0:00 So this video is 5 hours long and by the end of it you will understand how to think clearly in a world that explicitly profits out of you not doing so. I'm not a big productivity guy. I am a business owner who shares what I've learned on the internet. Uh I've made over a million dollars a year in profit for the last 3 years and I've made almost $5 million in the last 12 months. I say all of this because I firmly believe that once you figure out how to think clearly, you will learn as well how to act clearly. And so it is the thinking clearly that is the foundation behind being effective in a lot of real world settings. In my case, you know, entrepreneurship, but in your case, maybe something else. So in my view, over the course of the last maybe 2 or 3 years, AI and other algorithms have
0:47 negatively impacted our ability to think for ourselves. One of the goals of my course as somebody that talks a lot about AI is to help people take some of their ability to think back from these models and hopefully get to a place where you can both think deeply for yourself and achieve the myriad gains that thinking deeply gives you while also being able to utilize this technology effectively because I believe it does have the promise to be used very effectively. Now you guys won't know this if you watch my channel often but before I went into business I actually studied behavioral neuroscience for around 5 years at a research university. And during this time I worked in a variety of labs. We performed experiments on animals to determine how various things affected their ability to literally think. In the literature, this is referred to as their cognition. Uh I
1:32 changed stuff like their eating schedules. I changed who they got to hang out with. I changed the lighting in their cages. I changed how they were trained and so on and so forth. And so a lot of the principles that I'm going to be talking about in this course are taken directly from my time back in university. Lastly, before we get into the course, I want to make it clear that this is not AI slop. Um, I wrote all of this myself using the same principles that I'm going to share with you. I had Claude Fable generate diagrams based on the data, but all the words are mine and I poured many, many hours into this because I frankly think it is probably one of the most valuable things that I could share with you. So, without further ado, let me show you how to think clearly. First, a lot of these terms will probably seem kind of senseless to you at face value, and I'll do my best to explain them, but you're going to learn them later on in the course. There's no way that you can't.
2:18 I'm planning on going in depth into both research and then practical applications of all this stuff. The whole idea being that you walk away with both deep underlying theory which will allow you to categorize problems in real life into the bins that I provide you, but also actionables aka real strategies and immediately implementable techniques that you guys could take immediately after this course to go and solve problems that you're struggling with. What I'm going to do is frontload with the hardware sections of the course and then finally we'll chat software before running you guys through those immediately actionable skills. So here is the outline of our course. I'm going to start with the biological basis of cognition. Then we'll talk about scientifically defining self-control. Afterwards we'll talk a concept called choice architecture. Then I'll discuss friction in action and behavior.
3:04 Afterwards we'll start optimizing our biology. Then we'll optimize our environment, our workspace, our virtual environment, and so on. Then I'll cover a concept the ancient Greeks talked about called accasia, which is where you know something but you cannot do it and how to solve that. We'll then run through expected value methodology and how to use it to accomplish tasks. I'll then cover local and global maxim, which is a mental model handed to me by calculus and optimization math. Afterwards, we'll cover what is called attentional residue. I'll talk about models like the map versus the territory. Extremely important. You'll learn about Ulyses or Adysius contracts for people here that have seen the Odyssey recently. I'll then talk power law. I'll talk the chain law. I'll teach you guys about opportunity cost. Incentives, what's called good heart. If
3:51 you guys haven't heard of Chesterton's fence, which is a strong thinking technique, I'll run you guys through Chesterton's fence. I'll then talk about Beijian theorem and Beijian probability theory in natural frequencies. This is a very strong way to solve problems. You'll learn firmmy approximates which are ways of estimating magnitudes and sizes. I'll run you guys through hourly rate and offload rules, planning fallacies, and how to multiply your way out of them. I'll cover the explore exploit trade-off, which is increasingly relevant with AI agents and models. And then finally, we'll actually cover these immediately actionable techniques like taps, noticing. I'll show you guys how to run what are called premortems. I'll then show you guys how to use five minute timers in a very strategic and tactical way to solve problems using structured decision-m and then finally
4:38 at the end of this course I'm going to show you guys how to use AI intelligently and not be overwhelmed or destroyed cognitively by these models. Now, that's obviously a lot of information and because of that, I should take a moment to discuss how best to take this course and actually cram it in your brain because as you guys will find the sort of meta planning, even a few moments of that significantly improves the ability of your brain to consolidate this information into something useful over time. So, how do you actually take this course? Well, I would recommend you start by watching or listening to the course passively at 1.5x speed. Now, this will obviously take you a lot of time, but not as much time as if you played it at 1x. After you're done, I would watch the course at 1x speed. So, that actually slow it down. After every section, you guys will find that I've added these action
5:24 questions down to the bottom. Now, I like to do that because quizzes, short little questions that you answer, force you to retrieve information from the various corners of your mind that we've just stuffed it in. And what you'll find is encoding or putting information into the system is quite different from retrieval, which is getting information out of the system. It's important that you experiment and practice both if you really want to consolidate concepts. So I'd recommend after you play it back at 1x speed, answer those action questions if you really want to get the most out of the material. Finally, this entire document is available just in the link in the description. So you guys can download it and then keep it as a companion guide uh for the short term, for the long term, for a study partner or whatever it is that you want. So, let's talk about the biological basis of cognition, shall we? For those of you guys that don't know, thinking,
6:10 it's also referred to as cognition. Uh, it is a biological process and understanding that biological process is very important if you want to learn how to optimize it. I'm not going to sit here and then pretend to give you guys, you know, a biology or a neurobiology 101. So, I'm going to spare you most of the details and instead I just want to leave you with probably the most useful definition I found so far back when I was pursuing work in a cognitive sciences lab in university which I I did not end up getting but this was still useful nonetheless. Now cognition your ability to think is composed of three parts. You have your attention, you have your working memory and then you have your executive function. Now put another way any thought that you have even the thoughts that you are having right now as you are watching this course is a byproduct of three things. The first is
6:55 attention itself and a good way of picturing attention is like a gatekeeper that lets in a small slice of the incredible amount of sensory information that is constantly flooding in from the outside world. Think things like the feeling of the headphones in your ear if you are wearing them or where your computer is or your wrists on the desk or the various background noises outside, wind, flapping of birds, sounds from your family members, whatever it is. All of this is currently flooding into your brain constantly. Yet, you're not constantly aware of it. Why? Well, that's because attention is like a spotlight. Your brain can put that spotlight on the things that it wants you to attend to. And so attention is a gatekeeper like that spotlight that chooses what it is in our environment
