19 Lessons From 400 Episodes - Jordan Peterson, James Clear & Douglas Murray | Modern Wisdom Podcast

Don't identify with what your mind says any more than you identify with what someone on the street says. How many times have you thought a thing that didn't turn out to be true? You are your most untrustworthy friend. Imagine all of the things that you've thought that didn't turn out to be true. All of the concerns that you had, all of the fears, and the overthinking, and the absolute certainties about whatever catastrophe was going to occur, or absolute certainties about whatever success was going to occur and it didn't. If you were friends with that person, you would think that they were the biggest gobsh-... on planet. Hello, everyone. Welcome back. It is the 400th episode, the big 4-0-0, and to celebrate, I thought that I would give you some of my favorite lessons from the last nearly four years of doing this show. Four years sounds like a lo- well, it, it is quite a lot. I definitely didn't think when we did the first episode in my office with a friend who was going to row the Atlantic naked that we would've done 400 episodes only three and a half years later. Worked out that there's been five million hours of Modern Wisdom content watched and listened to over the last three and a half years, which is pretty crazy, uh, so thank you to everyone who tunes in, who listens, who shares the episodes with friends, who messages me and sends nice things to Video Guy Dean, or supports the show in whatever way you do. Uh, it's very, very appreciated. There is nothing that I would rather do at 6:00 PM most weekday evenings than speak to whoever the hell it is, a porn star, or a psychologist, or a philosopher, or a sports person, or me on my own. How it's going to be this evening, and I'm going to go through, like I said, some of the best lessons that I've taken away from the episodes. Some of them are from guests, stuff that we'd brought up on the show, and others are part of during my research for people that were coming on, and then some are sort of common themes that I've noticed throughout all of the episodes. So, let's get into it. Number one, "You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything." This is a quote from John Maxwell, but it reminds me of Greg McKeown's work with essentialism. Essentialism basically reminds us that almost everything that we spend our times doing, uh, they're trivial nothings. They don't contribute to our higher order goals. They don't actually push us towards achieving the thing that we genuinely want to. And in the modern world, we have far more opportunities to do things than time to do them, and far more things to do than things that we care about, which means that we constantly get distracted. We get... we stray from the path of the thing that we're here to do, the thing that is genuinely our highest point of contribution, that we genuinely care about. We just get frittered away, distracted by shiny objects, and you can fragment your life into so many tiny little slivers that you never actually get any meaningful work done. You never progress toward the thing that you genuinely care about. I'm pretty certain, in fact, I'm 100% certain that the biggest productivity strategy in the modern world is just getting ruthlessly clear about what it is that you want to do and then culling everything that doesn't contribute to it. What is the goal that you want to achieve, and then what are all of the things that don't contribute to that, that you don't have to do? Just stop doing those. Like, what's the prize that you win for being the person that keeps your Instagram notifications at zero all the time? Or what's the prize that you win for being the fastest person to reply in a group chat? Does that move you toward the thing that you genuinely want in life? Probably not. So why are you doing it? You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything. It also reminds us to stop overthinking. We believe that so many of the things that we decide we're going to obsess over are really, really crucial to what it is that we've got going on, and they probably don't matter. And in a week's time, you're probably not going to remember the thing that you were frantically concerned about right now. So... I really like that. I really like the idea of trying to remember that no matter what happens, you're probably going to be fine. I mean, you're sat or stood here now listening to this, so you haven't met your demise just yet. Have faith that you're probably gonna be okay in the future, too. All right, next one. Uh, "Perfectionism is procrastination masquerading as quality control." This is, this is me quoting me, but Tiago Forte on the show probably nearly three years ago now, uh, he tweeted something that got me thinking about this. "A paradoxical thing about people who consistently choose the most high leverage activity is that their efforts have a rough edged, half-assed quality because polishing things to perfection is a low leverage activity." Polishing things to perfection is a low leverage activity. What Tiago is for- talking about here is when you're trying to get better at something and iterate on your craft, whether that be content creation, or writing, or playing music, or releasing a new business, or starting a new relationship, or whatever it is, people will use procrastination, uh, use perfectionism as a form of procrastination, that they don't want to begin doing something until they're absolutely perfect on the brand name, or the logo, or the timing, or whatever, and it's stopping you from learning by doing. If you get something out into the world, you will learn by iterating and reflecting on the process. Okay, I did a thing. How did it go? Was it good? Was it bad? Did I find it effective? How can I improve the next time? That is so much more worthwhile. You're going to benefit so much more from that than you are from getting it from 90% to 93% quality, and it's a low leverage activity because so many people get caught up trying to go from 90 to 93. In that time, you