If you could go back 10 years ago or 15 years ago and give yourself two pieces of advice, it would be by Bitcoin and do 531 with progressive overload as your training program for the next 12 years, you'd be massive and rich. The challenge is what's the 45 year old version of you? What's that piece of advice for now? Do 531 probably probably probably.
By Bitcoin and 2.531. Fuck. How was Christmas? Did you do anything interesting?
So I just did. This was my first Christmas, not in a hospital, which was nice. So just spent some family time. I did all the Christmas man things, primary source, turkey, wrapping paper, all of it.
Did you carve the turkey? Carved the turkey. Did the special say grace to Santa at the beginning? That's right.
Is this what someone who's Muslim thinks that white people do? This is what white people do at Christmas. They pray to the turkey and then you have the star, which is Hezbollah, and he sits on the top of the tree. And you have the say grace to Hezbollah and then everybody does bad dance moves and invade the country.
And then you're allowed to eat. No, that's you. That's your people. That's what you guys do.
Is this your first experience of a Christmas celebration? Or have you had more than one of? Yeah. First one.
I do one of everybody's those. True. I think it was the highest Santa rating of all the Christmases that I've had. Like a Santa.
Really full, full beans. Yeah. Perhaps not. None of the food, the food items do not have anything to do with Santa.
I need you to get you need to separate these two things up. Hezbollah, Santa and the food items are free. I like it. The three separate food is a bit rubbish as well, like Christmas cake.
No, if it was nice, it would be available for sale the rest of the year. No, that's ridiculous. You can't say that. You get like for example Easter eggs and ice, but they're not for sale for the rest of the year.
Cream eggs and ice. Cream eggs are available all year round. Because they're just a different shape of. Hang on.
Cream eggs are available all year round. Yes, they're the one type of egg outside of the egg world, the legitimate egg world. I was Mindy eggs. Actually, yeah, mini eggs are also available.
It's quite a bit. So I feel like we've talked about this before, but there's a guy online who made, so he bought an Easter egg, Cream Egg. And he was disappointed because it was a hollow, large chocolate with little cream eggs inside. And he was like, no, no, no, I can't be having this.
So he bought 37 small cream eggs and made a solid Easter egg. It's probably weighed about two kilos. Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely diabetes, but did it?
So, what did you do? Not much, really. I went to my parents. I prayed to Santa.
I was in my dad and that's what I asked him. And yeah, very quiet, quite Christmas actually. It was quite nice. You're getting cool.
You're getting a nice presence. No, socks. Socks. You're getting things Africa, socks and hand.
Always. The truth. Yeah. I want you cross 30.
That's all presents become. Yes. You're actually a bit pleased about all of them as well. The saddest thing is the joy that you take from thinking, I don't need to buy Shaojel for the next couple of minutes.
I got I got four by 500 mls of Shaojel. This year, two litres of Shaojel. You do do Christmas condiments. Not condiments.
What's the word? So you're talking about the truth. Yeah, yeah. There's a word beginning with con or something.
Confectionary. What is it? People listening to that. Tylotries.
Tylotries. You do that by the gallon. Are they all the rest of me? They all the trisome.
This is a story because I tried to transport two litres of Trezime shampoo to Iceland when we were travelling over there. And we had to dump them in a bin. Christika, a hair salons with a hair product. In this case, I meant one did why it was over the bit for weeks.
Yeah, the lady, the lady wasn't happy with you. Well, how was your Christmas? Other than getting a lot of shampoo. Good man.
I got I've eaten a lot. I've had I'm surprised I didn't pee be in the gym today because there was a lot of calories behind those lifts. An awful lot of swelling. Yes.
Yeah. Extra extra water. Yeah, very much so. It was good.
It was good. I got on your backpack. I got some cool shit. I've been after for a little while.
And I fell asleep at like 7pm every day. Just a classic British Christmas. You know, just it phasing in and out of consciousness based on where your blood sugars at and then you didn't you realize that you've fallen asleep again. And you wake up you wake up watching fantastic beasts or whatever.
Yeah. That's a very good summary. I the falling asleep thing's weird because even after a night of like eight and a half hours, it still gets like six to eight years. So so yeah, we also are not used to having over 200 grams of sugar in a single day.
That's true in a single bowl. Yes. Yeah. That's true.
I believe the word was cosmetics. Yes. Relax. I'm not going to work.
And start the podcast as well. You'd be like the whole time. You know, Chris, I wasn't listening for the year. Like fuck.
Don't know. No, no, no. Let's send my brains taken up searching for this one word now. So OK, so we're going to do lessons from 2021.
Couple of lessons that we've taken away each. I did a big 400 episodes, 19 lessons from 400 episodes. The reason that it was 19, nothing special about that. But we can go through some of the things that we've taken away from this year.
Also, if anybody wants to do an end of your review and hasn't done yet, they can go and get my template, which is free. Chris will X dot com slash review. It's the exact process that I follow. And I think you do as well, Seth.
I think it's the same one that you use every year to kind of round out the lessons from the previous year and then set some plans and goals and stuff like that for what's coming up. So I guess some of the things that we talk about today may have been brought out by that. But I haven't done that yet. So I still need to do my end of your review.
So John, I've actually done it every year since last year. Wow. Wow. Wow.
Indeed. If that's not the testimonial that I've always wanted. Then we go. Johnny, what have you got?
What's your first lesson from 2021? There's a hot potato. There it is. Fresh out the oven.
So the I have actually done my end of year of view. Like a good boy, because I thought that was a whole point of this episode. But no problem. I think I might have said this in a life act before, but just the idea of like taking something away.
