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ChrisWilliamson.live.
What does trying for 20 mean to you?
As with most things, people tend to do it as a positive and a negative side.
I'm sure you're aware of that.
The idea is just that you know when everybody else is trying for 10, you're going to be the guy that tries for 20.
And so the positive side of that is you can end up getting a lot done.
You can end up building a podcast with a billion plays.
But the negative side of it is uh, you're constantly anchoring your actions and your behaviors to what you see other people around you doing um, so in some sense it kind of reduces your freedom.
But um can increase your actual output or at least like what you're managing to achieve.
So it's kind of like this comparative, competitive sort of testosterone maxing thing where you're just like whatever the other guy does.
I'm going to do more um.
I think it was in the homozy episode or something when it came to meditation.
However much everyone else is meditating for inner peace, I'm going to meditate more.
And it's like, if you're a hammer, everything is a nail.
And so if that's the type of guy you are, you're probably going to achieve a lot of cool stuff.
But yeah, you might not be the happiest while you're doing it, but you never know.
Maybe you will be as well.
Because the...
Position is always lack.
It's always.
You always feel behind the eight ball and you're trying to catch up.
Not only do you need to be better than everybody else, but you have set your sights so much higher than them double Yeah that you're always going to be setting a chasing.
An unrealistic opportunity 100 and also you're living in a reactive state, right?
Like you're.
You're not actually affirming something.
It's like an internally generated idea of what you should be doing with your time.
You're just reacting to the environment, oftentimes out of like a sense of lack or a fear.
And I mean we have these adaptive personalities that we create where something bad will happen and then, I don't know, maybe you're kind of outcast in school.
That was my example.
And then you kind of create this adaptation which is like okay, to avoid that sort of pain, you're going to do everything you can to not be in that position again, which often means just doing better than the next guy.
But the problem you can end up just getting really good at shit you don't actually care about or making a lot of progress along a dimension that you wouldn't have otherwise sued.
Give me an example.
Well, I was just in LA and I feel like this is a hub of that.
There's a lot of people sort of playing the status game.
It seems to be like the center of the status game in many ways.
And oftentimes it's to overcome a sense of lack.
You know, Nietzsche always spoke about like creating your own values.
And there's kind of a lot of debate over the extent to which you're actually capable of doing that.
People like Peterson are kind of saying like, you can't do it.
Jung says you can't do it.
But I think it's because there's.
It's not because we're actually confused about what we mean when we say values, or like the capacity or where they come from.
It's because we're generally quite confused about this term.
You like, I like.
What actually is that?
What's the scope of it?
And it can kind of expand or contract depending on the context at play.
So if you consider you to be like the body that is Chris Williamson, like that body will actually be creating its own values.
Even if they're mimicking other stuff in other people's bodies, like mirror neurons, are still in your head, right?
So you're kind of, if that's who you are, then you are creating your own values.
But the conscious personality, the conscious identity.
Chris, doesn't have any top-down control over the body.
If you did, I could say, just pause your heartbeat, and you'd be able to pause it.
But you can't, because nature's quite smart and it realizes that certain things just shouldn't be within the jurisdiction of the conscious personality.
What do you think about self-belief, or where do you think self-belief comes from?
Because it seems there that trying for 20 is inherently wrapped up in a high level of self-belief.
I can do this thing.
Even if you're whipping yourself into doing it, even if it's coming from a relatively negative fuel source.
It seems like that has to be tied up with self-belief.
And also in self-belief is the word self, which is what you were just talking about.
So what do you think about self-belief and its relationship to aiming high?
Um, I did this, you know, the, the, the quote, um, like is the juice worth the squeeze?
I.
I kind of inverted that at one point and said, like the the, the juice isn't a product of the um, the sorry the.
The belief that the juice is worth the squeeze is not a product of the juice or any of the attributes of the juice.
Um, the juice is actually a product of the belief that it's worth the squeeze.
And I think that kind of maps on roughly to self-belief where it's like can you actually do something?
Um, there's like a bi-directional sort of answer to that question where obviously, if you don't believe that you can, you're never going to actually try.
Um, and then from the opposite direction um, I think yeah, you have to have some level of like.
You just decide that you actually can.
And that's the only way that you ever get any evidence that will actually come to serve as proof in the future.
