Life Fails 101 - #035

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi, friends. Life Hacks is our most popular series of episodes, and today we're going to find out what happens when life hacks go wrong. Welcome to Life Fails 101, which is a collection of our biggest blunders throughout life, while we've been trying to optimize with the best will in the world, and we've fallen flat on our faces. Expect to learn why Yusef is barred from a number of pools in Newcastle upon Tyne, how I became an unintentional drug trafficker, what happens when Jonny tried to optimize his alcohol use, and what happened that time when Yusef joined a cult. In other news, the Modern Wisdom YouTube channel has now started cutting up some clips, best ofs from our existing episodes and uploading them with some new content and some additional stuff. So if you head to the YouTube channel, search Modern Wisdom or youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast, you will be able to check those out as well, but for now here is me, Jonny and Yusef face palming our way through an hour of fuck ups.
Welcome back. Today, we are going to do Life Fails. Now, if you are an avid Modern Wisdom listener, you will know that we often do a Life Hacks series. It's one of our most popular. And today, we are going to give our best stories about when those journeys into making our life more optimal go awry, I think, is the best way to put it.

**Yusef** (2:02)
Death by optimisation.

**Chris Williamson** (2:05)
In your case.

**Yusef** (2:06)
Instant death. Not one of these slow drawn out...

**Jonny** (2:09)
Do not pass go... Catastrophic...

**Chris Williamson** (2:11)
.or directly to being beheaded. I think we need to let you open up with your first Life Fail.

**Jonny** (2:18)
So Yusef has a list. Chris and I probably have a couple between us.

**Chris Williamson** (2:23)
I've got sentiment and you've got more Life Fails than you do Life Hacks.

**Yusef** (2:28)
I think a lot of my fails are stuff that you two remind me of. Oh yeah, what about that? I don't know why they seem to happen.

**Jonny** (2:36)
It's just my favourite list.

**Yusef** (2:38)
Jonny wants to see the list. So are we doing the underwater jasmine pool?

**Chris Williamson** (2:42)
I think the first one that you should do is jasmine pool and why you got banned from the pool in town.

**Yusef** (2:47)
Okay, so, early on in my quest for...

**Chris Williamson** (2:54)
Jonny's reading the list.

**Jonny** (2:56)
Because I remember these things happening.

**Chris Williamson** (2:59)
Stop it.

**Yusef** (2:59)
I'm sorry.

**Jonny** (3:00)
I'll keep it together.

**Chris Williamson** (3:05)
You're not keeping it together.

**Yusef** (3:07)
You won't keep it together.

**Chris Williamson** (3:09)
What does it say? What does it say?

**Jonny** (3:15)
What does it say?

**Yusef** (3:17)
I think this is...

**Jonny** (3:17)
It says, big poo in toilet. Tried boiling water. Released the steam. Got a stick from Meadows.

**Chris Williamson** (3:25)
Look, it's going right. Come on.

**Yusef** (3:28)
Okay. We can get to that one for sure. I do requests and everything. So early on in my quest for optimization, I read a book that described a process that supposedly Albert Einstein used. I think that's one of those most overused things where they just say, oh, this is the thing that Albert Einstein did, and it just instantly gives some credibility. A technique called image streaming. This is where supposedly you strengthen the connections with the corpus callosum between the right and left brain to create more connections and to communicate the left and right side of the brain. So that involves a series of lying down with a tape recorder and just describing verbally the things that you see, and that brings me into awareness. No, it hasn't even happened yet. I've not heard this part before. That idea started me off and ended up with me being kicked out of Jesmond Court.
What happened was, along with image streaming, I ended up searching more of it and there was a combined method that someone recommended, which is submersion in water for one hour a day total time. So total cumulative time of an hour a day for three weeks. And the idea is, by doing that, you create an adaptation in your body where you increase the surface area of your carotid arteries, the arteries that supply the brain, and increase the blood flow to the brain, equating to supposedly like a 10-point increase in IQ. So I read that and without any further verification, I was like, right, I'm gonna try it. So went into the pool in one town and basically had my little digital watch, sat by the side of the ladder thing and just pushed myself under water and timed myself and just built it up.