Modern Wisdom

James Clear's Atomic Habits has got four steps to embedding a habit. I often miss the fourth one.

It's a vessel for self-improvement disguised as a money making enterprise that it's the biggest driver of your personal growth because it comes in and just twisty nipples and finds all of the spots that you've got your trigger points and it will force you to level up and to learn those skill sets and to grow.

Atomic Habits by James Clear, one of the best selling nonfiction books maybe ever but certainly of the last five years, probably the best selling nonfiction book over the last five years except for maybe some autobiographies.

And this will be familiar to people that have read James Clear's book. The idea is you take the habit that you want to form.

And before you know it, James talks so much about like identity based habit change, which I guess maybe one of the remaining two or maybe not.

Sir David Brailsford who's known for his marginal gains theory and is written about in the first chapter of James Clear's book Atomic Habits said to me yet the the small gains the making the water bottle just a little bit bigger and the pillow soft are matted but the thing no one gives us credit for thing no one talks about is I took over a team that were depressed psychologically they were down and out they didn't want anything and by finding tiny little gains quote we felt like we were going somewhere that psychology of momentum is the greatest force in business.

It's still like the number one New York Times bestseller.

It's phenomenal. It's a powerhouse and rightly so, right?

As soon as he said, you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems,

the Atomic Habits James Clear advice of just 1% better every day focus on the what you're going to iterate on day after day after day is a great way to operate that really really is.

You fall to your systems you don't rise to your goals however it only works in service of something that you care about because if you don't know the direction that you're going in each of the different iterations could take you in the wrong direction.

My favourite is actually from James in Atomic Habits. And I think it's the best takeaway. ... and his rule is never miss two days in a row.

Atomic Habits, by James Clear, phenomenal book, fantastic writer, but when he said, you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.

as far as I can see, this is one of the issues, that came, in the wake of Atomic Habits, by James Clear, phenomenal book, fantastic writer, but, when he said, you don't rise to the level, of your goals, you fall to the level, of your systems

But there's a cool story from Atomic Habits by James Clear. And, uh, I think it was the lead coach of maybe the Chinese weightlifting team, or maybe this is Ben Bergeron's Chasing Excellence.

It was Atomic Habits for the 1800s.

My favorite out of all of Atomic Habits, bestselling personal development book of all time. The best thing that came out of that for me was never miss a habit two days in a row. He says one missed habit is a mistake. Two missed habits is the start of a new habit.

Atomic Habits by James Clear, Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money. I've spoken to each of these guys individually.

James Clear got this right in Atomic Habits where he said you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.

In Atomic Habits by James clear, he talks, I think it's like the head of the Chinese weightlifting team and they're super advanced. They're getting these kids from like five years old. He said the guys that are world champions are prepared to come in and do the boring things without complaining.

And obviously James Clear and Atomic Habits...

James Clear's Atomic Habits, very story-heavy.

I would 100% agree with you that the people for whom your next book is written and the people for whom Die With Zero by Bill Perkins is written.

Bill mutual friend, good example of this 2d lessons and 3d lessons reading Die With Zero 2d lesson listening to the audio book, even listening to him on a podcast, like a two and a half D lesson going to Bill's house and seeing his dial-in system and the chef and the wake surfing and all the rest of it, 3d lesson.

Bill Perkins the dude that wrote Die With Zero who's now become a really good friend says delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification and with monk mode You practice in private so that you can perform in public Private practice in the extreme results in no public performance.

Bill Perkins book 'Die With Zero' in which he says that wealth time and health time and money are the three main parameters that you're playing with and you want to end up enjoying your life as much as possible which means maximize your health spend your wealth appropriately and utilize time as best you can

I love that are you familiar with Die With Zero Bill Perkins stuff good book yeah I like that book

he has this shows the levels of wealth we're about to talk about your assistant this guy's got an experience architect who their only job is to find different things that they think he might want to do and then put them to him and then even if he says that he doesn't want to do them convince them that he's going to go and do them

health, wealth and time are the three factors that you play within his book your health is largely a determinant of what it is that you're able to do because your hips aren't going to take it skiing when you're 80 right

Bill Perkins that wrote Die With Zero has got another amazing quote where he says, Delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification.

I read Bill Perkins book, Die With Zero. And he's got this interesting idea from economics called consumption smoothing.

Bill wrote Die With Zero. He's got a party over it.

Bill wrote Die With Zero. He's got a party over it.

Bill Perkins wrote a book called Die With Zero. Great book. Great book. Three hour lesson. Everyone should go and get it.