7:41 we're actually going to be lighting. Working memory is the next step. And that is like a workbench. If you guys have ever worked with any sort of heavy machinery or tools, you'll know that that workbench, you know, can typically hold a few things simultaneously. And the whole idea of a workbench is you put something on the workbench, you work on it, you get rid of it, you finish it, and then you put it out away. You clear the workbench so that somebody else or let's say you in the future can put new items on the workbench and then repeat that process again. That is what working memory is and that's an excellent way of conceptualizing it. The next is executive function. The best way I found of conceptualizing executive function is like a foreman or a general contractor if you guys have experience with construction. These are the people that
8:28 ultimately decide what goes on the workbench and who works on the workbench. You have all these things that are constantly flooding into your working memory from your attention because it is the gatekeeper that permits things. Well, the executive function is the foreman that decides what gets thrown out, when you should stop one task and move to another, etc. They are the project managers of your thinking. Now, the problem is the majority of human beings currently operate with next to no attention, very poor working memory, and not very functional executive function. In practice, this leads to you feeling fuzzy all the time. You know, you you really struggle focusing on anything that is actually important. You struggle with carrying an idea through to its logical conclusion. A lot of the time things probably feel confusing or
9:14 unnecessarily difficult and things like maybe this course just feel like they're happening a little bit too quickly. This often frustrates you constantly and it also leads to a relatively emotionally fragile state which I'll cover more in the course. So, how do you actually fix this? I mean, it sounds like a pretty big problem, right? We have attention, we have working memory, we have executive function. These are obviously deep cognitive science concepts, and you're learning them for the first time. Just like a video game character creator screen, you can actually just pour bonus stats from various hardware and software optimizations that I will teach you in this course directly into these skills of your attention, your working memory, and then your executive function. You know, we can find hardware improvements through things like health optimization,
10:01 better nutrition, circadian rhythm optimization and so on. And then in time we can distribute these free wins to parts like your attention, working memory and executive function to allow you to level up each of these. Then we can also take various software wins which are problem solving techniques and so on and so forth to also fundamentally improve your executive function as well. And that is simply all we are going to be doing today. I'm going to be going through like a caveman, finding all the extra bonus stats that you're probably leaving on the table, and we're just going to combine them to make the best video game character you've ever seen. So, let's cover a little bit about the biology behind the brain. Now, if you didn't already know, the human brain is extremely expensive. By weight, the brain makes up around 2% of our total body weight, but at the same time, it
10:47 consumes approximately 20% of our body's energy at rest. That means that per unit weight, the brain is actually the most metabolically expensive tissue in the entire body. And you can see that with this graph right over here. Despite having a small share of body mass, only around 2% or so. It includes over 20% of all resting energy usage. And obviously, this is very disproportionate. A very, very light organ, but one that requires a lot of energy to fuel. Now because of this incredible amount of energy per unit, there are two major implications and frames that I want you to think about this course through. The first is that if something is expensive energetically, then evolution and other
11:32 pressures will always force it to minimize costs and the brain is no exception to that. That means that the brain will always prefer a habit to a decision. It'll prefer, you know, a guess to a calculation. it'll prefer, you know, the old to the new and so on. You can think of this as the brain budgeting its energy, you know, like a spreadsheet or something like that, trying to spend as little energy as humanly possible, assuming energy is a resource. Now, many of the techniques that I'm going to be discussing with you guys, things like chunking or implementation intentions, uh, and so on and so forth, they work because they exploit this inherent stinginess which is currently operating by default, but which you can actually learn to utilize to think more clearly and be more effective. Now, much more surprising
12:18 than that is that the brain's energy consumption is actually fixed. What I mean by this is throughout the day there's actually no statistically significant increase in whole brain energy consumption during difficult tasks versus simple and easy tasks. At most any local energy consumption difference caps out at around 5% or so. Now this has interesting implications because it means that from a metabolic perspective you burn just as much energy solving a calculus problem and really racking your brain with it than you would if you were to just stare at the window. [gasps] Now, this I think is at the core of why it makes sense to improve your ability to think and be effective because the core reality is from a metabolic perspective, your brain
13:03 is going to be burning those calories anyway. Why not use those calories as efficiently and as effectively as possible? Part of me feels like as an animal, I have a moral and ethical duty to use every one of those damn calories in a way such that I positively impact the world. And I think that if you guys understand that perspective, it'll probably inherently motivate you to learn how to do that as well. Now, there's this notion of willpower, which is the idea that there's a certain amount of effort you can apply to thinking, and that it is a naturally depletable resource. Well, think about it from this perspective. Looking out the window and then doing a bunch of extremely economically valuable work consumes the same amount of energy. So, where is that depletable resource? The science doesn't actually check out with that explanation. And I'm going to explain to you guys in a moment how you guys can
13:49 use a better concept of willpower to actually get things done. Anyway, for now, just know that the brain is expensive. It is always on. It's also very stingy and it budgets its energy as much as possible, typically by reducing the total capacity at all times. All of this puts you under a very strong constraint or optimization pressure, which you know, if you want to think clearly, you have to maneuver. Okay, now that we've covered the brain in general, let's cover probably the most important singular component of the brain that most people would say is responsible for how clearly you think. That's called your working memory. Now, if I asked you to repeat a sequence of 12 random digits immediately, like if I just gave you a random list of 12 numbers and then had you walk away from the computer and come back a minute later and then repeat them, would you be
14:35 able to do so? Statistically, no. Very few people can. Now, it's not because you're dumb, although that may have something to do with it. It's because of the incredibly small and natural size of a human being's working memory. I'm going to show you guys how you guys can increase or improve the size of your working memory in a moment. The current consensus in psychology, which is supported by many, many studies, is that you can hold approximately three to five meaningful items in your working memory at any one moment in time. because it's a range of three to five. Most researchers will round this down to about four. For those in not in the know, a meaningful item is also referred to as a chunk. And a chunk is any unit of information that your memory stores.
