Chapter 1: What is the importance of being comfortable with uncertainty?
The most important skill in the 21st century is the ability to live happily with uncertainty.
Yeah. I mean, do you know what's going on? I mean, you, millions of people like tune in to listen to you to try to figure out what's going on and you still don't know what's going on. So it's, if, if you and I can't figure it out, like, I think we're all pretty It is interesting that as access to information scales, the certainty and the confidence around that information dissipates.
I feel like everybody feels less moored to reality than ever before, despite the fact that we have access to everything 24-7, which is a very weird paradox.
Chapter 2: Is friction essential for personal growth?
But I think it's, it's, there's a deep human instinct to seek out certainty, to find a certain set of beliefs and assumptions that you can kind of like hang your hat on and build your life around. And I think it's becoming harder than it's ever been before. And I think as a result developing kind of the cognitive flexibility to live in ambiguity is probably more important than it's ever been.
What happens if you can't deal with uncertainty? Then you will over-index on one single belief, right? So you'll become radical about one idea. You'll basically put all of your kind of emotional well-being into a single concept or a single worldview. And the danger of that is just that like any, every worldview is going to get blown up at a certain point.
Like nothing survives contact with reality. So when you are forced, you know, when, when that worldview gets contradicted, you're either going to suffer immensely or you're going to have to double down the delusion to maintain the certainty.
anxiety is all about uncertainty.
Chapter 3: What should we consider when choosing a partner?
It's about trying to compress uncertainty down. I don't know what's going to happen in future. If I can imagine all of the different ways that the future might unfold, especially the really bad ones, I'll be able to plan and war game. And that means that when it happens, I'll be ready. You know, there's a,
It's a really strange comment on how humans' brains work that we would rather imagine a catastrophe than deal with uncertainty. Yes. You think about it as thinking in superpositions. People would rather collapse the superposition down into something that maybe even breaks the laws of physics. Your dead grandma comes back from the grave to tell you off for this thing that you did.
Chapter 4: Why is self-optimization not suitable for everyone?
There's entire supernatural shits going on. That's what you would rather...
have in your mind then i don't know what's going to happen right it's interesting to like what you described about anxiety that kind of that treadmill that you get on right of like trying to predict future outcomes in the process of trying to predict those outcomes trying to be become certain about what's going to happen uh
You actually just inadvertently build more surface area for more uncertainty because everything you try to project into the future, you just create more opportunities for that to be wrong. Yes, yes. So it's interesting because I think actually like the antidote to this, it's more of like an aperture issue, right?
Mm-hmm.
I think instead of trying to be certain about very specific, small, narrow things, it's better to try to zoom out till you find a place of confidence, right? So, like, just take like AI, for instance, right? Everybody's freaking out about it. Everybody's got, you know, some people think the world's going to end. Some people think everybody's going to lose their jobs.
Some people think like China is going to take over everything.
have no idea if any of those things are true but like if i zoom out broadly enough and you just look at every major technological revolution throughout human history there is disruption there is some displacement but like society adapts and moves on and so if i zoom out to that wide of an aperture suddenly i feel some degree of certainty that we're going to be okay in the macro
But in the micro, right, of like, are you and I going to have jobs in two years? Some less certainty about that.
Yeah, it's a kind of fragility to need a lot of certainty. Because what you're saying is, I can't deal with something that I can't anticipate. I don't have enough robustness in my system. If something happens that I haven't planned for, The only way that I can survive the future is if I've already prepared for it. And that's the opposite of robustness or the best anti-fragility. Look at COVID.
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Chapter 5: How can we summarize 10 years of therapy in one minute?
And the only way you digest is by like living and doing other things. I'm curious, like where, where have you procrastinated by learning more? Because I mean, clearly you like learning.
Where have I procrastinated by learning more? Well, before I started the show, just one example, I knew I wanted to do a podcast about
the start of the middle of 2017 but it took me until the February of 2018 to launch because I was working on what's the perfect name going to be that took like two months to come up with modern crushing Tuesday crushing and Tuesday is a brains and brawn actually um
uh that was a huge part of it then the artwork needed to be perfect then i needed to listen to tim ferris's how to start a podcast podcast and game my way to the top of the apple charts which actually worked so thanks tim and then um what's the i'm going to start the channel the youtube's going to launch at the exact same time as the apple podcast and in some ways
I actually think that feels very justified given that that would turn into a project that was 1,100 episodes. And the URL that I registered at the very beginning of that is the same one that we use now. All of those things are locked in.
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Chapter 6: What questions should you ask yourself before you die?
So it's just as well that I got it right. But also you need to be able to pick your battles because you can't spend six months or many years doing that. So that's one part of it. Um, certainly when I was at university, I did four years on my bachelor's, which included a placement year, and then I did a master's.
Mm-hmm.
I already, while I was thinking about doing the masters at the end of my bachelors, I couldn't remember half of my bachelors. I couldn't remember the stuff I was learning as I was learning it. And I just assumed that the next thing, because I'm like, I don't really know what to do. And I like more business, my choice of degree. That's a perfect one.
Chapter 7: Why is it important to stop waiting for permission?
My choice of degree. Like I'm really interested in psychology. I'm really interested in philosophy. but what? I'm going to get a job as a psychologist or a philosopher. Obviously, those degrees are useless. I can't imagine how. What is the most applicable degree to making money? Well, business, because business makes money. So if I do business, that means that I'll understand what I'm doing.
Chapter 8: What should you do to make your life count?
I'm like, dude, is that one of the biggest regrets of my early life is doing something that I thought would be transactionally useful instead of just doing something that I was interested in. It just took me a decade and a half to
I guess like six years from leaving uni or 12 years from starting it, to make my own amateur version of that by speaking to the world experts on whatever subject I wanted, most of which are about fucking psychology and philosophy. So I'm like, you know, had I have gone and done the degree, modern wisdom wouldn't have existed, but I wouldn't have had to wait 12 years to get started, you know?
I don't know. Yeah, what about you? What stands out for you?
Health was the big one for me. Dude, I read... I was the fat guy who could tell you everything about, like, metabolic dysfunction, insulin resistance. Oh, you're an expert.
Yeah. You did used to be fat. Which, looking at you now as a fucking slim trim 40-year-old, people can believe.
Yeah, I mean, I'm in the best health of my life, which is crazy because I spent years, I mean, I read all the blogs. I understood all the different workout protocols. I did a bunch of different workout protocols. I didn't stick to any of them. Hadn't stopped drinking. No. Oh, dude, didn't change a fucking thing.
I was pizza every day, you know, whiskey every night, uh, going to bed at three in the morning, waking up at 11, uh, and reading books about, you know, health, you know, yeah, yeah. This, this specific type of, uh, you know, calorie is gonna cause inflammation and fuck up your gains, you know, as if any of it, any of it mattered.
Um, and yeah, eventually it just took, I just had to hire a coach and he was like, dude, just go to the gym. And I, I was that obnoxious client who, um, would try to kind of debate him, I'd be like, well, you know, I heard that like this rep scheme wasn't as effective as like, and he'd just look at me and just be like, dude, just go to the gym. Like, why are we fat as fuck? Yeah.
Why are we talking about this?
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