I think the fear-based response is to try and wait for the proof to emerge, and then you'll start saying it, then you'll start believing it.
But yeah, it's not like it goes proof and then belief or it goes belief and then proof.
They're kind of like in a dynamic relationship with each other, and that's where you get like downward spirals and upward spirals, of course.
Yeah, that's that's a good point that if the world is delivering something to you which confirms your negative self-beliefs, you begin to believe them more, which makes you less likely to take action, which means that you believe them more, and the same thing happens in reverse too.
Uh, you've got this good idea, which is the line between grandeur and delusions of grandeur is just one good day, and it feels like that's talking about the same thing 100 yeah because like, you can have a belief forever and if, unless until reality matches it, you can be called delusional and it'll make sense.
But you could just have one good day like say, you're a trader or an investor or something and like um, I've been reading Taleb recently and Taleb's the perfect example of this right, because he had this like strategy for trading and options where he would essentially um, take lots of small losses over a long period of time with minimal downside, and then there would be massive upside potential when something unexpected happened, and so all he was betting on was something unexpected happening um, And he got super rich doing that.
And so, for the same, in in him executing that strategy there's, like the majority of the time, he is not actually coming across as a very smart guy.
He's just taking losses after loss after loss every day.
Um and so if you just sample, select a random day from his entire trading strategy, you might think you might feel justified in saying this guy's fucking retard.
And he's just.
But all it takes is that one good trade, which is the entire fucking purpose of the strategy to begin with, to then rewrite history and all of a sudden, oh yeah no, obviously that guy was going to do well like he, he was doing the thing you know.
So funny how uh retrospectively, we love to make sense of any story like that.
Rob henderson's got this great example where uh, he says the duh obviously response that happens when a lot of psychology articles come out is really interesting because, first off, duh obviously is.
I had an intuition about this, but no one is prepared to hold science and modern research to the standards of we don't need to research this, we just know it.
That's taking a step back to just intuitive knowing.
And he uses this wonderful example which I saw happen live, which was there was a study done that looked at whether high-value men or low-value men men that were more desirable or less desirable were more or less misogynistic.
And a first iteration of the study or this research came out and said that low value men were more misogynistic.
And the internet said, duh, obviously these men resent women.
They feel like they're entitled because they haven't been given this thing.
Turned out that that was wrong.
And it's high value men that were the ones that were most misogynistic.
And the internet said, duh, obviously they have got everything laid at their feet already.
They are actually entitled because of this sort of palatial looking down from on high pedestal that they're on.
And you go, So it's unfalsifiable.
The do-obviously thing becomes unfalsifiable, and I think it goes to show that we want to try and weave a very neat narrative together.
We want this sort of perfect sphere and we can sort of roll it along the floor and it doesn't bounce at all and it's beautiful and smooth.
Yeah, the intellect likes straight lines, but they never exist in reality and it will often retrofit them to adjust whatever kind of thing happened.
There was a good quote I think it was Taleb as well something along the lines of like we are easily tricked into thinking that we almost predicted something when it happened.
Because you look back and then obviously it makes sense because you can see all the points.
But at the time, you obviously fucking can't.
But every time something big happens or something unexpected happens, there's a sense like I almost saw that coming.
Well, everybody's got this sense.
It's been stuck in my head for about three years now, this line, built for more.
And it's certainly something that I felt when...
I was in my twenties not when I was probably a teenager, but especially as I got to the end of my twenties I was like God, this I just I feel like a crab sort of growing up against the my shell.
Like I just need, there's something that's constraining me and constricting me here.
And this doesn't feel good.
I think a lot of people feel that.
A lot of people feel like I'm not where I'm meant to be actualizing my potential.
I'm built for more.
There is something more out there that I should do, but the another line from one of your videos, like what if your dreams are just dreams?
What if there isn't any there there?
And nobody wants to hear that.
Nobody wants to hear.
Be realistic.
Don't try harder.
Don't commit yourself to this thing.
Take less risk.
Nobody wants to hear that.
And rightly so, because I think, on average, the sort of people that seek out content like mine and like yours are the sorts of people who already have quite a bit of self-doubt.
They already have quite a bit of introspection and rumination and have a tendency towards like, high agency but um analysis paralysis, which is this sort of brutal middle ground right, which is like i can make i happen to the world, but only if i really really push myself to do it and i'm chronically afraid of making making a mistake and getting it wrong.