15:21 For instance, how many chunks would these letters be? E I L N D A E. Well, if it's not clear, that is eight chunks long because it's eight letters. Given the previous cap on 3 to five items stored approximately four, statistically if you were to walk away from the computer for a second and then come back afterwards most of you guys would not actually be able to repeat those letters. And the reason why is simply we do not have the working memory capacity. There are only so many things we can store on our workbench at once. But the magic here is the meaningful part of meaningful items. Now, if you took those letters above, e i l n d a e, and then you reorganize them into
16:08 something meaningful, you can actually get a word out of them. For instance, if you reorganize e i l n d a, you'll find that putting the letters together magically, it turns into the word deadline. Now, if I flash the word deadline on the screen for just a second and then I asked you guys a moment later, hey, what word flashed on the screen? Not a very tough question to answer, right? It's the word deadline, obviously. Of course, I'd get it right. So, that takes me to an interesting idea. Why can't you remember eight letters by themselves like e i l n dae? But when you organize all of those letters into a word that it becomes really easy. Well, it's because of meaning. Meaning is a layer that inherently organizes information into higher and higher levels of abstraction.
16:53 Which means rather than store the base data of E I L N D AE into your working memory each as an individual chunk, you can actually just zoom out or reorganize the information a little bit into something that makes sense and then store the entire thing as a single chunk instead. Now this continues up the ladder of abstraction, reducing chunk size the entire time, which as you get good at things allows you to store more and more information in your working memory at once. Put another way, it allows you to zoom out and see more of the picture at once. And as you guys know, seeing a lot of the picture at once is how you make good decisions and think clearly. So for example, let's say I had this sequence here. You tarindula data at face value. If you guys are
17:40 listening and not watching, we have 22 chunks here, 22 letters. Now, this is obviously a lot of data and the probability that you'd be able to memorize this whole long string of characters without spending a lot of time and energy invested on it is quite low. But if I reorganize that information, you'll find that those letters, if put in a specific way, actually mean quarterly tax deadline. And to an average adult, we're no longer at 22 chunks anymore. Quarterly means something. Tax seems means something. And deadline means something. which means we will have transformed these 22 chunks into just three. Now, if I flash quarterly tax deadline on the screen and walked away, you'd probably be able to memorize that and be able to repeat that back to me in a few moments, right? Of course. But here's the really
18:27 interesting part. You can actually go one level up and that is where a high degree of skill becomes important. If I put the term quarterly tax deadline, not in front of an average adult, but I put it in front of a specialized tax accountant, you know, who has spent years internalizing the concept of a quarterly tax deadline. To them, it's not even three chunks anymore. It's just one. Why? Because they are now storing quarterly tax deadline as a concept in and of itself. A quarterly tax deadline is not just the combination of three separate words, quarterly tax and deadline. It is a thing. It is a constant reoccurring thing in an average tax accountant's life. It's something they're always looking up to and forward to. They recognize that as a standalone
19:13 idea. And that takes me to the following point. People who are exceptional at things can typically remember far more than an average adult so long as they are in their zone of competence. The reason why is because throughout their lives, they've applied meaning to larger and larger groups of information, which allows them to chunk larger amounts of data in any single time. A good example of this is a chess master. A world famous chess master can remember the positions of pieces on a board far better than you or I can. And it's not because their brains are inherently better than ours. They do not remember any more chunks, so to speak. What they do is they've simply combined all of the information into larger chunks themselves and then they store those fewer chunks in the same area that you
19:59 and I have available to us. Whereas you might see 32 distinct pieces on a board, they would see only three or four distinct patterns and thus can store far more information with just four chunks than we can. Another example. Can you remember the following number? 149217762001. Well, if I just said that to you guys and then walked away and came back in a minute and asked you to repeat it, the vast majority of you would not be able to do that. The reason why is because you're trying to remember 12 individual chunks. But for example, what if I told you that that number was actually just three chunks. 1492, which was the year that Columbus sailed to the New World, 1776, which is
20:47 the year of the American Revolution, and 2001, which is the year that the Twin Towers fell. If I asked you to now repeat those numbers back to me, probably be far easier, right? Simply because you now know 1492, right? That's the year Columbus made it to the New World. 1776, right? That's the year of the American Revolution. In 2001, right, that's the year that the Twin Towers fell. I'm doing this obviously for an Americanric audience. I'm Canadian, but hopefully you'll bear with me. Okay. And so, as we see on this diagram here, we started with 12 items, which was vastly over our capacity. You know, 1492, 1776, 2001. Very, very difficult sort of to remember it as 14921776,2001. But because we're now applying meaning to this information, we're organizing it
21:34 in a way that allows us to chunk them smaller and then store them all on our workbench simultaneously. Now, if I told you I was going to quiz you on this later, uh, you'd probably remember it for a week or more. And studies have shown things like that. You can be shown a long string of characters or numbers. You can then be told how the meaning organizes that into some sort of concept you understand. And a week, a month, a year later, people can still understand that information, which is obviously far more efficient, right? I mean, could you imagine working three times as hard to try and store 12 items in your working memory as somebody else who just knows a little bit more about the underlying patterns and facts and and let's say in this case, history and can turn them into just three chunks. Why would you work three times as hard if you don't have to? Well, this is a good example of exploiting that natural energy conservation concept of the
22:20 brain. Now, this is just a very tiny example in the grand scheme of things. As I discussed with you guys earlier, cognition is composed of three parts. We have attention, working memory, and executive function. And what we just discussed together, chunking, is just one very small and tactical way to slightly improve the working memory stat. In reality, there are actually dozens, if not hundreds of different ways that you can improve each of these three stats. High performers in avenues where thinking is very essential. So, think things like poker or public speaking or business, memory, championships, and so on and so forth. They will take all of the techniques that I'm about to show you guys and apply them across the board in a very intelligent way so that they can achieve productivity and thinking gains of well
