Our Biggest Lessons From 2020 | Modern Wisdom Podcast 261

Jonny & Yusef join me today to talk through our biggest lessons from 2020. Expect to learn what we've learned from the weirdest year ever, how Yusef's insight on the front-lines of a hospital has changed his worldview, how Jonny has improved his personal development by removing most of the things he does, how hot a hot potato can be and much more... Sponsors: Get 2 weeks Free Access to the State App at https://apple.co/36nNALG (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Jonny & Yusef's site - https://propanefitness.com/ Learn to build an online business - https://propanefitness.com/modernwisdom Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #2020review #mindset #personaldevelopment - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's an annual tradition for us, isn't it, to wear either ours, or if you're Youssef, your girlfriend's Christmas jumper?

• 0:06Speaker 01

  So, pre-roll, we had to adjust the neckline because I looked like a Christmas Steve Jobs.

• 0:12Chris Williamson?

  You did. You looked like a festive Steve, didn't you?

• 0:15Jonny?

  I suppose the second lesson is like, test something's worth by taking it away for a while and see if you notice anything or see what changes. Try not doing something that you think is helping and see if you're right or not. If you're right, great. Like, try not sleeping for a month. I guarantee you conclude that sleeping is helpful.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  We've seen a massive impact on people's mental health this year. A lot of it, I think, stems from people not being comfortable in their own company. It's actually really dangerous having a poo in a hospital toilet because the emergency buzzer is next to the toilet roll and it's a long cable and it's really sensitive.

• 0:47Jonny?

  I've pulled stuff like that before in the past. I've yanked a red cord like that before in a steam room, thinking that it was the, like, the thing for more steam.

• 0:56Chris Williamson?

  This is a more steam cord.

• 1:03Chris Williamson?

  Ladies and gentlemen, Merry Crimbo. Look at us. Look at how lovely we are. Look at this. Get your Christmas jumpers out for the lads.

• 1:16Chris Williamson?

  So nice. You always have the classiest Christmas jumpers, Jonny. Look at that. It's so Abercrombie, isn't it?

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Jonny duped us last year with the light-up one.

• 1:29Jonny?

  Broken?

• 1:30Speaker 01

  You said it was voice activated, I think.

• 1:32Jonny?

  Yeah, that was it.

• 1:33Chris Williamson?

  So where's that from? Is it Hollister?

• 1:36Jonny?

  So this, so the reason I'm wearing this is that Becca has bought all three of us, all three of us, including Dexter, matching Christmas jumpers. So Dexter has the same jumper, slightly smaller, obviously. And then Becca also has one. And they're the same, but kind of slightly different colour themes. But I agree, like, it's very, like, you could wear it. You could wear it out and just have your hand over sort of the reindeer, the arm over the reindeer and no one would say anything.

• 2:02Chris Williamson?

  Pretty trendy.

• 2:03Jonny?

  Like, oh, Jonny, Jonny's just wearing one of the jumpers he always wears.

• 2:06Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's an annual tradition for us, isn't it, to wear either ours, or if you're Youssef, your girlfriend's Christmas jumper?

• 2:15Speaker 01

  So pre-roll, we had to adjust the neckline because I looked like a Christmas Steve Jobs.

• 2:22Chris Williamson?

  You looked like a festive Steve, didn't you? No festive Steve's come to join us. So it is Christmas, end of the year. We usually do a little bit of a wrap up. Couple of things that we've experienced, couple of lessons, couple of fails. And we might have time for a quick game of bear or bull at the end as well. What are you doing there?

• 2:40Speaker 01

  You know what this is?

• 2:41Chris Williamson?

  He's warming the potato.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Chris warming the potato.

• 2:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:48Chris Williamson?

  Can you throw it to me, Youssef? Can you throw it to me?

• 2:52Chris Williamson?

  Chris will have a potato in the pan, scalding, scalding. It is warm. It is really warm. Johnny, I know you've got a drink in your hand, but catch. Thank you. There you go. Right. First lesson from this year. Blobsen.

• 3:03Jonny?

  For me. Okay. So that I think in, obviously, I feel like we need to comment on the fact that it's been a strange year.

• 3:16Jonny?

  As in, like, a lot of people have had a very different life this year to normal. And I think the, what that's encouraged me to do is, I think I entered the year, and you two probably remember this. Like, I was constantly adding things to my life. Like, I bought, I was doing, like, cold showers, breathing, reading, jumping on a trampoline, doing skipping, going for walks, doing Romwood. And I basically just stopped almost all of that.

• 3:44Jonny?

  So just trying to, Youssef and I have spoken a lot this year about 80, the 80/20 principle. And I feel like that's the sort of thing that I, like, think about a lot, but never actually practise. So I've just tried this year, in every, in trying every, every area of my life to try and do, get the same by doing fewer things, or even try and do more, improve by doing fewer things across everything. So like clothes in the wardrobe, apps on your phone, like everything that you like regularly do. Think, what, what could I do to just make this like simpler and easier for myself? And I think all that's basically like from, from January 2020, Johnny, to December 2020, Johnny.

• 4:26Jonny?

  I just do fewer things and just have more like bandwidth, is how it feels. But I've not known.

• 4:32Chris Williamson?

  What's a morning look like now then? Because you were doing all this stuff, jumping on a trampoline and a cold shower and a walk and a Romwood and reading and meditation as well, probably. What's a morning now?

• 4:40Jonny?

  Yeah. So I just meditate. Nothing else, but for longer.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  I think this is a great lesson because

• 4:51Jonny?

  Thanks.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  We're so wired to look for more stuff, more books to read, more ideas to take on, more methods, more programs, whatever it is that someone's going after. And really, that's never the limiting factor in 2020. Squeezing the lemon of what we already have has so much mileage. But people are like, oh, no, that's boring. I'm just gonna look for the next thing.

• 5:16Jonny?

  I think it's just that like self-improvement is very additive by nature. Like a lot of people look as like, what's the, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm trying to improve myself, but I still feel anxiety or still feel like I'm not improving. I need to add something else. And maybe I suppose if you're doing absolutely nothing to improve yourself, that probably is the answer. But I think a lot of people listening to this podcast are probably doing lots of different things. And I'm not saying you should do fewer things, but I think the, the 80 20 thing. So we've done a lot of that in, in business this year. And you do find that 80% of the progress comes from 20% of the things, 80, like 20% of the

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Bull egg.

• 5:54Jonny?

  80, 80% of the problems come from, come from 20% of the things as well. So it's like, if you just consistently streamline, streamline. Yeah, I think it's just a happier way of, of living your life. If you might, obviously you can cut out too many things and slow down.

• 6:08Chris Williamson?

  There's a potential that you might have gone too far with that. Like just meditation means you're not reading consistently. It means that you're not doing any breath work. Because we know that if you miss, the beauty of a morning routine is that it kind of locks in a ton of habits early in the day and ensures that you get them done. That's the best, for me, the, the best hack about having a morning routine is it certifies that you do things that you need to get done every day.

• 6:37Jonny?

