0:00

I'm really excited. Yeah, you're pumped for

0:02

themes. Genuinely, yes. Why are you so

0:04

pumped, Mike? I'm really excited about my

0:06

theme. You got a good one? I

0:08

think I got a good one. There's

0:10

a big project included in my theme

0:13

that I've not told you about that

0:15

I'm excited to tell you about. Okay.

0:17

And I feel

0:19

good about my theme from last year. And

0:22

I'm... You've been hinting at big

0:24

things in your discussion. No, no. Okay. Don't

0:26

even dare set it up like that. What

0:28

I've actually been trying to communicate is this

0:31

is the year that I've, by

0:34

a huge margin, taken the most notes

0:36

on my theme throughout the year. And

0:39

I have spent what has felt like

0:41

the virtual equivalent of the past three

0:44

days shifting through hundreds and hundreds of

0:46

little index cards with random sentences for

0:48

thoughts of like, what was going on?

0:50

See, that's exciting to me. I'm excited

0:52

about this. I'm excited about this. Yeah.

0:55

So I felt a little overwhelmed the

0:57

past few days of like trying to

0:59

condense down a bunch of things that

1:01

to me are sort of interrelated. So

1:04

I feel like there's been like big thoughts this year

1:06

is for me what's been going on. Gray,

1:09

what is a yearly theme? That is a

1:11

tricky question because a theme

1:14

to me anyway, it's very

1:16

fuzzy wuzzy. It's very hippy

1:18

dippy. It's a flexible thing

1:21

that you can adapt for you.

1:23

So I always feel like we

1:26

talk about themes, but

1:28

trying to nail it down to an

1:30

exact definition is always a little bit

1:33

tricky. But I feel like what

1:35

you can do is you can talk

1:37

about some characteristics and the things to

1:40

me that matter about a theme is

1:42

first in opposition to something like a

1:44

resolution. Boo. Boo,

1:46

Boo resolutions. But like

1:48

this is what started the whole thing years ago

1:51

kind of thinking about it. It's like resolutions suck,

1:53

right? I get to set

1:55

a goal for me for a year

1:57

from now. Past history has always

1:59

been. This works just great.

2:03

It works a really great goal

2:05

that you don't have to deal with

2:07

for a year, right? That you also

2:09

may or may not have set it

2:12

a semi-drunken haze the night before, right?

2:14

Oh, and also, I feel

2:16

like even more than that, you're setting

2:18

yourself up on January 1st to have

2:21

a disappointment by the 1st of February.

2:23

Yeah, and no one is ready to

2:25

go on January 1st as well. So

2:28

it's like it's almost built into

2:30

a resolution that no matter what you've

2:32

decided, you're already giving yourself January 1st

2:34

off. You know, you're already like

2:36

cutting exceptions right out of the gate. That to

2:39

me is like the key defining feature is that

2:41

it is not a goal. If

2:44

it's not a goal, what is it? And I like

2:48

to think of a theme

2:51

as an overarching tool

2:54

that you are using

2:56

to help guide your

2:58

thinking over the course of the year.

3:01

Because what happens? You're just like living your daily life.

3:03

You're doing these things. And every

3:06

day you've got 100 million decisions to

3:08

make about whatever. And

3:11

with a theme, you're trying to

3:13

help shape those decisions. Just

3:15

as an example, like let's say you pick like, oh,

3:17

this is year of family. It

3:20

helps shape in those moments that

3:22

if there's like a tiebreaker between

3:24

deciding something one way or another,

3:26

you should lean in the direction

3:29

that benefits your family or that has

3:31

you spending more time with your family.

3:34

It's not about, oh, I

3:36

have this goal of like X

3:38

hours of going to be like spending

3:41

with family. I just feel like

3:43

that does not work as well for these kinds of

3:45

things. Let's say for you, right? You live in a

3:47

different country to your family. Imagine

3:49

you'd spent two trips you'd done this

3:52

year. You were like, I want to

3:54

see my family more, so I'm going

3:56

to do three trips next year. But

3:59

something happened. Yeah. But you

4:01

still make two trips and you extend one trip by

4:03

a couple of days. Well

4:05

then you've succeeded in the year of family

4:08

because you've taken steps to

4:10

improve it but you haven't set

4:13

a fixed goal on

4:16

the outcome of that. That's exactly right. That's

4:18

another good way to think about it. It's

4:20

very easy to set

4:22

the specific things that you want

4:25

ideally future you to do. It

4:28

just always feels like you're setting yourself

4:30

up for disappointment when you do that.

4:32

And then you can even have accomplished

4:34

what you ideally wanted to do, which

4:37

is to spend more time on a

4:39

thing and still feel bad because you

4:41

didn't do the theoretical amount that you

4:43

wanted to do. To me that feels

4:45

like just such a defining feature of

4:47

the theme. It should help shape

4:50

your decisions over the course

4:52

of the year. And particularly

4:54

for me this year, it sort

4:57

of also guided what I was

4:59

thinking about. I found myself thinking

5:02

in a very meta way about the

5:04

theme and what does this mean for

5:07

what am I doing now and what am I doing in the future.

5:10

And so one of the other things that

5:12

I really like about a theme, which now

5:14

both of us having done this multiple years,

5:17

is that it is adaptable. And

5:20

I think we have often found

5:23

that at the end of

5:25

the year, you feel very differently

5:27

about what your theme was than at

5:29

the start. That you think

5:31

like, oh, I intended for it to be like this,

5:33

but at the end of the year I was thinking

5:35

about it like this. That

5:37

also feels to me like a very natural part

5:39

of the process. If you are thinking about a

5:42

thing more, it shouldn't

5:44

be surprising that you change or

5:46

adapt the way that you think

5:48

about that thing over time.

5:51

So not a goal, it's a way to guide

5:53

your thinking. It's adaptable over

5:55

the year. And all

5:59

of these add up to... Basically, it's a kind

6:01

of tool for metacognition, which I might

6:03

not have ever expressed it that way

6:05

before, but it is a way to

6:07

help you think about what

6:10

you're thinking about and a way to

6:12

help you think about the decisions that

6:14

you're making. And all

6:16

of this should add up to improvements

6:19

in your life overall. So

6:21

that's the way I think about it, Steve. Something

6:23

you said last year really

6:25

resonated with me, which is

6:28

how hard it is to change

6:30

something in your life, to

6:33

make meaningful, lasting change.

6:36

And genuinely, having

6:39

a yearly theme every year might be

6:41

the biggest change that I've been able

6:43

to make in my adult life. Because

6:47

there are things that I do because of

6:49

my yearly theme that I would not have

6:51

focused on or I would not have done.

6:54

And there are still ideas

6:56

that I'm carrying from themes from

6:58

three years ago. They've

7:01

changed me as a person because I spent

7:03

365 days thinking about a specific idea, a

7:09

specific thing that I wanted to see

7:11

some improvement on in my life, like

7:13

a word and how that guided me.

7:16

It's all about, to me, the theme

7:18

helps me shape what the year

7:20

is going to be. Because we

7:23

give them these little catchy phrases, it

7:25

sticks in my brain more and that makes

7:28

sure that it's front of mind when I'm

7:30

making decisions. So it's always

7:32

there, like having this little impact on

7:34

me. I've referred to

7:36

themes before as like a North Star.

7:39

And that's one of the key ways that I think about

7:41

it, is that it's always up there and it's

7:44

always a place for me to move towards. And

7:46

I'll just keep moving towards it. But like

7:48

the North Star, and they're actually going to get there, but I'm

7:51

just going to get towards it. And

7:53

that's what it's all about for me. And so this

7:56

is why yearly themes are so important to us

7:58

and continue. to be so.

8:00

I would also add that the catchy

8:03

names, do you really think are important?

8:06

Like coming up with words that just

8:08

stick in your mind, I really do

8:10

think that this is an important part

8:13

of picking the theme. It

8:15

draws your brain back to it

8:18

and just having these

8:21

nudges and these self-reinforcing

8:23

circuits in your brain of like, oh,

8:25

I'm thinking about this catchy word, or

8:28

I'm thinking about this catchy phrase, it really does

8:30

help affect behavior or it helps

8:32

affect long-term thinking. It's

8:35

like a couple of years ago, I

8:37

was talking about new decades dawn and

8:39

that sort of meant something for me

8:41

for my career and my work. And

8:43

it's, oh, I can still totally feel

8:45

that. Like even though that's from the

8:47

past, it's still affecting a

8:50

current theme, which is about work. It's like,

8:52

oh, this phrase has turned into something in

8:54

my mind. So yeah, there

8:56

is also this effect of them layering

8:58

up over time and kind

9:00

of forming a background base for your brain

9:02

and the way you think about things. The

9:05

names don't have to be cute and clever. Like

9:07

they just have to be something that resonates with

9:09

you. I mean, it can

9:12

be long and clunky as new

9:15

decades dawn again. I mean, I'll also

9:17

do a spoiler alert for at the

9:19

end. My one for this year, very

9:21

clunky. You're not gonna like it, right?

9:24

Well, you say that. I think I prefer

9:26

them that way. I wouldn't use them for

9:28

me, but I always enjoy the names that

9:30

you come up with. I'm gonna call it

9:32

right now. Worst name yet. It's

9:35

good. It takes the pressure off the listener.

9:37

Yeah, clever might be too much pressure. That's

9:40

why I think when I made the video

9:42

a while ago talking about themes, I ended

9:44

up circling in on, it is a very

9:46

hippie word, but I think it is the

9:49

best word of resonant. You're looking for the

9:51

thing that your brain

9:53

reacts to. And that's not a

9:55

logical process. That is a

9:57

feeling process. Which word do you use?

10:00

you feel like your brain is attracted to? When

10:02

you look at, in comments or

10:04

like other people using their themes, like

10:06

which of these things do you feel

10:09

like lights up a little bulb

10:11

in your brain? That's what you're looking for. You're

10:13

looking for something that is resonant

10:15

with your brain so that your brain will

10:17

also be brought

10:19

back to it naturally over the course of

10:21

the year. Can you

10:23

give us the review of

10:26

your theme for 2023? Let

10:28

us know and let me know how you feel like

10:30

you did. Before we do that,

10:34

I actually want to have a

10:36

little bit of follow up from

10:39

a theme years ago. Wow,

10:43

the year is 20 what? The

10:46

year is 20 something and

10:49

I had another very work

10:51

related theme. It might

10:53

have been something like New Decades on. And

10:56

in that discussion, I said

10:58

that there was something that I wanted to

11:01

make an exception for as a goal and

11:04

that was billion or

11:06

bust. Oh yeah. I wanted

11:09

to be able to have a billion

11:12

views on my YouTube channel.

11:15

At the time, my best estimate

11:17

was that this was a long term five

11:19

year goal. I thought I might

11:21

be able to bring that down to four years.

11:24

Three years was my very

11:26

aggressive but probably unrealistic timeline

11:28

for achieving that. And I'm

11:30

here to say that I

11:32

just did it in two.

11:34

What? As of today, I

11:36

have one billion, seven million

11:40

lifetime views on the channel. Oh my

11:42

God, I just got goosebumps. I have

11:44

no idea about this. Congratulations.

11:48

I was keeping it from you because I didn't know

11:50

if I was actually going to hit it before the

11:52

theme episode or if this was going to be something

11:55

we would talk about in January. I

11:57

just looked at the views this morning and

11:59

it's one. billion, seven million. So

12:01

just over the finish line in

12:04

time for the theme episode.

