Modern Wisdom

I had a conversation with Ryan Holiday about his new book Discipline Is Destiny. I came to the opinion that without any goals, there can be no discipline.

Ryan Holiday... he's got his book, Discipline Is Destiny, from this year, I thought was fantastic. And this quote really, really nailed it for me. So talking about the thing and doing the thing, vie for the same resources. Allocate your energy appropriately.

Talking about the thing and doing the thing, vie for the same resources. Allocate your energy appropriately. It also encourages you to just focus on executing.

When I signed her copy of Discipline Is Destiny, I wrote this in it because I think about it all the time. He said, do you want to be fast now or do you want to be fast later?

it was Michael Malys book The White Pill that really got me on to it cynicism is the opposite of enthusiasm in some regards

Michael Malice is a cultural commentator, podcaster, writer. He's just released a book called The White Pill.

But it's a book that's supposed to be about good as well. It's about good and evil.

It displayed some of the most egregious transgressions of humanity from recent history. Very recent history. You know, this isn't World War I. This is... Since World War I.

I would not change one word of that other than maybe delta because people don't get that reference. And I'm being only a little glib. I think you articulated it perfectly. In one case, it was literally overnight.

You can get it at whitepillbook.com. That's good enough for me.

I have had a serious historical education from reading this. And also, you write beautifully. Like it's so, the pacing, the way that you use your sentences, it's the same way that you speak.

Endurance by Alfred Lansing.

One of my favorite books is Endurance by Alfred Lansing about Shackleton's crossing of the Antarctic. Spoiler alert for anyone that hasn't read it, he doesn't do it. In that, one of the things that I really loved is a lot of the guys had diaries and a lot of the guys were writing in the diaries. And what you get to hear is what happened and what everybody else heard from Shackleton. And then you get to see what he wrote in his diary.

Have you ever read Endurance by Alfred Lansing? It's about Sir Ernest Shackleton's crossing of the anthology. Oh, very cool. I know. So it's the best, I think the best retelling of that.

what was this guy who wrote this this book called Bullshit Jobs I think yeah fantastic concept if you have a bullshit job you don't care about it and you're close to burnout and you're starting to make yourself go on walks just to calm down so you don't burn out like now you're doing the thing that you're describing which I think is really really bad

There was a story in David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs about a guy that wanted to move his computer ... it included like four different companies, two moving vans, ... six people, like a few thousand dollars

There's a really good book. Do you ever read the book? Bullshit Jobs.

Toby Ord has written this book, The Precipice, on this as well. I love it. It's one of my top five books ever.

The original conception by toby ord in The Precipice was written probably about six years ago maybe maybe four years ago so this is before chat gpt and I'm going to guess that he would have increased his his uh estimation so he's ai's gonna wipe his ayes it's the most likely

Toby Ord's from the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford with Nick Bostrom and he's a colleague of William McCaskill, long-termism, EA, et cetera. And he uses this example of... You can imagine on a journey, a particular individual getting to a beautiful, lush, abundant meadow would have to take a treacherous mountain path and along this mountain path, there is a particularly thin, small, steep, sharp, uncertain, unstable part of it. That's The Precipice.

And he talks about... I like to think about it like an hourglass. You have width with room and then you have a choke point and at that choke point, things can get dicey and it's Toby's contention that if we make it through this precipice, you broaden out and you have the meadow and you are a multi-planetary species. You have redundancy genetically, redundancy civilisationally.

You have overcome some of the limitations of the castoffs from your energy production and consumption.

A very famous and widely read book is Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. And he argued in this book...he says on page 22, 'It's always struck me that the New Guineans that I work with are on average much smarter than Europeans and Americans.'

Guns, Germs, and Steel may have been one of the great books of all time, but it was Jared Diamond taking things that were in the literature scattered and without doing real original research, he came up with a thesis that was spellbinding.

So I arrived carrying a copy of the book Jaws, A Hidden Epidemic. This is not Jaws the Shark. This book was written by my colleagues at Stanford, Sandra Kahn and Paul Ehrlich and it has an introduction by Jared Diamond who won a Pulitzer for Guns, Germs and Steel and a forward by the great Robert Sapolsky also a colleague of mine at Stanford so four heavy hitters on this book just to credential it first.

Barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice talks about the process of buying jeans 60 years ago

This is Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice... He uses the example of a jeans store with many options, showing how too many choices can lead to decision paralysis.

Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice suggests that it looks fantastic when you give people a ton of different options because it allows them to choose an option which is closer to the precise thing that they actually wanted.

Neediness occurs when you place a higher priority on what others think of you than what you think of yourself.

anytime you alter your words or behavior to fit someone else's needs rather than your own that is needy

anytime you lie about your interests hobbies or background that is needy

anytime you pursue a goal to impress others rather than fulfill yourself that is needy

neediness is the attraction killer therefore you cannot prioritize other people's opinions of yourself ahead of your own

the best dating advice book for Matt. Everyone should go and get it on Audible and go back in 2014... they were the two... Models by you.

Mark Manson, good friend of mine, his first book actually is from 2013, it's called Models. It's one of the best books for guys that want to learn how to be more attractive to women.