  I suppose the question is, why are you doing the things? I think that's what I spent a lot of time thinking about, like, why am I doing Wim Hof? Why am I doing, why am I having a cold shower? Why am I doing, like, there's a, it's like you're trying to do something, you're trying to like achieve something or change something with all of it. And I think the, um, the thing that I noticed from, so I suppose the second lesson is like test, test something's worth by taking it away for a while and see if you notice anything or see what changes. Cause again, it's very different, they're very difficult. If you have a morning routine, they have lots of habits, lots of things you do, just adding things in. And you don't know really whether it's the thing that you started a year ago that had been doing every day, or whether it's the thing you added last month that's having the change.

• 7:17Jonny?

  So if you stop doing something, it's like, ah, I took that away, like I took Romwood away, for example. And my injury rate was the same.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Hate that.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  The delayed reaction to stopping something and not noticing the decline or the improvement for three months. And then you're like, what was it?

• 7:39Jonny?

  Yeah, and it's not, I don't think it's the case that like, these things do nothing. It's just that there's always a trade off between, like, I could do fewer things and achieve largely the same result. And surely that's better, just from a, like, the number of things you have to manage perspective. Um, but it's probably just, it'll be like a, you know, in a year's time, I'll probably have added 10 things in again, right? It's just a phase that I'm going through, but I think it's been very helpful this year. Because it's just, it's allowed for a simple structure versus like this time last year. I felt like there was so many things that I was trying to do.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 8:19Jonny?

  Um, to, to basically just like feel better.

• 8:23Chris Williamson?

  Well, you know that at the start of this year, all of us were super, super impressed with how much you'd added in. And you were crushing it with this really great routine. So that took quite a bit of agency and some. You know, there's a lot of inertia to get over when adding in even one thing, let alone a whole ton of things. And then to be able to let go of the tether to that balloon of, I've built up this pattern. Finally, I've actually managed to achieve it. And to then be able to have sufficient agency to drop that is like maybe even harder. So I think that that kind of identifies why you're a bit of a motherfucker, man. Like it's just so it is. It's the same as it's the same as whenever you hear George Mack talk about

• 9:04Chris Williamson?

  something. You're just like, fucking hell, like this guy just doesn't really seem to deal with obstacles in a negative way. He's just happy to see like input, process, output, here's a, here's a way around it. And that's like, I think definitely something you can be proud of this year, man, like to let go of those tethers on a year where we're all being neurotic as fuck. Um, I think, yeah, that, that, that's awesome. I would, I will be interested to see where it goes. And I think you're right as well. We keep on bringing it up that is it, I always get this wrong. Seth, is it Goethe that talks about the vacillation between extremes of societies?

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Is it height or Hegel?

• 9:41Chris Williamson?

  Hegel.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  I think you've confused me now.

• 9:43Chris Williamson?

  Oh, sorry. I've got it wrong. I shit you not about 20 times. But yeah, we do vacillate between these things, right? We go from like minimalist to abundance. We go from excess cerebral to excess mindful to excess physical, whatever it might be. And then eventually at the age of 65, you'll have finally sorted your morning routine. Yeah.

• 10:04Jonny?

  The age of 65, just wake up and read the paper, don't you?

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Like it's all. Cause you've completed it all.

• 10:10Jonny?

  You're just like, oh, what's the point of any of that?

• 10:12Chris Williamson?

  Oh, fucking sick of this.

• 10:15Chris Williamson?

  Oh, fucking stupid. Um, man, that's, that's really awesome. I'm really happy for you this year with regards to that.

• 10:21Jonny?

  Thanks. But I think the lesson for people is like, try not doing something that you think is helping and see if you're right or not. If you're right, great. It's like, try not sleeping for a month. I guarantee you conclude that sleeping is helpful.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  It's a great way to test the hypothesis, isn't it? I don't think sleep really matters. Fine.

• 10:42Chris Williamson?

  What's that? What's that diet where you take out tons of stuff with inflammation in and then add them back in one by one?

• 10:50Speaker 01

  It's the elimination diet.

• 10:52Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Basically, a personal development routine equivalent of that, right?

• 10:58Speaker 01

  See, that would be really useful. Because then it sifts all of the marketing claims and people selling their six-digit journal and the eight-minute booklet and the five-minute file of facts and all this stuff.

• 11:20Jonny?

  Five-minute file of facts.

• 11:21Chris Williamson?

  That's a good one. I'd buy that. We don't all. The problem is that we would all buy it. If the five-minute file of facts came out, we'd all buy it because we'd think it would be the answer.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  You'd buy it for me and I'd leave it on my table.

• 11:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 11:34Jonny?

  And you'd eventually like read through it like.

• 11:40Chris Williamson?

  Right, Scob, what about you? Lessons?

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Lesson number one from 2020. This is more of a vicarious lesson. I've seen it in other people because I've got to admit, this year for me has been barely any change to my lifestyle. And I think for all three of us, just because we're all antisocial bastards and the work we do either involves being at home anyway, or in my case, being at a hospital, which hasn't changed. But we've seen a massive impact on people's mental health this year. And a lot of it, I think, stems from, in fact, hang on, I don't want to downplay the massive impact of people losing their jobs and being alienated from their families and stuff.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  And that's huge and that's circumstantial and avoidable. But the other side of it is people not being comfortable in their own company.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  And if you're, this has kind of highlighted it where you put someone, as Johnny said, if you you put someone on their own for some time and they very quickly learn how much they like themselves, how much they can sit in their own company.

• 12:53Jonny?

  This is my lesson number two.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 12:56Jonny?

  That's all right. That's okay.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  I've got.

• 12:59Jonny?

  Believable that that would land on that, but I suppose.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Well, there we go. I can give you that one. I've got.

• 13:04Chris Williamson?

  We can just combine, you can just combine it together, right? You can, if you've both converged on this same thing, I think it's probably a pretty big lesson.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Fair enough. Yeah.

• 13:14Jonny?

  No stooges used. There's no trickery. This isn't like we.

• 13:18Chris Williamson?

  It's Derren Brown.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  You're seeing this real unfold live. So one of the things that Gary Weber points out is that. Oh, no. You can see Johnny's reaction if you're listening.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Is that the worst, the highest grade punishment you can give someone, at least in a civilized world, is solitary confinement. And Johnny's really upset.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  The second highest punishment is taking the hot potato.

• 13:51Chris Williamson?

  Taking somebody else's lesson of 2020 and stealing it without them knowing. Yeah. So Gary Weber says being on your own.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Solitary confinement is one of the worst things you can do because suddenly someone has no distractions available to them. They have to face the crap that they've kind of tucked away all their life and it's just sat there. And so the lesson is to to learn to make peace with that. It's not a, not a quick process. There's no hack. It's just a very long term habit of taking the tissues out the tissue box and until the tissue box is empty.

• 14:28Jonny?

  Just to be fully clear on that, there's no, that's a, that's an analogy, right? You're not actually emptying the tissue box and then putting them back in again and then emptying the tissue box.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  We're gonna have loads of listeners that just go out and buy, well, Kleenex. Right? Am I gonna be happy yet?

• 14:42Chris Williamson?

  So what's the lesson from that?