23:07 over the 300% that we just saw with that 1492 1776 2001 example. And that's ultimately where we're getting to. In addition to talking about what they are, I'm also going to show you guys how you can apply them to real problems in your life. Until then, I want to talk to you guys a little bit more about the hardware to fully flesh out this idea of what thinking really means. Now, as mentioned, I spent about half a decade in behavioral neuroscience. And a lot of that time was spent volunteering and later working in laboratories whose whole goal was to manipulate the environment of animals, their food, their cage mates, the other animals around them, the time of day that their lights were on or off, uh their training, and a bunch of other things. and then immediately after test their resulting cognitive performance on big
23:54 batteries of tests. And so you can think about this as you know I at the time was volunteering and then later paid specifically to analyze what inputs resulted in clearer or less clear thinking. And so the key takeaway I got from that experience was that counterintuitively rather than thinking clearly being very hard thinking clearly is actually quite easy. They're actually extremely simple and very mundane, but very powerful interventions that drastically improve animal performance. And I guarantee you, you will not have thought about more than half of them. And the most powerful and impressive ones to me were not the ones that required injections or supplementation or various drugs or treatments. The most powerful ones were always things like a
24:40 few hours difference in the feeding times of the animals or which lights got turned off earlier or later than usual or which cage mates which other rats or mice did they get to play around with before they went to bed. And you'll find that all of these made a massive statistically significant difference in many cases between 30 to 50% of improved or impacted performance which turned them into basically different animals. And it all boiled down to simple changes that I don't think anybody here would probably bat their eyes at. These simple changes impacted their hardware. Now obviously it'd be unethical to perform these experiments at large on people. Okay? Okay, I'm sure some people have unfortunately, but it would be unethical to do this sort of thing obviously unless somebody explicitly opted into
25:25 it. But with what limited research that you know neuroscientists have done, it is clear that human beings are quite similar to the animals studied in most of these experiments. Small changes in what you eat or the strength of the lights that you are exposed to or maybe the people in your periphery or your friends or maybe the colors in your environment. Believe it or not, all of these variables that you might not have otherwise noticed at all, if you stack them up, can actually make a massive difference to your ability to think clearly over time for your brain to basically function. Now, I'm going to run you guys through a bunch of examples of those in this section and then give you a big laundry list of all possible ways that you can optimize your biology or hardware for the purposes of thinking. And we're only going to do thinking in this course, so obviously you can optimize your biology for
26:11 anything these days. Afterwards, I'm going to give you guys the programs that I talked about to stretch that hardware out as much as possible. So, if you guys didn't know, there's this very famous 1997 experiment where a bunch of adult mice were put into what they called an enriched environment, which is more or less a cage that contains more cage mates, a bunch of running wheels, a bunch of tunnels and toys, and so on and so forth. when they were compared to control mice and control just means like the default the mice that did not have all of this. Um what they found is that mice in the enriched environments showed massively increased granular cell layer thickness in an area of the brain called the dentate gyus which is the area of the brain that is typically responsible for new memory formation. The cool thing is this was achieved
26:57 solely through housing. There were no drugs and no training involved, which means quite literally the only difference was that their environment was more stimulating in a positive sense than the mice that did not see these gains. And you can actually see on this graph here that the granular neurons in the dentate gyus index to 100 here in the standard cage were 100. In the enriched cage, which had all these extra things that I talked about, we hit 115. Now, what's important to note here is that the mice did not have to, you know, hustle and grind for these improvements. They did not have to wake up at 5, watch a bunch of Instagram inspirational Tik Toks, and go to the gym. Really, they didn't get more disciplined at all. They also did not have to watch super comprehensive courses on how to improve your hardware and your software. All
27:43 that happened was they were by circumstance put into better enclosures. And as a result, their brains, their hardware followed suit and became better. Now, a similar study on human beings. There were 24 architects, uh, programmers, engineers, managers, just a bunch of knowledge workers basically that were put into a fake office for six full days. These had the exact same desks. They had the exact same co-workers as before. And to my knowledge, they were also doing the exact same work. The only thing that differed in that experiment was the air. how much of it came from outside, how much CO2 was inside of it, and how much offging there was, which is something called volatile organic compounds, which typically are gassed off of paint,
28:29 carpets, furniture, and uh, you know, things like that, typically when they're purchased new. Now, every afternoon at 3 p.m., these 24 knowledge workers took the exact same set of cognitive tests to evaluate their ability to think clearly. Well, the shocking result is that on the days with very clean and well ventilated air, the scores of these knowledge workers were literally double what they were on their normal office days. That's not 10% better. That is literally double. And the specific part of their thinking that improved the most was their strategy, their ability to plan, prioritize, and then sequence actions. All of which are executive function related. basically their ability to think clearly. There wasn't a single
29:14 person in that room that slept more. Nobody took supplements or neutropics. Nobody tried harder. All of these people literally just breathed slightly different air and then became twice as good at certain batteries as a result, which is kind of nuts, right? And as a business owner, that's extremely attractive to me because it means I can achieve 200% output with the exact same input. You know, we define that as leverage. It's free money. If you can make 200% with a minor change that has no real other impact on my day-to-day, why the hell wouldn't I do it? In general terms, you guys might have also heard of this concept as lowhanging fruit. And when you have low hanging fruit, you should probably pluck it wherever possible. It's low hanging, right? That's what I'm going to be doing with you guys next with zero additional effort. I want you guys to be able to