Yeah we uh, there was a, there was a quote you had a while ago.
I forgot what it was there.
It was something along the same lines.
Um, But yeah, this fear.
It's kind of sad to think.
You walk around and you get a false picture of how younger generations are actually doing, because the ones that are struggling aren't actually outside.
So you can go around living life thinking yeah, people are roughly okay, but there's millions of young people who are kind of just dying of thirst for that sense of adventure to test themselves up against something.
And You know, it's a cocktail of bad conditions in which there is sufficient ways to sort of sedate yourself and sort of avoid the pain that comes from, like a slow decay.
And yeah, you can get really resentful as a result of that.
I think, you know, this is something that happened with me to some extent.
It kind of turned into this like slow suicide, almost where it was like I'm not actually going to commit to it, but I'm just going to do everything I possibly can to ensure my own destruction.
I'm going to go out and do all the drugs.
I'm going to go out and abandon everything that I'm working on.
I'm just going to essentially stage a misguided attempt at rebelling against the harsh conditions of life.
And it feels like rebellion.
It feels like, yeah, why would I go out and commit to life?
Why would I get involved?
Why would I participate?
Um, especially today where it feels like it's kind of the the goal is just ever receding into the distance with, like home ownership and like the, the things people actually want, um is just kind of scooting further and further away and seeming less and less possible.
And, um, yeah, it's, it's a chicken and egg thing.
It's like the other thing, it's not like one, then the other, it's not like you you, you dangle the reward in front of somebody and then they go for it, or they go for it first.
And then the rewards start appearing.
It's like a dynamic thing both ways and like sometimes you just need to like.
It's like that urge you get when you see somebody in that position.
You just want to shake them like as if, like um, something was out of whack.
There's this thing in like um, in metallurgy, where they like heat up metal and in order to make it stronger, because the heat will make the atoms like get unlocked from their positions and then they'll settle back into like a firmer position.
But you need that like energy, you need that volatility in order to have it.
And when you live like every day on repeat and you're just in your mom's basement eating whatever, doing whatever, then yeah, you kind of lack the volatility that acts as the spark to that and like there's plenty of fodder in your soul, there's plenty of timber ready to catch fire.
But oftentimes it's like we're actually avoiding the sparks, because the sparks are oftentimes stressors.
They're often things that we don't really want to uh, to experience because they're uncomfortable um, But then yeah, you just trade like acute pain for chronic pain.
Yeah, it's a short amount of discomfort or a lifetime of misery.
Yeah.
And yeah well, I suppose it's this sort of comfortable complacency thing, region beta paradox, right.
It's not good enough to be good, but it's not bad enough to be bad.
And you have this weird prolonged dissatisfaction.
Do you think that reaches a fever pitch at some point?
Do you think it gets bad enough?
It depends.
So the region beta thing got.
I had a few questions on my live tour in Australia last year about this.
And this guy, it was ballsy.
It was like, I think I'm stuck in region beta.
Should I purposefully make my life worse?
You know, should I self-destruct in an attempt to hit rock bottom so I can bounce back out?
I'm watching the Charlie Sheen documentary on Netflix at the moment.
Have you seen that?
You'd love it.
Very, very good.
And he has a unique constitution, right?
But still it certainly seems like There was periods he, he didn't learn consequences was a big thing.
Every time that he did something insane, he seemed to land not only on his feet, but on his feet three steps higher than he had been previously.
So he never felt that come into contact with reality.
Rock bottom was, it wasn't a floor.
It was a trampoline.
And for him, he just kept bouncing higher and higher and higher.
Uh, but he did when he was in sort of a mm. capable complacency which is still a downward spiral but until he hit rock bottom he it was a and this is presumably the life cycle of a lot of addicts as well which are like i i'm clean i'm clean i'm clean i'm a little dirty i'm a little dirty i'm a little dirty oh bink and then we go back up i'm clean again clean clean clean clean and then i sort of spiral back yeah yeah because you're not like just what you don't you're not just like one person you're many people inhabiting the same body and they all have their own agenda of what they want to get done what they want to prioritize and um and yeah the the will to smash loads of cocaine and fuck hookers is there in those people and it will win occasionally it will win over time and like the there's this really interesting idea from Nietzsche that's kind of like probably one of the main reasons that I became so OCD about his questions that he asks and like trying to understand them or come up with answers to them um which is like That question of the I, what is the I, what is the you, is something that has always taken my interest because my dad was this non-duality speaker who speaks about that type of stuff a lot.