could have done two 90s or three 90s. You could have continued to release these bits of work. And someone replied to that tweet and said, "Perfectionism is a nice way to hide from shipping at a pace necessary to find what works." So that's talking about this iteration process. You need to work out how to be good at the thing that you're trying to do, and you don't learn that by trying to be perfect. You learn that by being good enough and delivering something to the market, or to an audience, or to whoever it is that you're trying to reach.... that's how you do it. You do it by actually getting out there and shipping your work. Next up, (smacks lips) "You do not serve people from your cup. You serve them from the saucer which overflows around your cup." So this was the first episode that I did with Aubrey Marcus, and he blew my mind on that. I, uh, knew he had this big podcast and this successful book and stuff, and I'd li- listened to him, and I thought, "Yeah, he's- he's good," but I- I wasn't really sure on just what it was going to be like in real person. And, uh, yeah, he really, really impressed me. The guy's the real deal. He's a very, very aligned, awakened human. And, um, "You do not serve people from your cup. You serve them from the saucer which overflows around your cup." This is Jordan Peterson again, right? Clean your room, sort yourself out before you go out and you try to fix the world. But what I like about it is that it makes us- it reminds us that by contributing to our own sense of well-being, by doing something meaningful that we care about, that we know is going to make us a better person, that everyone else comes along for the ride. If you work very, very hard on yourself, you're probably going to improve the lives of the people that are around you. There was a, uh, a concept that I thought about when we were discussing that that just made me think how many people have tried to pour from a half-full cup, how many people are trying to fix the people that are around them when they've got these gaping holes in their own mindset, in their own worldview, in their own daily routine. The same as being in a- an airplane, right? The masks come down, you have to put your mask on first before you help someone else, because if you're suffocating you're of little use to everyone. Now, that being said, this isn't an argument for, uh, ruthless, selfish, uh, single-minded capitalism just for you. Doesn't mean that you have to wait to be perfect before you can try and help other people, but that the best way to serve others is to make sure that you're sorted first. I think that's the main lesson to take away. Next up, "Do people love you for who you are or for what you do?" So this is James Smith, uh, asked himself this question when he was off his face on mushrooms in Bondi Beach somewhere listening to Hans Zimmer, and it's a really, really good question. "Do people love you for who you are or for what you do?" And it's a difficult one to answer because we are what we do, right? Like, when you meet someone new you say, "Hi, what's your name? What do you do? So tell me- tell me about you, what do you do?" Like, what you do is almost more important, it's seen as more important than who you are in the modern world. It is your identity. And, "Do people love you for who you are or for what you do?" is a question that forces us to work out, "Am I- am I being loved for what value I add to the world or intrinsically for the sort of person that I am?" When I spoke to Aubrey about this and asked him this question, he turned it round and said, "Do you love you for who you are or for what you do?" Because what we're asking the world to do is love us for who we are, right? Not for what we do. Meanwhile, we choose to love ourselves for what we do, not for who we are. The last business interaction that we had, the last sports game that we played, the last date that we went on, the last interaction with our kid or partner or boss or whatever, that is what determines our sense of self-worth for the next time up until the- the next opportunity that we get to reset that. That's obviously- that's obviously wrong. We're judging ourselves on what we do, not who we are. We feel like our self-worth is contingent on the work that we put out into the world. We're asking the world to do something that we haven't done yet. So yeah, "Do people love you for who you are or for what you do?" It's just an awesome question and it really reminds us to sort of focus on the- the things that matter most, which is you sorting yourself first. Next up, Douglas Murray, "When the barbarians are at the door, we'll be debating about what gender they are." So (laughs) I heard him say this at a live Spectator event, and his point is that there are genuine evil people out there and that the West has become quite decadent and quite caught up in its, uh, social justice, identity politics world. And if China comes a-knocking or if there is a large global war, the fact that we have been caught up in the culture for a long time debating more trivial matters than war and genuine evil, uh, we're not gonna look very good. We're not going to... I- I don't think that anybody could look at the West at the moment and say that it's a strong, powerful, good role model, that it's cohesive, that people feel like they're pulling together. None of these things strike very true for me. Um, but that aside, like, the "When the barbarians are at the door, we'll be debating about what gender they are," is quite a- a funny quote from Douglas. But what I tried to pull him up on the last time that we spoke was, I don't like the idea that smart minds are getting distracted by identity politics. So, Douglas can say all he wants that we shouldn't be focused on these sorts of issues, but he gets brought- he gets pulled into these sorts of discussions and so do Andrew Doyle and Zuby and, you know, pick your center or right-leaning commentator that gets stuck into identity politics stuff. Those guys get tied up talking about it. Uh, now, whether or not they feel justified, whether they