30:00 output twice as much as you are currently outputting. Or put another way, think twice as clearly. So our next few sections which are on the scientific definitions of willpower on choice architecture on friction on hardware optimization and on environment optimization you can think of as basically the human equivalent of designing a better cage like those workers were in or like those mice were in uh compared to their default counterparts. Now it's miraculous to me as somebody that's worked with modifying animal environments for performance reasons that human beings have as much control over our own environments as we do. Because if you think about it, you can quite literally design your world. You can, for instance, choose where to live. You can buy or build your own home. You can surround yourself voluntarily with
30:47 better cagemates, which are things like family friends competitors your spouse, and so on. When you do this and you actually design your environment or design your own cage, you'll find that for at least the hardware side of things, thinking clearly becomes way less a question of being really disciplined and using various structures to think and to guide your thinking and more really just a sense of minor engineering actions that you only really ever need to make once, which is when you make the decision to like move somewhere or I don't know buy a new house or associate with a person and not associate with another person. Okay. And that takes me to the first set of action questions in our course. First, what was that 12-digit number that I asked you to memorize from
31:32 earlier? Actually, I want you to sit with it for a second and think, what was that 12digit number that I asked you to memorize from earlier? Second question is given the experiment on knowledge workers and CO2/organic compounds can you guys just off the top of your head without us going in depth on hardware optimizations think of any other biological limiters that you yourself might be facing and that's just right now without you having any extremely detailed list of of steps to optimize anything come to mind odds are that thing is probably pretty important to fix. Okay, moving on to willpower. On a similar level, what the hell is willpower? Well, most people think of willpower as a reservoir. Every time that you use your self-control, they are
32:19 withdrawing a small amount from their willpower reserve. Like, let's say you, you know, didn't hit snooze this morning even though you really wanted to, or you didn't check your phone even though you really wanted to, or somebody was rude to you, but you kind of buried it and were polite instead. The way that most people conceptualize willpower is that consumes a little bit of willpower, a unit here, a unit there. And then eventually what happens is at the end of the day your willpower reserve is low. Maybe because you've had a, you know, a lot of temptation fighting all day. And then because it's low, you know, if another temptation comes around or something happens that requires self-control, maybe you're you're more likely to give up, you know, and at some point you refill your willpower reservoir with sleep and then just refill or redo the process tomorrow.
33:05 Now, what's interesting is, have you ever noticed how some people are capable of staying extremely clear-minded and self-controlled, whereas other people cannot? Why is this? Do you think it's because they have more willpower? Well, it's not really. The answer, which has been backed by a tremendous amount of science at this point, is not that some people have more willpower than others. It is that the people that you think have more willpower simply never have to fight the same level of temptation that you do in the first place. What I mean by this is people that maintain clear thinking and strong self-control usually just do not put themselves in situations where they have the opportunity to make a mistake at all. If you think about it logically, if you cannot make mistakes at all because that is not one of the possible moves available to you, like in a video game or a chessboard, well, news
33:52 flash, you're probably going to make fewer mistakes, right? Because you simply can't make the move that leads to a mistake. Think bowling with the guardrails up. If you bowl with the guardrails up, landing in the gutters is simply not one of the possible mistakes. I mean, I guess it is technically a possible mistake, but damn, you'd have to screw up really hard to make it in the gutter. What happens when you bowl with the guardrails up is if you bowl and you're just a little bit off to a side, you knock off a guardrail and eventually end up virtually somewhere in the neighborhood of hitting the pin that you want. Now, in a similar vein, it turns out that the majority of the effort involved in resisting temptation or avoiding work that you have to do or some sort of similar issue like that really just boils down to you having to adjust to do work at times that are maybe less
34:38 effective or profitable for you. To do things outside of a regular schedule. to do things at times that are closer to the end of the day when your quote unquote reserves have fallen low than at the beginning of the day when your quote unquote reserves are still high. I want to give you guys an example of this. A person that doesn't check their phone in the meeting, for instance, would commonly be referred to as resisting temptation. And that's good for them, right? But if you think about it logically, a lot of people don't check their phones during meetings. Do you know how most people do it? They just don't have their phones on them in the meeting. The people that don't check their phones in the meetings, that have them in their bags, constantly have to fight the temptation of pulling out their phone to check a text message or write something down. Whereas the people that simply do not have phones on them whatsoever, well, they never have to fight that temptation. Their phone is,
35:24 you know, three doors down. It's impossible to get it without making a total ass of yourself. Basically, the people that don't check their phone in this example because they don't have their phone on them, they have adjusted and built their environment such that temptation never shows up in the first place. And this is a very small example of much larger sweeping lifestyle changes that I'm going to run through with you. Now, to be clear, this is probably not what is going on in your brain under the hood. There probably is not actually a reservoir of willpower. It's not like you're using up energy every time you say no to something. As mentioned, we use approximately the same amount of energy when staring out the window or, you know, working on a task. But I want to introduce a concept to you today called asymmetric bets. If you assume that your willpower was limited and then acted according to that philosophy, that
