What Happens When You Dedicate A Year To Optimising Your Life | Carl Cederstrom

(wind blowing) Hi, friends. We are back again, and this week we're talking about life hacks, but perhaps with a little bit of a different angle. Carl Cederström is an associate professor at Stockholm Business School, part of Stockholm University, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and Harvard Business Review, amongst many others. Carl spent 12 months immersed in the human optimization movement. Him and his co-author, Andre Spicer, dedicated one month of the year to a different area of their life and trying to optimize it as much as possible. This is the (laughs) absolute zenith Mount Everest of trying to optimize your life, and the experiences that Carl went through have elicited some really, really interesting (laughs) results. He'll tell us exactly what, out of 12 months of pure optimization, was the single best tool that he came across, how he was able to optimize his sex, his relationships, his vanity, his looks, his finances, and a whole bunch of other things. And then we move on to his new book, which is called The Happiness Fantasy. Now, recently we've discussed happiness quite a bit with Susanna Hallinan and in the Q&A that I did with Jonny and Yousef, and it's, uh, interesting to see Carl's approach to it. He makes a strong case that happiness isn't something that any of us should be aiming for, and that there are much more worthy terms that would make us much more fulfilled and content within life. I'm gonna leave it there. I won't present any spoilers (laughs) for the rest of the episode, but I wanted to give another shout-out to Scott McGrath, who sent in a screenshot of him sending out on (laughs) another company internal intranet one of our podcast episodes. Now, thanks very much for that, Scott. I really appreciate it. Again, if you do manage to share one of the episodes on a big network, please let me know, and I'll be able to give you a shout-out on a future episode. Coming up soon, we have got How to Survive University, me, Jonny, and Yousef talking about that, and the long-awaited Life Fails 101 Edition, which is essentially the antithesis to our very slick approach to human optimization. So, there's lots of exciting stuff coming up, but for now, here's Carl. (upbeat music) Mr. Carl Cederström, how are you today?

I'm very good, thank you. How are you doing?

Very good, thank you. All the way from the increasingly cold England at the moment. Where are you in the world?

I'm, uh, in the increasingly cold, uh, Sweden, uh, Stockholm, to be precise.

(laughs) Very nice. You're an associate professor at Stockholm Business School, right?

That's right, which is part of Stockholm University.

Fantastic. For the listeners at home, could you give us a little bit of a background to yourself, please?

All right. Um, well, I live in Sweden, been living in, in the UK, in Cardiff for a few years, but now based here, live in Stockholm, two children, a wife, and the author of, uh, uh, a few books, which I believe we will talk a little bit about. What else can I tell you? That's it, really, I think-