My friend Bill wrote a great book, Die With Zero. And in it, he says, delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification.

He wrote this book called Die With Zero, which is about how to sort of make the most of your wealth. And it's written for people who struggle to spend money, even though they might earn a little bit more than they need to.

I read the book and then immediately after that, from the podcast, he said, oh, why don't you come and wake surf with me? And I got to learn the lesson both from the book and then from the podcast.

There's this really phenomenal quote I took from Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is True.

And he says, it's a quote from Ken P. Rinpoche. He says, ultimately happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of our mental afflictions and the discomfort of becoming ruled by them.

So this is from Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is True and in it, life is suffering is commonly quoted as coming from the Buddha, but scholars can test that the translation is actually wrong and the final word which is duke, d-u-k-k-h-a isn't translated as suffering, but unsatisfactoriness.

That really helped. That was one of the first books that I read that kind of helped to frame it.

ultimately, happiness comes down to deciding between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions or the discomfort of becoming ruled by them.

I really enjoyed Robert Reitz book on Why Buddhism is True talking about religion you spent a good part of your career deconstructing religion only for it to then perhaps be replaced with some similar religious thinking around things like identity politics

Robert Wright in Why Buddhism is True, evolutionary psychologist who then pivoted to do mindfulness, a lot of retreats and sort of have a take on Buddhism with an evolutionary lens.

Why Buddhism is True. That's a nice book. Fuck, dude. Blending evolutionary psychology with Buddhism. Awesome.

the first time i ever learned about that was in robert wright's Why Buddhism is True oh yeah he crushed with that book that was so good fuck i mean evolutionary psychology meets mindfulness for me it's like yeah

It's called 'The Alchemist,' by Paulo Coelho. It's about this young man who's basically, you know, he's got to make a big decision in his life.

When you're in the middle of something, you're in your own little bubble. The book kind of made me look at life from a wider lens.

It's like "The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho where you end up going all the way back around to just stick to your words, say things that you believe are true, do hard things when you can.

The parable of the Mexican fisherman, if you've heard the story a couple of times you remember what it is, you don't need to hear the story again. You just hear the parable of the Mexican, oh yeah, of course it's the guy that over complicates his life and ends up coming back to the place where he began. The same stories you get in the alchemist by Paulo Coelho, etc. etc.

I just read Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist as well. He was like the first book I'd read in probably a decade.

So I was kind of in this weird out-of-body experience for a good chunk of that time where all of these things were going on and there was story lines or whatever and all I was thinking about was this guy. If anyone's not read the Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, there's this young shepherd boy going on a journey of self-discovery trying to find out who he is and that really, really spoke to me at the time.

It's like The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho. He could have just come back and in the yard outside of where he first started.

I know that a book that you like is the alchemist.

the story of the alchemist, right?

It's a really beautiful book and it's a, it's a fiction book. It's super easy to read. It's not a flex to say that you've read it, but it's kind of a bit trippy to read. It's this beautiful story about Santiago, this Spanish boy who goes on a journey and he comes back and spoiler alert. The treasure that he's looking for is in the backyard of the place that he started. And the story's takeaway is going on a journey to end up back where you began is not the same as having never left.

there's a book called Hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hansen which is precisely about that

I think Hard Wiring Happiness by Rick Hansen is a really great book that it came out just a little bit before the podcast revolution, which is a shame because I think it would have really changed a lot of people.

What he basically says is that when good things happen, you should allow yourself to marinate in them as much as possible, even if it's just a small thing.

Rick Hanson's idea from Hardwiring Happiness

I'm on the board for the, given that I'm on the board, I really should know the name of it. ... He wrote Hardwiring Happiness.

Rick Hansen, who wrote Hardwiring Happiness, is 20, 25 years old. Hardcore neuroscience guy, Dharma teacher, meditation expert, life person. Fucking awesome intersection with all. And he has this wonderful acronym of HEAL. Have a positive experience. Enrich it.

Rick Hanson, if you're familiar with Rick from Hardwiring Happiness, I think he's just so great. You know, he's got this unique intersection of Dharma and Buddhist mindfulness stuff, and then the hardcore science behind the neurosciencey things.

Rick Hanson in this great book called Hardwiring Happiness, he says, absorb the experience. Imagine it sinking down into you and becoming a part of you.

Hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hansen and I'm really starting to lean into this despite the fact that I had him on the show four years ago allowing yourself to feel gratitude and enjoyment for things well done shortly after you do them reinforces the positive pattern of encouraging you to do it again and that is not something that should be taken lightly it is really really powerful.