So if you I think a lot of people who listen to these episodes, I imagine probably do or try and do a lot of things, whether it's like personal development or hobbies, or if you run a business, you'll probably try lots of different stuff. You try and build a builder and podcast or do similar to what we do in probing. You've got a lot of things that you're trying to juggle. And I think it's very hard when you're doing a review process like this and planning the next year to think, I want to do more of it and get all of it, all of it better and hit PVs and all of it.
But it's very hard to know whether any of it's working. So stuff that I've done throughout this year, some of it's forced, some of it's not forced was stopping doing a few things. And I think you either realize just how much of an impact it has and you're even more convinced on it, like more convincing. You never be or you're like, actually, you know, I stopped that and I didn't really notice anything.
So two examples of me from that were when I, so I didn't train my had COVID or had a cold, like a really bad cold in December, didn't train again, both times. Like sometimes I think like, I'll be nice to have a month of training. You'll be nice to have a bit of time where I don't have to go to gym. When I'm forced to not train, you realize just how many things and you said this before, because just how many things it impacts you, stopping meditating for a while, realizing how much of an effect that has when you don't do it.
But for example, things like gratitude, general, genuinely in general, when I stopped doing that, I don't notice that much. So taking things away and then there's loads of examples of the business side as well. So if we stop this year, like we stop the podcast and only when we started getting people saying like, where's the podcast? Or we decided to bring it back in again.
So just testing something with something's actually helping or not by practicing, not doing it for a while, or banning yourself from doing it. Like an elimination diet, but for your daily productivity system. Yeah, or anything, like even as done like certain exercises or like try not squatting for a while, see what happens. If you notice anything, for example, yeah.
Well, we never know, right? This is the fucking thing. You never know what is contributing to your success or failure in life until you start to take things away. Because if you add stuff in, and this is always the problem, whenever someone says, Oh man, you really look like you make great progress in the gym during the first quarter of this year.
What is it that you've done that's caused that progress? Like, bro, I have no idea. I did 10 things. I did a bunch of different things.
My diets changed, my sleep's changed, my programming's changed, this has changed. Or it's what you did in Q4, the prior and actually late games. Yeah. It's worse than I thought.
Stopping doing things that are working forever, terrible. But yeah, so first lesson is I think when you're planning next year, pick one thing to deliberately stop doing for a while. So it's actually something you're not quite so I think we've all got that thing in like morning routine or like, well, I'm not quite sold on it, but maybe do it because you think we have to just try not doing it. Like, for example, I tried not tracking my calories while I was bad for a period of time this year to see if I could get away with it.
But I can't. Some people can. Some people can. And I listened to this podcast.
It was so convincing. It was with our accounts and without it. Tissue, they were like, not tracking is way better than tracking. So it's deep by feels.
Yeah, that sounds so much better. Try it from a month, gain weight, right? Lesson learned back to tracking. Yeah.
It really depends on because I think we're all probably front running Chris's lesson for the year actually because I know you mentioned this one. So last week, but I guess it depends on do you value the progress or do you value the lesson more and that's I guess short versus long term. So as you say, if you're doing a training program that is just throwing the kitchen sink at it and hoping that you get big, you might be happy with the fact that you got big and not really wonder about whether it was the split squats or whether it was the lateral raises or whatever. But as Johnny says, like, if you're interested in continuing to make progress, it's useful to know which part of it was helpful and which part wasn't.
So it's a, I think it's in software design, they call it like exploit this is explore, right? Something like that. So you go through like a phase where you're like trying to find your best off and then putting all of your resources into the best of rather than it being more diffuse because you've already got so in units of like time, energy, attention. Yeah, it's nice to say like, oh, let's just do the maximum less approach.
Just do everything hard all of the time and you'll make progress. But you know, the book recommendation from last year, Chris, essentialism is a book that I think I'm going to need to read a few times and it covers Johnny's lesson that I called the negative pilot where you take something that you're doing, you say, I'm going to actively not do that and see what happens. And I suppose it's similar to what you were saying about choose what you're going to suck out of. Oh, yeah.
So Johnny, as you've been saying that one of the lessons that I have this year overlaps with what you're talking about and then one of the ones that just didn't make today's list but now has made today's list because you basically brought it up. Oliver Berkman who wrote 4000 weeks, he says in advance of making goals, you need to choose what you're going to fail at because a lot of the time when you decide to focus your attention on something inevitably that takes your attention away from other things, then as you notice that those other areas start to slip, you feel the FOMO and you think, Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck. I know that I said that I was going to focus on getting into a relationship or socializing more with my friends, but I've noticed that my conditions dropping because I'm not going to the gym as much or I'm not making as much money because I'm spending more cash on nights out and stuff like that. So then you alter your perspective and you start to try and just do everything at once.
The fear of losing gains in certain areas mitigates your ability to focus on one area in any case. And that's like, it's so hard to let that go because we want, as you say, that maximalist approach. Everybody's looking for, yeah, I know, I know like the normy NPC version of this is that I need to focus and I'm going to have to let some areas fall behind. But how do I get everything at once?
It's like, no, you can't do that. You can't really lose fat and gain muscle and get a girlfriend and save for a house and you know, you can't do all of these things at once. What are the priorities that you really, really care about? It's exactly like you look at people and you go, oh, no, that's just recommendation for the like, you know, that's the suggested serving sites.
No, no, no, I'm the whole thing. Oh, the whole fucking box. Yeah, man, I mean, my, to run off the back of that one, Johnny, my first one is a quote from John Maxwell, which summarizes Greg McEwen's essentialism perfectly. You cannot overestimate the unimportant of practically everything.
And that's John Maxwell. What is also a sort of a quote? Can you say that again? You cannot overestimate the unimportant of practically everything.