12:06

Oh my word. That's amazing. Pretty

12:08

unreal. So I have an

12:10

important question, but I have a technical question first,

12:12

because I've just gone to your page. It doesn't

12:14

show me that on your about box. There's a

12:16

thing that's happened here, which I wasn't really thinking

12:18

about when I set this goal, is

12:21

that there's two different metrics on

12:23

YouTube. There's the public metric of

12:25

how many views are there, but

12:27

you as the creator have a

12:29

private metric. There's a

12:31

big disparity between the public and the

12:33

private number. That's partly because

12:35

of things like live streams. I also

12:37

archived a bunch of videos this year

12:39

that I thought were just out of

12:42

date. There's also what is now hilariously

12:44

the Rock Paper Scissors project, which also

12:46

none of those views count. So those

12:48

don't go towards the total. Cause they're

12:50

like not public on the page. Yeah,

12:53

so any views from an unlisted

12:55

channel don't count on the public

12:57

page. But as I realized

13:00

like, oh, there's actually a big disparity between these

13:02

two. The thing is for me, it's

13:04

like, man, I know that I should

13:06

care about the public number, but it's like, I'm

13:08

just looking at my like private dashboard and this

13:10

number is getting closer and closer to a billion.

13:12

And it's like, this is the one

13:15

that my heart cares about. I log into YouTube now

13:17

and it has one B for the views.

13:21

Damn, oh my God. All

13:23

right, so the more important question, how

13:26

do you feel about this? Mainly

13:29

I feel great because when

13:31

I did set that goal for

13:33

Billion or Bust, I

13:36

really did do my best

13:38

to actually move towards that.

13:41

And there's a bunch of

13:43

like non-obvious ways that I could do

13:45

something like that, but it provided like a real

13:47

target for me. And we

13:50

can get into it later, but I think

13:53

there's some things about the YouTube environment that

13:55

have really changed over time. I'm

13:57

glad to have been able to do this. sooner

14:00

because it feels

14:02

like I achieved

14:04

this number in

14:06

a time frame where this number

14:09

is still meaningful. It's

14:11

still sort of what views meant

14:13

to me when I started YouTube,

14:15

they still mean now. So this

14:17

metric hasn't moved. I

14:19

didn't do a thing like, oh, I've

14:21

uploaded a bunch of shorts to my channel and

14:24

cheated my way to a billion views. It's like,

14:26

no. Because you could have done it way faster.

14:29

Yeah, because I could have done it like that.

14:31

Like I played with shorts for a little bit

14:33

and I decided like, I just hate this. And

14:35

part of the thing about the shorts was it

14:37

really did bother me thinking like, if

14:39

I hit a billion views and I've done

14:41

it with a ton of shorts views, it

14:44

just will feel worse. Like it'll feel

14:46

like I had cheated. So I'm really

14:48

happy to have done it with

14:51

actual videos that people had

14:54

to click to watch. You're

14:56

not leaning on what

14:58

is a easier path,

15:01

which is shorts, because people

15:03

can consume so many of them and

15:05

the algorithm is so thirsty.

15:08

There's also just weird things

15:10

where like YouTube

15:12

has gotten on what I think of as the old

15:15

Facebook train where people can just

15:17

promote a video, right? Like to

15:19

pay to promote a video. And

15:21

it just feels like, oh, right.

15:23

I hate that. I hate

15:26

that as well. So like there's just a bunch

15:28

of things that are changing on YouTube. None of

15:30

them are like in full force now, but

15:32

it's like all of this stuff is coming. And

15:34

I just felt like I'm really glad to have

15:36

hit this goal at what feels like

15:39

maximum meaningfulness and

15:42

it's an absolutely inconceivable

15:44

number. It just goes

15:47

right past what your brain can

15:49

even think of. Yeah. And also

15:52

quite good timing for me is one of

15:55

the things I wanted to say. It's like,

15:57

I'm always so awkward for introducing myself at

15:59

conferences. Like, how do I write

16:01

like the one line summary? And this was one

16:03

of the motivators is like, I'd like to be

16:05

able to just say like, I run a YouTube

16:07

channel with a billion views. Oh great, I've got

16:09

a conference in a few months. It's like, I

16:12

could just put that as the bio. It's like,

16:14

no more fussing over this. It's like, no, I

16:16

run a YouTube channel with a billion views. Great,

16:18

there's my one sentence pitch for who I am

16:20

at this conference. So that's also just really

16:23

nice to have reached this before the next

16:25

time that I was actually going to use

16:27

it. So remind me again, when you set

16:29

this, what was your timeframe? So

16:33

it was on the 2021 episodes. Yep.

16:37

And at that point I was

16:39

300 million views short. And

16:44

given views at the time, my

16:46

estimate was like five

16:48

years, maybe four years, three years

16:51

if I really push it. To

16:54

have actually done it in two years is great. So

16:56

like it took you like seven, eight

16:58

years to get to 700 million. Yeah.

17:01

And then you did 300 million in two years. Yep.

17:04

That's pretty good, man. That's pretty

17:06

good. Like, I think

17:08

it was the last two years, things

17:11

you've been talking about the idea of

17:13

like being serious, like accepting what

17:15

that means. And this is the proof

17:17

that you did that work. There's two

17:20

sides to this. Like one side of

17:22

it is what

17:24

I've in the past talked about as

17:26

not being a baby and just accepting

17:28

that the marketing of the video is

17:30

part of the video and not be

17:32

like, I'm going to have a thumbnail

17:34

from 10 years ago that I thought

17:36

about for two minutes as like the

17:38

only things to promote this video. It's

17:40

like, no, I was being serious in

17:42

how do I pitch these

17:44

to viewers, what's effective for

17:47

actually bringing new viewers in. And there's

17:49

a thing that I'm going to talk

17:52

about later with my actual theme

17:54

stuff, but there's also something that's just been

17:56

on the back of my mind for a

17:58

while, which is about the videos. released over

18:00

the past few years. While

18:03

they haven't been great in number,

18:05

there's been an unusual number of

18:08

really good videos in that crop

18:10

and really good videos for the

18:12

core audience and those kind

18:15

of videos, when they come out, encourage

18:17

people to rewatch a bunch

18:19

of the back catalog. So

18:23

it's a combination of these two things

18:25

that I think really were able to

18:27

push it forward is be more

18:29

serious about actually making it appealing for people

18:31

to click on a video and

18:34

release videos that the core

18:36

audience just really likes and

18:38

remind them why they like your style and

18:40

then they'll go back and watch a bunch

18:43

of the old stuff again. So those

18:45

are like the two factors that have really

18:47

contributed to why was

18:50

I able to get the

18:52

300 million views in the last two

18:54

years. It's those two things together. I

18:56

will also say from a selfish standpoint,

18:58

happy that you had that

19:00

difference with the internal number because I got

19:03

to find that information out live

19:05

rather than if you would have done

19:07

it before now, someone would have written in to ask a

19:09

question about it. Someone would

19:13

have been like, oh, great hit a billion.

19:15

How does he feel? I'm just happier that

19:17

you got to tell me and

19:19

therefore all the audience too. Everyone

19:22

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21:07

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21:37

FM. Alright, so now

21:39

I'll take a second shot. I'll ask you

21:41

again. How

21:43

did your 2023 theme go? Okay,

21:47

so 2023 theme was

21:51

year of work. As always, there's

21:53

some brackets. Part one was

21:55

work while you still

21:58

can. Did

22:00

you forget that? I was wondering if you forgot

22:02

that part. I forgot the subtitle. Mike,

22:06

the subtitle is a very important part

22:08

of what that is, right? Year of

22:10

work means one thing. Year of work,

22:12

while you still can, has a very

22:15

different feeling. Very different feeling, yes. And

22:19

the second part was work on

22:21

your health. See, I remembered that one. I

22:23

remembered it as on yourself. But like I

22:25

remembered that. I thought it was like year

22:27

of work and also work on yourself. I

22:29

forgot the while you still can,

22:32

but maybe I just

22:34

decided to like forget that because it is

22:36

a horrible feeling. When I relisted to the

22:38

episode, when I said that part, you laughed

22:40

at this particular mic wave that I

22:42

was aware of. Like, oh, he might have

22:45

just immediately buried that thought in his

22:47

brain. Like, let's not think about that. So,

22:50

yeah, I just want to do it in reverse

22:52

order. So for health, I'm

22:54

going to put this as like health and travel were

22:56

sort of two things that were going on here. So,

22:59

yeah, the situation was I had just

23:01

gotten myself for a bunch of reasons.

23:04

We don't need to recap into like

23:06

not a great health situation. And I

23:08

was like, OK, I just absolutely need

23:10

to fix this. And again,

23:13

like, while themes are not goal

23:17

oriented, this is one

23:20

of the places where it's like, well, I do have

23:22

stuff to track. And I have

23:26

like this little wiggle room around goals. It's like the

23:28

way I think about it in my head. It's like,

23:30

you don't want to set goals, but

23:32

trend lines are OK. Like what is

23:34

the trend lines going in the right

23:36

direction? Because like if you say health,

23:38

then you can look at trends and

23:40

you can see where they're improving and

23:42

then that's good. But if you had

23:44

said white or if you

23:47

said, how much can I lift like

23:49

these aren't in the spirit

23:51

of themes, right? But the idea is just

23:53

like I want to improve my health. Well,

23:56

you can take a look at where it's improving and be like,

23:58

oh, look, I did it. and that's

24:00

the difference. Yeah, I know. I do

24:02

feel like this is one part where

24:05

I slightly rules lawyer myself about the

24:07

themes. I just feel like

24:09

trend lines are getting slightly close to a goal, but

24:11

I do agree with that distinction. It does matter. And

24:14

it also matters partly because of, like you said,

24:16

the ideally the

24:18

theme is broad enough that it is

24:20

also flexible enough. A

24:23

theme that was like, this is my year

24:26

of biceps lifting more. It's like, well, now

24:28

this is too specific. Now

24:30

you've just made a goal out of your theme. But

24:32

yeah, so listeners over the

24:35

year will know that I had like 100

24:37

little jibes about the Apple Health app. And

24:39

this is the reason why, because I was

24:41

thinking about my health a lot. And so

24:44

I was looking at that app and

24:46

just constantly checking in on

24:48

how are things going over the course of

24:51

the year. And I'm very

24:53

happy with the way things went. The

24:56

big headline marker here is

24:58

that I dropped 12 percentage

25:01

points in body fat. So

25:03

I went from well above

25:05

the average to below the average

25:07

now. I've still got like, depending

25:10

on what metrics you use, I've still got

25:12

like maybe another five to go to be

25:15

in like the firmly healthy range. But

25:17

boy, I'll tell you, like you just really

25:19

feel that change in percent body fat over

25:21

the course of a year. Like you really

25:24

do. I was also tracking

25:26

just a bunch of other things. And for

25:28

me, the other main one that I was looking at was

25:30

like VO2 max. OK,

25:34

so basically VO2 max is like

25:36

a proxy for your aerobic health.

