16 Lessons From 700 Episodes - #702

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is me. To celebrate 700 episodes of Modern Wisdom, I broke down some of my favorite lessons, insights and quotes from the last 100 or so episodes. So today, expect to learn how your expectations define your happiness more than your circumstances, what monothinking is, why the Abilene Paradox is my favorite new idea, the problem of taking advice from super successful people, how to actually achieve enlightenment, my favorite mindset hack for doing the right thing, and much more. This episode is brought to you by Gymshark. You want to look good and feel good when you're in the gym, and Gymshark make the best men's and girls' gym wear on the planet. Their studio shorts for men are the best pair of training shorts I have ever found in my entire life. Their crest hoodie in light gray mall is what I fly in every single time that I'm on a plane and their Geo seamless t-shirt is what I've been training in every single day for over a year now. Basically, everything they make is unbelievably well-fitted, high quality, and you get 30 days of free returns globally with global shipping plus a 10% discount sitewide. If you want to see everything that I wear and recommend for guys and girls head to bit.ly slash shark wisdom that takes you to my super secret product page and you can use the code MW10 at checkout for a 10% discount plus that 30 day free returns that's bit.ly slash shark wisdom and MW10 at checkout. This episode is brought to you by Marek Health. When I wanted to get my blood work done in America, I asked around and found that Marek Health was the most sophisticated and most comprehensive company out there. That's why I started working with them and I loved the approach that they had so much that I reached out and brought them on as a partner on the show. They are a premium telehealth platform that connects customers with partnered providers from the comfort of your own home. It's concierge service for your very own patient care coordinator as a health advocate. You go over all of your needs and goals from improved sexual function, hair loss prevention, increased muscle mass, fat loss and overall improved performance. They can prescribe treatment options that can be ordered and shipped directly to you if you meet the requirements all from the comfort of your own home. You can get a 10% discount off everything site-wide if you go to marekhealth.com/modernwisdom and use the code Modern Wisdom at checkout. That's M-A-R-E-K health.com/modernwisdom and Modern Wisdom at checkout. This episode is brought to you by Surfshark VPN. Protect your browsing online and get access to the entire world's Netflix library for less than the price of a cup of coffee per month. If you use a public wifi network like a cafeteria or a library or an airport regularly, that internet admin can see all of the data going back and forth between your computer and the internet. Your internet service provider is selling your data to companies that target you with ads and phishing websites are trying to steal everything from you at all times. All of this is fixed with a VPN and it is available across unlimited devices. So it protects your phone, your iPad, your laptop and even your smart TV. And it's got a 30 day money back guarantee so you can buy it and try it for 29 days. And if you do not like it, they will give you your money back. Head to surfshark.deals.modernwisdm for an exclusive discount plus that 30 day money back guarantee. That's surfshark.deals.modernwisdm.
But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the wise and very wonderful me.
What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. It is a 702nd episode. It would have been 700, but Huberman took that spot. So I guess I can really kick him off to do this arbitrary run through of lessons. If you are relatively new here over the last 100 episodes, you might not know that around about every 100, I recap a bunch of lessons that I've got from the show, or from life, or from writing my newsletter, and I get to run through them. So today you're gonna get to go through as many as I've got time for or from the last nine months or so, and there are some absolute bangers in there. Before I get started, if you haven't already, Newtonic is live now, my first ever product. It is the only thing that you need to drink to get absolutely dialed in no matter what you need to do to be more focused, attentive, to improve your memory. This thing is phenomenal. So without further ado, by the way, newtonic.com if you need that. Without further ado, your expectations define your happiness more than your circumstances. And this is something that I knew intuitively, but needed a couple of quotes to kind of really synthesize it. So Tim Urban says, if you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished, but we wish to be happier than other people. And this is always difficult, for we believe others are happier than they are. Montesquieu said this 300 years ago, and we're still working on this one. So Tim Urban resurfacing that famous quote really highlights the asymmetry between what we see of ourselves and what we see of everyone else, right? Because humans are comparative, relative beings. We don't just judge what we are in isolation. We judge it as a part of the entire hierarchy of society. It's not just about being in a situation and it being good. It's about being in a better situation than we were before, and also a better one than the people that were around, and also a better one than our parents were in when they were our age. This is an intergenerational competition theory, it's referred to us. Charlie Munger had a really great insight where he said, the world isn't driven by greed, it's driven by envy. Our lives are objectively the best humanity has ever had, yet complaining and dissatisfaction is as high as ever. And also because everyone usually only shows the world the best of themselves, this means that we see our own misery and our failings and foibles and vacillation from a front row seat, while we watch the highlight reel of everyone else. And this makes us think that other people are doing better than they really are. And when we feel the delta between where we are and where we imagine they are, it hurts, right? There is no such thing as objective wealth. Everything is relative and most relative to those around you. That's from Morgan Household. And there's kind of a way to look at this, that your circumstances are one indication of your happiness, but your expectations are one too. And you can either bring your circumstances up to meet your expectations or try as best you can to bring your expectations down. But the problem is no one is going to feel fired up or romantic about the opportunity of leaving lots on the table, right? This isn't very homosy-pilled to say, oh yeah, I'm just going to expect less of myself. I'm going to leave as much as I can on the table because I understand that the gap between my circumstances and my expectations are where happiness sits. So by having lower expectations, I can increase my happiness. That doesn't, it kind of feels like folding almost to this ineffable force that's out there trying to crush us. But I don't know, I think there's something to it in as much as you can take satisfaction in the things that you have done. I was talking to Dan Bilzerian, someone that you might not think of as a font of like life, bro wisdom, but he's a really smart guy. And we were talking about how each time that you achieve a new level of success, it essentially just creates a new bar for you to meet again in the future. And that sounds, I don't know, it might sound kind of trite, but the problem with a rapid increase in status or wealth or accolade or whatever, is that all that you're thinking about is, oh God, that's now the new bar that I need to get to. So for instance, let's say that we release a YouTube video and it breaks some record for a 24-hour play. Let's say it does a million plays in an hour, which I think in a day, which is around about our current record, there is elation at the fact that we've done it. But then there's also this despondency in the back of your mind where you think, oh my God, that's the new bar. In order for us to get another best record, we have to do 1.1 million plays in a day. And that's terrifying. It's also a reason, I think, why I'm not so bought in on Universal Basic Income being a solution if AI automates all of our jobs and starts producing better podcasts than me. Because as soon as humans reach an acceptable level of existence, they start wanting to push for more in order to stand out from the crowd. And a flat hierarchy doesn't stick about for long. So even if every single person earns the same amount of money, people will just find something else to compete on, right? So in 2100, when everyone's needs are met and nobody needs to go to work or something, we're all going to be collecting leaves or wives or social credit score system points or something. Like, you are naturally going to stratify out into a hierarchy because it is not about your absolute happiness. It is all about your relative happiness, your relative attractiveness, your relative wealth. Gad Saad said this on the episode a couple of weeks ago, right? He said, if you want to be happy and satisfied with your sex life, you not only needs to have the amount of sex that you want, but you want to be having a little bit more sex than all of your friends around you. So yeah, happiness and satisfaction in life does not exist in a vacuum. As much as you and me may think, oh yeah, fantastic, I can do this from first principles.