You cannot not underestimate the unimportant of not everything. You're looking confusing everyone. Stop it. Stop it.
You're being, you're down in Surrey and you know that I can't get to you. That's how it is. Um, so the, my, my realization for this year is that the ultimate productivity system is to get really clear about what you want and then to ruthlessly call everything else. Like, if you really, really want to make progress in a particular area, just forget about the other things, forget about the FOMO, forget about the failure and that, all of the Berkman thing plays a part of this, right?
Like, choose what you want to suck at. So for me this year, I really, really wanted to rehabilitate my Achilles and to get my lower back into a place where it's super, super stable and I can start to build a good training program in 2022. So I knew that my condition was going to drop this year. I'm like, okay, I'm probably going to look a bit chittier than I usually will do and maybe my left to my strength and maybe training is going to be a bit boring.
But okay, like when I noticed that, when that arises and I think, oh, I don't look as big or my lift on the strong or training sucks a bit, that's the price. That's the entry price I was prepared to pay in order to make the progress I wanted to make. And it helps to mitigate that short and long term thing as well. It helps to keep you in a long term is mindset.
It's like, look, you wouldn't have a problem with dieting for one week before you go away on holiday, but talking about doing a rehabilitation plan for an entire year so that your training for the next five years can be really, really strong. There's, there's like a time discounting problem that we have with that, right? You just think, I'm so long, it shouldn't take this long, but your look, the body takes a fair bit of time to recover. So yeah, you kind of overestimate your importance to practically everything.
The ultimate product of the system is to get really clear about what you want and then to ruthlessly cool everything else. And the only way that you can get really clear is to do something like an end of your review, to look at what, what are the lessons I've learned from this year? What are the single goals I want? Health, relationships, career, and personal growth, like the four areas, just single north star for each of those.
And if you got those by the end of the year, you would be so buzzing with your achievements because there's going to be tons of downstream things that you can't predict in any case. You don't need to say, oh, I want to learn a new skill or try a new sport because you're just going to do that as a byproduct of existing. You know, that doesn't need to be on the list. It's like, what's the real, real big change that I want to make?
The forcing function change. And yeah, that's, it's so funny how both of our lessons for this year have been to do with taking more away rather than adding more in. Yeah, I think that feels just like the phase where, you know, you go through it when you go through any sort of personal development journey. I think the first phase of it is just doing absolutely everything and adding adding adding and you end up with the five hour morning, you end up with most of your day being in morning routine.
Right. Hang on a second. This is ridiculous. Yeah.
I'm going to track my sleep data that's been output by my, whoop and my ora ring to make sure that I, yeah, there's definitely a lot of, I'm going to just select another 30 minutes. Yes. Yeah, precisely. Yeah.
Yeah. It's, do you think, you know how girls that spend lots of time together, their period cycles, their menstrual cycles tend to align? Do you think that we have productivity cycles that have aligned because of the same reason? I would say so.
That's real science as well. Right. That's not real science. Real science, Dr.
approved. Thank you. What's that your productivity means that cycles align. Align up.
Yeah. And you also, you're more productive when it's the full moon because gravitational pull on the lunar energy because of chakras. Yes. So that's mine.
You said what you got. So this actually leads onto very nicely this one, but you have to do the negative pilot stuff first. You have to know what you're exploiting before you do this tip. So if you're not doing that, do you negative pilot?
Pause the podcast. And now. Before we. Yeah.
So once you know what it is, yeah, what it is that you should be doing. Usually the first thing that comes up is I don't have time to be doing that thing. And we know from the last few chats we've had, we've always kind of circled back to screen time is that usually if you say you haven't got time to do something and you look at your screen time and you see how many hours you're binging away on stupid apps, you probably do have the time. So then the next question is, rather than try or the next thing to do is rather than trying to increase your reading speed or how efficient your training is or how high quality your meditation is by using your binodal beats and your infrared helmet and all this stuff, sometimes you don't need the life hack.
You just need to do more of the thing that you know that you should be doing. And I think sometimes the mindset of maximizing the speed and things means that we end up actually cutting corners on just the total volume of time that we spend doing something. So, so trying to listen to the I'm so guilty of it listening to things on two or three times speed and therefore spending less time actually listening to something rather than saying, no, I'm going to dedicate an hour and a half, two hours to actually get through a book or you know, rather than trying to use the news headset and the biofeedback and all that you know, I'm better off meditating for 40 minutes a day than trying to get like 10 minutes of pristine quality meditation or, you know, people do it with training quite a lot as well. Like, you know, you see the guy coming in with his compression.
Occlusion. Occlusion training and all these kinds of advanced techniques, but he's not he's missing 20% of his sessions. So the overarching theme there is really stop trying to perfect your form if you aren't actually doing the reps in the first place. Obviously both are important, but quantity and quality are both needed.
And if you let one slip, then you're losing a big side of the equation. So like reading about meditation versus just using that time to meditate. So yeah, I read so many books about meditation when I look back on them, like a lot of them are saying kind of the same thing. And it's difficult because you know, there's the occasional book that was a game changer that's really leveled it up.
And you know, it was one of those books for you. So for the standard of the past mindfulness meditation, I think mindfulness in plain English is very good. For concentration meditation, Ajahn Brahms book called mindfulness bliss and beyond I think even though it's not about mindfulness, it's about the other side of meditation is fantastic. Cool.
One of the just the kind of quote from that was that enlightenment comes from the soaring summit of silence within. Nice. I don't know what it means, but it's nice. Nice.