• 14:45Speaker 01

  That we need to learn to cultivate the ability to be comfortable in our, with ourselves, in our own company. And a lot of people have learned to do this, this year anyway. It's just accelerated, it's catalyzed that process. But it's so, it's been so interesting to see that unfold.

• 15:08Chris Williamson?

  You got anything to add there, Claude?

• 15:10Jonny?

  So the, the, there's a study that Gary Weber references about, I think we might, we might even talk about this. So before we came on this podcast, I checked the life hacks list and I don't think any of us have actually ever said meditation.

• 15:27Chris Williamson?

  I think we've mentioned. Apps, we've said, yeah, different particular ways.

• 15:30Jonny?

  There's like four, four or five apps or like things to try, but the, the hack that we've now actually suggested people do regularly is meditation. But the, the, the study that Gary references is they took, I think initially university students and put them in a room and they had to sit by themselves for 15 minutes. And it was like, they found that, and so they weren't allowed any devices, weren't allowed to check anything. And it was incredibly painful for people. So they gave people a bracelet that was attached to a, like a strap around their ankle with the option to shock themselves with electric, electricity. And over half of the men, I think, opted to shock themselves. And just like, when you think about that,

• 16:14Jonny?

  it is insane that someone would rather shock themselves with electricity than sit by themselves for 15 minutes.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Truly amazing. It's such a like 14 year old or like year nine activity as well. Like you're sat there, you've got like a bit of deodorant, you just spray it until you're like.

• 16:30Jonny?

  Spray it in your arms.

• 16:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Or doing that thing with a compass where you go like, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, through your hand.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Wait, well, you can have the two man version where you flick pennies at each other across the, across the desk.

• 16:42Chris Williamson?

  Oh yeah. And then when you do it, you gotta hit your knuckles. So I, I think, um, who's the person who said all of man's problems stem from the fact he can't sit in a room quietly by himself? I think that's a philosopher.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Who is either Goethe, Hegel or?

• 16:57Chris Williamson?

  Hegel, probably, probably Hegel. Uh, but I'm pretty certain that's thousands and thousands of years old. And part of me wants to blame hyper stimulus and the modern era of devices for ramping our dopamine up that we can't sit in a room on our own. But it seems like that's the sort of thing that's been around for quite a while.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  I reckon it's worse in this decade than it was.

• 17:24Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Do you remember 15 years ago, you could, like you'd turn up for an appointment for something and you'd sit in the waiting room and you would just be like?

• 17:38Chris Williamson?

  Now, if someone does that, they're a psychopath.

• 17:40Jonny?

  So I really hope that Ben Harrison is listening to this.

• 17:43Chris Williamson?

  Because he does that.

• 17:44Jonny?

  Whenever you meet Ben and he's there before you and you see him like through the window, he's just sat like this.

• 17:52Chris Williamson?

  Just on standby. In a whole, in a holding pattern.

• 17:57Jonny?

  And you look at him, you're like, Ben, that's weird, mate. You can't, like, I know it's all mine.

• 18:00Chris Williamson?

  Get your phone out, yeah.

• 18:01Jonny?

  But it's weird. You've got to stop doing it.

• 18:04Chris Williamson?

  Well, the, the, the number one thing that phones have achieved is they've eliminated boredom. Like, nobody is bored anymore. Nobody ever. As long as you've got battery, nobody's bored anymore. Um, and it's a combination of

• 18:20Chris Williamson?

  habitual checking in terms of i- i- it's actually drilled into your synapses that you go into the pocket, you get the phone out. Which is why a great life hack for anyone that wants to reduce their phone time, the simplest one you can do, just keep your phone in the different pocket. So swap the pockets that you have your phone and your wallet in, and the number of times that you'll take your wallet out and look at your wallet and you're like, "What an idiot."

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Brother went to Egypt and he was driving this, this banger and it was obviously left-hand drive. He kept banging his hand off the, um, off the wall, off the door.

• 18:53Chris Williamson?

  Oh, because he was reaching to get his phone. Oh, right, okay, yeah.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Um, and also every time he went over a speed bump, the airbag would deploy.

• 19:01Chris Williamson?

  Every time? Actually, it only happens once.

• 19:06Jonny?

  Yeah, you don't like just hold it back in. Right.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  But yeah, he said it was quite sore.

• 19:11Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 19:12Jonny?

  I can imagine. Did he shout "into me"?

• 19:15Speaker 01

  "Into me."

• 19:16Chris Williamson?

  Uh, any, any other sort of insights around that, Seth, about the sort of solitude?

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Not from the solitude one. I've got another one coming up, which, uh... Which may be related, but.

• 19:31Jonny?

  So just to wrap that one up, and you said, so someone's heard all of that. And they think, yeah, I agree. Like I've had a lot of this year, like sat in a room, like bored by the TV. Sat with my thoughts. What, what say, like, right in 2021, I'm gonna try and do something about it. I'm going to.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, so. Usually if someone hasn't got a handle on this, it's because they're just holding it just at bay, like just at arm's length the whole time. And the counterintuitive thing is just to let it in, just to do something that does involve total solitude with. You know, as Chris said, put your phone in your other pocket or leave it at home, go for a walk, like do something that really forces you to to do that. And if you can do something that's full solitude for an extended amount of time, many bouts of solitude become much easier to handle. And eventually become actively pleasurable until, as cheesy as it sounds, if you can become your own best friend. Then.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  You're having a great time, aren't you?

• 20:37Chris Williamson?

  I think this year's definitely highlighted how much people's lives were held up by the scaffolding of not being on their own. Like fortunately, I put this in a newsletter a couple of weeks ago, introverts have had a competitive advantage in 2020 for the first time in history. Like almost every extrovert outperforms an introvert because they can network harder, they can spend more time around others. It's kind of what is seen as a more admirable, more desirable trait in other people because it makes them more personable. Uh, you can just spend more time around other people. So your networking effect multiplies. But this year that's been stopped. So it's very much been, are you able to recharge your batteries on your own?

• 21:19Chris Williamson?

  The problem that I see that links in with phone use is that people have got a confused definition of solitude. Cal Newport's got the most useful definition of solitude that I've ever seen, which is time away from the input of other minds. Now, that's not driving in the car with the radio on, calling a friend every so often on a long journey. That's not being in your living room, watching Netflix whilst double screening on your phone. Like, that's the opposite. That's more input from other minds. Like, genuine solitude is something that you can learn from, but hiding from that fact, pushing it away, repudiating it by giving yourself this false sense of socialization,

• 22:01Chris Williamson?

  means that you're not getting the social contact that you desperately desire, but you're also not learning the lesson about solitude and being comfortable with yourself. So certainly progressive overload in terms of that, even if you can just do it 30 minutes at a time, one hour at a time, 90 minutes at a time, you know, like extending that.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  There's a really good, I think that's a really good heuristic for what is actual solitude. Because yeah, if you're just sat calling mates and watching stuff, whatever, then yeah, it's not really solitude. It's just diluted contact with other people. And I did a video on NoFap recently, which is an internet movement of people that refrain from jerking the gurken, so that they can improve their dopamine sensitivity. And they're claiming all these kind of huge benefits that they get psychologically and physiologically. And I was saying in the video that a lot of the big benefits people get are because they're going from a pathological

• 23:02Speaker 01

  state to a normal state. And that's what's causing this this big change in that most people probably wouldn't get such a big improvement from it. Something I do think people will all get a big improvement from, and that's because we're all pathological with it, is this idea you said of like double screening. And like even when even Netflix alone, something that's designed for like compulsive retention is not enough to trigger all those dopamine receptors. You have to then get a second screen out. Like, we are mental. And so I think doing that repeatedly makes us so desensitized to dopamine.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Simplifying, but to to the reward circuitry that when we're just with another person, that's not enough. It doesn't doesn't scratch that itch. And so we end up then having to like be with another person, but also on our phones. And I think people of our age, like we recognize this rude and so we don't do it. But when you see like teenagers together, like, you know, when you know, every city, especially like cities like Newcastle, Liverpool, Leeds, that have like a Casper's ice cream shop. There's like a

• 24:10Chris Williamson?