I spoke about this idea to Neil Strauss, the guy that wrote The Game and he wrote Rick Rubin's book

I was at a point where I was looking at my life and asking, "What's the point of all this?" and a lot of the people who were involved in that world were very unhappy. The relationships that they were having were very shallow, and they weren't getting what they wanted out of life. So I wanted to write a book that would help people see the other side of that.

So I wrote "The Game" as a way to expose the tricks and techniques that these pickup artists were using to get women.

But I also wanted to show the dark side of that world. The fact that these guys were often hurting women and themselves.

I wanted to show that there was a better way. That you didn't have to be a pickup artist to find love and connection.

Just because we're throwing quotes at each other, one other one from last year that stopped me in my tracks from Neil Strauss, the guy that wrote The Game, who's a pickup artist dude and he's kind of now transcended that. He's actually coming on the show in a couple of weeks. He said, unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.

Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.

The original world that we had when Neil Strauss who wrote The Game came up and did pick up what that was was exclusive marketing.

And I think that the world much of the world of men's online dating at the moment in the more sort of nihilistic black pill side is exclusive lifestyle.

The Game was like a huge, huge selling book and the pickup artist kind of community in the 2000, late 2000, late 2000s, early 2010s, it kind of morphs into the red pill community or kind of splits.

The Game was like a huge, huge selling book

the guy that wrote The Game

I thought was phenomenal The Status Game.

It's wonderful but that thing of like going well actually you pick what status game you play in you can have anything you can't have everything.

Do you read Will Stor's book, The Status Game?

You'd love it. You would fall in love with it. It's absolutely fascinating.

You've read Will Storsbach, The Status Game where he talks about that group that has yams. They grow the biggest yam and then they give it to their enemy.

Will Storr who wrote that great book The Status Game you know there's this tribe somewhere that grows yams they grow massive yam these unbelievably huge yams and they have to take four men to wheelbarrow these yams in and I'm pretty sure that what you do is you give the yam to your greatest enemy or something like that and it's almost like this yam shaped middle finger that you

If you've read Will Storr's The Status Game, you've probably interviewed him at some point, his really, really good piece of work is that everyone is completely blessed with status.

It's that Will Storr thing, that status game book, which is again, I mean, it's just, he's such a genius writer. I love him.

Will Storr, do you know him? He wrote The Science of Storytelling, The Status Game. So he was on the show yesterday, his new book, A Story is a Deal.

I fucking love that series so much. I went back and started again from the first one even though I haven't finished the seventh one or the sixth one whichever one it is now uh I went back and read the first one again and started it's so fantastic for the people that don't know what we're talking about Red Rising awesome sci-fi slash fantasy future novel series by Pierce Brown it's my favorite fiction series of all time

it's available at the modern wisdom reading list which you can get at chriswilliamson chriswillx.com slash books hundred books that you should read before you die all of my favorites and there's a link to this one in there and a justification for why I like it uh but I'm just about to finish the final book in the series and I can't wait to see what he does he's great

that series should come with a addiction warning label it's so fantastic

Red Rising my favorite fiction book I must have read at least three times.

I like Red Rising and the lead protagonist in that it's called darrow I think darrow is a fucking dope name for a kid you're not having a loser if your son is called darrow like it's impossible to grow up and be called darrow and not be an absolute stud so darrow.

Pierce Brown is the author of Red Rising and a fucking legend. I love the series and I'd love to bring him on at some point. I must have mentioned Red Rising on an episode, and I love the series.

Why not start to build out Red Rising or The Name of the Wind or something else?

books, book suggestions, Red Rising, which is this fiction series I've addicted everybody to and is amazing.

The third life hack is Red Rising, the Red Rising series.

Red Rising's not going anywhere.

I gave that book to all my friends. It was a big deal for me.

One of the things I remember reading was The 4-Hour Workweek, and it was like, how can I hack this work stuff, like I don't have to be at the office.

I read that book, that 4-Hour Workweek a long time ago.

There was a book that really kind of helped me with that transition, which was "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Timothy Ferriss, and it talks about the idea that you can build your own business. You don't have to work a traditional 9 to 5 job to be successful, and you can set up your life in a way that is more conducive to your health and longevity.

It was four-factor model based, even though I didn't know at the time, I came up with that.

I was at four hour workweek when it came out, you know, did and that's what really inspired me to stop doing the mail.