Sounds great. Yeah, I am. I think that it is a blending between those two right and Chris Sparks a couple of years ago said to us in order to pick something up, you have to put something down. So when you're thinking about adding stuff into your productivity system or your daily routine or your habits or your life, for next year, you have to presume that the amount of time that you spend being productive is the amount of time that you have.
If you just think, I'll add this in and I'll down regulate my sleep or regulate my efficiency to be able to fit in playing rugby, joining a rugby team and training two nights a week and a Saturday. A massive one, you know, people will have like all the sleep kit and the like of the Ben Greenfield magnetizer for you, Mattress and the sleep mask and all this stuff, but they're doing six hours. That'd be a bit of six hours. Yeah, precisely.
Go to fucking bed for a little bit longer. Yeah, Jesus. Yeah, that's good. I had an experience that years ago with Eric Helms, my coach, saying to me, he banned me from asking him any questions about car back loading and car timing, because it was like, if you, you cannot send me a message, any mail asking me about car timing while you are hungover, like you are completely missing the point.
I'm like, you missed today's training session, you're because you're hungover and you're asking me about timing your carbs. Like, it's kind of like, this is like a keep it simple, stupid approach, right? Stop fighting the small stuff. We know a guy, Johnny and I, who is huge.
And if he's listening, he'll know who he is. We saw him in the gym and Johnny was trying to about his training programme. And it turns out he's just done 531 for several years. But what you said on a life act a little while ago, if you could go back 10 years ago or 15 years ago and give yourself one piece of advice, it would be, oh, sorry, two pieces of advice, it would be by Bitcoin and do 531 with progressive overload as your training programme for the next 12 years, you'd be massive and rich.
You have a pretty good time in your 30s, wouldn't you? The challenge is what's the, what is the like 45 year old vision of you? Same thing, you know. What's that piece of advice for now?
Do 531's probably. Probably the same thing. By Bitcoin, 2, 531. Fuck!
Fuck! So, what do you think of Johnny? Just come down and just do 531. I should have just done 531 the whole time.
What was it doing? Right, Johnny, what you got? What's number two? God dammit.
So this is, I think this is something I've been talking about before. You might have done a video on this course, but just the whole thing of like, make every year when you make progress or you hit a new milestone or it's all numbers really, isn't it generally like achievements, things that happen. And they generally feel the same. I think especially money feels the same.
It's like this year in propane, we've hit like new arbitrary milestones, we've always wanted to hit, or hit a new low weigh in or a new PV in the gym. And I was saying to the back, like it's the end of the year, we've hit the target, we wanted to hit financially, but I feel just the same way as I did last year and the year before. When I do this review process of like, what's the next thing? And unless you're like 10 to 100x your personal income, your life's going to be pretty much the same next year.
And as a quote, it's something that I hit Paul Morsay, which is, I've never heard it, I've heard it like this idea before, but never heard it phrased like this, that the outcomes you hit are the rewards you get for running your system or for pressing play on your system. So like if you're just running this process all the time, you'll naturally just hit these arbitrary numbers and milestones. And so I think the lesson or the thing that I always come back to you when I look at this stuff is trying to just accept that like, certainly the way I'm wide, I think a lot of people wide is just by like little mini wins, like little bits of progress are really all that matter. So setting something that you quite like doing on a day or a week and then just care about the mini wins and almost forget about like, it's so hard at this time of year isn't it?
Because I really want to hit, I want to get that promotion or I want the next milestone wherever that is. And you forget about the, like when you step on the scales and hit a new low way into the week, that doesn't matter because it's not the big number, but actually it's really all that matters if you just stay motivated. You're only knowing about that thing is that you never, you never want to believe people that say that they've actually been there. So because you always go, oh, no, when I hit a million, I'm like, I'm definitely happy.
I didn't make him happy with us because whatever. Like I remember watching, yeah, I remember watching Ali, I'll talk about when he first hit his million subscribers and million million dollars revenue for the year. And he was, you always talk very flatly about, you know, just, he don't like adaptation. Like actually, I was probably most happy when I first hit my 500th subscriber because that meant so much to me at the time.
And when I hit a million, it was kind of like, oh, yeah, well, here we go. Or when I hit a million pounds. And yeah, for some reason, you look at that and you go, no, like, I'll be different. Stephen Bartlett has a story about that that he brought up on the podcast.
He was saying today that social chain got sold for some terrifying amount of money. He was less excited than when he found 19 pounds down the back of a chicken shop seat because his head on a adaptation had kicked in. And yeah, it doesn't really matter how many times you hear the story. You don't want to believe that it's true.
But man, it's so fucking true. It's touches on a bunch of different things that again didn't quite make my list, but unbelievably important, celebrating little wins, giving yourself the, allowing yourself to actually have a celebration. So me and Dean got, when we hit 100k, we got balloons and we took photos. It's a dumb thing.
But that we wanted to do it and it made us feel really fucking good. And you're like, yeah, that's a thing. That's a memory now. We did it.
We worked really, really hard. I hit this goal. And before I decide to set myself the next one and start obsessing about what's coming next, Morgan Hassel has a quote in the psychology of money where he says, the number one thing that you need to do to win the game is to stop moving the goalposts further away from you. Every single time that you hit a new financial goal, you then move the goalposts further away.
Ben Hardy. That's nice. I'm thinking of this straight away. Benjamin Hardy in the gap in the game, which is the gap in the game by Ben Hardy's brand new.
It's only come out about a month and a half ago. It's 160 pages. You can read it in a weekend or you can listen to it. And it exclusively talks about this problem.