And also, it's just a weird thing.
I mean like you can.
Viveki gives an example where he like the spit that's in your mouth is kind of you.
If you spit it into a clean cup, it's not you anymore.
So the idea of drinking it again is disgusting.
Nothing's changed about what it was.
It hasn't got dirtier or anything, but just physically, as soon as it exits, that's not me anymore.
But while it's there, it's kind of a part of you.
And so this like sense of self can be very sort of transient and it can move around a lot.
Um, and you know, the idea of history is written by the victors.
So Nietzsche kind of took that not literally that quote, but like this is a good way of explaining it.
He took that and applied it to the sense of self, where those drives like the, the urge to fuck hookers and do cocaine versus the urge to start a family and all the various different wills that you have within you um, they kind of will battle for like, executive authority over your actions, and then whichever one wins writes the history.
And that is what the sense of self is.
So When you say I, you're actually that's just the winning drive rewriting history, to say that was me all along.
A sequence of victors saying this is what happened before us.
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Who's the trauma dude that Huberman had on his show?
He said he was the smartest guy in terms of raw intellect he's ever spoken to.
He wrote a great book about trauma.
He's a big trauma guy.
He taught me on the show that we can retrospectively rewrite things from before a specifically traumatic incident.
But the same thing would probably occur in smaller amounts if it was less traumatic.
I said, when I was 20 years old, I got hit head-on by a snowplow at 60 miles an hour on the A1 from Newcastle to Scotland.
So it's a single-lane contraflow at 60 miles an hour, like a classic A road.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did.
Walked away from it, but had travel anxiety for a little while, which I overcame after a couple of months.
But if I was on a road that had contraflow, so no central reservation and traffic's coming in the other direction.
The Tyne Bridge in Newcastle is a perfect fucking example of this.
And it made me nervous.
And what he said was, with some people, if they didn't get over the travel anxiety, if they were more susceptible to it or it was worse or whatever, it reached critical mass.
Not only would they stop driving because it made them uncomfortable, but if someone was to say to them well, you used to love driving.
You remember before the crash?
No, no, no.
I've never liked driving.
So they rewrite that, who they were prior to the incident, their capacity to be able to see uh, either side of the war being lost and the victor of travel anxiety winning.
That doesn't exist anymore.
That makes i think that's aligned with what you're talking about yeah, 100.
Yeah, it's impossible to sort of see yourself fully as somebody else.
Like we have this capacity for empathy.
We can feel feelings that other people feel.
We can imagine what it would be like if we were in their position.
You can't really imagine what it would be like to actually be them.
It's just, it doesn't.
Well, you also struggle to imagine what it was like to be you in the past.
I've always thought it would be such a great idea if we could make a kind of like a photo camera.
But for mental states.
If I could go back and visit what it was like to be Chris at 27 and 17, how cool would that be?
Oh, my God.
Do you remember when I used to be captured by that?
I was so distracted.
I was so focused.
I was so peaceful.
I was so in chaos.
And you know, you could just go back and visit that like take a mental screenshot and then re-inhabit it for a little bit.
Because it's kind of the same question as when did you get older?
When did you get fat?
You say one day at a time.
And it's the same thing.
When did you become peaceful?
Or when did you become anxious?
Or when did you get travel discomfort?
One day at a time.
And even when it's a very acute situation, your ability to imagine what it was like before is pretty difficult.
Yeah, which is why we also tend not to think that we'll ever change going into the future.
Because we don't see the change happening in front of us.
Yeah.
Or in the past.
In the past as well.
I think if you did have that machine where you could just zip back to 20 years ago, you'd probably just not believe it.
I think you would sit there and you would kind of be like... Oh, that's good.
No, there's no way this was actually me.
They've got it wrong.
There must be something wrong.
Yeah, there's something wrong with the machine.
Jonathan Haidt has another cool idea about this sort of retrofitting rationalizations for moral intuitions.
And that's another example of it where you can be fully convinced.