25:39

And kind of talking about

25:41

how themes layer on top of each other. Past

25:44

me would just never

25:46

have been able to

25:49

care about aerobic health

25:51

in any way. Listeners

25:53

who have been on this journey with me, it

25:56

took so long to get me

25:58

to care about. physical

26:01

health in any way. It

26:04

took so long to start

26:06

establishing just minimal weightlifting as

26:08

some kind of repeated health

26:10

habits. To have like this, what

26:13

I think of as the basic

26:15

platform for any kind of health in my

26:17

life, like even at my highest

26:19

percent fat over the course of the year, I

26:22

was still doing okay on

26:24

the strength front compared to

26:26

previous me who just never done anything

26:28

like this. So

26:30

I feel like it

26:32

kind of built up and this year,

26:35

much to my own surprise,

26:37

I was actually really able

26:39

to make it part of

26:41

the routine to add on top of this,

26:44

just doing much more aerobic exercise than I've

26:46

ever done before. What really

26:49

helped was to have a specific goal. So

26:51

in the past, people are always like, you need

26:54

to do aerobic exercise. And it's been like, so

26:56

what? I just need to be on this

26:59

treadmill until I'm too sad

27:01

to be on this treadmill anymore. That sucks,

27:03

I hate this. What am

27:05

I supposed to actually do here? And what

27:07

I mentioned very briefly in State of the Apps is

27:11

the thing that I sort of settled

27:13

on is like, okay, this is the

27:15

actual goal and the target with what

27:18

is a meaningful improvement in aerobic health

27:20

is like the number of minutes, what

27:23

I was tracking is the number of

27:25

minutes every two weeks that

27:27

I spent in zone two heart

27:29

range. So, oh

27:32

my God, like I never would have done this

27:34

without the Apple Watch previously, but like the ability

27:36

of the Apple Watch just like set an exercise

27:38

and then set little alerts for when you drop

27:40

out of or you go, very importantly,

27:42

you go over the target heart

27:45

range. It's just like life

27:47

changing. So good to be able

27:49

to do something like that. So the

27:51

VO2 max of my like health

27:53

trend, it's the most

27:55

stubborn metric to move, but

27:58

this is one where it's like, okay, over

28:00

the... course of the year I could see

28:02

that the trend line is up. It

28:05

is like very slow. I would

28:07

still love to get it to be

28:09

in like the above average range but

28:11

it's like I'm at least like a

28:13

normal person now with my aerobic health

28:16

and I'm not just at the absolute

28:18

worst when I first started being concerned

28:20

about this when my Apple

28:22

Watch was like oh hey you're at the

28:24

bottom 2 percentile of aerobic health or whatever

28:26

it was that it said I was like

28:29

oh that sounds really bad. No I don't like

28:31

that. Yeah I don't like that

28:33

at all that sounds like the Grim Reaper

28:35

is standing above my shoulder like tapping his

28:38

watch. Basically the summary of this is

28:41

with the exception of sleep which we talked

28:43

about on a few of the more tech

28:46

episodes all of my health metrics that I

28:48

can track are trending in the

28:50

right direction over the course of the

28:52

year for health. So the question that

28:54

people would naturally ask is like how

28:56

do you do that right? And

29:00

the thing for me is always you can't just say oh

29:03

just work harder bro like just do it

29:05

more. I didn't just do it more this

29:07

year. The thing that

29:09

was really absolutely key

29:11

for me was I just

29:14

really paid attention to and

29:17

thought a lot about where

29:19

does this fit in my actual

29:21

schedule exercise. Where

29:24

does this go? And over the

29:26

years I've tried to like fit it

29:28

in in different ways I've tried to do it

29:30

at different times and I

29:32

realized this year that

29:34

basically I have two

29:37

options that work successfully long

29:40

term. If I'm

29:42

going to exercise regularly I

29:45

basically have to do it every

29:47

day otherwise I just fall off

29:49

the wagon and it needs to

29:51

be the very

29:54

first thing before work starts

29:57

or the very last thing

30:00

after work is done. This

30:02

is what I learned this year. It's like, man, if I

30:04

try to do anything else, it

30:06

just doesn't work long-term. I've just been trying

30:08

to do things like in the past, oh,

30:11

exercise, this seems like a great break

30:14

in the work schedule. And it's like,

30:16

no, it's actually terrible. It breaks it.

30:18

That's the problem. Yeah. Again,

30:21

like it's so dumb, but I

30:23

always say like understanding yourself is

30:25

surprisingly hard to do sometimes. And

30:28

you really need to spend

30:31

mental effort on really

30:34

understanding what you're like, keeping

30:36

in mind that your brain is also

30:38

just delighted to trick you about what

30:40

are you really like, you know, what

30:43

is actually effective. I think in particular,

30:45

just realizing that an exercise schedule I

30:47

had been really resistant to the idea

30:49

of exercising first thing in the morning

30:51

actually was more effective for

30:54

me. It

30:56

had changed that my best routine used

30:58

to be just like

31:00

wake up and the whole goal was

31:02

like, how fast can I go from

31:04

waking up to typing on the computer?

31:06

That was like my whole life previously,

31:08

but something has totally changed with me

31:10

in that. And I was slow to

31:12

recognize it, but it's like, oh, I

31:15

wake up and now it is just a

31:18

longer time before my brain gets

31:20

going. And I realized,

31:23

oh, well, instead

31:25

of just having a slow morning, you

31:27

know what you could do? You can have

31:29

a slow morning while you're

31:32

exercising. And it's like, man, it's

31:34

worked really well for me. Interesting. And then there's

31:36

this fallback of, well, if I don't, for

31:39

whatever reason, if I don't exercise first and I

31:41

start working, because there is just something that's straight

31:43

on my mind, it's like, okay. Well

31:45

then the very last thing when

31:48

you're done working for the day should be

31:50

the exercise. That's the flip side of it.

31:52

It's like one of these two things. But

31:54

I'll tell you, there's a real bonus for

31:56

doing it in the morning. Turns out between

31:58

sets. excellent

32:00

time for theme system journaling. This

32:03

has just been perfect for me.

32:05

Huh. Is I don't want to

32:07

be in the morning really listening

32:09

to anything. Like I'm not gonna

32:11

listen to a podcast while I'm exercising in the morning. It's

32:13

like no, no, no, because I'm kind of like gearing up

32:15

my brain for work. I've always said

32:17

in the past that I do tactical

32:20

journaling with the theme system, but

32:22

this year it's also switching to

32:24

exercise in the morning has had

32:26

a huge impact on the amount

32:28

that I journal regularly. And it's

32:30

because no, this is great.

32:32

I'm exercising. I've got the journal and

32:36

what am I doing? It's like oh, you're doing some

32:38

exercise and then you have to wait two minutes before

32:40

you do the next set. And

32:42

I just have the journal out and I

32:44

just go through that

32:46

in the morning. It's like you know

32:48

one of the things I like to do with that is

32:50

I think like what's on my mind? And it turns out

32:54

well if I'm going to be exercising for like 45

32:56

minutes before I start to work, I actually have

32:58

a bunch of time to really think about what's

33:01

on my mind. I have a bunch of time

33:03

to really think about for me at

33:05

the bottom I like to put like two things I'm

33:07

gonna try to do for the day like the top

33:09

two. I have a lot of time to think about

33:11

that and I found this schedule

33:13

just works kind of amazingly as a

33:17

booting up process. It's gonna take me

33:19

a while to get ready for to

33:21

work anyway. I might as well start

33:23

exercising first thing in the morning and

33:25

while I'm exercising I might as well

33:27

have the journal open and

33:29

just this is the time to

33:32

think about all of the different parts of

33:34

this. It's been kind of amazing. That

33:36

is a very interesting way to fit

33:39

journaling into your life. Like I never

33:41

would have considered that as a thing.

33:43

Yeah. But it makes sense though because

33:45

I know that when I'm doing some

33:47

kind of exercise that takes time and

33:51

I'm not watching or I can't watch

33:53

or can't listen to something, my

33:56

brain just goes around and around

33:59

and swimming is the one that I always think of

34:01

in that. Because when you're swimming, you

34:04

can't listen to a podcast, you

34:06

can't watch The Office, like you're

34:09

swimming. And it's always been

34:11

like interesting to me, like I like

34:13

to swim and I like the way

34:15

that it gets my brain going but what I also

34:18

then don't like about swimming is it's very hard to

34:20

capture anything. Right, exactly. What are you

34:22

gonna do? Yeah. When I was swimming more frequently, I

34:25

had a waterproof notebook

34:28

and pencil that I would

34:30

leave by the side of the pool and

34:33

would jump kind of out of

34:35

the pool like a mad person and

34:37

make notes and then jump back in again. I

34:40

must have looked so weird to people doing

34:42

this. That was what I would do.

34:45

Or I did also for a while I

34:48

would like dictate into my Apple

34:50

watch but then like

34:52

when I was doing this, the Apple watch was not

34:54

very good. And so like Carrie

34:57

will often tell of this time where I

34:59

would send her messages and

35:01

they would barely make any sense. Like

35:03

I'm swimming right now would be as

35:06

part of the message so she would

35:08

know to try and like loosely understand

35:10

what I was getting at. Right,

35:12

any of these words could be words that

35:15

sound like other words. Exactly. What does this

35:17

sentence mean? And it's also like

35:19

one of those things when you're talking into a

35:21

smart device where like and you're dictating for you

35:23

if you're sending it to someone where

35:25

there is always that part of the message where

35:28

you have to explain what you're doing. Yeah.

35:30

And you kind of can't stop at that point.

35:32

You just have to keep going and it gets

35:34

a bit messy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really interesting.

35:36

It's really interesting. I

35:38

can't, like a lot of things, it

35:41

seems really simple and obvious in retrospect

35:43

but it's not simple and

35:45

obvious to come to that solution in

35:47

the first place. I mean

35:49

just to be clear, I'm never doing the aerobic

35:51

exercise in the morning. That's where it's like I'll

35:53

do that at the end of the workday if

35:55

I'm gonna do it on that day. So this

35:57

is just strength only and the strength just

36:00

I find incredibly lends itself. It's

36:03

like that bit of boredom and

36:05

that like what are you thinking about? And like

36:07

give your brain some place to focus and then

36:09

I find it just works as a nice transition

36:11

into work as well So it's like okay do

36:14

the journaling Usually the journaling

36:16

doesn't take the full exercise time and then

36:18

in the rest of the time like well

36:20

now I'm actually kind of waking up then

36:22

it's like ah, okay brain now on to

36:24

the computer part like here We go now

36:26

you're up, but yeah The

36:30

meta lesson here that I just want to pass on

36:32

to listeners is it's very easy to Have

36:35

an idea about yourself that you

36:38

don't recognize has changed and

36:40

it took me a while to recognize that wake

36:44

up to typing Minimize

36:46

that time was just not the goal

36:48

anymore that this had changed at one

36:50

point This was great, but I was

36:52

actually being Anti-effective by

36:54

trying to optimize for this marker

36:57

because I hadn't been self reflective

36:59

enough on like dude This

37:01

obviously doesn't work anymore. Don't keep fighting

37:03

it. Just think about something else to

37:05

do. I feel like this

37:07

is a really totally

37:10

unintentional but absolutely perfect

37:12

intermingling of the two

37:15

parts of the theme of health and

37:17

of work Next

37:20

let me just quickly talk about the travel

37:22

stuff. This is pretty minor But one of

37:24

my things for this year was I don't

37:26

know if I had this exact phrasing at

37:29

the start But it morphed into my mind

37:31

of I will not

37:33

get on a plane this year That's

37:35

sort of what it solidified as the

37:37

target. I really wanted to just reduce

37:39

travel and Boy, I

37:42

just had no idea

37:44

how much this was going to save

37:46

me over the course of the year

37:48

This was just a very weird year

37:50

for me in my life There

37:53

were a bunch of ways that this was like quite

37:55

a personally difficult year that I'm just

37:57

gonna skip over right now But yeah

38:00

I've got to say, because

38:02

of that, deciding in advance

38:04

not to travel just

38:08

really saved me. I

38:10

think this year would have been just

38:12

a complete disaster from top to bottom

38:15

if I had also done a bunch of

38:17

trips. As you know, travel

38:20

just really affects me. I feel like

38:22

it always throws, whatever the actual time

38:24

of the trip is, I feel

38:26

like 3X that time

38:28

gets messed up for me on either end.