And he says that setting goals in this sort of a way is like running toward the horizon, that every single step that you take, your goal moves the same distance away from you. And the problem is that we all love the byproduct that we get out of this, that not fear of insufficiency, but that constant desire for more motivates us and continues to get us to move forward. But like one of the lessons or the lesson that I had that didn't make a list, which is now making the list, is that the outcomes that you're going to get in life are going to come along for the ride in any case. Fearing about whether or not you're going to get them is a fucking pointless exercise that just annihilates your enjoyment in the moment.
Like you are going to get to the place that you're going to get to based on the skills that you have and the work that you put in and the people that are around you and support you. And really, that's probably not going to change if you decide to fret and be anxious and be really, really concerned about what's coming next and constantly think about what you're going to feel like when you hit this next goal. Or if you just do the thing, there is no difference between the man that obsesses over the thing and does the thing. It probably doesn't help.
It probably negatively impacts your performance. Yeah. Well, so that's the thing that was kind of attached to this, which is ironically the I have fact like this is a bit weird with this. This is something I was talking about.
Lunar energy. Lunar energy, exactly. The cosper. Yeah.
But the as soon as you kind of I find as soon as you like accept that, like, oh yeah, the number is arbitrary. It doesn't matter. You just hit it anyway. It's actually easier to hit that way.
And this has happened so consistently to me that I almost don't even want to acknowledge it for fear of setting the the tree or something. But like the more you just like, oh yeah, I'll just like do all the things I need to do today and forget about everything else. Then, oh, shit, I've hit this new target that I had six months ago and I've not even really thought about it since then. But yeah, I'm worried about it.
Like, if you're looking for something in the house and you're like, I know someone smart at it's gonna go, ah, well, it's always in the last place you look because then you stop looking. But what I mean is you're looking for something and then you're like, ah, you know what, forget it. And then immediately it turns up. There's something to do with the ease and the grace that you go through life with for doing stuff like that.
I think this is a big part. John Vivekki this year on the show really reminded me the importance of an embodiment practice, getting out of your head, just getting into sort of just feeling the way that life is. And Johnny Wilkinson on that high performance podcast, he's saying fine joy in the present moment. And then watching the dishes is no more or less important than winning the World Cup final, because if it's less important, that means that I am less important as a human when I'm not playing rugby.
Am I less important now than I was then? No, I'm not. So that pushes the will and the like lunar energy even further than you, Johnny. But I don't know.
I think, I think you said laughing because for about a week you said thought that Johnny Wilkinson was Wayne Rooney. Did you realize that? Wayne Rooney is a really good thing in my head. When you say the word Johnny Wilkinson, a picture of Wayne Rooney comes up in my head.
And I was thinking, wow, he's so aerodynamic and so thoughtful. And then some manga all. I'm sure you said to us, Chris, like listen to Johnny Wilkinson. You said, listen to it.
He's like, wow. And they're like, is this Johnny Wilkinson? The photo of Wayne Rooney? I don't remember that.
Like sports, not my thing, but I know that that's not Johnny Wilkinson. Fucking hell. Yeah, man. I think that's like an absolutely mega lesson.
Whatever it is that you're trying to do, the outcomes are probably going to be the outcomes that you're going to get and fretting and annihilating yourself and being neurotic about it en route to doing it changes literally fuck all about the outcome, except maybe negatively impacting it and it ruins the entirety of your journey up there. And I think that an analogy that Ben Hardy has, he says, you're climbing a mountain. 99.9% of the climb is the climb and only 0.1% is you standing on the top of it. But do you want to really hate all of that bit up there because you're terrified about the prospect of not making it to the top of the mountain?
But equally, like no one summits ever as by accident. Like they're just, ah, yeah, I'll just have a crack at that. Like how hard can that be? Like they have a plan and execute it in the way that they find like very consistent.
Did you watch Nimmsperger's documentary, that 14-piece thing? Really shit the bed. You watch that, sir? No.
Worth while really, really good. Hard bastard. Crazy, Gurker, X, special boat service, special British Special Forces guy holds the record for the highest, the 14 highest death zone mountains in the world. So the 14 mountains that are above 8,000 meters.
And the previous record was six and a bit years. And he does all 14 in eight months. He does one of them with a stonking hangover, like the worst hangover that anybody can believe in. And then he does three of them in 48 hours.
He does like the three of them in Pakistan, gets his weather window and does K2, which is the second highest and something else and something else. And all of the climbing community are just, they go up smack. They can't believe that this guy is a complete freak. The one that he does with the hangover is the most egregious of the lot.
Something about the miners, just missing a chip in their brain for fear. No fear. No fear. So I, two years ago, went up Hell-Valen, which is basically compatible, comparatively.
Bless you. So that's 3,000 feet tall, right? What's that? 950 meters.
OK, so eight and a bit times that. Yeah, OK, so I climbed up Hell-Valen, and honestly, for days afterwards was white. Right. Like, I thought it was going to be not that bad.
It was really difficult. Like, people are listening and laughing. I wasn't, I'm not cardiovascular in the best condition possible, but my God, is that part of anything. And then I watched this guy do, like, on consecutive days, some of the times that.
And the best bit was when he's, there's like all those climbers, the climbers, like, round the base count of one of these mountains going, like, we'll do that, we'll do that, we'll do that, we'll do that, we'll do that, the one that's too badly rising. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the next morning, it does it anyway. It just really was.
Yeah, man. You say. Right, Seth, what have you got for the next one? So my mind is just, it doesn't get easier.
You just get better. I think we expect when we hit certain milestones that you'll somehow, like life will get easier as well, but it just changes the, whether it's because we're changing the goalposts or just because you're just hit with new bouts of problems and qualitatively different types of admin at different stages. And I suppose that relates to if you're building a business, for example, like the problems that you would have in a 100,000 pound business, a very different to what you'd have in a 10 million pound business or a 100 million pound business. It's not necessarily that it's easier just because there's more money, just because you've achieved what you think is the metric that you're going for is just the types of problems change.