36:10 would probably lead you to reducing temptations more. Right? So even if you are wrong, you will have built yourself a better environment and probably some extra capacity now. Similarly, if you assume that your willpower was unlimited and that you could just rely on it every time because you're a badass MF, right? Well, you will fail in front of everybody at the worst possible time simply because that is the modus operandi with which you have lived your life. So logically then if you have possibility to believe one thing or the other thing and one thing leads to a universe where you are better off aka you resist temptation less because you just do not have the opportunity to resist temptation and the other one you resist temptation more which leads you to screwing up every now and then. Shouldn't you believe the univer believe in the story that results in the
36:55 universe where you do not have to resist temptation at all? Obviously, right? This is a concept known as instrumental rationality, which we'll cover a little bit later. But basically, it is where you choose the most effective and useful belief system to achieve a goal, even if it slightly differs from reality. The takeaway is do not build resisting into any of the plans that you come up with. If one of the steps in your proposed plan, which we'll be doing a lot of later on, is you know, I just won't do that bad thing that I always do. Well, it's not a plan. It is a hope and it is quite unrealistic at that. Instead of eliminating X completely, what you should aim to do is just reduce X by reducing your access and opportunity to abuse X. If you remove some sort of
37:40 temptation entirely, it will naturally go down for free and you will think more clearly as a result. Now, in terms of an actual immediately actionable example that you guys can do right now while watching this course to gain an additional 10 to 20% out of it, you guys probably have your phone in the room right now. And some of you may actually be listening or watching to this course on their phones. Now, by doing so, you are increasing the probability of picking up your phone for whatever reason and getting distracted by an order of magnitude, which is 10x or more. What I'd recommend you do right now is if you are watching me on the computer and your phone is somewhere in your periphery, I'd recommend you actually stop, go grab your phone, pick it up, move it to another room, and then place it somewhere where it isn't directly in your periphery. And if you are listening to me while on your phone,
38:26 because this is your only access to media, then I would recommend you swipe down from the top, go to the do not disturb button, or the equivalent, depends on your operating system, and turn that on. If you just do that one thing right now, if you pre-commit, you will get 10 to 20% more out of this course. Imagine if I had two options available to you, kind of a red pill or blue pill like in the matrix. And on one hand, I had a dollar and on another hand I had a $110 and I said, "Hey brother, which one do you want? Do you want the dollar or do you want the$110?" What would the logical thing be to do in that scenario? It would obviously be to be like, "Hey, give me the freaking dollars." Obviously. Well, that is what I am offering you right now. You have the ability to design the future few hours that you will be listening to this and to maximize your engagement and
39:12 minimize your distractability during that time period. And so, this is a great example of a bunch of techniques that we're going to line up back to back in order to help you think more clearly and get more done. But I'd recommend that you do so right now because if you do so, you won't be serendipitously distracted by like a rogue notification flavors. Yeah. You won't be randomly distracted by a friend of yours texting you a funny meme on Instagram, which you have because the damn default notifications always blow up your phone. You know, you won't have a little buzzing constantly occurring in the background, which pulls five or 6% of your cognitive capacity away from you like we'll learn about in the hardware optimization section. [sighs and gasps] Can you think of a freer? You're literally picking up a 100 gram object, moving it 10 meters to the right, and then immediately being 10 or 20% more effective. Okay, another good example of this which my family would probably hate is that I used to smoke weed uh mostly
39:59 in social settings luckily and I did not really like what weed did to me. You know, I was I grew up in a British Columbia, you know, Vancouver. So I was I was smoking that BC bud for anybody in the know and I grew up in East Van. Um so there was a lot of it an abundance, let's say, in my periphery. So I tried many times after, you know, picking up the habit with my friends at parties and stuff like that to just quit many, many, many times. But I didn't really know half of what I know now. And back then, I tried to quit every time based on my willpower. Not shockingly, every one of my attempts failed. You know, I would do pretty well for like a week or two saying no and no and no. But then finally, one random night, I'd go with my friends and maybe I'd be a little bit sleepd deprived. Maybe I wouldn't have been entirely in my best state and somebody would have some weed on them and they'd offer some to me and then
40:44 next thing you know, I was smoking. So eventually I identified a rule and the rule was when I hung out with person X or person Y, I would lead to smoking weed. And then when I did not hang out with person X or person Y, I would not. So logically, me being a, you know, I don't know, bright 18 or 19-year-old kid thought, hm, I wonder, can I use this rule not to smoke weed anymore? So what I did is I just stopped hanging out with the people that smoke weed. And miraculously, I stopped smoking weed. And it's been a hot minute, quite a while since the last time I did. If you think about it, this is a very simple and minor example of a deep part of me not wanting to engage in a habit that I had picked up just by happen stance that I then felt chained to for for quite a long time. We all have the ability to do
41:31 so. We simply need to stop and observe and notice, which I'll cover in the software uh section, various things in our periphery that tend to lead to actions that we do not want. The second you've established an if then rule, everything becomes very very easy. So the key pattern is I put the work in before I got tempted, not during the temptation. I could have come up with a variety of things to say, maybe like I tell my friends, no, not tonight, guys. I got to wake up early tomorrow. But that works far less effectively than just building a rulein to eliminate the possibility of temptation in the first place. It sucks that we stop hanging out, by the way. you know, some of these people are pretty cool, but obviously my life is way better off. And I think that's a core thing to understand. Like, do you want your life to be better off or do you want to be dragged down to the level
42:17 of everybody else? I don't necessarily want to do things like that. Um, maybe if you zoom out on a deep level, I don't want to. Maybe on a superficial level when I'm tempted and so on and so forth, I do. But I obviously like the deep version of myself more and that's ultimately who I'm I'm looking to better and self-actualize. So if you find your guyselves in similar situations, that's a very simple and easy hack to do. Okay, let's think of some action questions. Think of the last time this week that you lost to some sort of temptation. Maybe it is your phone. Maybe it is your food. Maybe it is skipping your workout. Whatever it is for your particular challenges. Was there a way that you think you could have reorganized your environment to avoid you doing the thing that you did not want to do? I'll give you guys an example. I had some junk food in the house because my girlfriend and I bought a bunch of these wonderful