He gives a great example where You know the can't you thing that I explained earlier, where it was like can you just not, um?
So that was an example from his book where his wife came in and was like can you just not leave?
Like the um, the dog food on the table where the baby food is supposed to be.
And he like immediately invented the story of like i was doing, i was walking the dog, feeding the baby and doing the dishes all at the same time, like i was kind of multitasking because i was in like a rush because of x reason and like he came out with it and believed it himself and it was only when he was like writing the book later where he thought back against that because it was such like a unremarkable part of his day.
It was just the type of conversation that goes on a hundred thousand times a day.
Um, and you look back and he was like, actually, I just, that wasn't true.
There was a sequence.
Like I, I walked a dog and then I did that thing.
Yeah.
Do you think that the fundamental sort of underlying principle there is I am right.
I am in the right somehow.
Yeah, and it's impossible to see past that, even if you, i think, even when you believe that you are seeing past it, it's kind of like um, it's like a sort of psychological sleight of hand thing that's you're like simulating it like this is a really autistic um metaphor but, like on a computer, you can have a virtual machine which runs like another operating system on top of it.
It's kind of like that.
It's like not actually at the base layer, but you can simulate what it would be like.
Right yeah yeah yeah you're, you're not fully engaging with it, but you're imagining what it would be like if that was true.
Yeah yeah yeah, that's a cool, that's a cool way.
And i think that happens with a lot of like advice stuff.
When people hear what, like i made a video kind of like criticizing my, the other thing that i'm doing, which is making like advice videos, and the thing that i'm doing yeah, both of us yeah um, and yeah, one of the main points in that was just that like it's very possible to listen to people talking about something that you want to do and or like help you reason about like your priorities and stuff, and then it feels like you're actually doing it.
Or when people give dating advice about like um don't uh yeah, don't be too pushy, or something like that, like you listen to that and imagine what it would be like to be them.
Which is this like virtual machine simulation you're doing, but like because you think in pictures and pictures create feelings, like you get the feelings from it too, and that feeling is often then mistaken for like a inner change.
When oftentimes like inner change, I think it rarely comes from like just words and mental pictures.
It has to come from like actual experiences.
Yeah, talking about the thing and doing the thing vie for the same resources.
Allocate yours appropriately.
Right.
And Dr K, who was on the show yesterday, has this wonderful explainer about venting, which is.
People like to vent often, but one of the problems with venting is that anger is a really motivating emotion.
Anger frustration bitterness resentment, like you know those sorts of things.
They really galvanize you to get going.
And if you vent, you actually blow off some of that energy that could have been used to put it into action.
So again, talking about the thing, inventing about the thing, or doing a thing inventing about the thing, vie for the same resources.
Allocate yours appropriately.
And if you're using it's the same as People who struggle with sleep, especially with sleep latency falling to sleep.
Matthew Walker's advice is just don't nap.
People think, I only got four hours of sleep last night.
I should nap this afternoon.
But you build up sleep pressure.
And that sleep pressure is good because it's going to help you actually fall asleep.
Obviously, there's caveat, caveat.
But largely, this is the same thing.
And I think venting like a pressure release valve for some of the action that you could take.
Yeah, okay.
Maybe you want to connect with your friend and be told, it's all right.
You got it.
Like you've got nothing to worry about.
On the flip side, that you've just kind of got rid of a little bit of that and you've got a bit of yeah, I feel better about this thing now.
So maybe you didn't need to feel better.
Maybe you needed to feel fucking motivated.
Yeah.
And I wonder whether the online advice, uh, I thought that essay was, was fantastic.
Uh, by the way, dude, I thought it was really, really good.
Give me your thesis.
What do you think about the world of modern self-help advice on the internet?
I think we've culturally sort of mistaken unpleasant experiences for harm.
We've sort of made a false equivocation.
This goes deep into the fundamental values that you have.
But I think largely we're in a hedonistic culture.
And that's not to say that everyone's running around doing whatever they want.
It's just to say that pleasure and pain are paramount considerations.
And if pleasure and pain are sort of the only values that we're still holding on to, then anything that's painful is harmful.
And we're kind of unable to distinguish between the two.
Like you see on university campuses all the time where like safe, like I need to feel safe.
And you often get it in relationships as well, where the word safe isn't quite.