And there's books out now, the Settle Art of Not Giving a Fuck and Girl, Wash Your Face. And these are all books that say don't mind what other people are saying.

I read 'Models' by Mark Manson, which is probably 10 years old now, so most people will know Mark for 'The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck', really great book, but he actually wrote a, I guess we call it kind of like ethical pick-up artist history, but toward the back end of the Neil Strauss era in 2013-14.

Mark Manson wrote a book on dating. That was his first ever book before he did the subtle art.

I'm never going to write a book that does more than the subtle art.

And some of the other greats, of course, Mark Manson did a marvelous job with, you know, subtle art...

I think it succeeded so insanely highly, I honestly felt like there was no, where do I go from here? ... I spent probably half a decade with that as like my map... And then all those things are achieved and literally three to six months after the book came out, I was just completely at a loss for about six months.

That was the smash hit best selling book that blew up, and it made me depressed because the velocity of the success was so drastic that I didn't know what to do next for about six months.

I'd read Steven Pressfield's The War of Art and then Turning Pro and I thought, wow, imagine what would happen if you treated the pursuit of my chosen career, which is podcasting, like an athlete.

I want to turn pro I read Stephen Pressfield War of Art and then I read Turning Pro I want to turn pro with the show what's that mean what would it mean if I treated this pursuit like an athlete does so an athlete they review game tape and they do mindset work and they've got a sports psychologist and they look at what they eat and they look at what they drink and they go to bed on time and they're hanging around with people that are growth minded and they're getting the right coaches and then all the rest everything is done in order to facilitate performance in the thing that they say they care about but everybody has the opportunity to do that you just need to define what the thing is I'm never going to be Patrick Mahomes right yeah I know but I managed to find my thing and then nearly kill myself in dedication toward it

Stephen Pressfield says this in The War of Art real writers know that the difficulty isn't the writing part the difficulty is the sitting down to write part and that is it.

I read it three years ago at the start of the pandemic and I actually read sorry I read The War of Art which is Steven Pressfield book and turning pro is a chapter in The War of Art which he then turned into a sequel and they're both great and you can get both of them by going to chriswillx.com books that is a list of 100 books you should read before you die and it'll explain why I like them in a little bit more detail and there's links to.

There's a concept from Steven Pressfield's, The War of Art where he calls those shadow careers. He says the number of people that he met in LA who were failed actors or always wanted to become an actor, but ended up becoming an agent because it was tangential enough to the industry that it made them feel like they were maybe in the thing, but it wasn't the thing.

Greg Lukianoff, one of the authors of "The Coddling of the American Mind", which is a pretty good book, a very important book.

"The Coddling of the American Mind" is this book that really talks about what you're talking about.

The book is about, it's written by a lawyer and a psychologist, they're both involved in higher education, they say that kids today are being harmed by overprotective parenting, by overly safe spaces, by the kind of "trigger warning" culture that really inhibits the development of resilience.

They argue that this overprotectiveness is leading to an increase in anxiety, depression, and an inability to cope with the difficulties of life.

And they go through these really interesting historical parallels between the way kids are being raised today and the way kids were raised in the Victorian era.

There's a very formative book a couple of years ago called The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Height and Greg Lukyanov and Ricky and Greg have worked on this, which is the canceling of the American Mind, which is their new book.

And it's interesting to see kind of how the two are related and how a victimhood culture and an over a degree of cuddling for children results in a society and a culture which is hyper concerned about dangerous speech, dangerous actions.

And it's very interesting, especially when they've dug into the data and actually looked at this from a statistical standpoint too.

