretend resilience because you ain't never lost some shit. So the way to architect really impressive resilience and a really impressive self refilling belief in your ability to do hard things is to consistently do hard things, almost always win at them, but occasionally not because you shot too far, come back, get a couple

• 2:13:39Mike Israetel?

  wins in a row, then go for that big one, maybe it'll happen, maybe it won't. That, if you split it into quartiles, 25% margins, bottom 25% fucking useless, your brain doesn't believe it. Top 25% too fucking hard, you're out of your mind. Shooting somewhere between 50 and 75%, occasionally you get to 76%, flunk out, occasionally you get to 49%, you're like, that was too easy. Staying in that 50 to 75% margin is going to be the place where at the end of several years of experiences, you're likely to feel competent, confident, and resilient all at the same time.

• 2:14:15Chris Williamson?

  Do you think most people shoot for 76 or 49 on average?

• 2:14:20Mike Israetel?

  Most people won't shoot for 49 because those people typically don't shoot for anything. So you have a very, very small number of people going between 26 and 49. Who does that? A lot of people shoot for way below and they're fine. They don't ever feel nice about anything. The people that are listening to this right now, they try to shoot for 110. You know, it's like the people that say give 110%. The charitable way to understand that is give more than you've ever given before.

• 2:14:52Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 2:14:53Mike Israetel?

  Your prior 100 is now your new 100, your new 110, et cetera. The not charitable way to understand that is you're out of your mind, that's an impossibility. It is glorious to give everything, but I think I would rather give everything in small chunks on the way to a goal, back off rest, back off rest, versus set a goal that requires everything of me. Now, mind you, I might be more successful if I set exotic goals. I never had the audacity to set a goal like I'm gonna found a billion dollar coming in if I don't have that skillset. Maybe I could develop the skillset if I really fucking was brave. But I would say that every time we see successes of that, and we do in Hollywood, sports.

• 2:15:37Mike Israetel?

  You know, Chris, like a good sports documentary is unlikely to materialize if you're like, oh, they're aiming for sixty seven percent. Your boy won five championships. Everyone was like, this sucks. Turn it off.

• 2:15:46Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 2:15:47Mike Israetel?

  You know, aiming for the impossible and then gloriously achieving it and then still being pissed like Michael Jordan.

• 2:15:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:53Mike Israetel?

  People love that shit, but there's a huge selection bias there. You won't hear about most of the people that tried to do their best. Because

• 2:16:02Mike Israetel?

  they lost.

• 2:16:02Chris Williamson?

  Well, there's also a depth of insight that you don't have with Michael Jordan because there's something. The haunted visionary, right? Or the the sort of the the

• 2:16:14Chris Williamson?

  never satisfied savant or whatever. There's something very sort of seductive, very cool about that. It's like renegade.

• 2:16:25Chris Williamson?

  I don't want to be them.

• 2:16:26Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, Chris. Yeah, you said it all.

• 2:16:28Chris Williamson?

  Michael Jordan.

• 2:16:29Mike Israetel?

  You, those people are fun to have sex with, fun to be in relationships with, fun to be around as friends, cool to associate in business with. You do not want to be those people. Because at the end of the day, the idea that that's cool is an idea you feel they don't. They feel inadequate. And feeling inadequate feels kind of the same, no matter what the fuck is going on around you. Michael Jordan. I remember having this this whole thought process of when is enough enough? And I remember thinking, okay, if you win something, okay, but you're not world champion. If you're world champion, okay, you're not Olympic champion or you're not multi time world champion. If you're not multi time world champion. Or so if you are one of one of those things, you might not be the winningest person of all time.

• 2:17:15Mike Israetel?

  If you are the winningest person of all time, maybe you're just generationally like that guy, like Lee Haney versus Ronnie Coleman. Who's the better bodybuilder? Most people say Ronnie Coleman because he competed during a more difficult time in bodybuilding. It was objectively. Bigger, right? Okay, so you need to be generationally the best. And then what happens when you're generationally the best until you fucking croak? And your brain's not recording outside events anymore. You fear every fucking day, some new upstart is gonna cut your shit right off. When Phil Heath was really on his shit? And on number fucking six, number seven, whatever number of Olympias? I don't know, man. If I was Arnold, if I was Ronnie, I'd be like, ah, is he gonna keep going like this? Who knows? Because then all the way you're retired at that point, you're powerless to anything about it. So if you're Michael Jordan and you're looking at LeBron racking up all his shit, you're like,

• 2:17:59Mike Israetel?

  because a lot of people say I'm the GOAT. Kobe? LeBron? So which one was it really go? I don't know. And so if you think about what it's like to be that person, there are is a balanced way that people like that exist. I don't know. I've never talked to LeBron ever about him. He seems really fucking balanced as far as all the interviews are concerned. He's just like, oh, he's just like so goddamn wise, you know? But like in his heart of hearts, does his like, is his willingness to compete eating him alive? Maybe for Jordan, we sure as shit know it is.

• 2:18:30Chris Williamson?

  Still now.

• 2:18:31Mike Israetel?

  Oh, my God, bro. Like he has Jordan, by the way, I don't know if you've heard like his Nike contract is like, he just gets like a hundred million dollars a year or some shit like that, like for forever. Like, imagine yourself in his shoes. Imagine most people right now, if you're listening to this right now.

• 2:18:47Chris Williamson?

  And his size eighteen.

• 2:18:48Mike Israetel?

  Would not be amazed. Oh, shit, those shoes are too big.

• 2:18:50Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 2:18:51Mike Israetel?

  Imagine you got paid a hundred mil a fucking year. You would be happy, yes? For most people, they actually would. Of course they fucking would. They'd be like, oh, this is amazing. Parties all the time. Is Jordan happy? I don't know. Watch his last documentary. You tell me.

• 2:19:05Chris Williamson?

  I don't think so. Dude, you're fucking awesome. I appreciate the hell out of you.

• 2:19:08Mike Israetel?

  I love you, Chris. Thank you so much. By the way, you look excellent. And your cheekbones are protruding and making me question my already questionable heterosexuality as usual.

• 2:19:16Chris Williamson?

  Very good. RPstrength.com slash modern wisdom. If you want to train like I have for the last fourteen months. Fuck, yeah. Appreciate you, man.

• 2:19:23Mike Israetel?

  Thank you.