It shouldn't really be there.
But we make this false equivocation.
And then what comes downstream of that is, you know it, There's something kind of a bit messy about the incentives of the internet when it comes to advice.
People that have done a very good job at coming up with retrofitting narratives to their experiences that optimize for pleasure and against pain tend not to have truth as like an anchoring point.
Can you give an example?
If you've had a conversation with somebody that just went through a breakup and they're sort of talking about what happened and they're like, can you believe they did this thing?
And then they did the other thing with the person and they did the, and you're like nodding.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But in your head you're thinking well actually, kind of, maybe that was actually the right thing for them to do.
And the reaction that you're seeming to be okay with on your, on your side, isn't adding up.
And this story you're writing is a bit fishy.
And, so you're like not convinced, but the other person is fully convinced.
They are genuinely, they're not lying to you.
They're lying to themselves and they're fully convinced by their lie.
Um and so those sorts of stories that people create uh, they're adaptive, that they're there to, to kind of avoid discomfort and oftentimes to avoid like uncomfortable implications about ourselves.
Um, and then you can take that sort of story and naturally people become very enthusiastic when they find a story that rewrites the history of a painful experience, such that it's not as painful anymore to think back on.
Obviously they're going to be enthusiastic about that, and that enthusiasm often translates to blah blah, blah and they're posting it and that video then gets filtered to other people who have had similar painful experiences, because they've kind of got this like.
If it's if the story, if the narrative is kind of abstract enough and zoomed out enough, then you can kind of like take what they said about that thing, about their relationship that they're not saying was a part of their relationship or derived from it, but they've made it really abstract.
So now you, it's like horoscopes in a way.
It's sufficiently vague that everybody can insert their own story.
And yeah yeah, like cold reading, like bluish bluish, greenish eyes, like you kind of just take the out the part that you like and go ah yes, of course um, and that is at least what you see as a good chunk of online advice.
Yeah like, probably the vast majority of it, not in terms of what, not.
If you're measuring it by like what gets consumed, I think people have half decent bullshit detectors generally, especially adults that's a really good way to put it but in terms of like the actual advice that gets posted.
Like god, I live in Bali at the moment.
You go to Bali, there is thousands of coaches that shouldn't be coaching.
Like and you know it's.
You can make the point that okay maybe like, they're actually like good at giving advice, they're just not good at implementing it themselves.
And like, Just because a doctor is fat doesn't mean he's not good at being a doctor.
You can make that whole point, and that's fair.
But I think in lots of these things, especially on the dating side, it's so intimate and raw with your emotional centers that it's hard to separate.
It should be treated with caution as well.
100%.
I think it's a good point.
I think the word that keeps coming up for me is cope.
Right that this is just retrofitting cope yeah, and you know cope has got a bad rap like a lot of the time.
You do need to cope with problems and maybe you shouldn't engage with the full raw 4k, high bit rate, difficult thing that is in front of you now or that happened to you yesterday.
Perhaps a little bit of anesthetic for this while to bring you into land would be a good way, a good, healthy way for you to do this.
It's okay, you can just like cry on the couch and watch netflix and eat ice cream for a And then after then you can begin to engage when you've had a little bit of psychic distance from this thing.
Perhaps now we can engage with that challenge.
But yeah, I think, you know, I certainly traffic in internet advice.
One of the things that, you know, you'll be episode 1005 or something right on this show.
Definitely what I've tried to do at least partly successfully, I think is regularly identify my own ignorance, regularly say when I change my mind or that I get things wrong.
So sort of publicly state.
I used to believe this thing and now I believe this thing, and and and and, and.
That's changed, which helps to keep you uh, like it's not intellectually humble, because that doesn't that.
That sounds like it's something that's noble.
It's like a intellectually aware of your own, like idiocy would be maybe a more accurate way to put it.
Like you just put your ignorance up front.
And that helps you to not cling too tightly to ideas, which has been pretty good.
And, on top of that, an easy way to do this, at least as far as I've found, as things change over time, concede that my strategy, or whatever it is that I'm doing, or whatever I agree with, doesn't need to be right forever.
It's what I'm trying right now.
And sometimes it was right for right then.
So I've got this idea that don't model the results, model the rise.
And this is.
