The Best Moments of Modern Wisdom (2025) - #1036

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
What's happening, people? Welcome back to the show. It is the end of 2025, and to celebrate, I've put together a collection of my favorite moments from the podcast over the last 12 months. Some huge episodes that you probably saw, some other episodes that maybe you missed, and I've put them all together in an interesting flow and pacing, and I really loved all of these. I love all 1040 of my podcast children, but these were just some highlights from 2025 I appreciate you all for being here. I appreciate you all for making Modern Wisdom the eighth biggest podcast in the world, according to Spotify Wrapped this year, which is insane. And thank you for all the support and all the shares and all the everything. Thank you for staying patient with me when I've tried to bring in new ideas and guests that you've never heard of. I really, really do work hard to try and curate a nice art gallery that even if you don't know who the artist is, you're probably going to enjoy their work. So thank you for sticking with me as I go down rabbit holes that you didn't know that you're going to enjoy and commenting and all of the support and everything, especially this year more than ever, it's meant an awful lot to me. So yeah, I appreciate every single one of you. Before we get into it, you need to do an end of your review and the review process that I use for myself, that I've stolen from all the best productivity guys on the planet, is at chriswillx.com/review. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have recorded it and done their work on it already, and you can get it for free. Copy into your Notes app and do your end of your review. So chriswillx.com/review.
Anyway, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year. And let's get into it. The worst outcome in the world is not having self-esteem.

**Naval Ravikant** (1:55)
Why? Yeah, it's a tough one.
I look at the people, and I don't want to offend anybody, but I look at the people who don't like themselves, and that's the toughest slot, because they're always wrestling with themselves. And it's hard enough to face the outside world. And no one's going to like you more than you like yourself. So if you're struggling with yourself, then the outside world becomes an insurmountable challenge. And it's hard to say why people have low self-esteem. It might be genetic, it might just be circumstantial. A lot of times I think it's because they just weren't unconditionally loved as a child, and that sort of seeps in at a deep core level. But self-esteem issues can be the most limiting. One interesting thought is that, you know, to some extent, self-esteem is a reputation you have with yourself. You're watching yourself at all times. You know what you're doing, and you have your own moral code. Everyone has a different moral code. But if you don't live up to your own moral code, the same code that you hold others to, it will damage your self-esteem. So perhaps one way to build up your self-esteem is to live up to your own code. Very rigorously have one and then live up to it. Another way to raise your self-esteem might be to do things for others. If I look back on my life and, you know, what are the moments that I'm actually proud of? There's very far and few between. It's not that often. It's not the things you would expect. It's not the material success. It's not having learned this thing or that. It's when I made a sacrifice for somebody or something that I loved. And that's when I'm actually ironically most proud. Now that's through an explicit mental exercise, but I'll bet you at some level I'm recording that implicitly. So that tells me that even if I am not being loved, then the way to create love is to give love, to express love through sacrifice and through duty. And so I think doing things like that can build up your self-esteem really fast.

**Chris Williamson** (3:44)
It's interesting when you talk about sacrifice, because a lot of the time people say, well, I sacrificed so much for my job. It's like, yeah, but that was you sacrificing something that you wanted less for something that you wanted more, as opposed to genuinely taking some sort of cost. And yeah, I wonder whether if self-esteem is you adhering to your actions and your values aligning, even when it's difficult, or perhaps even more so when it's difficult, I wonder whether there is a price that people who are more introspective, high integrity pay because you think, well, you've got this heavier set of overheads that you need to pay in some way.