  Next to next to it's always outside of a place called the green, isn't it?

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And there's like pink neons, black leather sofas and like 30 flavors of ice cream. You all you see like groups of 18 year old kids all sat like in silence on their phones.

• 24:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Like, wow.

• 24:33Chris Williamson?

  Well, the the mad the mad thing at the beginning of this year, which I said in the first COVID episode that we did was I took a like undue amount of pleasure from other people struggling with the challenge of working from home. Like, I was like, oh, welcome to the fucking party. Welcome to this. And then I realized after a little bit of time that that was my own projection. Like, I shouldn't take pleasure in other people entering my nightmare. Like, that's not a thing. But that's what I was doing. And after a little bit of time, I realized, right, okay, no, be a bit more fucking noble and virtuous than that. But very much so,

• 25:15Chris Williamson?

  like, this is this is a pill that we all had to swallow a long time ago. And maybe there might be some other entrepreneurs or sort of working from homers who have felt this for a long time. And then this year, it was like, like, put me in, coach. Like, this is my time. And yeah, it's been an interesting year of reflection. Definitely people becoming more comfortable in solitude. It should have expedited it because you haven't had any choice. Like, you've had to do it. And for a lot of people, that's probably something that they can take away. Yeah, there's been a lot of negatives that have come about this year, but you've learned to be on your own. Like, that's definitely one positive, I think you can take. What's your lesson from this year, Chris?

• 25:57Chris Williamson?

  First one is the power of rest. So classic type A personality, do more, get more done. Even though I took the essentialism red pill this year and decided to do less in terms of breadth, that gave me more capacity to do more in terms of depth. So the total amount of time that I spent working wasn't reduced. It was just the number of projects that I worked on. That was constrained heavily by the fact that my main business events has stopped. But that just gave me even more time to work on doing whatever it was that I fucking did. I put this again in a newsletter a couple of weeks ago. The trip to Dubai gave me such an unbelievable sense of perspective.

• 26:42Chris Williamson?

  It was nothing as lovely as Dubai is. It was nothing special about Dubai, but it was about the fact that I had this change in working routine in a year where everybody has felt like it's Groundhog Day over and over again. You're looking at the same four walls. You get up, there's, you haven't got five weddings to go to. You haven't got a barbecue. You haven't got somebody's birthday. There's nothing, there's, there's no, I haven't even been ill this year because I haven't seen anyone. I haven't got, I haven't got sick because like, who the fuck's going to infect me? Like we're hiding from a pandemic. So upon going away, it reminded me of something I learned from Ollie Olerton, who was in the SAS. And he had this idea called a breakpoint. So you can imagine before the operatives enter a room or breach a building,

• 27:27Chris Williamson?

  they'll stack up outside of the door, outside of the entrance. So they'll have already landed at the, near the objective and then either like fought or snuck their way through. And then they'll get outside and they'll take a moment to just reset, breathe, slow down a little bit, consider what the objectives are, and then they'll go. And that period of calm between two periods of intense chaos was what I termed a personal breakpoint. It's called a breakpoint in the special forces. And I termed it a personal breakpoint for me while I was in Dubai. And it just forced me to come back. And I think this links in with what you were saying, Johnny, about kind of really giving a first principles look at your routines and thinking like, right, okay, is this serving me? Does this actually make my life any better? Or am I just doing it because I've always done it, even if it was once good?

• 28:12Chris Williamson?

  Like, we can talk about kind of the first level, like, basic bitch, mate, you drink three times a week because your mates do. But then even taking that into something which has been the horse of Troy snuck in by it being something that was good once. Breathwork did serve me at one time. Cold showers did serve me at one time. Getting up at 5:30 AM every day and going for a walk did serve me at one time, but does it now? My requirements are different, my routine is different, my life is different. And then, you know, that consistent checking of whether the things that you are doing serve you can only be facilitated when you've had a break from it, because it permits you to have that perspective

• 28:53Chris Williamson?

  and clarity around things. And very much, I came back and it was the happiest I'd been at home in maybe even years.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 29:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it was unbelievable, man. I obviously was super inquisitive about like, what the fuck's going on? But I've come back from a place that was 32 degrees every day of glorious sunshine to somewhere where I can't leave the house. And it's got about eight hours of daylight, most of which is grey. Like, why, why am I so happy being back home? And I honestly think it was because I got to see a life that I've crafted for myself with new eyes and think very much, it was well timed as well going into a new year, to think about, okay, what do I want to try and achieve next year? But from first principles, not just what do I want to carry over that I'm already doing, or do something that I already do a little bit better? Like, genuinely, what do I want to do? And it gave me this

• 29:44Chris Williamson?

  kind of, yeah, a very liberated sense of bottomless potential for next year.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  So, have a break. Micro and macro.

• 29:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  It comes into what you said about, said last year on this 2019 podcast, of Chris Spark's idea of nothing gets grandfathered in, everything is up for sale.

• 30:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Just because you've been doing something, whether you think it's good or think it's bad, it has to get re-examined and say, right, should I continue this habit or this project or whatever?

• 30:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 30:18Jonny?

  Did you find that you got the same amount of work done in Dubai? Like, did you still get the, like, the key work done in spite of, like, I presume, working fewer hours?

• 30:31Chris Williamson?

  The key work, yes. I can't pretend that I was working on the

• 30:39Chris Williamson?

  Probably the long term important on the cusp of important but not urgent. Because inevitably, there are some things that will take you away from that. There's a boat party on tonight, there's a MK's playing at a pool, there's whatever's happening. We're going out for dinner, I'm going for a walk, I'm cycling the desert. But the stuff that keeps everything ticking over, I kept on top of perfectly fine. And had I have been there for longer and it not had a defined endpoint that we pushed back by a week. But had a defined endpoint to it, perhaps I would have forced myself to do that stuff. But for instance, the next lead magnet that I want to do for the newsletter is 151 books to read before you die. Like, I was not going to start that project while I was out there.

• 31:22Chris Williamson?

  It's got no defined deadline to it. It's slightly confusing and messy to begin, there's a lot of inertia to get over. There was no way I was going to begin that while I was out there. But I kept recording, I kept on a recording schedule. I kept meditating while I was out there, I kept on doing my rehab for my Achilles, all that stuff.

• 31:41Jonny?