38:30

I'm just like, I'm less effective, I'm not

38:32

focused on things, I'm focused on the actual

38:35

travel itself. This

38:38

was just so good to

38:40

do. But boy, the year

38:42

really did test me because I

38:45

just had some uniquely interesting

38:47

travel opportunities come up. To

38:51

me, it's just such a good example of

38:53

how in life, it's like there's

38:56

just trade-offs. That's all there

38:58

is. There's no perfect solution to a thing,

39:01

there's only trade-offs. I

39:03

definitely traded off saying

39:06

no to some interesting things.

39:10

I did try to let everybody in my life,

39:12

like friends and family, know it in advance. I

39:14

was like, okay, listen guys, just so you know,

39:17

this year I'm not going to

39:20

get on a plane. That's what I'm going

39:22

to do. It's just kind of funny because this is obvious

39:24

in retrospect. Everyone was like, yeah, yeah,

39:26

yeah, that totally makes sense for everybody except

39:29

for me. But for me, right?

39:31

You'll get on a plane and it's like, no,

39:33

no. I

39:35

mean this for the year.

39:37

For me, I'm not getting on a plane. It's like,

39:40

yeah, yeah, you won't get on a plane to see

39:42

other people, but you'll get on a plane

39:44

to see me, right? Oh, no. I

39:49

definitely had a few frictions with some

39:51

people about I cannot believe that you're

39:53

not going to travel to do this

39:55

thing, but I'm glad that I

39:57

did it. And it's like being able to

39:59

do it. able to tell people it's like, I'm not

40:02

making a decision about this trip with you.

40:04

I made a decision about what I need

40:06

to do for the year. Really

40:09

did help those conversations, even if everybody

40:11

did feel like they were going to

40:13

be the exception to that rule. So

40:15

yeah, I'm really happy about it. And

40:18

that ended up being just what I

40:20

didn't realize was a really important

40:22

decision that I think saved

40:25

my year from what would have turned into

40:27

just a huge disaster if I'd done all

40:29

the travel that was asked of me. And

40:32

this is a great example

40:35

of pre-commitment working.

40:37

And that sentence is me

40:40

foreshadowing pre-commitment that doesn't work.

40:43

What about like the work work

40:45

part? While you still can? Like

40:47

where is that? Work while I still can, yes.

40:51

Work hours were just up hugely

40:53

this year, especially what I didn't, again,

40:55

thing I didn't expect at the start

40:57

of the year. But what

41:00

you know as well is like,

41:02

boy, especially with regard to Cortex,

41:04

there was like an insane explosion

41:08

of like work hours logged related

41:11

to Cortex. I don't

41:13

do the like yearly comparison with my time

41:15

tracking, especially I couldn't do it this year

41:17

since I switched time trackers halfway through the

41:19

year. But man, like if

41:22

I could know what the percentage difference

41:24

was this year versus last year for

41:28

Cortex hours in particular, I would love

41:30

to know like how many hundreds of

41:32

a percent increase that was. And

41:35

I'm sure people are thinking like, oh, it's Gray's

41:38

new job as chief logistics officer. That's

41:40

part of it. But it's also

41:42

just like the podcast this year.

41:44

I could just put in more

41:46

preparation time, more editing time

41:49

and more episodes. Yeah,

41:51

more episodes. That's delightfully crazy

41:53

episode to put together with Vision Pro. Like,

41:56

boy, that was like a busy time. But

41:59

yeah, I feel like. in Cortex

42:01

Land, it's really paid off on

42:03

both fronts. The Cortex brand stuff

42:05

is paid off hugely, and

42:07

I also feel like the extra time

42:09

put into the show has paid off

42:11

really well. I'm

42:14

just so happy with the way that it's gone.

42:17

I don't know how it feels from your end, but it's

42:20

just something that I wasn't really

42:22

thinking about at the start of the year as

42:24

something that would change. But yeah, all

42:27

hours are way up, and Cortex hours

42:29

percentage wise are up, like just

42:31

some insane number. It doesn't surprise me, because I

42:34

know that my hours are up as well. So

42:36

like they would go up together. Yeah, I guess

42:38

that does make sense, yeah. But that doesn't have

42:40

to be the case, but I

42:42

know that it would be the case this year just because

42:45

of what the work has been and

42:47

how we've been doing it. It just makes sense

42:49

to me that hours will go up. I mean,

42:51

and I just figured yours have anyway, because I

42:53

just know how much work you've put in on

42:55

the logistic stuff. So it just seemed natural

42:58

to me that that would be the case. But

43:00

I do follow a similar feeling

43:03

to you of, I've

43:05

been very happy with the output of the

43:07

show this year. I

43:10

feel like it might be the best year

43:12

for content. I've felt very, very happy with

43:14

the content. I felt very happy with the

43:17

way we planned it out. Like all

43:19

of that stuff feels better. And what

43:22

makes me happy about it is it doesn't

43:24

feel like a fluke. It was

43:27

planned this way, and we have better

43:29

plans in the way that we're thinking

43:31

about how the show is produced.

43:34

So I'm pretty enthused about that. I mean,

43:36

there's so many episodes, it's so many years

43:38

now. It's hard to rank

43:40

order them in any way, but that is

43:43

my gut feeling is the hours

43:46

have paid off in

43:49

just quality shows. And anecdotally,

43:51

I feel like I've gotten

43:53

way more compliments from people

43:55

about liking particular episodes. That's

43:58

always hard to know, it's hard to. remember, but yeah,

44:00

it's an interesting question. But yeah, I think

44:03

it might be the strongest year for the

44:05

show. And it also

44:07

does feel like it's not fluke-y. Like we

44:09

didn't just happen to have a couple of

44:11

topics that went really well. Um, one

44:14

of my things for this

44:16

year with work time, because

44:18

my thing was sort of like the inverse of

44:20

yours where it's like, I'm focused on the work

44:22

days and you were focused on the weekend. And

44:25

I was really careful of like,

44:27

okay. When I was having

44:29

busy times this year, my big

44:32

concern was like, I don't want to

44:34

have just an endless number of days

44:36

that like mush together.

44:39

It is important to have

44:41

defined breaks, but I

44:44

did kind of cheat the weekends a little

44:46

bit. So for parts of the year, I

44:49

wasn't running on, okay. Here's

44:51

a thing I don't recommend people do. I

44:53

wasn't running a seven day week. I was running

44:55

a 12 day week instead.

44:58

So I, what I was doing is three

45:01

days on one day off, three on

45:03

one off, three on one off, repeating

45:05

this sequence of three sets of four

45:07

days with a different pattern of like,

45:09

what am I going to do on

45:11

every day? This is a moment where

45:13

I legitimately wish we produced a video

45:15

podcast because I didn't make

45:17

any sound that could accurately get across

45:19

what my face was doing while you

45:22

were explaining that. How would you describe

45:24

your face? I feel like I was

45:26

just loading. Well, look, we all know

45:28

that seven day week is terrible. Right.

45:30

We all know that. Sure. We can all agree on

45:32

that. We can all agree on it. And what everybody wants

45:34

is it to be longer. We're

45:38

all in agreement. Well, I

45:40

mean, if it was longer with more weekends, I think

45:42

people would be in agreement. Um, but

45:45

yeah, what I don't recommend people

45:47

do is that they set up

45:49

a bunch of repeating events on

45:51

their calendar to try to create

45:53

a 12 day week on

45:55

top of their calendar, which only

45:57

wants to know about seven days.

46:00

Yeah, although I will say fantastic al is

46:02

a really valuable here because it lets you

46:04

set like the two-week view at any number

46:06

between 1 and 14 days.

46:08

I think ah great. Thanks fantastic al

46:10

12 days. That is

46:12

a very strange feature to have

46:17

But I'm pleased that there was an app that

46:19

could already do this for ya It would have

46:21

been really brain bending if I couldn't have done

46:23

that I think that might have gotten the way

46:25

but yeah, I sort of played

46:27

around with this for a while And I discovered

46:30

like oh, I think this really

46:32

works well for a sort

46:34

of crunch time schedule so

46:37

It's fewer weekends than would normally be the

46:39

case, right? So obviously also as part of

46:41

the year work I did several gradations over

46:43

the course of the year and I was

46:46

Mostly running the 12-day schedule while I was

46:48

on those gradations. It's like okay I'm gonna

46:51

do three intensive days and then like One

46:54

easy day and three intensive days and then

46:56

one easy day and I just I think

46:58

that really that works really well for me

47:00

I did learn a kind of personal lesson

47:02

with regards to happiness

47:04

and particularly working on videos

47:07

which was weekends

47:09

are important But

47:11

I can enjoy a weekend

47:14

day much more if I

47:16

have done what

47:18

I think is like the minimum

47:21

possible amount of work

47:24

first thing in the morning on that day and So

47:28

what I've also just gotten into the habit like when

47:30

I talked about exercising every day is like, okay Even

47:33

when it is the weekend and

47:35

my wife and I had planned like oh, we're gonna go

47:37

somewhere later in the day I'm

47:40

still going to get up pretty early.

47:42

We're going to do exercise

47:45

and I'm gonna do like an hour

47:48

of writing and I kind

47:51

of learned like oh this lets my brain

47:54

Really just relax and enjoy the rest

47:57

of the day. It sounds

47:59

weird But doing

48:02

one hour of work on a

48:04

weekend day made that weekend day

48:06

more relaxing than if I hadn't

48:08

done that single hour. It

48:10

was just a bit like, oh, my brain can actually let go

48:12

of a thing. So

48:15

that was kind of something that I learned

48:18

about myself this year

48:20

and had a conversation with my wife about

48:22

this. It's like, okay, here's something that we're

48:24

going to do. And she

48:27

also could see over time, she goes,

48:29

oh, yeah, you just are way more

48:31

relaxed if I leave you alone

48:33

for an hour and a half

48:35

first thing in the morning, and then we go do whatever we're

48:37

going to do. She

48:40

also appreciated that this is better for

48:42

her than me getting

48:45

up and feeling like, okay, I'm

48:47

going to intentionally not

48:49

do anything this morning. So

48:51

now listeners might be asking, where

48:54

did all that time go? Like what's

48:56

happening with all of this work? Well, you made

48:58

like 400 videos. Well,

49:01

okay, this is part of the weirdness of

49:03

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support of this show and Relay FM. So

51:26

I wanna talk about what

51:28

I've been thinking about all

51:30

year and have had a really difficult

51:32

time to try and articulate it

51:35

until now. You and I, Mike,

51:37

a couple of times throughout the year, we're

51:39

like, hey, Gray's thinking about work a lot,

51:41

like let's talk about a thing, and we

51:43

never did because everybody's like, I just don't

51:45

really know how to express this. So

51:48

year of work caused me to think

51:50

about my work a lot, which means

51:52

thinking about YouTube a lot. So I

51:55

wanna talk about the best

51:57

I can do to summarize a bunch of

51:59

comments. complicated thoughts that I have had over the

52:01

course of the year. Work while

52:04

you still can. When

52:06

I said that last December, the main

52:08

thing that I was thinking about was

52:10

AI. Oh no, right?

52:12

Chat GPT had just come into existence.

52:15

We were all staring down the

52:17

glowing eye of our potential destructor thinking,

52:20

oh, how is this going to go?

52:22

But I'm just going to, for this, I want to just like, I want

52:25

to take that topic and I want to shove

52:27

it into the future, right? Once again, we're like,

52:29

AI, not going to talk about it now. It

52:31

was the source of like my

52:34

worry though for the wall you can.