43:03 creamy all-d dressed potato chips from I think Miss Vicky's. And these things are incredible. They are so good. But one of my goals was not to eat these sorts of extremely ultrarocessed potato chips. Well, anyway, we had bought it earlier on in the week because we were celebrating something. I just got hungry one day. I opened up the cabinet and there it was. I ate it. If I had not had that at home, I obviously logically would not have eaten that bag of chips, right? I would not have just downed 1,200 calories worth of probably the most ultrarocessed fat known to man. Now listen, I'm not saying you have to, you know, live your life like a freaking a sack. You really don't. You can enjoy your life and have fun. And it's not the first time I had a crazy bag of chips. Not the last time. But the end result is I ended up doing something I didn't want to do, not because of intention, simply because of my environment. So why not
43:49 only do the things that I actually want to do? And I have the power to do the things that I want to do. If I did want to have that bag of chips, I could have reconstructed my environment such that I got them when I wanted them, but I did not. So, at some level, a dumber, younger version of me or somebody else, the manufacturer of the chip, you know, and so on and so forth, essentially made me do something that I did not entirely want to do. So, think about an example like that from your own life. Do you have any? If so, consider them. Now, next, find some step in your plans that depends on you resisting something in the moment. Rewrite that step so nothing needs resisting at all. Maybe instead of you, I don't know, coming home from work or something and then having a big fat candy bar, remove the ability that you
44:37 have to do that in the first place. So, let's talk phones. What is a phone really? Well, initially it was a tool used for making phone calls. Then it expanded into a tool used for both messaging and making phone calls. But eventually it exploded into a basically general purpose computer that could do everything from check your GPS route to video conference your friends to take photos and post them and more. How about social media? Social media initially started as a simple tool for messaging your friends. Think things like AOL chat rooms, IRC, and so on. Eventually, in the pursuit of increased functionality, it became a tool used for both messaging and then posting updates. Think things like MySpace with like your original pages. Eventually, like everything else, it exploded into an everything app where
45:22 you can play games and you can even buy furniture. Have you ever asked yourself the question, who came up with all of that and why? Well, the unfortunate reality is virtually all of the decisions around your virtual environment and your physical environment were made by other people for the express purpose of consuming more of your time, typically in an unproductive way. Think about it logically. You don't need to be able to play Farm Simulator 2000 on Facebook, do you? No. So, why does it exist? Well, it's because there was some smart person on Facebook's team that noticed that having games embedded in their little message box increases the average user time spent by, you know, 10% or 17% or 25% or something. If you think about it,
46:09 the vast majority of the time that you do something on the internet and really life in general, it is a decision that somebody made for you. This is called choice architecture. Now, this term was coined in a book called Nudge. Really good book if you guys haven't heard of it before. And it basically means the way that you present options or the way that options are presented to you influences which options are chosen. Put another way, there is no single way to neutrally present more than one option. Anytime that you give somebody a choice between X or Y or A or B or C, in some way, shape or form, you will always be influencing their behavior logically.
46:54 A good example of this is a cafeteria manager. A cafeteria manager can actually fundamentally change what people eat. Not by taking anything off the menu entirely, but simply by changing the way in which the food is presented or the story is shaped. For instance, if you have two items, a healthy bowl and then an unhealthy burrito. If a photo of the healthy bowl looks like crap and the photo of the unhealthy bowl, unhealthy burrito is high quality and attractive, people will eat way more of the unhealthy burrito. And if you think about it, that's a massive responsibility on behalf of the cafeteria manager because over 10 years or 20 years or 30 years or even 50 years, that single action could theoretically lead to hundreds of times more heart attacks, strokes, deaths, and so on and so forth. If this is a really
47:40 busy cafeteria with several hundred people visiting every day and you've nudged them even 30% more towards a very unhealthy food option or something like that, obviously people are going to eat way more of it and as a result screw their bodies up and that obviously has consequences, right? So what I mean to say here is that you are being manipulated constantly. Even the algorithm that led you to my video here today was in part some sort of manipulation. Now, in rare cases like the one that you guys currently have, manipulations can be positive and they can end up improving your life. But that is the exception and that is not the rule. The vast majority of the time, the 99.999% of the time, manipulations are actively detracting from your ability to think clearly because your ability to think
48:25 clearly is tied to your ability to set intentions and then reason through those intentions. But if you are being led not by your own intentions, but by somebody else's, obviously you're not being led to your own ends. You are being led to someone others. A great example of this um from like a sociological perspective is organ donation. Some European countries run optin systems where you're not a donor unless you actually register to become a donor and then other ones run opt out systems which are where you are automatically a donor unless you register out of it. Now they compared the two groups of countries back in 2003 and found an insane difference in total organ uh uh essentially defaults. Now in Germany which is an opt-in country only 12% of people were registered as donors. In Austria which is right next door and which was an opt out uh uh region 99.98%
49:14 of people registered to be an organ donor. Every single opt-in country was around 28% or less whereas every single opt out country was around 85% or more. And if you think about it, that is one of the clearest examples of how impactful choice architecture can be. These governments simply made a choice really early on. Should we default people into organ collection or should we allow people to make the choice about whether they want their organs collected or not? You know, basically opt in. The countries that said opt in have virtually no organ collection. The countries that say opt out have virtually all of the organ collection. And it is a hell of a power law difference here, which I'll cover later on. Now, these are societal level choices that are being made for you. And it shows clearly how much a single line on a piece of paper can impact things