  I think the, there's something that I've, I've found, like not necessarily this year, but like on, in years where you're, you're travelling, going to like three weddings in a week. Are sometimes the most, for us, like we'll have like the most profitable week ever in, in propane. And I've worked some of the fewest hours and you look at it and you're like, fuck sake. You know, like all these weeks where I sit and like hammer away at the, at the, trying to push the boulder up the hill. When there's just a rate that it's going to move and no matter how hard you push. Is, is a, a nice reminder to say that actually I can't just take, I can't just stop working, have the, have the rest of the day off. Or I can take the weekend and not check my emails or whatever.

• 32:22Jonny?

  But I think that's harder and harder to do when there's fewer, so the average person at home this year hasn't had the.

• 32:30Chris Williamson?

  What the fuck else is there to do?

• 32:31Jonny?

  The, the desert to go and cycle.

• 32:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 32:33Jonny?

  Or the, the beach party to go to. But yeah, I think it's a, I think a lot of people I know have, have just let work like. Fill everything because it's either work or Netflix sleep, work Netflix sleep.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  I think it's it's about matching the personality type of the person to the recommendation, which you you kind of hat tipped to before, which is that if you're a type A, hard driving, overachieving personality, then you need to engineer in work into your day. Whereas if you naturally gravitate to sloth, then you need to create structure to do the work. Um, interestingly, someone called Neve, who listens to the Modern Wisdom Podcast and got in touch with me as a result, asked me to do a talk at my hospital. Um, for junior pharmacists and junior doctors on like life hacks for it was to a clinical life hacks. And one of them was go for a poo. So bear with me.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  It's but when when you're on a an on-call shift, which is where you are covering the entire hospital out of hours for thirteen hours. Um, it's a long shift and it's basically your your adrenal glands are just slowly getting nipple crippled for the whole thirteen hours. So you're getting a phone call every like thirty to thirty to sixty seconds. And you've been asked to do loads of stuff and you're just getting like slammed kind of relentlessly. And if you just go from one job to the next without that personal breakpoint, you just you you cortisol is just gonna go

• 34:09Speaker 01

  and so you you do just have to stop and have a poo and be like, you know what? I'm allowed a poo like this job contract. What if you don't need one?

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Even if you don't need one, you can just just sit and have a have a sham poo. You know how you have the the sham surgery with Stu McGill? Yeah. Do the same thing. So you prep as if you're going for a poo. Pants down.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  You go into the cubicle. Do you have to wipe afterward?

• 34:33Speaker 01

  That's a good question.

• 34:35Chris Williamson?

  If you want me to believe it, if you want me to believe your shampoo was a real poo. Shampoo.

• 34:40Jonny?

  It should be a.

• 34:41Chris Williamson?

  Shampoo, Johnny. Shampoo.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  It's actually really dangerous having a poo in a hospital toilet because the emergency buzzer is next to the toilet roll and it's a, it's a long cable and it's really sensitive.

• 34:56Jonny?

  I've pulled stuff like that before in the past.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  And then like the security come bursting in.

• 35:00Chris Williamson?

  When you're in anaphylaxis.

• 35:03Jonny?

  I've, I've yanked a red cord like that before in a steam room, thinking that it was the, like the thing for more.

• 35:09Chris Williamson?

  More steam. This is a more steam cord.

• 35:12Jonny?

  And a, and a woman with like a, like a box ran into the steam.

• 35:16Chris Williamson?

  A defibrillator.

• 35:18Jonny?

  It was just like, I think a box of like miscellaneous, like.

• 35:21Chris Williamson?

  Plasters. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:23Jonny?

  What are you gonna do with that?

• 35:24Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna bandage you up.

• 35:27Jonny?

  You're gonna put a plaster on my shoulder. Yeah.

• 35:31Chris Williamson?

  So yeah, that, that was, um, basically working more can deliver less output as well is kind of a subset of that. That it, it's the sort of thing that you hear everybody say, but you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's for people who don't, don't actually know what they're talking about. Like, no, no, no, no, no. It's not just diminishing returns that you get from work. You genuinely can do work which is so bad or move so slowly that across a week you will deliver less output by working more. If you decide to undersleep yourself, over caffeinate yourself, create work which is motivationally so subpar that it makes you feel bad the next day. You don't want to do work.

• 36:14Chris Williamson?

  Honestly, just having some sort of rule. I know that like a hard stop can often be difficult because the stop can come at a time which is awkward within the workflow, especially if you finally found focus after fighting to, to get a hold of it for the last few hours. Um, but finding a point and saying, right, okay, like that's enough for today. Like, congratulations, well done. And then giving yourself genuine rest time away from that, the David Allen quote, "Your ability to deploy power is directly proportional to your ability to relax." And that's, that's not a powerlifter, that's a man who does productivity for a living. So yeah, that, that I guess you're totally right. That's the micro and the macro. I definitely think that a personal breakpoint as a prescription needs to be longer than a week.

• 36:59Chris Williamson?

  I don't think that you can get the benefits from a personal breakpoint by doing a holiday which has no resemblance to your normal life, or a trip away which is just work in a new place that's exactly the same. The whole, the whole point is that everything changes except for the core elements of your life. And that actually goes back to what you said, Johnny, where you were like, all right, did you get work done across the board? And I didn't, but I got the skeleton done, which is what is the, the minimum viable product. It's like that, what I have to do each week, which meant that everything else was up for sale in the Chris Sparks example. Like nothing gets grandfathered in, except for obviously the stuff that needs to be grandfathered in. Like obviously I need to eat, obviously I'm going to train, obviously I'm going to do,

• 37:44Chris Williamson?

  you know, the projects that actually matter to me.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Well, you have to do those things, but the way that you eat or the way that you train is up for sale.

• 37:52Chris Williamson?

  Right, Johnny, next, next, your second lesson has been popped, hasn't it? Yeah.

• 37:56Jonny?

  Well, my second, my second lesson was just meditation, which is a really simple one. I was just, I was saying it isn't in the life hacks list. I think it was Yusuf that put me onto it originally. And then you put me in touch, Chris, with a meditation teacher. Yeah. And like even the, so like, I suppose all of what we're saying, like the sitting alone thing and the, even like knowing when to take a rest and all these sorts of things. It just, it just comes back to like awareness of yourself, awareness of how you feel. Everyone gets to sort of towards the end of the day and thinks, I'm not getting anything done now, but I'm still going to like sit here and just like hit my head off a laptop and hope that, hope that something comes of it.

• 38:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 38:36Jonny?

  But having like a formal practice like that, I think is, is just the best way to get better at that. Like when do I need to stop? When am I feeling anxious? What is feeling anxious? Like, I don't have to identify with being anxious just because I have this sensation. Just having a practice like that that becomes like a really, I think I've taken that a lot more seriously this year. What I've previously done, like ten minutes here, fifteen minutes there, whereas now it's like the first thing I do. Just because I do, I think it's like having a good night's sleep. You know, when you wake up, having had a really good night's sleep and you just, you compared to any other day, it's not even close. In terms of like the decisions you make, the way that you feel. I think after doing a long meditation session, I feel the same way.

• 39:19Jonny?