52:37

And while that's what I thought I was concerned

52:39

about at the start of the year, I realized

52:42

there's something else that's going on

52:45

in the world and in the world

52:47

of video content in particular that

52:50

is also very concerning and

52:52

that I need to think about for

52:54

like, what does this mean for me

52:56

as someone who makes videos? So

53:00

we've discussed in the past a little

53:02

bit, we've kind of touched on an

53:04

idea in economics which is

53:07

called the missing middle. Now for actual students

53:09

of economics, I'm going to kind of like

53:11

mix together a bunch of different concepts under

53:13

this header. Don't worry about

53:16

it. And so people will recognize

53:18

this phenomenon of in

53:20

any market for any kind of

53:22

product, the longer that

53:24

market exists, the more

53:27

products in the middle get

53:29

pushed out. So

53:32

if you rewind the furniture market to

53:34

however it was 50 years ago, you

53:36

could find a wider variety

53:38

of products at different

53:41

prices. You're looking for

53:43

a chair. Well, you can get

53:45

a cheap chair, you can get a

53:47

fancy chair, and you can also get

53:49

good value in the middle chair. But

53:52

as you start turning that dial over

53:54

time, it becomes harder and

53:56

harder to find the product in

53:59

the middle. There isn't a single

54:01

good reason for why does this

54:04

happen. It's more like there's

54:06

a bunch of things that contribute to this effect.

54:09

One of the things that contributes to this

54:11

effect is just economies of scale. You

54:14

get really big advantages from producing

54:16

a huge number of chairs, and

54:19

you don't get good economic advantages from producing

54:21

a small number of chairs. It makes the

54:23

individual unit cost go up. What

54:26

happens is there's a

54:28

push towards either end. A

54:30

company is probably going to make

54:32

more money manufacturing a million

54:35

chairs that they're making a

54:37

tiny narrow profit margin on,

54:40

or a company is going to make more money

54:42

by producing a small

54:45

number of very high quality chairs.

54:47

Now, this is something that I've thought

54:49

about for a while. In some

54:52

ways, it's kind of like a Cortex brand effect. You

54:54

can go for the low end of the market, or

54:56

you can go for the high end of the market.

54:58

But if you go for the

55:01

middle of the market, you will

55:03

almost certainly find yourself pushed

55:05

towards one end or the

55:07

other over time. Now, what

55:10

I hadn't really fully

55:12

considered before is that this

55:15

is not just constrained to

55:17

physical things. It

55:19

is also true for

55:21

the entirety of the entertainment industry.

55:25

YouTube and online video is

55:28

a relatively young market, but

55:31

I think it has existed long

55:33

enough now that particularly in the

55:35

past couple of years, we're

55:37

really starting to see the effect

55:40

of the missing middle. We're

55:42

really starting to see the effect of

55:45

the two axes here. I

55:48

think the entertainment industry is a little bit

55:50

different, but there's two axes here where there's

55:52

a missing middle. One

55:55

of these axes is what we can think of

55:57

as like... This is

55:59

a great word for it. like high

56:01

effort versus low effort content. I

56:04

really kind of want to say like high quality versus

56:06

low quality content, but I feel like that doesn't quite

56:08

hit it either. So I'm just gonna say high effort

56:10

versus low effort, but like what

56:12

takes a long time to produce and

56:14

what can you produce very quickly? And

56:18

projects in the middle of that

56:20

range are

56:22

increasingly pushed towards one end

56:25

or the other end. The

56:27

other axis is long

56:29

content versus short content. We've

56:32

even talked about it again without like really

56:35

thinking about it in the past couple of

56:37

years of just mentioning, for

56:39

example, like, oh wow, it

56:41

seems like more and more content creators

56:43

are going longer and longer periods of

56:45

time. And then they're producing a video

56:48

that's like three hours long, right? Yep,

56:50

everybody has their favorite creator, right? Who

56:52

like within the last couple of weeks

56:54

has dropped like a 12 hour video

56:56

or something. Yeah, like I actually went

56:58

and checked a bunch of my subscriptions

57:00

and the effect is even stronger than

57:03

I thought. Like the number of creators

57:05

I follow who haven't uploaded anything in

57:07

over a year is huge. But

57:10

they're still active. Yeah, they're still active creators,

57:12

right? Yeah, it's not like they stopped. They

57:15

haven't stopped. Oh wow, this effect is way

57:17

stronger than even I thought it was. And

57:19

I was already thinking about this. So there's

57:21

a push towards long and

57:24

then on the opposite end, there's

57:26

a push towards short, which I

57:29

think is the more obvious one

57:31

to people. People know like TikTok

57:33

and shorts, right? There's a push

57:35

towards really brief content, but it's

57:37

not as obvious to people that

57:39

there's an equivalent push towards really

57:42

long content. So now we have

57:44

a sort of two-way axis here of

57:47

which kinds of content

57:49

are being increasingly favored over

57:52

time. And it's

57:54

things that are high effort and

57:56

long, low effort and short,

58:00

can do, it's low effort and long,

58:02

or it's high effort and short. Any

58:05

of those extremes are

58:08

where everybody is getting pushed in content.

58:10

That second part that you mentioned that

58:12

like set something up in my brain.

58:14

Okay, all right. Yeah, yeah. What are

58:16

you thinking? I'm thinking of you in

58:18

the sense of like content

58:20

that's long, but your content isn't long. It isn't long.

58:24

It's short, but it takes a long time. It's very high

58:26

effort, but short. Similar to there

58:28

are a lot of people that create TikTok

58:30

and shorts that do take a long

58:33

time. Right. Because they're

58:35

not like, here's a dance or here's like the

58:37

meme, but it's like, I'm making something that's going

58:39

to take a long time just so it can

58:41

be a short video because it's actually more impactful

58:43

if it's short, but it took me days. I

58:46

think I've kind of hit upon something

58:48

that clarifies a lot of conversations that

58:50

I've had with people are when I

58:53

hear people talk about content, it's missing

58:55

that there are four different natural attractors.

58:57

Yeah, like here's the classic version

58:59

of this, right? You talk to people and they go like,

59:02

ah, everybody's attention spans are so short these

59:04

days, right? Like that's why TikTok is doing

59:06

so great because it's just, they're only watching

59:08

30 second videos. It's like, yeah, yeah, they're

59:11

only watching 30 second videos or

59:14

seven to 16 hour streams

59:16

that a person is doing.

59:18

It's like those two

59:20

things are at such incredible odds with each

59:22

other. I was like, oh yeah, yeah, they're

59:25

just watching those 30 second shorts or they're

59:27

watching this four and a

59:29

half hour documentary about an

59:31

obscure thing that they're super

59:34

interested in. But then it's also

59:36

very easy to forget

59:39

that both ends have

59:42

their own high effort and

59:44

low effort versions. There's

59:46

low effort and long things and there's high

59:48

effort and long things and it's the same

59:51

with short content. So this is

59:53

what I've been thinking a lot about is there's

59:55

this thing called the missing middle, but

59:57

what makes it complicated is that there's two

1:00:00

axes upon which entertainment

1:00:02

exists. Whereas for

1:00:04

physical products, you really just have

1:00:07

the one axis, which is about

1:00:09

how much does it cost to

1:00:12

make this thing? What this means

1:00:14

is every single content creator, you're

1:00:16

going to have this effect of

1:00:19

whoever you are, whatever you make,

1:00:21

wherever you stand on this chart,

1:00:24

you are the middle because

1:00:26

there really are only four

1:00:29

people in your world at one

1:00:31

of those extremes. And

1:00:33

if you aren't one of those four people, you're

1:00:36

in the middle. This is kind

1:00:38

of related to the phenomenon of like

1:00:40

Mr. Beastification. Mr. Beast is the

1:00:42

most obvious example on YouTube. He's the current person

1:00:44

who gets all of the views. And

1:00:47

I don't think it's like

1:00:49

an accident that Mr. Beast exists now

1:00:51

and that the system rewards him as

1:00:53

much as it does. Mr.

1:00:56

Beast makes high efforts and

1:00:58

by YouTube standards, pretty

1:01:01

long content. Like his videos

1:01:03

are surprisingly long and

1:01:05

they take forever to make. And

1:01:07

he just outcompetes everybody else on

1:01:09

production value for these things. He

1:01:11

was in my mind because I

1:01:14

just saw a short video where he

1:01:17

climbed the stairs of the Empire State

1:01:19

Building. Now that is a

1:01:21

very high effort short video. Exactly. Yeah.

1:01:23

Yeah. Because you just climbed

1:01:25

the Empire State Building. That's

1:01:28

a good lot of effort. Yeah. And

1:01:30

it was a short. That was what

1:01:32

it was for. That's the most literal

1:01:34

high effort short video that might exist.

1:01:36

Yeah. I heard him talk

1:01:39

about short content in a couple of

1:01:41

interviews. I was like, it's very interesting to hear the way that

1:01:43

he thinks about it. And yeah, he's also

1:01:45

doing like the high effort short stuff. I'm just

1:01:47

less familiar with his shorts. But

1:01:50

so if we think about what like what's happening

1:01:52

with Mr. Beast, Mr. Beast gets just

1:01:54

gets like crazy view numbers.

1:01:56

But it's also interesting to

1:01:58

see that. This

1:02:00

missing middle effect has also

1:02:03

happened to Mr. Beast himself.

1:02:05

If you go back and you look at

1:02:08

the history of his uploads, I

1:02:10

think people in their mind have this idea

1:02:13

like, oh, Mr. Beast uploads a ton of

1:02:15

content. But there is one clear direction, which

1:02:17

is down. Like the frequency

1:02:19

of his videos has just been

1:02:21

going down over the past few

1:02:23

years, as the like

1:02:26

effort that goes into them goes up. And

1:02:29

I think it's because he's existing on

1:02:31

this one spectrum of like high

1:02:34

effort, long videos. Now the thing

1:02:36

is, where are those views coming

1:02:38

from? They're coming from the creators

1:02:41

in the middle. It's like all

1:02:44

of the views are getting aggregated

1:02:46

to these points. Why do shorts

1:02:49

get just insane numbers of views?

1:02:51

It's because the things

1:02:53

that are optimizing as short form

1:02:55

content are very successful.

1:02:57

At catching attention of people for long

1:02:59

periods of time. So they rack up

1:03:02

just like crazy numbers of

1:03:04

views for this short term content.

1:03:06

But where does it come from?

1:03:09

Those views again are coming

1:03:11

from videos in the

1:03:13

middle that are not

1:03:16

getting watched. When you're saying coming

1:03:18

from, what do you mean? It's

1:03:20

not entirely true, but we can

1:03:22

functionally think of it this way.

1:03:24

That the number of human hours

1:03:27

that can be spent on

1:03:29

watching YouTube has

1:03:32

basically been maximized. So

1:03:35

here's one of the things, like why hasn't

1:03:37

the missing middle phenomenon reared

1:03:39

its head sooner? The reason it

1:03:42

hasn't reared its head sooner is

1:03:44

because YouTube was growing. And

1:03:47

that growth allowed just an increasing

1:03:49

number of views, an increasing number

1:03:51

of human hours to be spent

1:03:53

on whatever's there. I

1:03:56

Think this is also where when the pandemic

1:03:58

hit, I Think that... Growth was at

1:04:00

it's end, and then the pandemic. Kind

1:04:02

of artificial. we hid that by massively

1:04:05

exploding the number of hours that were

1:04:07

available. Yeah, people, right. But. That

1:04:09

growth and that artificial bumper over

1:04:11

you know it's kind of like

1:04:13

a famous Leiva that slick Ceo

1:04:15

years ago said I gave you

1:04:17

their prime competitor is sleep Feel

1:04:19

like Boy, if you really think

1:04:21

about what that means as really

1:04:23

horrifying, but it's getting at the

1:04:26

same idea that. They've. Kind

1:04:28

of like optimize the number of hours

1:04:30

that a person is going to spend

1:04:32

watching Netflix and so the only way

1:04:34

to increase that number is like a

1:04:36

push into people's least. I wanted to

1:04:38

clarify it because they when you're saying

1:04:40

is coming from the people in the

1:04:42

middle it what you want saying was

1:04:44

the people in the middle a generated

1:04:46

content yeah were you saying is people

1:04:48

that would have made content net was

1:04:50

in the middle of the time effort

1:04:52

scale. Those use don't

1:04:54

exist for them anymore. Yeah, and

1:04:57

nothing that the Netflix saying. Lots

1:04:59

of people have said some version

1:05:01

of this where it's effectively you're

1:05:04

just compete in said time. like

1:05:06

yeah, it's actually what everybody's compete

1:05:08

with. Swear like. It. Seems

1:05:10

very strange, but. People.