feel like this is a- a real problem that we need to stop from occurring or else they're going to capture the culture and that's going to have real issues, both sides are playing badly. So one side is baiting and the other side is responding. I appreciate that it's kind of like, "Oh, well, he did it first. I'm not going- I'm not going to let them win." So I- I understand why it's there. And don't get me wrong, I- you know, I see a Libs of TikTok video and I think, "Oh, this is ridiculous. I should do a reaction video to that." But...... if we are genuinely concerned about the rise of China and Russia and misinformation, and what's going to happen with... I mean, we've just had a pandemic that might have come out of a lab. Is this not, is this not the time for us to try and focus on things that matter more? Um, so yeah, I f- I feel like something needs to change in the culture on the right as well as on the left. So on the left, they need to stop focusing on mental woke identity politics stuff. But on the right, they need to stop treating them, treating these news stories with quite as much respect and clout because it does, uh, amplify the message of whatever craziness it is. Now, even if you're mocking it, that's fine, but I think there's been enough mocking of crazy stories from the left to have split-tested the, "Can we mock this out of existence," uh, drug. It's not working. It... Taking the piss out of inherently ridiculous and self-contradictory identity politics videos isn't stopping them from happening. So, there needs to be another approach. I, I genuinely think that ignorance isn't too bad of an idea. Um, (smacks lips) and at the very least, the greatest minds of our time shouldn't have their time spent debating about whether men are men and women are women or not. There, there has to be something better that they should spend their time doing. And Douglas Murray's had a pretty long and illustrious reading, writing, and academic career, as far as I'm aware. I think Andrew Doyle went to some pretty prestigious universities and Zuby also went to Oxford, and these people are spending their time arguing on Twitter. Like, I want them to be doing better things. And I also want people on the left to be doing better things 'cause if you're a moderate leftist and the (laughs) most well-promoted, uh, individuals from your side of the aisle are these purple-haired libs of TikTok people, that, that sucks as well. Like, nobody should be supporting what these people are doing. But yeah, i- it's sort of like, um, you should be bigger than it, is maybe the question. I'll, I've got Douglas coming on, he's got a new book coming out in next year sometime. April, I think. Uh, so he'll be back on, so ask him about this again. Next up, "Don't try to beat the market, just dollar cost average into it." And this is Morgan Housel's, uh, investment advice. So, there's this story that Warren Buffett had a bet with a hedge fund manager and he said, "You can pick..." Oh, I think it was with another person and that could pick five different hedge funds and say, "You can pick all of these. You can pick whichever hedge funds you want, see what their returns are over, I think about seven years, and I'm gonna pick the S&P, and whoever gains the most between the S&P and any of these five hedge funds, they win." The S&P 500 won, which is the, um, 500 biggest companies in the world, an aggregate of all of their changes in value. And Morgan is a guy who spends a lot of time talking about finance and personal investing. Uh, he's got a book called The Psychology of Money, which is an awesome, awesome read that you should go and check out. It's part of the Modern Wisdom reading list, which you should go and get. Uh, chriswillex.com/books for a free list of 100 books that you should read before you die. And, uh, yeah, Morgan says that most people try and beat the market when all that you need to do is track the market. So, dollar cost averaging is setting up, um, an ISA or any sort of normal, uh, stocks and shares savings account, and just depositing a steady amount of money into it every single month. So yeah, sure, there's going to be movements up and down within the market, but over time, you're going to catch most of them at relatively all right points. Yeah, maybe you'll catch one when it's a little bit high and then it pulls back, and yeah, maybe you'll catch some when it's a little bit low and it pushes up. Over time, it'll average out, dollar cost averaging, and it just removes most of the complexity. I don't think... I certainly know that I don't have the mentality or the mindset to be a trader. I've tried it. I've tried picking stocks and fucking about on eToro. And man, (sighs) it is... For anyone that is a trader that's listening, you are a psychopath inside, because I don't understand how you can put up with watching your net worth get ragged around at the mercy of the market. I, I'm just n- totally, totally not built for it. So, rather than that, the solution that I've gone for which is what Morgan proposes is to not try and beat the market, to just dollar cost average in. So just put money into a stocks and shares ISA, which is linked 100% to the S&P 500, and just do that every month. That's it. Just every month, same amount goes in. You don't have to think about it. You know that it's... Uh, uh, barring some sort of catastrophe, and I mean, if the S&P 500, uh, crashes, there are far bigger problems than what's happened to your money. We're probably in the middle of some Mad Max post-apocalyptic nightmare world. Uh, so yes, that is probably the only investing advice that 80% of people probably need to know. Next up, "Consistency is even rarer than talent or enthusiasm." So this was just a common theme that I found throughout a lot of the episodes where I was speaking to people, again, partly for business and content creators, but also just for people that want to improve themselves or get good at anything. Lots of people find that they pick up a new sport or a new pursuit and they have a talent for it. They have a natural knack for