And my co author um his previous book is The Coddling of the American Mind which um concentrated quite a lot on parenting and its impact on politics and Gen Z um and so we think that there's a lot about leading by example as a parent and raising kids who will not be cancelers and understand their own vulnerability as well as the vulnerability of their friends um and I I do find a tremendous amount of hope in the fact that young people are so put off by cancel culture that if they were just given the positive restorative framework to fight back against it and um kind of a social pact that would be mutually protective that there's there's some hope they're going forward um we also think that divesting away from the elite university system just being the only way that people end up in in positions of power in society is a healthy thing um and that people who were hiring should consider kids coming from large state schools and kids from different backgrounds are people who didn't finish college or people who went down a different path in that we shouldn't just have this funnel of kids coming from consistently the most elite schools or the schools but the worst attitudes towards free speech which I think it's no surprise that we're seeing uh absolute chaos erupting on campuses like Harvard right now because if you abdicate free speech and you suppress students and send bad ideas underground for decades on end all of a sudden in a moment of cultural unrest they're going to explode and that's precisely what we're seeing right now um and so we believe that you know opening our minds to alternative education systems and not allowing these schools that seem to breed cancel culture and cancillers to you know take the reins of society consistently with every graduating class that's a positive um and also even people who are running corporations uh can I think take one note out of Netflix's book after the jade de chappelle controversy where they said you know if you can't tolerate the fact that we are going to publish viewpoint set you disagree with as as a platform for ideas and expression then you can leave um I think that's that was a remarkably unique and brave stance to take and actually coin based did that um a while ago their CEO Brian Armstrong was like we're just not going to make any institutional statements and if that's a problem for you you can go and like 10% of their employee base did actually go but like that's not the 10% of people that you want to work for you so I think um on the the level of corporations we can um I think there are a lot of we hear frequently Greg and I both from corporate leaders who are terrified of their like 23 year old hires and that's just such a bizarre power imbalance and it's very fixable if you just create a free speech culture from the get go but I also think weirdly um after october 7th there's a lot of people rediscovering the importance of institutional neutrality and of free speech and free expression and you know it's I think it's a really revealing moment for schools to suddenly say oh you know we had a statement about Kyle written house is acquittal and BLM and all these completely irrelevant things to the interworking of a university but we can't make a statement on this of course I think it's it's shocking that this is the moment that they've finally discovered that institutions are full of people with viewpoints and do not have viewpoints themselves but maybe there's a silver lining that this moment of just absolute chaos in an institutions free speech was not valued for so long where they're suddenly hiding behind the valence of free speech like maybe this is where we actually buy in and we realize that we're all vulnerable in a world where a liberalism is allowed to rein supreme

It's like treating adults like infants, incapable infants who couldn't cope with a different opinion and if they have the misfortune of coming into contact with an opinion that makes them uncomfortable then they need a safe space with puppies and coloring books.

But this to me sounds a lot like the concern over protectionism strategies, especially on college campuses, especially in liberal arts colleges and stuff around America and maybe creeping into the UK as well.

That's right yeah that's a great book yeah fantastic and then he wrote this uh great essay for the washington post I think called the tower of babel and it's kind of a development on from where he was coddling of the american mind he's sort of big into this anti social media thing he's concerned about what it's doing to especially young girls sense of self and anxiety and so on and so forth however what he's doing on his maybe sub stack maybe something else he's writing the book chapter by chapter publishing it maybe just to paying members or maybe for free to everybody what they're just getting feedback on getting feedback and iterating so he will have released every single chapter of his books first draft for largely free over the space of a euro 18 months great idea

I love Coddling of the American Mind, too.

The Body Keeps the Score. This book absolutely broke the internet and there's so much to take away from today.

It is interesting indeed that it's so obvious and I actually have gotten, my bookstores sold 5 million copies. I've hardly had any blowback of people who say that I'm getting it wrong. I mean, it's really obvious but we come from a world of medicine where we try to define things very carefully.

I'm just writing a new book, finished last chapter for a new book and I started with a quote from Marcel Proust, in order to change, you need to see the world with new eyes.

So at the end, if you really want to recover from trauma, you need to, we need to help people to change their perceptions of the world. We're not gonna change the world out there, but we're going to change what they see and how they experience themselves and the people around them.

You mentioned that you tried every modality that you put in The Body Keeps the Score. Which is the one that you have found to be either most impactful or the one that you keep coming back to most regularly?

I think Bessel van der Kolk's really great book, the title I think probably did a lot of disservice and confused a lot of people who never read it and made assumptions about what was in the book.

I talk about implicit memory. I talk about sensations. Think The Body Keeps the Score.

the work of Bessel van der Kalk from The Body Keeps the Score.

I re-read this book, this is my favorite book probably in the world. The Obstacle Is the Way is a book I read at least once a year.

Ryan Holiday wrote a book called 'The Obstacle Is the Way' about this. So many people see obstacles, and they're like 'Oh, this is terrible.' But you know what? They're not terrible. Obstacles are opportunities for growth.

Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday, Art of Resilience by yourself on Audible.

Read Art of Resilience by Ross Edgley, Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday and watch the documentary resurfaced with Andy Murray.

If you've downloaded my reading list you'll see that one of the top five books is Essentialism by greg mcqueen and being an essentialist i.e focusing on the vital few not the trivial many doing less but better is easy when you have fewer things available for you to do than time to do them in because you can say yes to everything and still feel like you've got spare time.