Somehow it's a really, really good bit on this, where he says people presumed that one day they're going to have fixed all of their problems. What? Did you think that one morning you were going to wake up and all of your problems would have been solved, like playing a video game and arriving at a level where there's no more enemies, there's no more landscape, there's nothing to do. Yeah, it's in about zero for your entire life.
No, problems are going to be a part of life. You're always going to have challenges. How does it mean? What's the difference between getting better and it being easier?
So, for example, if you lift weights, yes, 100 kilos is going to feel easier, but now the challenge is 200 kilos. And that feels just as hard if anything, probably more painful in some ways because your skin hasn't got thicker. Your connective tissue isn't that much better. So it's just that as you level up, yes, what all you've done is you've made yourself stronger to deal with bigger and bigger challenges.
And you can coast, you can stay out the previous ones, equivalent to the guy who is just always spending 100 kilos and everyone's doing increased it because he's happy doing that. Fine, all the power to you if you want to do that. But I suppose that it's not a fine way to live life if you're always well within your capacity. Ed Cohen is famous for giving that answer a seminar.
What does it feel like? It's got 1,000 pounds. And he just says, well, what's your wonder? Max, it's like exactly the same.
It's what it feels like to you. It's got 150. It's not? So, yeah.
But of course it is. I suppose it's just a get like, learn to enjoy the frustrations or learn to just accept the frustrations and the like, whatever it feels like now is how it'll feel at whatever level you're at. And it's always going to. And so, yeah, I suppose that the two lessons are a don't get complacent, but also don't expect to wake up one day and be like, all right, everything's solved now.
And as I've gone up a level, there's no new problems at this level. It's not going to be an empty level. It's a series of different problems. All right, my one.
So this was a bit less productivity focused, but just opportunity cost is a mental model that most people will be familiar with. It's by going to the theme park, it means that you can't go to the gym. The cost of going to the theme park is the fact that you can't go to the gym. There is a choice between the two.
That's the opportunity cost of you going to do a thing. So I felt like there was an equivalent to do with uncompleted tasks. So I called it the anxiety cost. And I learned this by realizing that at the start of every morning when you wake up, your daily tasks reset, let's say that every day you need to walk a dog and meditate and answer emails and do whatever, right?
That resets every morning as soon as you wake up. The time that you spend throughout the day up until you do that task is filled with ruminative thoughts about the fact that you still need to go and do the task. What that means is the sooner that you can get that task done, the sooner you can feel relieved about the fact that you no longer have to think about it. So the anxiety cost is the amount of time that you take up thinking about the fact that you haven't done a thing.
Let's say that it's somebody's birthday coming up and you need to buy them a present. You can buy them a present right now and never have to think about the fact that you still need to buy them a present. Or you can wait for the next month and how many times you're going to think about the fact that you still need to buy them a present. You can mitigate and reduce the anxiety cost by just doing the thing that you need to do sooner rather than later.
We all know someone who at uni would always leave the essays or the dissertation until the absolute year, the past minute. So not to blow my own trumpet or anything. I got a dissertation in probably a month early. I remember people were saying to me, oh, you're so organized or motivated or whatever.
And it's not really. I'm just avoiding the pain. We've got two types of pain I could experience here, either the anxiety cost or the all-nighters. Well, anxiety cost and the all-nighters and stuff or trying to get it done a bit early.
And you have long summers at uni where you're doing actually nothing. Well, that's just time that you could be doing that. There's nothing special about that time where you can't be. So, yeah, I don't think it's any more virtuous to do one over the other.
It's just what kind of pain do you want to experience? I think it's all the time about like, I should just go to the gym in the mornings. I've just honestly, all the time, like it'll get to 4pm. I'm like, oh, God.
Why does it train earlier? Yeah, like I've got to do this big session. I could have just done it this morning and I could just continue doing the task that I'm doing. And I quite like to finish.
I'm going to have to stop to do my gym session. But the trouble is like you can apply that thing, that idea to everything. You have to do everything immediately. Well, yeah, like I've got to write that email, I've got to make a full of it.
I'll do it all now. I'll do it all now. I'll do it all now. I'll do it all now.
I'll do it all now. I'm open to the toilet, like level 10, the frozen turkey vision I just do nothing ever to do happen. Yeah. Yeah.
I do get a man who just canceled all of this direct edits and just waited to get back in touch with him. He was like, oh, there's too many and I don't know what goes where. Just blank cancel. Just blanket everything.
And you said barely anyone got back in touch with him. Wow. Probably got a bit left coming to his door now though. But yeah, it's a serious time.
After a while, they get the authorities involved. Don't they? It's that anxiety cuts the big deal, but you're right. There's probably a limit to what you should apply this to.
But with things that are easy fixes, if it's a short time investment, choosing a birthday present for someone is such a perfect example. So look, it's gonna take you five minutes. If it's someone that you need to get a little one for, it's gonna take you five minutes to choose a birthday present. Just fucking do it, just do it now, immediately.
Or paying a parking fine, paying a parking fine, especially because the anxiety cost actually comes with a legitimate increase after two weeks in the amount of money that you need to pay. So that's perfectly correct. That's how it should be. If you leave it for two weeks, if you've left the anxiety cost in there, pay double your prick.
It becomes a real cost. Yeah, so there's not just the anxiety cost, but there's the risk of forgetting about the task. Just knowing in the back of your mind there was something I needed to do, but I can't quite put a letter now. It's not a bit.
Do it. Johnny, we got. Is it about you? Uh, uh.
Let's try this, mate. Oh, thank God. Oh. The potato's cool.