1:05:13

Listening to this show right

1:05:15

now on not watching Netflix

1:05:17

Gentle Guy had not listening

1:05:19

to music on Spotify or

1:05:22

we're not to compete with

1:05:24

other podcasts. For somebody

1:05:26

time with competing with anything they

1:05:28

could possibly be filling their time

1:05:30

with for their attention. Yeah, that's

1:05:32

how like these big platforms. Think.

1:05:35

About that, Netflix A competing with video

1:05:37

games as much as they are competing

1:05:39

with other streaming platforms? Yeah, exactly. And

1:05:41

I'm trying to keep this relatively constrained,

1:05:44

but there is another big part of

1:05:46

this, which I think I'll probably make

1:05:48

sense to talk about in episode, but

1:05:50

that idea is also related to something

1:05:52

a bit Think about quite a lot

1:05:55

this year, and I think is also.

1:05:57

it leans right into like wise

1:06:00

missing middle phenomenon occurring. Because

1:06:02

we're in a time

1:06:04

where not even necessarily

1:06:06

on purpose optimization

1:06:10

is occurring. And I

1:06:13

also just want to like signpost before we

1:06:15

get any further that none of

1:06:17

this conversation is to be implied that it's from

1:06:19

me of like, YouTube should

1:06:21

do something different. This conversation is

1:06:23

a bit like the

1:06:25

weather. And it would be like saying,

1:06:28

the weather should be different, right? With my hands

1:06:30

on my hips, like great. The government needs to

1:06:32

do something. Yeah. It's like, that doesn't mean anything,

1:06:34

right? Like the weather is just happening. It would

1:06:36

be like in any other part of the economy

1:06:38

going like, ah, there should be

1:06:41

quality products in the middle. Well,

1:06:44

that's lovely to think, but

1:06:46

physical reality and also the

1:06:48

revealed preferences of customers says

1:06:50

no, says that they don't want the thing

1:06:52

in the middle, despite how much people might tell

1:06:54

you. So that's

1:06:57

what's happening with this phenomenon. So yeah, so just

1:06:59

to clarify, the creators that

1:07:01

exist at any of those four

1:07:03

corners are drawing views,

1:07:05

right? Or they're getting the

1:07:07

views that in years gone

1:07:10

by would have been more

1:07:12

evenly distributed to creators who

1:07:16

were making things that were more in the middle.

1:07:18

And again, like, I just want to specify,

1:07:21

I view myself as a

1:07:23

creator that is in the middle of

1:07:25

these things. And basically everyone

1:07:27

will view themselves as the creator

1:07:29

who is in the middle. And

1:07:32

that is true because basically

1:07:34

everyone isn't Mr. Beast,

1:07:37

but there's also going to

1:07:39

be, no matter what world

1:07:41

you exist in, you can

1:07:43

increasingly identify who

1:07:45

is the Mr. Beast

1:07:47

of this area. So

1:07:51

in my own category on YouTube, it's

1:07:53

very clear to me, like, Oh, Mark

1:07:55

Roper is the Mr. Beast of education.

1:07:57

And it Perfectly makes sense.

1:08:00

Like if you watch his

1:08:02

content you can see this

1:08:04

same thing of he is

1:08:06

really emphasizing the high efforts

1:08:08

and for you tube long

1:08:10

form content and so Mark

1:08:12

Roper is doing that kind

1:08:14

of crazy viewed numbers that

1:08:16

wouldn't have been possible in

1:08:18

the past in like a

1:08:21

less optimize kind of world

1:08:23

and so if you look

1:08:25

around you can try to

1:08:27

identify who is the mister

1:08:29

beast of. Which every. And.

1:08:33

The. Some areas where like that person might

1:08:35

not be on top yet because this is

1:08:37

still taking some time. like in particular I'm

1:08:39

can thinking of. I can unless confident on

1:08:41

this one. but in the tech world like

1:08:44

your first thought might be like oh Mtb

1:08:46

it's D is the Mr. Beast of the

1:08:48

Taxis. I'm not sure he is actually think

1:08:50

the the creator called Mr who's the boss

1:08:53

which feels much more like he's the Mr.

1:08:55

Beast of this world. He just hasn't caught

1:08:57

up yet. Yeah I think about this I

1:08:59

still think is Mk Bst right now. Buy

1:09:02

seeds the argument. The reason I say

1:09:04

that as I just think and Kph

1:09:06

D holds a lot of power. yeah

1:09:08

I don't think okay beast he is

1:09:11

going anywhere. I would just be very

1:09:13

curious to see like two years from

1:09:15

now where those creators relatives who each

1:09:17

other near. So this is to say

1:09:20

you increasingly see on the platform as

1:09:22

a whole and also in any sub

1:09:24

genre. That. Views

1:09:26

are getting concentrated in

1:09:29

a smaller number of

1:09:31

creators. Basically. It's

1:09:33

a natural phenomenon there. Are.

1:09:35

Algorithmic reasons that I think that

1:09:37

happens that sort of don't help,

1:09:39

but even without them, I think

1:09:41

the phenomenon would still exist. I

1:09:44

think this can just be a

1:09:46

difficult topic to talk about, especially

1:09:48

sometimes with other creators because. This

1:09:50

is also very much a relative

1:09:53

phenomenon, so someone is either like.

1:09:55

More. Extreme on any of

1:09:57

these axes relative to you.

1:10:00

So, like, I can think of creators

1:10:02

who, from their perspective, I am

1:10:05

the, like, low-effort, short,

1:10:08

fast creator. And I

1:10:10

can think of creators who, from their perspective, I

1:10:13

am the high-effort, long creator. It's like one

1:10:15

of these graphs, right? Like, every point on

1:10:17

the curve, you can look down and up,

1:10:19

and you see the exact same effect. But

1:10:21

just what happens is, the further along the

1:10:23

curve you get, the stronger that effect is.

1:10:26

And also, the more you go over

1:10:29

time, the curvier that curve is. Anyway,

1:10:32

this is the reality. The missing

1:10:34

middle has come to entertainment. I

1:10:37

don't think that this effect is

1:10:39

widely seen because it's sort of

1:10:41

subtle, like, it's small, it's not

1:10:43

obvious on any particular video. But

1:10:46

pretty much everyone I know, if

1:10:48

they look through their analytics and they

1:10:50

think about their videos, can feel this

1:10:52

squeeze happening. Oh boy, like, a video

1:10:54

that I used to think was gonna

1:10:56

get, like, X views actually got 70%

1:10:58

of X views. And

1:11:01

those views have gone to

1:11:03

the extreme creators. I

1:11:06

think it's a thing that all creators

1:11:08

need to be worried about because not

1:11:10

everyone can be the person who optimizes

1:11:12

to be the most extreme version of

1:11:14

that thing. What this means for me

1:11:17

is that if you depend on

1:11:19

an algorithm to bring

1:11:21

viewers to your content,

1:11:24

this is disaster and bad news for you,

1:11:26

no matter what else might

1:11:28

happen with AI. Like I think AI

1:11:30

will accelerate some of these trends, but

1:11:32

even without it, it doesn't matter. This

1:11:34

is just like an economic effect that

1:11:37

is impulse. And

1:11:39

so I think this now explains why.

1:11:42

Why is it that I

1:11:45

spent a huge amount of time

1:11:47

this year switching over

1:11:49

to make sure that,

1:11:52

like, I had a website and

1:11:54

an email list that really worked

1:11:56

in a successful way, that wasn't

1:11:58

working against me. as I gained

1:12:01

more people actually following me. It's

1:12:04

also one of the reasons why Cortex

1:12:06

has been on my mind because Cortex

1:12:08

is like charmingly old fashioned in the

1:12:10

way that it works on the internet,

1:12:12

right? People subscribe and then what happens?

1:12:14

They get an episode and it's delivered

1:12:17

to their podcast player and they can

1:12:19

actually just listen to it and you

1:12:21

can as the creator be reasonably confident

1:12:23

that they at least have a chance

1:12:25

that they're actually going to see it.

1:12:28

So this thought has

1:12:30

just completely shaped the

1:12:32

way that I've picked projects.

1:12:34

It's completely shaped the way

1:12:36

that I've been working on

1:12:39

a lot of stuff in the background this year and

1:12:42

it has just been so top of

1:12:44

mind. I feel like it

1:12:46

has touched everything. And

1:12:48

so very early in the

1:12:50

year, a bunch of my plans that

1:12:52

I was kind of thinking for like, ooh, how do

1:12:55

I wanna do things? Like, no, I'm kind of like

1:12:57

scrapping all of this. I'm working on

1:12:59

a ton of the backend stuff. I'm gonna flip all of

1:13:01

that over. And in

1:13:03

particular, I wanna think about the

1:13:05

kinds of projects that I'm working on and

1:13:08

I wanna think about how is

1:13:10

it that I can actually ensure that

1:13:13

the people who really like my stuff

1:13:15

can see it in the future. And

1:13:18

I need to be able to get

1:13:20

people to be actually following me in

1:13:23

places where I can be reasonably confident

1:13:25

they will be notified about my stuff.

1:13:28

And fundamentally, YouTube

1:13:31

is just not going to be great for

1:13:33

that. So that's been

1:13:35

one thing, is how do you get

1:13:37

people to actually watch? You need

1:13:39

to get them in places where they can be

1:13:41

notified. And then the second thing is just

1:13:44

thinking about my work and

1:13:46

what do I make that I like

1:13:48

and what do people who like my

1:13:51

stuff like? Someone left a comment on

1:13:53

one of my videos that I really

1:13:55

liked. The best projects

1:13:58

to watch or to read. are

1:14:00

the kind that really hurt their creators of

1:14:02

the process. That just

1:14:04

totally nailed something that's right. Suffering for

1:14:07

your art. I

1:14:09

mean, that's a very pretentious way to put it.

1:14:11

But it isn't. It's the same thing, right? There

1:14:13

is something there, and it

1:14:16

kind of hits the, like, high effort

1:14:19

axis. And

1:14:21

when I think about

1:14:24

the videos that I've made over the past couple

1:14:26

years, the things that really did

1:14:28

help allow me to hit that billionaire

1:14:30

bust so far in advance, the

1:14:34

commonality of them has been, boy,

1:14:37

it's just been videos that have freaking

1:14:39

killed me in one way or another.

1:14:41

It's like, oh, that runway video, so

1:14:44

good, but goddamn was that just

1:14:46

brutal. The flag video that

1:14:48

I made this year for the States, we

1:14:50

never talked about it, but, like, I cannot

1:14:52

even possibly begin to recap the amount of

1:14:55

work that went into that thing. But it's

1:14:57

like, I think that might be the best

1:14:59

video I've yet made. It's just like, that

1:15:01

video is perfect. I think I said that

1:15:03

to you. I think that is like

1:15:06

absolute S-tier video of

1:15:08

yours. It's also interesting because I think

1:15:11

it's a video that sort of really

1:15:13

splits the core and casual audience. Like,

1:15:15

the core people just absolutely love that.