whatever it is that they're doing. And other people also, when they start something new, find that they're enthusiastic about it. It's quite common. You know, it's basically every January 1st in the gym. You rock up and everyone's keen to do something, they've got these new New Year's resolutions, they're all enthusiastic, and some of those people will be talented. But how many of those people end up being consistent long term? How many of those people do that thing over and over and over again, every few days or every f- every week?... for years and years and years. Almost no one, because it's not sexy. It's not sexy and it's boring, and you will lose talent. Your talent will only get you so far. Very quickly after you do anything, you're going to be out of the pool of newbs and into the pool of other people who are as talented or maybe more talented than you are, who are as enthusiastic or maybe more enthusiastic than you are. And that's why consistency is the perfect competitive advantage, because it's the best way to do what we were talking about earlier on, which is to leverage, uh, shipping at a pace that allows you to know what works. You get to do a thing consistently, the market or your audience gives you feedback. You go, "Okay, well, got to get better at that. This has gone well. This has gone badly. We'll change it." And it's so rare that it's immediately going to separate you out from almost all of your competition. So the statistic about podcasts that 90% don't make it past episode three, and of the 10% that do, 90% don't make it past episode 20. So by making 21 podcasts, you're in the top 1% of all podcasters ever, and that's purely based on consistency. Can you create 21 podcasts? Okay, there you go. Top percentile pod- podcaster. Why? Well, it's because consistency is fucking well rare, that's why. "Loneliness is a kind of tax you have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind." This is Alain de Botton from The School of Life. Now, Alain, uh, won't reply to my emails, or his assistant won't reply to my emails, so... This is what he would have said, um, had I have got him on the show. This is what he will say when I eventually get ahold of him in his little jumper, sit him down in a seat, speak to him. "Loneliness is a kind of tax you have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind." So the more unique you are, the fewer people are going to be like you and the fewer people will get you. And this means that it can suck, right? You can end up feeling a bit more lonely because it's harder to find people that you want to have a conversation with. If your interests are perfect, ba- slap bang in the middle of the normal distribution of normal, then everyone, or the vast majority of people are going to agree if you said the match last night or fucking what happened on Hollyoaks or whatever, you can tell that I'm really shit with pop culture, um, then there's gonna be lots of people for you to find to speak to. The difference is that if you have... as you start to push out toward those ends of that distribution, there are fewer and fewer people who genuinely are like you, and it can cause us to be tempted to compromise who we are, right? We want to try and push ourselves right into the middle because we think, "Well, even if I'm not fully embracing me, at least there will be other people like me." So you'd rather be a persona in a crowd than yourself on your own. And I get this compulsion. I, I, I genuinely do understand. But I think that the increase in depth of insight is worth the entry price that you pay. So you get to see the world in a different way to other people because you have this unique perspective. You have different interests. If you have a slightly more complex mind, then yeah, you're going to feel things more deeply. It's both a blessing and a curse to feel everything so very deeply. You are going to. But also, it means that you get to see the world in a different way to other people. You will have a deeper insight. You will feel things in a more nuanced and subtle and high-fidelity way, which is pretty cool. I don't think that that's something that you should let go, certainly not simply because you're struggling to find someone to connect with. So... And the other thing as well is that over time... I mean, this is the topic of my TED Talk basically, um, TEDx talk, not TED. Didn't call. Um, yeah, the weirdness in compromising yourself causes you to degrade your own virtue. It, it's not what people actually want in any case. People think that they want to be just like everyone else or people think that people want people that are just like everyone else, but they don't. They want people that are romantically unique and trailblazers that have odd idiosyncrasies and quirks that they can fall in love with. That's the people... Think about whoever it is that you admire in the world. You don't admire them because they're mind-numbingly normal, because you know one of their views and you can accurately predict everything else that they believe, because what stops you from loving somebody else that's the exact same as them? The more unique that you are, the fewer people are like you, and that's a big thing to be proud of. "Imposter syndrome is a feature, not a bug, of growing as a person." So this was Seth Godin, uh, marketing hyper genius, uh, on the show, start of this year maybe, end of last year, and I asked him about imposter syndrome and he said that why would you not feel imposter syndrome when you're doing something brand new that you've never done before, especially if it's maybe something that no one has ever done before? So we try and rid ourselves of imposter syndrome or ask why it's there, but what imposter syndrome is, is, uh, an uncertainty in yourself around whether or not you can complete a particular task or achieve a goal or project or whatever that you've got in front of you. But if you've never done it before, then quite rightly you've got imposter syndrome. It's an accurate representation of your uncertainty about whether or not you're going to be