  Which is a recent thing, didn't used to happen like that. So I think it's just a compounding hundreds of hours situation.

• 39:25Chris Williamson?

  What's your current practice? I'm going to guess that you're following Brian's five, well, it's Shinzen Young's Five Ways to Know Yourself through Brian.

• 39:34Jonny?

  Sounds like such a.

• 39:39Chris Williamson?

  Five Ways to Know Yourself through Brian?

• 39:41Jonny?

  Yeah, like the meditation accelerator, like Get to Know Yourself of Five Ways by Brian.

• 39:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 39:46Jonny?

  Um, so it's a bit of that, it's a bit, I've been following, um. So this is, this is taken from Ben again, who's Mr. Meditation, who I know has recommended this to me and you, so there's a film called Chasing the Present. Where this guy interviews like, um, I mean, Gary Weber's the, the big name in the.

• 40:04Chris Williamson?

  OG.

• 40:05Jonny?

  In the, in the film. But a lot of his stuff, like the self-inquiry stuff I've been doing, so he's got some guided sessions online. Some of the Shinzen Young stuff, like the noting practice, like is it visual or somatic or audible? Um, just that really. Um, but I think the thing, I, I spend too, too long getting caught up in like the method, like program hopping and not enough time in just.

• 40:28Chris Williamson?

  Doing.

• 40:29Jonny?

  I need to just do thirty minutes a day. Like I just need to do enough time for this to actually make a difference. Um, I think hearing Gary say it needs to be like a minimum thirty-five minutes is a real like.

• 40:44Jonny?

  Like, it's not very ten, ten minutes for ten days headspace, is it?

• 40:48Speaker 01

  He basically says like you're wasting your time if you're doing less than thirty five minutes. You're just like, oh, Gary. Oh, Gary, we've all got real lives.

• 40:55Jonny?

  Leave me alone, mate. Yeah. Stop making me anxious. Um, but yeah, I think he's done like twenty thousand hours or something.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Motherfucker.

• 41:03Jonny?

  Of mindfulness practice, but now just has no, has no thoughts.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's the guy that switched off his default mode network, isn't he? This is what I love about Gary Webber, because he fully puts his money where his mouth is. Like, he's been a researcher and participant in a lot of the Harvard functional neuroimaging studies, where he's just like, yeah, put me through an FMRI and his brain just does not work like other people's brains.

• 41:28Jonny?

  The thing I, I think I like.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  Any activity. Sorry.

• 41:31Jonny?

  This about having no thoughts, he's like, I say most of the time because it, it sounds more believable. And like when I'm tired and, and stuff like they do occasionally come back. But most of the time, like you can use thoughts for problem solving and things like that. But there's no like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah going on constantly. I just love how he admits that, like, if he's feeling a bit groggy, he occasionally has a thought.

• 41:57Jonny?

  Whereas most people when they're feeling a bit tired are just drowning in like. Stream of bollocks. And he has the occasional like, that's not gonna work. I'm like, oh, that's shit. Oh, this is gonna go badly.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like when, when my blood sugar's a bit low, uh, they can.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  They can occasionally reemerge.

• 42:19Jonny?

  So I think like the chasing the present film is a guy who had or has like material success. He just outwardly is, is your average, like. Millennial, I suppose, who has all these things go well for him and then realizes like, hold on, I still feel terrible. Like, I still worry all the time. I still don't feel at ease with myself. So he just goes on this huge journey and interviews loads of like big names in, in the meditation world. Really good film. So if anyone wants like.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Where is it? Amazon Prime?

• 42:50Jonny?

  Ben sent it to me on YouTube Pro or YouTube Paid For, whatever that's called, but I'm sure it must be on Amazon. It must be elsewhere as well. Um, but yeah, that's not really a life hack, but I just noticed that meditation's not in the Life Hacks Guide. There's just loads of ways to track meditation.

• 43:08Chris Williamson?

  Well, that says it all, that it's such a taken.

• 43:11Jonny?

  Consumed thing.

• 43:12Chris Williamson?

  We just presume, like, what, you're not meditating every day? What's wrong with you?

• 43:17Jonny?

  Um, Yusuf, it was Yusuf who said to me in Liverpool, after we got out of lift and said, like, "Stop being a dick about it and just do thirty minutes a day for ten days and you tell me that you don't feel any different."

• 43:32Speaker 01

  It's because Johnny was following like the Atomic Habits method of like starting at two minutes, building up to four minutes a day. And I think.

• 43:41Jonny?

  Three minutes.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Three, three, then four, sorry. Um, and I think for a lot of habits, that can work. Um, but I think when a habit has a minimum effective dose like meditation, it could be counterproductive because you're then doing all of the boring bit without the benefit.

• 43:58Jonny?

  Do you, do you believe Yusuf, and we'll move on after this because I'm aware of spoken about meditation a lot, but do you believe that thirty minutes, like the Gary Weber thing of if you're doing fifteen, it's literally pointless?

• 44:08Speaker 01

  I don't think it's literally pointless, but it, so Gary's purpose of meditation is to quiet the mind enough to do the self-inquiry and fully uproot the illusion of self, like that's the, so, so the meditation's almost a means to an end for him.

• 44:23Jonny?

  I see.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Um, whereas you will still get the benefit of time under tension with meditation from doing small amounts of it, but I also think it's, so I don't think it's as much of like a, as a switch, but it's like, um, training. If someone's, if someone's doing six minutes of training a day, they'll get maybe a bit of benefit if that training is like super dialed in and absolutely perfect and really consistent. But it's kind of making it difficult for themselves compared to the guy who trains an hour, three times a week and goes deep with it.

• 44:59Jonny?

  What if the six minutes is just burpees?

• 45:01Speaker 01

  That's what I mean. Yeah. If it's like, do you mean, are you saying because it's like?

• 45:06Jonny?

  No, no, I was just, I was just, whenever I think of like, how would I make training as hard as possible for? I think there was a CrossFit open workout or there was a CrossFit workout, which was just seven minutes.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  Seven minutes of burpees. Yeah.

• 45:17Jonny?

  I can think of, I can honestly think of nothing worse. Training wise, that's as bad as it gets.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Lesson two, scope.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Lesson two is that 2020 has been the year of the confidently wrong.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  So this is basically from all of the kind of online health experts and so on, just coming out of the woodwork. And preying on people's health anxiety or fears, um, not helped by media and so on. That's, that's basically been like scaremongering the whole time and selectively using, um, claims or stats to like really send the shits up people to keep them in the house, which, which like, you know, it has a, it has a policy purpose, but there are, um, there's definitely people that have tried to capitalize on that. And they're either knowingly wrong or they're unknowingly wrong.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  And so this is like people selling immune boosting supplements online or, um, like we, we once saw someone selling an anti-cancer diet and, you know, all this kind of thing. And you're seeing people repeatedly make predictions about what's going to happen in the next month. And then they might even be high profile people that are then shown to be like dramatically wrong. And the lesson really is to hold your opinions lightly. I think this is a lesson that I've

• 46:49Speaker 01

  internalized quite a lot. Um, and I think it's been caused by having my anus handed to me a few years ago from big trading losses and.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  That's because trading is the abstracted version of this. Like, yes, you're just looking at a line on a screen, but that that's like the perfect way to distill that down to the pure emotional rawness of being wrong. Because you can invest all your ego into like, oh, no, it's definitely going to go up now. And then you you like you go sunk cost fallacy and you invest you like your your energies into it. And you're like, oh, no, but it's definitely because you're seeing patterns that aren't really there. And then the market just keeps hitting you with pain until you learn the lesson. And so by doing that, you end up realizing, actually, I have to hold my opinions lightly. Not, you know, just for the sake of keeping my ego in check, but because I'm

• 47:45Speaker 01

  going to be hit with pain if I don't. So I think it was a great teacher, and it applies to everything else that if you're able to quickly change your opinion on something based on new evidence, then you're never going to be stuck in a losing position.