50:00 like your organ availability or more what people will do with your body after you die. And that takes me to this concept of default. If you think about it, autoplay is a default that is selected and defaulted to because it increases your watch time. Notifications on your phone are a default because they are selected to increase the total number of times you open an app. pre-selecting an annual plan when you are shopping around a SAS that is done to increase the total amount of money that you spend and your ultimate retention or churn and putting candy by a checkout is done to maximize the number of people who ultimately impulse buy because they're saying well I already got all that healthy stuff when I just throw in some candy too. It is not illegal right now to do this. It's just designing an environment in the
50:47 service of a KPI. The issue is it's just not your KPI. Now, I don't mention any of this because I want to freak you the hell out or mislead you. I just want to offer a new lens to look at the world through. Next time that you're presented with some sort of choice, okay, just ask whose interests are being served by this choice. You know, if you have a choice between A or B, is that a choice you need to make at all? When you get a phone and all of your notifications are automatically defaulted to on, or you get a new Windows PC and you have a bunch of game apps that are auto pre-installed, why are they auto pre-installed? Why is all of that stuff set up the way that it is to begin with? It's not like phones evolved. There's something that a person put together. Same thing with Windows PCs. The reality is there's a complicated interconnected
51:34 web of incentives at play, but the harsh reality is most of those incentives are not for you. They're against you. Now you can use this knowledge to design your own life. As mentioned, you guys can build defaults yourselves that overwrite the typical defaults of corporations and big organizations. And in doing so, you can have a lot more control over what it is that you do on a day-to-day basis. The math is very much in your favor. And it's another clear example of leverage if you think about it because you only ever have to make the decision one time while very clear-headed, maybe on a, you know, Sunday morning after you've had your cup of coffee. And despite you making that decision once, it will continue to pay dividends even, you know, at every other 6 a.m. morning when you don't get a lot of sleep, you're tired, you're lazy, maybe you're a little less caffeinated, whatever. The point that I'm making is
52:21 you can make a default decision right now when you're in a strong state of mind and then force all future instances of you to do the default decision and basically just treat that as how things are. Okay? So, you know, if a default is set by a company and you do nothing, you get what they want. But if you set a default and you do nothing, you get what you want. So, maybe your laptop automatically opens the tab that you were on yesterday. And you know, usually before you go to bed, you're on some sort of entertainment website or social media. What that means is the default is when you go to your laptop in the morning, you are now seeing a bunch of social media. If there were two universes, one where you know you had that tab open and then another where you had a tab open with your work on it. You
53:06 which of the two universes do you think you would do more work? Obviously the one where your tab is open with the work on it, right? You have the ability to control that. Tabs reopening are not a default setting. That is something that the people that designed these browsers did because they want to keep you on them for longer. Likewise, maybe your refrigerator is organized so that the worst snacks are at eye level. And so every time you open it, they're literally the very first thing that you see. Now, that is a default that you yourself probably unknowingly created. But it's also a default that you can change. How about your calendar, your virtual environment? Maybe it's bookable 24/7, and the reason is you just never set your working hours, and that results in a variety of annoying ass notifications that come in throughout the day, and a bunch of people that come in and steal your time. Well, you have the ability to control that and change
53:52 that right now. So, all these are defaults. They take you maybe a few moments, but the cool benefit here is if you change them, you get repeated gains literally every day until you die or until the company claws back that claws back that default. How do you actually identify all the defaults in your life? Since obviously this is a okay list, but it's not an exhaustive one. Well, I use the following diagnostic tool to do this. For every transition in my day, I just ask myself, what happens if I do nothing? So for instance, at 5:00 a.m. in the morning when I access my computer, what happens by default if I do nothing? So a good example of, you know, environment design is what I have done to my computer at 5 a.m. when I access my computer. I open it up. There are no additional applications on my
54:38 screen except for Chrome. So I will double click on Chrome. I then look at my bookmarks bar, which includes links to all of the work laid out in serial uh capacity. Literally 1 2 3 4 5. I then click one and then it opens the page that I have to start doing my work on. If I try and access any sites outside of these, my browser will actually block them until 3 p.m. So, what I mean by this is that that's a transition state for my day, right? I went from waking to working. What happens by default if I do nothing in this situation? Well, I work. I physically can not work. I basically have, if you think about it, gone onto like some sort of Wet n Wild tube ride or something and, you know, I've gone up to like the slide and I've entered the slide and the slide takes me to the end destination and there's nothing I can do
55:23 about it. The cool thing is I'm the one that architected that slide and I'm the one that made it how I wanted it to be. as opposed to entering somebody else's slide which maybe had a lot of entertainment on it or distractions or things that reduced my capacity for attention, working memory or executive function. I got to do all of this myself. Similarly, since my phone is not in my room, you know, if I do nothing, I cannot check my phone easily without physically getting up and going somewhere else. Which if you think about it means that my default if I do nothing is I have very low usage of my phone. This graph here is quite important because if you notice that when you do nothing you achieve an outcome that is beneficial for somebody else like a company odds are that default is something that you need to change. Now if you do nothing and then you achieve a positive outcome that you like odds are
56:09 you have in some way shape or form shaped that default and that is okay. So some action questions look at the last 24 hours and list every point at which
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