able to do the thing that you say that you're trying to do. So imposter syndrome isn't a bug, it's a feature. It's an accurate representation from your mind thinking, "This is... I'm trailblazing some new ground here. I've never tried to lift this weight before. I've never tried to go out on a date with this type of person before." Whatever it is. Right? That's you just expanding your domain of competence. And if you think of it like-... if you feel a little bit of imposter syndrome, if you feel a little bit of, um, concern about whether or not you can complete the thing that's in front of you, what if you reframe that as a signal that you are doing work which is good, which is growing you as a person, if it means that you're in the proximal zone of development, just- just outside of your competence? What if you saw it as that? What if you saw it as a- a- a line in the sand that you've crossed that lets you know that you're trying to do new things? And that, on the other side of this, you should have proof that, "Wow, look at my capabilities. Look at what I was able to do. That's new. I couldn't do that before. I didn't even know that I could do it before. I wasn't even sure that I could complete it." So yeah, imposter syndrome is a feature, not a bug of growing as a person. I really like that- that reframe. And, um, it makes a lot of sense. If you haven't done something before, where's the fucking proof that you're gonna be able to do it? (clicks tongue) "Never lie," Jordan Peterson. So, whether it's by omission or commission, lying degrades your virtue. Your internal sense of self-worth is keeping check even if you aren't. Telling the truth is a superpower. It works for everything. Start being radically honest today and your life will change. So this is one of the biggest changes I think I made between my 20s and my 30s, was how much I value truth and how much I tried to focus on telling the truth. Not because I was lying all the time, but just that it's easier sometimes. It's easier to feed people convenient omission, or to tell people what you think that they want to hear, or to give a more, I don't know, a- a more acceptable form of an answer, or whatever it is, whatever it is that you're talking about, right? That was me for a very long time. And the problem with that is that you can end up telling little fibs and- and curving off edges of yourself for so long that you genuinely don't know who you are anymore, and you have to scrape all of that away. If you want to try and find out your genuine opinion, your truth, your actual innermost logos that you need to speak forward, if you want to try and do that, you have to scrape away all of the stuff that you've piled on top of it, all of this muck and all of these layers and layers and layers of you being performative and saying what you think people want to hear. (clicks tongue) It's not very nice. Like that was- that was the largest amount of self-work that I still have to get through now. The biggest chunk of it was me working out who I genuinely am. I mean, that's hard enough on its own. We are a mystery to ourselves, a- a mystery to everybody, especially ourselves. And yeah, if you're- if you're lying, you're not making that any easier. It's like, you're already struggling to see the person that you are, you're already mostly a mystery, and now you're wearing a bunch of different outfits and ha- trying on different opinions that you know aren't yours, so you're just further muddying the waters that you're trying to see through. So yeah, I mean, almost all of the people that I know that I really, really value in life are the ones that are incredibly truthful. And that doesn't mean that they'll, um, (clicks tongue) not pull their punches, that doesn't mean that they won't say things in a- a charming or an empathetic or a caring way. I'm not saying that you need to be an a- a brutal asshole with everybody. But that, with a little bit of charm, and charisma, uh, and care, you can deliver exactly what you yourself need to hear, what the people around you need to hear, whether it be at work, whether it's in a relationship, whether it's with your family, whether it's with friends. You can be a really, really good influence on them because most people are just going to take the easy route out of whatever the conversation is. If there's something that, uh, someone in your friend group, everybody knows they need to stop drinking, but no one really wants to bring it up with them, that- the fact that everybody knows it and nobody's saying it is exactly why you need to be the person that takes them to one side and says, "Hey man, I wanna, should we, why don't we have a chat about- about how much you're drinking? Like, are you okay? Is there anything that I can do to help? I- I'm really concerned about you." Like these are more compassionate sentences than, "Oh, leave him, he'll be fine. Nah, it doesn't really matter. You know John- John's- John's sweet, John's sweet, he just, he likes to party, he likes the sesh." Nah. Nah. You can be the person that says the thing that that person needs to hear. And if you are only friends, if- if the people around you are only accepting of you when you're lying, you need better friends. Shane Parrish, "The wise of every generation discover the same truths." "The wise of every generation discover the same truths." This was really cool because there's this sort of yearning for tradition that we have at the moment. Tim Stanley a couple of weeks ago, he spoke about that. And it really does feel like so many of the solutions that we come upon are things that, you know, your parents would have told you. It's like that midwit meme, like the idi- (laughs) the idiot and the genius, uh, arrive at the same place, and the midwit in the middle is the one that doesn't. It's like the, uh, parent and you at your highest virtue, your highest wisdom, you arrive at the same thing, and then you in the middle is the one that's trying to overcomplicate everything. The, um, "Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Take the solution away, and