Done. So this is in relation to the last couple of years, but I think it applies to most stuff. And I've been really getting into a guy called Zag Dog MD. It might be fun to get on the podcast, actually.
Zubin. Demaya. Demaya. I'd say the bra of scales and things.
But he went through the pandemic and then kind of polarized views on it and all of the, sequally, that we're seeing from how people respond to it. And we were saying in the day, Chris, that there seems to be this. We had tie in now with like different ends of the political spectrum, having like mixed in their views on therology. Yeah.
How the fuck it is that far left and far right have managed to agree on the same thing, which is that big, the large farmer at the top of the tree is trying to kill everybody. Like what the fuck do yoga moms and populist right wingers have in common? Oh, they all hate big farmer now, apparently. Yeah, it's become kind of paked into the actual identity.
And I remember seeing this because I'm politically completely unaesthetic and I like to think that I'm quite evidence-based or at least empirical with the way that other things and obviously working as a doctor as well. You see much more of the clinical side of it. And I have been like, why have people gone so mental? Like what is, what switch has flipped in people?
And actually this guy's ed dog explains it really clearly, which is that people see everything through their moral lenses and it blocks their ability to see reality clearly. And you'll be much more attuned with this. I've not read The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Hight. But he talks about the different moral taste buds and how each of those taste buds touches a different part of our palate and causes us to swing to one side of the spectrum or the other.
And when we're faced with two choices basically over the last couple of years, it makes for a very harsh swing. And then obviously that's reinforced by algorithms and echo chambers and all that stuff too. So I think having that maximum of just realizing that people only see things through their own moral lens gives you a bit more compassion for how people can get to such wacky conclusions. And this is wacky on both sides of the fence, right?
There are people that are so militantly pro vaccine and so militantly anti vaccine. Like both of those stances seem to lose a lot of the nuance because anything that you're 100% or 0% on is inevitably probably not because the world doesn't operate in that. Nobody should be able to say it at the very, very best. It's like 99.9% versus 0.01%.
Like that's where it is at the most extremes. There's two quotes that come up that make me think about that. That Go Into Bogle taught me that a lot of ridiculous ideological views, again, moving away from like vaccine stuff, but just any ridiculous ideological view or extreme ideological view. Is a signal of loyalty to your own side and a signal of threat display to the opposing side.
So it's not about the fact that you believe or don't believe it's that this is a badge of honor that you need to wear in order to be a part of our group. And if you don't, then we know that there's something up with you. This is exactly it. And so now even if you the inner scientist in you says, OK, well, based on the evidence, I think this is my conclusion.
If that betrays the group that you're identifying with, suddenly it's a problem. You have to you now have a choice. You have a moral choice of loyalty versus betrayal rather than truth versus false, which is ridiculous. It also impacts your ability to do sense making yourself, right?
But you don't know your emotions start to feed into your own ability to be rational. I don't actually know what I think about this anymore. I'm genuinely unable to separate out what I think factually from what I feel emotionally. Well, what's interesting is that just to run through the six moral taste buds here, and as you hear them, you'll be like, oh, actually, I can see how COVID will have completely touched on everyone's trigger buttons with each of these.
There's care versus harm, vendors versus cheating, loyalty versus betrayal, authority versus subversion, identity versus degradation, and liberty versus oppression. It's all of those big trigger buttons. I've never read that. I need to the righteous mind sounds like a good one to add on to the endless list of books I'm never going to read.
I just seem to ask your your. No, Jonathan, I love his happiness hypothesis. That's the one that I got through this year, which was fucking outstanding. Yeah, man, that's a serious one.
That's a really guy that posts on my that I've met a couple times. You know, he is your stuff. We've met him in my mind, not the face you're thinking of. In my mind, like a very intelligent guy.
I was very, very broad. Quite quite quite like middle of the road. You use a lot of stuff that like everything he posts at the moment is basically comparing the vaccine rollout to Auschwitz. Seriously, and like making some really, and I was saying this to the back of the day, like it makes me, I can feel the things that he's posting, slowly make me think like, do I need to like reconsider how I feel about all this stuff?
Is this guy is like so convinced and someone will ask him a question beneath like just a question and he attacks them? And then like all of his friends like attack the person to like, what is this guy seen that I can work? He's convinced that this is Nazi Germany. And I've got my booster book tomorrow.
How has this happened? Like these are people who like, ostensibly totally normal two years ago and suddenly something just pressed all the buttons. The same thing goes for people that are pro mandate. I really, really struggle to understand how somebody can be pro mandating a population to take for a disease, which doesn't have the anywhere near the sort of mortality that you need to think about mandating something for.
I use this example on a debate which is never actually going to get ahead. But as I can you imagine, give yourself a thought experiment where this disease has 100% mortality of all females. Would you support a vaccine mandate? In that case, it's like everybody would.
Everybody would say, yeah, the army gets to come in and hold you the fuck down. Because the alternative is the end of human civilization and every female on the planet dies. So it's not a difference of kind. It is just a difference of degree.
I understand that there's a spectrum, but we're nowhere near the threshold that that should happen. So for me to think like, what is it? What is it like for someone to believe that you should mandate people to take a medical procedure to get a vaccine? I'm like fucking hell.
Like, that's another situation that I can't get my head around, but people have gone down both of these rabbit holes. Well, and the fact that you've now shied away from 100% on either side, you're kind of somewhere in the middle now. Well, now you're the enemy of everyone. Oh, yeah.
That's a Sam Harris problem, right? That I would on the extremes, you get agreement from your own side, but in the middle, you get disagreement from both. Like, I think James Smith posted something on his story that they are like, it's fine to not get the vaccine. But if you end up in a better ICU, then you're a ex-operative and everybody like jumped on him.