1:15:18

And I feel like they kind of get that it's

1:15:20

almost like barely a video about flags. It's like it's

1:15:22

a lot more than that. You know,

1:15:25

there's a casual audience who's there, they just want

1:15:27

a list of flag rankings, and it's like, you

1:15:29

know, that's fine, but you're sort of missing out

1:15:31

on a bunch. That core group really loved that,

1:15:34

and that was just brutal to make.

1:15:36

And then again, rock, paper, scissors. What

1:15:39

a nightmare. Don't need to recap it, but rapidly

1:15:41

moving its way to be the most viewed thing

1:15:43

that I will probably ever make, if you want

1:15:46

to count it in like the weird way that

1:15:48

may or may not make sense to count it

1:15:50

that way. And then when

1:15:52

I also just think about my own personal

1:15:55

happiness working on

1:15:58

things, like

1:16:01

the videos that I hate the most and

1:16:03

cause me the most pain are the ones

1:16:05

that I am the most happy to have

1:16:07

made. So I'm just

1:16:09

totally leaning into that. I'm just gonna lean

1:16:11

into this thing and

1:16:14

that's what I've been doing all year is leaning

1:16:16

into look on average over the years

1:16:18

of my

1:16:21

career like the average amount of effort

1:16:23

per minute and hours per minute has

1:16:25

totally just gone up. Even

1:16:28

my like quick and easy videos something

1:16:30

like the Antarctica video are like so

1:16:32

much longer and so much more effort

1:16:35

than full videos 10 years

1:16:37

ago. It's just kind of crazy. So

1:16:40

I have this feeling right now like oh

1:16:42

man I have been talking for hours and

1:16:44

I feel like I have barely covered 20%

1:16:46

of the sort of things that I want

1:16:48

to but there's just been this was a

1:16:50

really weird year. I think it had some

1:16:53

strange projects that end

1:16:55

up reflecting that. This

1:16:58

is a huge project that just got killed

1:17:00

which also falls into the like I

1:17:02

wouldn't want to do this year again but I

1:17:04

feel like it was an important year and I

1:17:07

made progress on the things that matter.

1:17:10

I feel like I

1:17:12

have some good thoughts about

1:17:15

how it is that I want to work and

1:17:19

this might be one of the biggest

1:17:21

divergences between what I thought it was

1:17:23

going to be at the start and

1:17:26

what it actually was at the end.

1:17:29

See this is very big. This

1:17:31

is very lofty like when we're

1:17:33

talking about some very large things here that I

1:17:35

have no doubt are going to come up more

1:17:38

and I know this is one of those times where you're

1:17:40

going to listen back to the episode and you're going to

1:17:42

hate it. I'm going to hate every second of it. No

1:17:45

not that. You're going to have things that you're going to

1:17:47

want to expand upon more and we'll talk

1:17:49

about them in future episodes. But I

1:17:52

think what you're highlighting here is an

1:17:54

example of how your theme helped you

1:17:56

where like you

1:17:58

had this idea of work while you

1:18:01

still can and your initial feeling was that

1:18:03

it was going to be AI related. But

1:18:05

you kept it broad because it was like

1:18:07

you knew there was change coming. But

1:18:10

then throughout the year you've been able to adapt

1:18:12

to the idea of like, oh, the change was

1:18:14

different, but I'm still aware there's change.

1:18:16

And so the work that you had done in

1:18:19

trying to prepare yourself for change could

1:18:21

still pay off and you could like

1:18:23

guide it differently to kind of where

1:18:25

you are now. I think you've summed

1:18:27

it up very well, Mike. This

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1:20:53

right. You have to tell me about how your

1:20:55

year went. Mine

1:20:57

is simpler. The year of the

1:20:59

weekend. The description that I gave was

1:21:01

in the idea that over the years

1:21:03

prior, what I was trying to

1:21:05

do and was successful with was

1:21:08

to bring more structure to my life. But

1:21:11

at the same time, I have more and

1:21:14

more projects coming my way. One

1:21:17

of the ways that I was going to address this

1:21:20

was to force myself to be as productive

1:21:22

as I could be by

1:21:25

only working for five days and

1:21:27

then having two days off. This is

1:21:29

a weekend as it is known around

1:21:32

the world, but something that I

1:21:34

had not been doing a very good

1:21:36

job of observing that I would find

1:21:38

myself working some amount of

1:21:41

time every single day of the week.

1:21:43

Essentially, I was not allowing for rest and

1:21:45

that wasn't good for me. I wanted

1:21:49

to observe the idea of five days

1:21:51

working, two days off, ideally Saturday and

1:21:53

Sunday, but I would be kind to

1:21:55

myself if I had to work Saturday, I could take another

1:21:57

day off or something like that. We'll

1:22:00

start with that part. I have a bunch

1:22:02

of outcomes that I was hoping to achieve

1:22:04

this year and I want to review those.

1:22:07

I think for anything that

1:22:09

I've had, this

1:22:11

idea of the five days on, two days off

1:22:14

might be the most successful I've been in any

1:22:16

part of anything I've ever done because

1:22:19

I just did it. I have not been working on

1:22:21

weekends and the

1:22:23

vast majority of weekends this year

1:22:25

have seen no work. I've

1:22:28

been very good at ensuring that I

1:22:30

take days off if I have had

1:22:32

to work on a weekend. Because

1:22:35

of the conscious

1:22:37

effort in making sure that

1:22:39

the days were free

1:22:41

of work, I've been

1:22:44

very good at relaxing in

1:22:46

a way that I have not done

1:22:49

in my entire self-employed life. Taking

1:22:52

effective time to relax

1:22:55

and also recognizing a

1:22:58

relaxed feeling, that

1:23:00

has been very successful for me. Also

1:23:03

having time to take care of a bunch

1:23:05

of personal family stuff. There's

1:23:08

been a lot of things coming up this year,

1:23:10

some stuff unexpected, some stuff where I had

1:23:12

to purposefully take Wednesday off on work

1:23:15

Saturday, like in the opposite because

1:23:17

I have something going on, I need to do this. The

1:23:20

structure that I've had has allowed for that

1:23:22

in a way where I think it would

1:23:25

have been much more chaotic in

1:23:27

a regular year. I've been very

1:23:29

pleased with this and I

1:23:31

feel like I have actually had

1:23:33

a better work-life balance in 2023 than any

1:23:36

other year. That

1:23:39

sounds pretty good. I just wanted to pick up on

1:23:41

something. When you say that you recognize

1:23:44

a relaxed feeling, what do you mean by

1:23:46

that? I guess it's hard to

1:23:48

describe but just in a sense

1:23:50

of like, not only am

1:23:52

I not working right now, I'm

1:23:54

not thinking about it either. It's

1:23:58

hard to describe an absolute sense

1:24:00

of something. You

1:24:02

know what I mean? But like there has

1:24:04

been times this year where I've been like

1:24:08

I feel pretty chill right now and that

1:24:11

is rare for me I think. And

1:24:13

this is not to say that this year hasn't

1:24:15

been stressful. I would actually say for stress

1:24:18

this might have been one of the worst years of

1:24:20

my adult life. Sort of why I

1:24:22

wanted to expand on that a

1:24:24

little bit because from the outside

1:24:27

perspective at least of

1:24:29

what I am aware of in your life like

1:24:31

you know a person never knows the full extent

1:24:33

of what is going on in someone else's life.

1:24:36

But your life has seemed to me the most

1:24:38

stressful probably of the time that I have known

1:24:40

you. I feel like the only asterisk to that

1:24:42

is maybe like one of the first couple years

1:24:44

I might have known you but I just don't

1:24:46

remember well enough. So yeah this

1:24:48

has seemed like a very stressful year

1:24:51

from my perspective. So it feels

1:24:54

like a extra accomplishment for

1:24:56

you to feel relaxed this year

1:24:58

then. Exactly. This is a

1:25:00

very hard thing to balance.

1:25:03

The way I've been thinking about it is imagine

1:25:06

what it would have been like of a different theme.

1:25:09

Right yeah. You are right

1:25:11

you know you know enough about everything

1:25:13

in my life to know

1:25:15

that this year would have been very

1:25:17

taxing, very stressful. But

1:25:20

the fact that I had the

1:25:22

year of weekend in my corner

1:25:25

meant that when nothing was

1:25:27

going on I

1:25:29

was able to truly savor that

1:25:31

time. Hmm. Right like if I

1:25:34

was like oh today I

1:25:36

have no appointments I have no shows I

1:25:38

am going to just enjoy my day or

1:25:40

I'm going to tackle that project that I've

1:25:42

been wanting or I'm going to play that

1:25:45

video game. Like it

1:25:47

almost helped clarify that when

1:25:49

something wasn't happening I

1:25:52

was actually achieving something by doing

1:25:54

nothing. Right right okay. And under

1:25:56

a different theme this would not

1:25:59

have worked. me. Say

1:26:01

like a year of growth or a year of

1:26:03

work or a year of foundation, I would have

1:26:06

run myself ragged this year because

1:26:08

I would have been trying to squeeze

1:26:10

as much as I could into the

1:26:12

time where stuff wasn't happening and it

1:26:14

would have been too much. So

1:26:17

it's very strange to have had such high

1:26:19

stress but also to feel

1:26:22

relaxed and like to feel like my work

1:26:24

life was good, like the balance was good.

1:26:26

But the thing was even though there was

1:26:28

stressful things happening, it wasn't ending up in

1:26:30

putting more hours in. It was just like

1:26:33

that's not going to solve this problem. So

1:26:37

I just have to make sure I'm

1:26:39

keeping things balanced. So

1:26:41

in that more family

1:26:43

time has been one of the bigger

1:26:45

effects. I think I've done very well not

1:26:48

working weekends, giving myself the days

1:26:50

off and the number one person I'm able

1:26:52

to then spend time with is my wife.

1:26:54

And we've had a

1:26:56

lot of time together this year and a

1:26:59

lot of it has been spent like settling

1:27:01

into a new home but it

1:27:03

would have been so much worse if I wouldn't have

1:27:05

been able to do this. Like we would not have

1:27:07

been able to get things to the point where they

1:27:09

are now where we are mostly settled and our house

1:27:12

is starting to feel like a home now because

1:27:14

I've had the time. And I

1:27:16

also feel like I have increased the amount of

1:27:18

time that I've spent with my wider family. I

1:27:21

can always do better at that though. But I've

1:27:23

been able to be more available to my

1:27:26

family. Like if my mum's needed

1:27:28

something from me, I would have been

1:27:30

more able to be like I can come over on Tuesday

1:27:33

where like before it might be like what are you doing

1:27:35

a week Sunday? Which is not

1:27:37

good. Yeah, that's really not good.

1:27:39

I can schedule you in three weeks from

1:27:41

now. It's not great. Because

1:27:43

this is one of these things where when

1:27:47

I was working basically every

1:27:49

day, people in my life wouldn't understand why

1:27:51

I couldn't be available for them. I

1:27:53

was like well if you worked seven days a week, you

1:27:56

probably wouldn't be available for me either. So that's

1:27:58

what I'm doing. That's been very positive.