often the problem comes back." So, so many times people are trying to reinvent the wheel, okay? With relationships, "Okay, we h- see rising divorce rates, so maybe, um, monogamous relationships are horseshit, and we should all just try polyamory and just fuck everyone." Um...... yeah, I mean that's one, that's one solution. Or it could be that marriage is just a bit hard and we've now got technology that is throwing us to the lions with regards to novelty and distractibility. Um, and, uh, I mean marriage rates are, are decreasing as well. The wives of every generation discover the same truths. There's been a lot of unlimited numbers of people that have thought about the biggest questions that plague all of us. Why do you think that in 2021 we're going to be able to immediately just come up with a brand new set of solutions to stuff? These have been split tested a lot, an awful lot. Thousands and thousands and thousands of people have been consumed by the same thoughts that you are every single day. Whatever it is that's concerning you, whatever it is that you're worried about, that belief that you have a, a particularly unique problem that no one on the planet has ever faced before is almost certainly horse shit. And looking for solutions in the future or the present is probably a pretty bad idea. There's definitely someone that's come up with, that's faced what it is that you're struggling with. The wives of every generation discovering the same truths reminds us that if you look back, if you try and find a little bit of wisdom from the past, there's probably an answer already there. "The bleeding edge of internet culture can predict downfalls six to 12 months before most normies even realize." That's from Ryan Long. Um, so Ryan's an interesting guy. He's this comedian dude that I had on the show, uh, earlier this year. And he's like quite a bro, uh, kind of like, he's like 2021's version of American Pie, sort of. Comedian, used to be in this really famous ska band, uh, in Canada, a ska punk band. And he's still got that sort of punk rock thing going on with the hair and the nose ring, and he's like just super bro-y about everything. Um, but I find, uh, he's cool. He's genuinely a cool guy in a way that I don't think I, I could ever be. And his insight around the absolute bleeding edge of culture, like he has his finger on the pulse. Some of the things that he says in the episode if you go back and listen to it, he drops some names and he makes some just ... What he takes for granted as part of culture to me seems like something that I've only glimpsed the very, very corner of. So he'll bring up the name of someone or he'll mention something about a person that he doesn't think is very cool or just a, uh, a passive put down about some, some content creator, whatever it might be. He does that so seamlessly because to him it's plainly obvious. But this person or whoever it is that he's talking about does it on loads of his other videos as well. These people are still riding high. So Dan Bilzerian was a, uh, an example. If you looked at people like Philyon, uh, who's an awesome YouTuber that you should check out. Uh, I think maybe Coffeezilla did some stuff on it. I think Tom Mc, fucking Swedish looking guy with a beard who does finance stuff, Tom somebody, um, those guys had done takedowns of Dan Bilzerian. They'd realized probably a year, year ago, 18 months ago or something like that, that Dan Bilzerian was kind of coming across like a bit of a man-child, that he was this, he was just weird. There was something just a little bit off. He hadn't positioned himself appropriately. And then look at what happened six to 12 months later. It turns out that he's sort of a bit of a charlatan who said that he owned this huge house and he didn't. He was renting it. And his company's finances were in the toilet and it seemed like he was getting bailed out by his dad who had all of this money that he'd got in this dodgy way and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if you had kept your ear to the ground on the right areas of the internet, you would've been able to predict this 12 or 18 months in advance. And that's the, uh, world that people like Ryan kind of seem to be in. Now that's not me saying that he's gonna be fucking Cassandra, right? And that he's going to be able to predict absolutely everything that happens for the rest of time. I don't think that that's right. But the bleeding edge of internet culture is a pretty good window into the future. You know, here's a perfect example. WallStreetBets. I told the boys about WallStreetBets. It was me, me. I broke, I broke the WallStreetBets (laughs) uh, uh, story. Um, me and Yousef and Johnny were watching the dankest trades compilations on WallStreetBets over a year ago. Before last summer we were watching them and that was when the, I think the sub had half a million people on it, something like that. Less than a million people that were members of their Reddit. Uh, and this is before GameStop. This is before the short squeeze. This is before AMC. This is before Deep Fucking Value. Um, like before all of that, before it became a national news story. And I don't know how many people ... Let me see how many people are in WallStreetBets now. WallStreet, WallStreetBets. How many people are in this subreddit now? 11.1 million, 11.1 fucking million people in this. So we'd seen this a long, long, long time ago. And, um, I, I thought this is fucking cool. Like it was being, uh, videos were being made by people like Kamikaze Cash who are, they, they know what they're talking about. They're really, they spend a lot of time on the internet. They understand internet culture. They understand meme culture and they know the sort of things that are going to go viral, like culturally viral, virality.... and sure enough, you roll the clock forward and the correct sequence of circumstances occurs and it- the channel went 10Xs. It's part ... uh, it's on news. I mean, that Deep Fucking Value guy, didn't he give ... I swear he gave a, a talk to Congress or something, or some, uh, some