• 48:09Chris Williamson?

  I think the problem is, especially with social media, certainty is conflated with truthfulness or expertise.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:19Chris Williamson?

  To someone that's absolutely hard in the paint about one particular point. I keep using this example, but it was just so fucking flagrant. I couldn't believe it. Joe Biden said at the beginning of this year that stopping Chinese people coming into the country was xenophobic. And then two and a half months later said that the travel restrictions were entered too late. It's like, dude, you do not get to fucking do that. You don't get to do that. Like, you're supposed to be the vanguard of statement like truthfulness and honesty. And the problem is that I don't know why, perhaps the media teams say, actually, mate, if you were to track back on that and identify that you were wrong, it shows in the polls that people are going to lose

• 49:03Chris Williamson?

  faith in you or something like that. But that's only if you're so basic that you can only hold one thought in your mind at a time. Like, if your mental RAM is so constricted that like a goldfish, you can only remember the last thing that this person said and not frame it against the things that they said before. But Perhaps, this is me being a dickhead, perhaps, uh, reputation on the inter- the internet is additive with a time limit rather than multiplicative across time. I don't know.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Additive with a time limit rather than mo- multiplicative.

• 49:38Chris Williamson?

  So imagine if you multiplied by zero, you'd end up with a big fat zero. If you say something which is just totally, totally wrong and then decide to multiply it by something else which is totally wrong, you're just at zero. Whereas what it might be is it's just zero plus zero plus zero plus one. And you're like, oh, look at me, I'm at a one. And everyone's forgotten all of the fucking zeros in any case.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Oh, I see. Yeah. So, so I think the, the, the memory span of the feed and all of that stuff is very short. Yes, you'll get the occasional person be like, oh, but you signed back in March this. And, but also the, the whole system, as you said, the polls and the algorithms and everything are all, they don't reward nuance and restraint, which is what every true expert has because they're, they realize how little they know. And they're like, well, you know, it could be okay, but, um, and they reward people who are certain and promote, um, outrage in the comments. And yeah, the, the media thing's a big one. Like I was, um, in the hospital the other day. One of the staff was like, yeah, doctor, are you having the COVID vaccine? And I was like,

• 50:42Speaker 01

  well, maybe, but, um, that was most likely yes, but you know, I don't want to be one of the first guinea pigs, but she was like, I saw on Facebook they gave it to a bunch of African kids and I'll died.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Okay. When did you see that? It was on Facebook? I'll do, you're like,

• 51:02Speaker 01

  okay. I mean, there's, there's some degree of nuance between those two opinions.

• 51:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I didn't even know what to say about him, man. It like makes me viscerally uncomfortable. Like the level of, like especially Facebook this year, the, the nail in the coffin of Facebook has been COVID 2020.

• 51:23Chris Williamson?

  It's just a cesspool of people who haven't got. Do you remember when everyone was adamant that the army was being deployed to London to lock people in their houses? Do you remember that? When people were sharing, oh, well, my cousin is actually is part of the Reserve Armed Guard for the 14th Northumberland Division, and he's sent, and it was forwarded through like a million WhatsApp groups. You're like, what is this? It's like a guy wearing his kit, walking down a street? It's not the impetus for, yeah, it's martial law's not been fucking deployed.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  So this is funny because people believe that more than they believe the immediate stuff, because a friend of a friend is like, like, my brother is still convinced that doctors are shills putting COVID on death certificates of people that didn't have it and to bump up the numbers. And I said to him, like, you realise I work in a COVID hospital and I've not put that on a death certificate for like seven or eight months. And he was like, oh, yeah, but that's because you're too junior. Like, it's the seniors that are getting paid off today. You're like, no, because it's us that do it. And also, I wish I was being paid off by Big Pharma.

• 52:37Chris Williamson?

  How fucking well orchestrated would this conspiracy have to be? How many people would they need to keep quiet about this?

• 52:46Speaker 01

  The thing is, like, I'm not being paid anywhere near enough. I would love to have a little side, side pack from, not really, but.

• 52:54Jonny?

  It's the same thing as like when Darren Brown's like, I don't use stooges. And people are like, oh, he definitely uses stooges. Like, the tightness of his network for him to use stooges and not one of them just go to the Daily Mail and go, I'm a Darren Brown stooge. And that's Darren Brown. So then think like, imagine all of the healthcare system in the world is in on this huge thing. The number of people that have to be sufficiently paid off to not one of them just go to the media and go, here's all the evidence.

• 53:22Chris Williamson?

  Or tell their wife or do whatever.

• 53:25Jonny?

  Here's me being told to do this.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  They'd get a big old payout, wouldn't they?

• 53:27Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Unless Darren Brown has threatened their family.

• 53:32Jonny?

  But but this is what I mean.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Individually.

• 53:34Jonny?

  This, yeah, so that's like the lengths you'd have to go to to get to get everybody on board. And that's just Darren Brown. I mean, he'll just use night magic.

• 53:43Chris Williamson?

  Is there a is there a heuristic that you use for people online scope? Obviously, like you've identified this problem, which is people being confidently wrong. Um, certainly, Jordan Peterson, in one of the interviews, where he it wasn't with Kathy Newman, it was when they sent Kathy Newman away, put her on like a really big course of steroids and got her to do five three one. And she came back with like research and a new haircut and she worked for GQ.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  Remember that.

• 54:10Chris Williamson?

  Um, it was like, ah, you idiot, you haven't seen my final form. And then he basically said, um, if I can take one of your opinions and from that one opinion, predict everything else that you believe. There's something very, very wrong here because you shouldn't take your opinions wholesale. They should be piecemeal. So that's an identifier that I would use. Look, is this person just basic bitch, one on one, conspiracy, left, right, with absolutely no nuance. But that's difficult to tell online. Like, what do you use?

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Really good way of looking at it, that that the world is not doesn't fit into one ideology or category. So if someone only has opinions that have that flavor, there's a big red flag there, isn't there? Um, and so because it shows that they just haven't thought of themselves, they've just taken it. So yeah, my the way I filter that is, um, for example, I I was like, I'm supposed to be a representative for healthcare and I don't really know much about the vaccine. So I need to look at some of the data. So I will I'll never I'll just never go to anything that sniffs of social media and just have to look at the original sources. Um, I just don't think that any of the filtered down stuff that's getting to social media is ever going to be

• 55:27Speaker 01

  accurate or well, obviously, there's the there's a stopped clock is right twice a day, but to try and find that in social media is so hard. Um, there was a good podcast for the layman, if anyone's interested in kind of understanding this stuff with Peter Attia and a guy who is on the board for the FDA approval of vaccines, um, with like.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  And this is his, his special area and he's worked in drug approval and everything. And he talks through in a very systematic way, um, some of the, the mechanisms and processes there. So I would go to things like that.