1:28:01

I mentioned the house and the home stuff. I

1:28:03

wanted to be Handyman Mike this year. Oh,

1:28:06

right, yes, that's right, I forgot. Maybe the

1:28:08

least successful part of the theme, to be

1:28:10

honest. I would say I have gotten

1:28:12

better at picking up

1:28:14

house projects and doing things, but

1:28:16

nowhere to the level that I

1:28:19

wanted to be. I would

1:28:21

say, though, that this has been

1:28:23

part me, part just the

1:28:26

house itself. I don't

1:28:28

really feel like our house has been conducive

1:28:30

to the idea of home projects until

1:28:32

kind of about now, in

1:28:34

a lot of instances. A lot

1:28:36

of the things, the homely stuff that

1:28:38

you would do, we kind

1:28:41

of haven't been able to do that. We

1:28:43

had actual more work to have

1:28:45

done on the house by professionals than

1:28:48

we'd considered this time last year. Yeah, I don't

1:28:50

know. I feel like it's because you just didn't

1:28:52

get the hammer jeans like that. I also didn't

1:28:54

have a pair of hammer jeans, and that was

1:28:57

probably what held me back. It probably held me

1:28:59

back. The hammer jeans would have changed everything, Mike.

1:29:01

I think you're right. I would say, well, this

1:29:03

is something where I feel like I

1:29:06

have prioritized work stuff

1:29:08

over these projects. It's

1:29:11

something that I will continue to want

1:29:14

to spend time being better

1:29:16

at, because it's something that I do want, but

1:29:18

I haven't got my priorities in check when it

1:29:20

comes to this stuff yet, I think. So

1:29:24

I wanted to be both smarter

1:29:26

about my scheduling, so not

1:29:29

booking one appointment into a day that

1:29:31

was otherwise empty, and

1:29:33

I also wanted to start to

1:29:35

change my feeling of needing to

1:29:37

be connected to work all the

1:29:40

time. I

1:29:42

will have more to say about these in a minute, because I think

1:29:44

I found a better way to do this. I've

1:29:46

got a little bit of the way there, but

1:29:48

this is part of my 24th theme now. And

1:29:53

I wanted to, with moving into

1:29:56

a new area, experience that

1:29:58

area and spend time with my friends. my friends,

1:30:00

this has been so great. I had no idea

1:30:02

what 2023 was going to give me when I

1:30:06

set this. So one

1:30:08

of the biggest changes is two

1:30:11

of my oldest friends just

1:30:14

so happened to move within 15 minutes of

1:30:16

my house. And

1:30:18

it's been amazing.

1:30:20

And we have gotten

1:30:23

to spend so much time together

1:30:25

this year. Scheduling is particularly problematic

1:30:27

between the three of us. We're

1:30:30

all very busy and they travel a

1:30:32

lot. They travel much more than me.

1:30:34

These two friends travel more than

1:30:36

me of 2019. Oh wow, okay.

1:30:39

Yeah, they are very international people

1:30:41

but we're committed to spending time together. The

1:30:43

best thing that we had done is

1:30:46

if we would see each other, we wouldn't leave

1:30:48

until we'd set the next date. Yeah, that is

1:30:50

so key if you actually want to keep up

1:30:53

a relationship. It's so hard to do but I'm

1:30:55

the problem now though. I was doing that.

1:30:58

I was taking that mantle and

1:31:00

making sure that we would do it but

1:31:02

then stacked September came. And I

1:31:04

was like, guys, I'm not going to see you all in September.

1:31:07

And now since then it's been almost impossible to

1:31:09

try and arrange something via WhatsApp for the three

1:31:11

of us. But we will get back to it

1:31:13

and then I'll get back on the wagon again.

1:31:16

This combined with they live

1:31:18

close to me so I'm experiencing things

1:31:20

that they enjoy in our

1:31:23

shared area but then also me

1:31:25

and Adina have been kind of

1:31:27

venturing wider and wider from our

1:31:29

neighborhood into neighboring neighborhoods. This

1:31:32

has been fantastic and I feel like

1:31:34

the groundwork has been laid for

1:31:36

this that it's becoming part of

1:31:38

our lives to experience things that

1:31:41

are local. And the great thing

1:31:43

is we've moved to an area where this stuff

1:31:45

is around so that's not going to change. That

1:31:48

has been the biggest surprise and one

1:31:50

of the biggest impacts for my mental

1:31:52

health this year is these two things.

1:31:55

And again, it was like I'm so happy

1:31:57

that I made it so I was allowed

1:31:59

to do it. myself this year to have

1:32:02

a better work-life balance because

1:32:05

it has allowed for

1:32:07

these things to happen where

1:32:09

if I was maintaining my 2021-2022 kind

1:32:13

of mentality with my schedule, this

1:32:16

just couldn't have occurred. Yeah. Because it's

1:32:18

hard enough with me working the five

1:32:20

days that I work because I work

1:32:22

such weird hours. If I also didn't

1:32:24

have weekends free, I wouldn't have been

1:32:26

able to take advantage of any of

1:32:29

this. Yeah, I mean that's incredibly fortuitous

1:32:31

for you. Like maintaining friendships is

1:32:33

so hard and one

1:32:36

of the primary reasons is just

1:32:38

lack of proximity. Like lack of

1:32:40

proximity will just kill a friendship

1:32:42

debt 99 out of 100 times.

1:32:45

And the other thing that will kill a friendship is lack

1:32:48

of time. It's like you need these two

1:32:50

things. You need the frequent contact and you

1:32:52

need them to be proximate in your life.

1:32:54

And there's totally an alternate

1:32:56

universe version of you where you got the

1:32:58

proximity back but you just weren't able to

1:33:00

spend the time. It's like, oh that just

1:33:02

sucks like and you would have missed out

1:33:05

on this. So I feel

1:33:07

like yeah that's such great luck to

1:33:09

be able to have the time when

1:33:11

proximity presents itself with old friends. Like

1:33:13

yeah, you're really in a great position

1:33:15

with that. So typically when

1:33:17

I get towards this time of the year we

1:33:19

spoke about this before you're like, how did my

1:33:21

year go? Did I really do what I wanted?

1:33:24

And yeah, I did what I wanted. This

1:33:26

was just a success. Like everything

1:33:28

I feel like was successful, just

1:33:31

different levels of it. I don't really

1:33:33

feel like I failed at any part

1:33:35

of this idea of

1:33:38

what I wanted my life to look like

1:33:40

this year. Like I feel like it's

1:33:42

been a very positive

1:33:44

theme for me and I feel

1:33:48

like I'm gonna be carrying this

1:33:51

one forward very easily. Like it's changed

1:33:53

a lot of my approach to work

1:33:56

and I'm just very very happy with the way that

1:33:58

it's gone. Year of the week. Yeah, very successful.

1:34:00

There's nothing more to say. It was, I

1:34:03

feel like it's a simple theme. Yeah, yeah.

1:34:05

It was executed well. And so

1:34:07

it's just tick, tick, tick across the board. Like I

1:34:10

didn't learn anything grand about

1:34:12

myself this year, except I

1:34:15

like to have weekends. Hey,

1:34:19

it's important to know yourself. Yep. All

1:34:22

right, lay it on me. Okay, so listen.

1:34:26

Here we go, here we go. As

1:34:31

it may be clear to listeners, last

1:34:34

year's theme was a real biggie

1:34:36

for me. Quite exhausting in many

1:34:38

ways. Exhausting to even try to

1:34:40

recap a tiny part of it.

1:34:43

I'm looking at all of my notes and all of the

1:34:45

things we still haven't spoken about. It's just like, I'm

1:34:47

just gonna let that go for now. We'll bring it up in

1:34:49

the future if it matters. So

1:34:52

I was really aware of

1:34:54

that. I was like, this was big theme year.

1:34:57

And so looking

1:34:59

forward, I thought, you know what

1:35:01

I need? I

1:35:03

need something that's not as big of a

1:35:06

theme, right? This is like Mike's done year

1:35:08

of the weekend. That sounds lovely. It

1:35:11

was something like clear and simple

1:35:14

that I could focus on as a theme. This

1:35:16

is what I need. You know, at

1:35:18

the end of the year is approaching, I was thinking about

1:35:20

different things. I'm like, oh, I might like this to be

1:35:22

different or I might like that to be different. But

1:35:24

I had a problem with a bunch of the

1:35:26

things that were coming to mind where I kind

1:35:29

of thought they were too small

1:35:31

or they didn't really make sense as

1:35:34

a yearly theme. It's like, oh, this might

1:35:36

make sense as a seasonal theme, but

1:35:39

it's just no good for, I wanna

1:35:41

try to pick something to lay out for the year. So

1:35:45

mulling it over, mulling it over. And

1:35:47

then I realized that a bunch of

1:35:49

these little things had

1:35:52

something in common. And in that

1:35:54

moment, I thought, ah, I

1:35:56

know what the theme is. I am inspired

1:35:58

by... a thing

1:36:01

that happens in video games. They'll

1:36:03

have a bunch of releases, they go, oh here's

1:36:05

a bunch of new features to play with. Oh

1:36:07

great, another thing, another release comes out and you

1:36:09

go, ah a whole new set of mechanics, that's

1:36:12

amazing. Another release comes out, oh here's a whole

1:36:14

new kind of army or units to play with,

1:36:16

fantastic. Then sometimes they go,

1:36:18

this is a quality of life release.

1:36:20

We haven't added anything, we've just made

1:36:23

a lot of things easier. And I

1:36:26

thought, that's what I want my theme

1:36:28

to be. I want this year

1:36:30

to be a quality of life release.

1:36:34

There's nothing major here, there's

1:36:36

just a lot of little

1:36:38

things that I want to make

1:36:41

smoother in my life. So

1:36:44

your quality of life release is

1:36:46

a terrible thing, yeah that's no

1:36:48

good. The best I've come up

1:36:50

with so far, I'm open

1:36:52

to workshopping this, but the

1:36:55

best I have so far is year of small improvements.

1:36:58

I'm trying to have something that's a

1:37:01

bit catchier, but if you

1:37:03

have any suggestions, if cortex have

1:37:05

any suggestions for something catchier, I'm

1:37:07

really open to that. But that's

1:37:09

so perfectly said, maybe there's something

1:37:11

catchier, but that works

1:37:13

right? Maybe it's just because like quality of

1:37:15

life release really sticks in my head, it's

1:37:17

like that's the thing that my brain is

1:37:19

really thinking of. And for

1:37:22

me, I kind of like that it doesn't

1:37:24

fit in with the year of pattern,

1:37:28

just like a real quality of life release.

1:37:30

We've stopped, there's nothing major that's happening here,

1:37:32

we've just like tidied up a bunch of

1:37:34

stuff. And the

1:37:36

thing that really pushed me over the edge

1:37:38

into realizing that this is what I should

1:37:40

be doing, it was actually our

1:37:43

state of the hardware episode was the thing

1:37:45

that started to, it was

1:37:47

the beginning of the crystallization of this

1:37:49

idea in my mind, where

1:37:52

I realized in getting

1:37:54

ready for that episode that

1:37:56

I hadn't just done a mental

1:37:59

and physical. sweep of

1:38:01

my full environment in a

1:38:03

long time. Like when you

1:38:05

do an episode like that and you think, oh, we're gonna go through

1:38:07

like all of the stuff that we use in our life. I

1:38:10

think there's a way in which your brain can

1:38:13

just kind of forget

1:38:15

about or ignore the environment around

1:38:19

you in some ways. And it's like, no, I'm

1:38:21

really looking at everything now. I'm looking at all

1:38:23

of these things while I'm preparing for that show.

1:38:25

But in the process of looking at everything and

1:38:27

thinking about all of the things, you're

1:38:29

also just thinking about how can stuff be

1:38:32

better. As I mentioned on that show,

1:38:34

I was thinking a lot about like, what

1:38:36

are the high touch items in your

1:38:39

life? What are little things that you

1:38:41

interact with all the time that could

1:38:43

be slightly less annoying or it could