committee meeting or something in America. Um, yeah, bleeding edge of the internet culture can predict downfalls six to 12 months before most normies even realize. (sniffs) Your framing is everything. So this is Dr. Benjamin Hardy, uh, and his new book, uh, The Gap and The Gain, kind of talks about this. So a good example that I use for framing is feeling like you just finished a workout in the gym is amazing. So you go in. This is what people actually go for, right? They're going to the gym to make their lungs bleed, to work hard, to do spinning class or yoga or weightlifting or CrossFit or whatever it is. They go in because the end of the workout feels so good, when they're lying on the floor in a pool of sweat or when they're walking out and they get to high-five their friends. Like, those endorphins, that is precisely why they go there. So feeling like you just finished a workout in the gym is amazing. But if you had the exact same experience of finishing a workout while you were sat spontaneously in traffic, you'd be terrified. "Well, hang on. It's the exact same sensation." So why does one make you feel great when you're in the gym and the other one (claps hands) make you feel terrified that you're having some sort of aneurysm or heart attack? Well, it's because of framing. It's because the reason that you are prepared to put up with the sweating and the heat and the discomfort and all that stuff when you're in the gym is you know it's in service of something good because you've just done a bunch of stuff that's led you up to believe that that's good. Whereas when you're sat in the car you think, "What's going on? Am I dying? Is this what it feels like to be abducted by aliens?" Like, what's ... you, you don't understand what's happening because your framing has changed. So if you learn to control how you frame situations, you can actually alter your perspective. You can not only alter your perspective, but you can also alter what that situation even means to you. So in The Gap and The Gain, which is Ben Hardy's new book, which you should get. It's quite short, 20, 160 pages. Uh, you are always going to have a problem with framing if you compare yourself against how you could or should have performed. Comparing yourself against what you could or should have done is like trying to race toward the horizon. No matter how hard you work, you're always going to come up short. So that's another case of framing, okay? You can look at ... You do a thing. When you do the thing, you can compare yourself with how far away from your potential you are or how far from your starting point you are, okay? One is the gap versus potential. One is the gain from starting point. Now, if you compare yourself against where you could have been, you are never, ever going to get there. Uh, maybe you're going to glimpse it a couple of times in your life, but even professional athletes don't perform at their 100% of their perfect potential. Like, they make mistakes as well. We see it every single day, and that's ... they're p- professional athletes. That's their job. They're employed to be as perfect as po- as possible at one very specific narrow domain. So what hope have you got of giving a talk at work or going on a date or having a conversation with a partner or whatever it might have been? Whatever pursuit it is that you're going after, if you frame the situation as, "You idiot, look at how much better you could have been or should have been," well, yeah, obviously. Obviously that's going to be the case because I'm never going to hit 100%, but how far have I come? Look at how different this particular performance was versus the last one. And even if it's gone backwards you can say, "Okay, well, that's another rep in the tank. That's another ship of a product. I've shipped it again. That's another iteration that I can learn from. It's another opportunity for me to get better." The difference in terms of framing gap and gain is really, really powerful, and I'm glad that Ben has now given a name to it. The Gap and The Gain is a ... an awesome one. I don't know whether, uh, the episode might not be out yet or it might have just come out, but if it's not out, it'll be out soon. Uh, this is the weird and wonderful world of, uh, scheduling podcasts in advance. Uh. "Don't practice what you do not want to become." So this is a Jordan Peterson quote, uh, that made me think about an episode I did with James Clear. The James Clear episode was two years ago? Maybe even more. I did it ... I did it in America, in Redlands, which is just inland from, uh, LA, and I'd propped my laptop up on two tables in the hotel room where I was staying, and I'd tried to light myself with a desk lamp that kept on, uh, turning off during the episode. So, um, yeah, "Don't practice what you do not want to become," which is a guy that balances his laptop on two tables. Um, "Every action you take is a vote for the kind of person you're going to be in the future. If you do a thing today, it's more likely that you'll do it tomorrow. This includes negative self-talk and a lack of compassion for yourself. Treat your habits with requisite care." So, "Don't practice what you do not want to become" reminds us that every single time that you do a thing, you make doing that thing more likely again in future. If you do or don't break your diet, then tomorrow it's going to be more likely that you do or don't break your diet. If you do or don't go to the gym, if you do or don't have a difficult conversation with your partner, every single ... if you do or don't pick up your phone when you don't need to or, um, break that promise that you made to yourself by not using social media before a particular time or pressing the snooze button, all of these things are contributing to a future ...... where you are going to be the sort of person that is more likely to do the thing that you've just done. That's how habits work. There's a story about a woman, a, a girl who was horse riding when she was a kid. And her parents were quite strict, and she didn't want to get caught smoking when