I was like, how dare you say that? Like, that doesn't mean it's just saying that. Because what's he saying that really? Actions have consequences.
That's all they're saying. I think everybody would agree that like a lot of people who don't smoke get annoyed that smokers take up a little hospital care or that, you know, that's why there's like extra taxes on these things. But people don't like that argument when it's applied to something. It's like a choice that you text requests quickly about it.
And you know, it's like, it's all over TV. It feels like people keep on bringing up and rightly so. People continue to use the fat people. There's most of the people that getting hospitalized overweight or a lot of the people that have huge comorbidities are overweight.
Should we penalize people that are fat when they decide to go into the NHS as well? And the only real difference that you can see, again, it's not a difference of kind. It's just a difference of degree is that the decision to be thin takes a lot of time. Whereas the decision to take a vaccine is an immediate one.
So all that it is, it's just the ease. The people that are pro that are saying somebody that is unvaccinated shouldn't be given this hospital bed, but the person that's fat should be given this hospital bed with the fucking diabetes, the loser, lego, whatever it is that they're getting. The only difference that that person has there in their head is that getting fat is something that's far easier to do somehow. And it happens over time.
I don't know. That's the kind of thing they ask in medical interviews. Like you've got three patients and two beds, you know, one of them's a child with cancer. One of them's a convex that's come out of prison for doing this.
And he's a smoker and then the third one's a heroin addict, like which one do you give a bed to? And what's the relative life extension that you can provide for each of these people? And you want to talk through the different moral decision-making matrices. So the trolley problem where they are, you're like, who do you run over?
But the people who, you know, people say, oh, it's fat people over the problem because they shouldn't be fat. I think it was suddenly everybody who has less than 5,000 pounds in a current account dies of covid or everybody who gets less than seven hours of sleep dies of covid or every, you know, everyone's got a thing that there is shit out that comes down. Like it's poorly managed. But, you know, there might be someone who's overweight, but it's very successful financially or has a really immaculate house or, you know, whatever.
So you just like pick something that happens to be the thing that you're not at all there for. And that's that's that's a good way to go to a good way to put it. The thing that the most annoying group and this is it doesn't matter whether you're pro or anti-vaccine are the people that are so militant to jump on debates online. Like those are the people that covid should have got those are the ones that it should have fucking killed the people that decide to take the most extremist outlandish, like totally bombastic view and immediately start spirting out their opinion whether it's well informed or not, bro, this is not the hill that I want to fucking die on.
So get out of my comments section. Like I do not care enough and people think that this is this is some sort of a stand that you're really, really going to give a shit about. It's like, dude, I don't give a fuck about your half baked cod psychology opinion about why it's actually happening to be drawn into this thing. There's actually like there are bigger problems in our day to day lives that we need to sort out your fucking relationship with your daughter out.
Like, how about that? How about that? There it is that the women's and surgical, surgical rinse. So political incision.
Moving on, Johnny, what have you got? Scalpel out. So one of the things I realized this year was that this is a business, I guess it's only ready applies to business owners, I suppose. Some of our like best weeks and months were either way, I wasn't online at all, so I was away or I worked less for whatever reason, which makes me feel like I make things worse.
Firstly, like when I'm trying hard, it is worse. But also just I think a reminder that I guess like as a, I think I heard Jeff Bezos say like he considers himself to be paid to make like one to three decisions a day, like one to three high quality decisions a day. And I think as some, if you're in charge of something, you're in charge of a team or you run your own business or whatever you try to do, like really, the thing that you, that moves you forward is just having a few hours of like clear energy filled headspace to make some decisions and do a few key things and actually like constantly trying to push the boulder up the hill with time often just makes it worse. And I'm always, we had a quote that you said, although when I was referring to it, it was a business mentor of ours said something like, you know, as a business owner, you're like a, you're like someone in the SAS, you're like in through the window, kill the target, and get out again, like don't like sit on the sofa for five hours.
And I think it's so easy to do fill your, fill your days with things that don't necessarily matter. When it's just the few things you could have done. Do you think that this is a byproduct of people that are small business owners and entrepreneurs that have started things from the ground floor up because they have that sort of firefighter putting out the small problems, operations first, I'm going to do the logistics, I'm going to fix the problem. Like that's what all three of us have grown up running businesses as the guide that the book stops with.
And I wonder how much of that is kind of programming from how we came up. Yeah. For the first couple of years of us running propane, like we were doing the marketing, the accounts, the delivery, the making the logo, like posting on Facebook, or just literally like you are the entire HR, you're the entire suite of departments, aren't you? As when I have a problem, I email HR, which is you, sir, and then he forwards it to me to deal with, to deal with toxic culture problem in.
Work culture, horrendous, yeah, all sorts of work. But yeah, like, so this idea that like, having a busy month and overly busy when they're working too long, to me, I was on a Monday, impacts Tuesday, which impacts Wednesday. And I think just as woo as it sounds, protecting the energy and the head space you have of other things, because actually doing like two hours of focus work on something or even just two hours of thinking in a day is more important than spending all day in your inbox. I can't remember who it was.
Sorry. Good. No, that's it. I can't remember who it was that said that if you look at the role of a business owner or CEO, like specifically what they actually do, they're a hard to replicate complex decision engine.
So that's what the value is. That's why the person at the very, very top of the tree gets paid so much, because they can aggregate all of this data, both objective, subjective, qualitative, quantitative, the felt sense, all of that stuff, right? They just aggregate all of the shit that's going on and they like, and they just spurt out a single answer at the end of it. And the presumption is that that answer is the right one, like that.