• 56:04Chris Williamson?

  It's a lot of work. That's the problem. It's significantly easier to read a tweet, take it as true and then start broadcasting it to everybody else or retweet it or tell, tell your parents. Going and doing research and actually having to think for yourself is hard, which is why most people.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  There's a really good video of people going, this guy going around like a Trump rally. And he's asking people, they've all got their hats on and stuff. And he's like, so what do you think of the allegations about Trump's thingy and the transcript? And they're like, think for yourself, read the transcript. That's all I gotta say. And then, oh, have you read the transcript? No, I haven't got time for that kind of thing. He's like, okay, how long did you wait in the queue to get to this protest? And they're like, seven hours. It's like, oh, seven hours. Okay. A lot of free time. Okay. But think for yourself.

• 56:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  And read the transcript.

• 56:51Chris Williamson?

  That's funny.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. You've not read the transcript?

• 56:54Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 56:57Jonny?

  We are running up against my time a little bit, guys. Sadly.

• 57:00Chris Williamson?

  Well, I'm gonna have to do my second lesson and we'll finish it there. We were going to play a little game of bear or bull, but we'll save that for next year. If you do have any bears or bulls, basically topics that you want to hear, whether or not we're bearish or bullish, i.e. negative or positive about and why. Uh, just send them to me or put them in the comments and we will be doing an episode next year. Uh, so my final one was a lesson I learned, I guess, from my injury, uh, which is you're more resilient than you know. And I think this probably actually extrapolates out across a lot of people this year. Um, you know, sadly, there's going to be some people who were with us at the beginning of 2020, who aren't going to be with us in 2021.

• 57:38Chris Williamson?

  Uh, because of the pandemic and the same goes for businesses, the same goes for relationships and financial investments and bank accounts and all the rest of it. But for the people who are still here and are listening to this, you're still here. Like all of the things that you thought this year that were going to absolutely annihilate your life, all of the worries you had that didn't come to fruition or did come to fruition, but didn't end up finishing your world, like you are still here. And that was kind of brought front and centre for me when I ruptured my Achilles. I presumed that my constitution as someone who's had depression in the past and sometimes just has catastrophic thoughts, I just thought I'm going to deal so badly with this. This is going to be, it's just

• 58:19Chris Williamson?

  going to set in motion a downstream fucking like nightmare. And what ended up happening was, yeah, it was uncomfortable. And there was a couple of periods of like, just sheer suffering when I was dealing with stomach cramps from opiate constipation for three days solid, unable to sleep, eat, go to the bathroom, and doing all of that with one leg was like a particular low light. But all of those things that I went through very quickly just reset my expectations. And with sufficient stoicism and a little bit of mindfulness, I actually found like so much more fortitude in myself that I didn't even know existed. And that's kind of put a lot of faith in me for what I might be like moving forward.

• 59:03Chris Williamson?

  Because I genuinely opened a door inside of myself in a house I've lived in my entire life to a room that I didn't know existed. And I was like, holy fucking shit, like where's this fortitude and resilience come from? And it was just like, when it was called, when it was required, it came type thing. And that ties in nicely with realising just how little of our own internal motivations and the fact that our consciousness gets to see this tiny, tiny, tiny little blinkered sliver of what our true motivations are and what we're actually able to be aware of is so much less than the elephant that we're sat on the back of from a mental perspective. And yeah, realising that all tied together for me to think like, stop being so cerebral

• 59:48Chris Williamson?

  about things. You can't be a reductionist utilitarian about absolutely every different potential permutation that's going to occur in life. You are far more resilient than you know. And if you need it, it will be there. And because of that, the person that you are now, when you're worrying, and the person that you are if the incident that you're worrying about occurs, are essentially totally different. Have faith that the future you is going to be able to deal with whatever's going to come. Have faith that the future you will pay the bill, make the business work, regain the client, fix the relationship, get over the relationship, fix the Achilles, deal with the opiate constipation, whatever it might be. Like, all of those things came together to make me sort of really reassured

• 1:00:33Chris Williamson?

  that everybody's constitution is far stronger than than they know. And specifically mine. And I'm like, a really, really good example of somebody who I think, who I thought would be terrible in that sort of a situation. And I managed to get through it. So yeah, that was, you are more resilient than you know.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  Nice. Yeah, that is very good. I like the idea of discovering a room in your house that you didn't know was there.

• 1:01:02Jonny?

  I just hope I don't do my Achilles.

• 1:01:05Chris Williamson?

  I wouldn't advise it. Well, I mean, as a personal development strategy, it was effective, but not necessary. Like, I wish that I hadn't had to do it to realise it. But, you know, in terms of

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  If you'd done a sham Achilles, that would have been better. Like, you're still white.

• 1:01:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20Jonny?

  Still got a white.

• 1:01:22Chris Williamson?

  Gentlemen, I really appreciate it. It's been a year where we've probably not seen each other, probably the least we've seen each other in forever. And maybe even spoken as well, which is a shame. But hopefully, hopefully next year that'll change. And I value both of your friendships. I value the fact that you're both in my life, as I always do. Propane Fitness dot com slash modern wisdom to find out the seven things you won't believe about how to build an online business. And propane fitness dot com slash calculator if you want to get your macro sorted. Did I get it right?

• 1:01:54Jonny?

  He did.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can even just go to propanefitness.com.

• 1:01:57Chris Williamson?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:01:58Jonny?

  That would have been easier. But don't do that.

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  Chris, it's been a pleasure.

• 1:02:03Jonny?

  It has, yeah. Thanks for having us back on, man.

• 1:02:05Chris Williamson?

  We're gonna do it more. We just need, I need to get ahold of you guys. It's significantly easier when we can sit us down in a living room because we can get multiple episodes out.

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  I can't wait till we can do that again.

• 1:02:14Chris Williamson?

  I know, man. I got my, I got my, um, couch like reupholstered as well. Yeah, yeah. It's so much more comfortable. It was all flaccid before and now it's very turgid.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  It's just ready, like beckoning us to.

• 1:02:27Chris Williamson?

  Enter.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:30Chris Williamson?

  Uh, look, gents, thank you. Uh, have a good Christmas and to everybody that is listening, Merry Christmas as well. Uh, I will see you in a couple of days. Actually, Chris Sparks coming on to talk about how to do the ultimate end of your review. Uh, so it's a very timely episode, so stay tuned for that one. As we've already said, all the stuff from Propane Fitness, if you're an online coach, go and check them out and they will teach you how to transition online or to improve your online business as it is. For now, gents, Merry Crimbo.

• 1:02:56Jonny?

  See ya.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  Bye.

• 1:03:11Speaker 03

  Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:03:28Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped moving? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:03:32Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:03:35Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:03:37Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17 and under 15 without parent.