she turned into a teenager but her parents didn't follow her to horse ri- uh, horse riding. So, her and her friends would go out horse riding and they'd smoke while they were on the horses and then she'd come back and she'd mock the horses out or whatever so she'd mask the smell. Uh, and then she stops. She gets pregnant when she's a bit young, uh, and has a kid, and then 10 or 12 years later decides, "Oh, well I'm, I'm going to take my child horse riding because it was something beautiful and it's something that my mom introduced me to and this will be really good." 10 or 12 years she hasn't had a cigarette, sits on a horse, wants to have a cigarette again instantly. She stopped for 12 years, but sitting on the horse was the trigger that she wanted a cigarette and that craving still existed. Why? Well, it's because the way that myelin sheaths lay down, the way that our brains work is that it's really quite hard to atrophy connections in the brain once they're made. If you have your phone always on one side of your desk, as soon as you put your phone back there even if you didn't have it for 10 years, you're going to be able to pick it up because those wirings still exist in your brain. So, one thing that you can do, I mentioned, uh, phone use a lot here, to try and pattern interrupt the, um, way that your brain sees this is to just switch some things around. So an easy one is to, if you're a guy and you, where you put your phone in pockets, put your phone in the other pocket and put your wallet, let's say that you've got phone in right pocket and wallet in left. If you swap it around, it's going to pattern interrupt that natural thing that you've got in your mind where you just put your hand in your pocket and you pull your phone out. That's going to change almost instantly. So, that's one way to fix it, to try and change little routes and routines and pattern interrupt what your brain is expecting to happen. Rearranging the, uh, menu on your phone, moving different icons around in different places is another really good one because more than anything when you get your phone out, you know, your brain understands where particular triggers are on the phone. It's not as if you're pressing the icons, it's as if there's a cue craving a reward that's already embedded into your thumb via your brain, and your thumb is just following that little routine. If you break the routine and now fucking Barclays Banking app is where Facebook used to be and you press on that, you, it's going to stop you. So adding in these extra layers of friction and pattern interrupting that is a really good thing to do. I actually considered, and this would be total sacrilege, but I'd actually considered getting an (laughs) an Android phone, I can barely say it, getting an Android phone because I knew that I wouldn't be able to use the same, uh, modes, uh, uh, phone use, um, that I'm used to on an iPhone. It's going to be so, it's going to be a complete departure, right? The operating system. This would be an awesome thing for phone manufacturers to do, to offer different types of operating system. So imagine if iOS had 10 different ways that the interface could look, not just the way that the icons are positioned but even the way that you navigate around the phone and what the gestures mean and how you swipe perhaps. If you were able to totally pattern break what it was that you were doing, yeah, you have the same device in your hand but the way that you use it has to be completely different, that would be so good because it would basically be like starting again. But yeah, I mean it, it, it scares me. It honestly does scare me some of the bad habits that we pick up. They're, they're with us for the rest of our lives. Now we can replace them with other good habits but getting rid of habits that you've already created is really, really difficult. I mean, I asked, uh, Anna Lembke this, that dopamine researcher only the other week and said, you know, "Can you kind of get rid of addictions?" And she gave, she kind of gave a bit of a diploma- (laughs) diplomatic answer. Um, it seems like you can definitely overcome addictions but there's always kind of going to be something there. So yeah, don't practice what you do not want to become is a simple sentence but it's og- oddly existential. Um, another thing as well is I'm really glad that phones weren't around even sooner because embedding these particular habits when you're younger is significantly easier. Think about how easy it was to learn stuff when you were in school, right? Like all languages, there's some stats I saw about how much harder it is to learn a language I think after the age of 13 or something like that. So your brain is just primed for taking in information and learning habits, right? When you're younger. But most kids have got iPads or phones and I am so glad. If I think about how challenging I find technology use now, uh, compared with how long I've been using it and then think, okay, now double the amount of time that you've been using an iPhone from, I think I probably got one when I was about 25. Yeah, it would be more than double. That's terrifying. That's scary. Uh, Corey Allen, You Are Not Your Thoughts. So, Corey is a meditation teacher and, uh, producer, music producer, and he makes binaural beats. He makes some shit hot binaural beats for meditation and for deep focus and stuff. You should check those out if you're looking for some new ones. "The voice that speaks in your head is not you. You are the one who hears it speak. Don't identify with what your mind says any more than you identify with what someone on the street says. This is one of the most liberating truths to know." So with this, it's reminding us that you don't know what you're going to think next.You don't know what you're going to think next. If you don't know what you're going to think next, how can you say that the voice in your head is you? It's just another element. Uh, th- think about the fact when you've lost your keys and you say to yourself, "Uh, where are my keys?" Who the fuck are you talking to?