Essentialism by Greg McKeown I must have read at least twice or three times.

Essentialism by Greg McKeown was a huge influence on me.

Essentialism was superbly formative for me. If you've downloaded the Modern Wisdom reading list, you will know it's in the top five.

It's just so great, and it's become more useful over the last ten years since he released it.

It's a wonderful redress to a lot of the problems that those of us that like to try and achieve things face.

Greg McHugh, an author of Essentialism, was on the speaking circuit's 10th year anniversary of Essentialism next month.

Essentialism by Greg McKeown's not going anywhere.

Your first book Psychology of Money was a beast and this next one is absolutely phenomenal.

I think about a lot and that was one of the points of talking to that author who I was speaking with because I know this is going to be my situation how do you prepare mentally when I hope to write many books in my career and I would bet very good money that the first book I wrote will by an order of magnitude be the biggest seller.

it's kind of a hard thing like when I'm 66 how am I going to feel knowing that I peaked at age 36 when psychology money came out it's probably not going to feel that great to be honest of all the problems to have it's not a bad one

I wrote about this in The Psychology of Money

There was another story that I wrote about in The Psychology of Money that I thought was just so ridiculous when I read it.

There's a Morgan House will quote where he says the best way to win the game is to stop moving the goalposts.

And he's wrote this great book called The Psychology of Money.

And it's true that most people treat their goals. Their relationship to their goals is like the horizon that for every step toward it they get. Right. It then moves one step further away.

Atomic Habits by James Clear, Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money. I've spoken to each of these guys individually.

I'm never going to write a book that does more than The Psychology of Money.

Morgan Housel's The Psychology of Money. What a book. Just outstanding.

David doitch's book The Beginning of Infinity

I read David Deutsches The Beginning of Infinity and was just blown away by what if we're the first hundred billion people that's how many people have lived right yeah a hundred billion I'm including us in that and it could be trillions in the future

If you're trying to read beginning of infinity by fucking David Deutsch, you got a fucking yeah, exactly.

I was reading David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity with chat GPT.

the ape who understood the universe by steve stewart uh The Moral Animal by robert wright the happiness hypothesis by jonathan height um richard reeves of boys and men uh billy no mates another good book

My coming of age red pill was The Moral Animal. Robert Wright's first one. I mean, what's that? 91, 92, 93. That book probably.

Well, dude, nearly 30 years and it still holds up. It's still read. There's some stuff that's like less so, but largely it's phenomenal.

I got into evolutionary theory through Robert Wright's book from 1993? 1993? 1993? 1992? The Moral Animal. ... that book is still fucking fantastic. I love it.

The Moral Animal from 1991 or 1992 or something. It's still, there's some of the stuff, a little replication crisis, but most of it's shit hot. And I loved it.

Who was the dude that did Don't Trust Your Gut and Everybody Lies? Seth Stevens-Davidowitz, Don't Trust Your Gut. Wonderful book.

I had a Seth StephensDavidowitz on the show who wrote Everybody Lies and Don't Trust Your Gut.

Don't Trust Your Gut is the new one.

Another stat, which I picked up last year from Seth Stevens Davidowitz's book, Don't Trust Your Gut is a man who works in hospitality and earns $300,000 a year is the same level of attractiveness as a firefighter or a lawyer that earned $60,000 a year.

If you're wanting to read more, Seth, the guy that wrote Don't Trust Your Gut, during COVID, during the first wave of COVID, he was able, using aggregated Google search data, to predict where outbreaks were going to occur three to five days before they did with greater accuracy than the CDC.

The other data science book that I got really interested in over the last year was Don't Trust Your Gut by Seth Stevens-Davidowitz.

I will send it over on email afterward, that book, Don't Trust Your Gut by Seth.

You may have heard me talk about Nick for quite a while, his book Superintelligence which came out 10 years ago in 2014 was super formative.

It basically kicked off the entire AI risk and alignment discussion, and now he's come back with a book that works out what happens if we get it right.

And it's still kind of apocalyptic actually, to be honest.

It's fascinating, it's so interesting, the question of what happens if things go well and what are the weird externalities that we face as a byproduct of that.

Back when Superintelligence came out, this was a very neglected area.

So Superintelligence was basically what happens if we get it wrong.

I remember reading Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence, what, a decade ago? I think that came out. Maybe, yeah, let's call it 10 years ago, something like that.

I think my first introduction to this was probably 2016 or 17 when I read super intelligence by Nick Bostrom.