Your book, The Madness of Crowds, talks about the collapse of grand narratives. One of the biggest collapses of grand narratives was religion.

me and Douglas Murray became friends just after he wrote The Madness of Crowds

and in that he's talking about the collapse of grand narratives right he's talking about the fact that people are latching themselves onto ideological movements political movements identity based movements to try and fill what he saw as a whole that had been left with this grand narrative that came over the top

And he wasn't exactly one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, but he wasn't like, he was tangential to that group ... Douglas's second last book, The Madness of Crowds, was all about the collapse of grand narratives.

Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Urquhart.

The Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Urquhart, also great. That's real life nonfiction.

I read that book. It was fascinating.

For anyone who wants to read The Housemaid, the book, skip forward by about 90 seconds.

And that totally made me think, I mean, it's such a good twist.

I read The Housemaid. Uh, that's actually pretty good.

I loved this book. It helped me to understand how our minds work and how we make decisions.

And then there's a, I read about this later from the classic book which I hope everybody's read called Man's Search For Meaning by Victor Frankel.

It's also uh analogous to Man's Search For Meaning right victor frankle but ultimately your ability to respond in any situation is the thing that can never be taken away from you

The Power of Now was one of those books that was really difficult for me but I think helped a lot with grounding. This was the book that started me to be more self-aware.

he says the reason that we don't like to admit that we're wrong is that it's tantamount to the ego being destroyed

There was a really interesting workbook from tony robbins Awaken the Giant Within that a friend sent to me about three months ago and i had a bunch of decisions i was really really struggling with and i've been vacillating about for ages and uh it's one of those classic sort of mid-2000s american self-help hardcore self-help style you know it's got a real sort of uplifting music in between each of the chapters it's really funny but he has this great idea where he says that you cannot say that you have made a decision until you have taken an action in the world that moves yourself toward it

tony robbins Awaken the Giant Within has a really weird if you look on audible there is a 90 minute version which is just workbook exercises there's a bit of narrative in it too i have no idea what the fuck he made this for but a friend sent it to me it's so odd like this thing it's 20 years old and it's not the book it's Awaken the Giant Within something just do a search and have a look through a bunch and he has a few different exercises one of which is think about a thing that you want to make a change with now and bring into the present moment all of the ways it's cost you in the past is costing you now and will cost you in the future all of the situations you've been through where you wish that you could have changed it what it's doing to your life in the moment and all of the ways that in the future this is going to continue to curtail and limit your happiness and your fulfillment

And 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.

This book, Deep Utopia, let me promote it a little bit to our publishers. It doesn't talk about that at all. It's like not about the practical problems between here and it's rather like assume for the sake of argument that everything goes as well as it possibly could with the whole AI transition, et cetera.

And in order to get to the point where you can then ask the question, what's then if we do end up in this condition where all the practical problems have been solved, what would we humans then do?

So much of what we seem to value and take pride in are clever ways to deal with scarcity.

And Deep Utopia is what happens if we get it right.

There are whole novels written about this. Jane Austen has been writing. Maybe she writes about this better than anybody else at all. Just talking about sort of the rules of polite society and what exists behind those rules.

the relationship between Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice is kind of sets the bar for what a relationship... should look like.

There's a lot of criticism and skepticism at the moment about therapy and therapy culture. Abigail Schreier recently wrote a book called Bad Therapy. She went on Joe's show, she came on this show. What do you think therapy looks like when it's at its best?

Abigail Shire wrote a book called Bad Therapy, yeah, and I fundamentally disagreed with a lot of the ideas in it, so I thought, and I messaged a friend before I was going to do it and said this is my plan for the episode, I want to make my positions known and not step in and throw a life boy to try and fix the problem. And the, you know, perennial recovering people pleases out there may sort of feel the same, that you say a thing which is going to induce some discomfort or something which is it stops, it's got a harsh end to it, or whatever. And then you say would it be, would that, you sort of bring this thing into land by offering, so how can it be the case that therapy, all therapy is bad, because it allows you or causes you to focus on your, yourself and your issues, but you also include in that CBT something which is unbelievably practical and shows up as an evidence-based intervention for lots of people's disorders. Is it that, and then it's the is it, that you step into soften the blow? I see, so throughout that episode in particular, I had to ask these questions and then as I watch the guest get to this point, which is exactly the reason that you ask a difficult question as opposed to there is this compulsion inside of me, I'm dragged forward to go, what would I mean and, and throw this sort of life boy to them, because sitting with that discomfort.

I wrote a book the 5 a.m club 5 a.m was the time I'd wake up and I created that 2020 formula that I wrote about these days for the past eight or nine months I'll begin at but 4 a.m and I open my window and I listen to the rooster's crow in this old farmhouse I live in in tuscany I listen to the dogs bark and I do 45 minutes of mvp I meditate I visualize and I pray

There's a great book that I can't remember the name that talks about um all the varied habits of the greats and their morning and evening routines

The 5 AM Club Robin Sharma right and then there was a New York um author as well that tried all of them and then also did a YouTube series on them.

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

I'm pretty sure Tim Ferriss wrote about this in four hour body right 15 years ago whatever right they having an apple before bed having some sort of slow releasing glycemic index carbohydrate can really stabilize blood glucose and he nailed it he was he was dead on man like those things can be really really helpful