You look at people that are successful and they talk about X, work-life balance, the importance of their family, how their dog walks and lying in a hammock is their performance enhancer.
And you say, oh, that's great.
Like you know me starting out on my journey like Warren Buffett, I should just read books and the FT all day.
And you go, well, what did he do when he started?
No, he was a hustler.
You know, he didn't sleep much.
He didn't have good work-life balance.
He didn't look after his body.
He I think looking at what people did when they were at your stage, not what they do now.
And this is the issue that most of the people who have the platform to be able to give lots of advice only reached that because of being successful.
But as they're more successful, that makes them more out of touch with most of the people who are consuming the content right.
They are an outlier by design, which means that the things they now do are not strategies that are accessible, applicable to people that are watching or them when they were in the position of the people that were watching.
You know what i mean yeah, and then they look back and they say like oh no, i was never like that.
It's the thing we were talking about earlier.
There's like a i'm not sure on that.
At least i think, if you, if you like.
So what did you do when you were my stage?
There we go.
Actually, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I did do that.
I did.
You're right.
You're right.
I did send the fuck out of it.
I did burn the candle at three ends.
Like, okay, there we go.
But I do model the rise, not the result.
It's just a really lovely reminder.
Like, if you get the opportunity to sit down with Warren Buffett like, don't ask him how he spends his day.
That's of no use to you until you're 90 and a billionaire.
Like, what did you do when you were 31?
Can you remember?
What was that like?
What would you do if you were at X stage?
Because that's the most applicable.
And that's one of the issues that people who are super successful really struggle.
It's easy to know what you did two steps ago. pretty hard to remember what you did 20 steps ago.
So leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, which is the advantage of writing regularly, talking regularly and recording it, et cetera, is I can't really recall the challenges, not viscerally, like you were saying, I can run the virtual computer of, I was interested in productivity when I was 32 years old, whatever.
But I actually have this little time capsule of well, look at what I was obsessed about for 50 episodes.
Nearly half of them were about spaced repetition and the Ebbinghaus forgetting, curve and studying and whatever it might be.
So, and then I moved on to this and I moved on to that.
So with the internet advice thing, I think one of the issues and the dynamic that I know you've talked about before is that um, certainty is a proxy for expertise.
That someone who's ardent about this is the way looks like they know what they're talking about, because most of us are chronically uncertain.
And if you see somebody who's unequivocating in their perspective, you assume that that's because they have expertise and they know this shit super deep.
Maybe they are.
Fluency is not a proxy for truthfulness, and certainty is not a proxy for expertise.
But we can't help but think well, fuck if, if i was that certain and unequivocating about something, i would have to know it inside out, by front and back.
You know, i'd have 20 year career of understanding this stuff.
That's exactly the way i need to have my relationship.
That's exactly the way that i should train and eat and sleep and do whatever else.
Yeah, we're not really good at um understanding that other people can be very different from us.
And just because you wouldn't do something, you wouldn't act.
That certain if you weren't certain doesn't mean, other people won't.
And also like there's the self deception thing.
Sometimes they truly believe they're certain.
And that's why I think this show has done really well, is because you haven't really been a finger pointing teacher.
You've been.
You know the whole building in public thing.
You've been learning in public and people have been watching, learning out loud.
Yeah.
And people watch that and they learn alongside you.
Um, kind of my did you see like there's this michelle thomas way of um learning languages?
It's great.
It kind of like separates you from the language learning process by uh, their audio tapes and there'll be somebody teaching another student and then there'll be a third person that's like kind of helping them along and you just listen to this student learn.
Um, and the whole kind of prompt they give you at the beginning is like do not try to remember any of this.
Like don't try to.
Don't try to learn the language, just listen to this other person learning it and listen to the way they get confused and stumble when they're trying to say a certain thing and like your brain maps the language so much faster.
No way doing it that way.
Yeah, that's so cool.
What's that called michelle thomas?
They're like they're quite famous a while back, i think, in the language learning things, but like it works way better than duolingo and stuff like that, where you're i mean, i did it for like a few weeks and then moved on because google translate exists, but um, but yeah, It's kind of a similar thing where I think if you try, if you're like really trying to do something, often you can like sort of get in your own way, trip up over your own feet in a lot of ways.
Um, but yeah, no, the show works really well for that reason, I think.
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I hope so.
It's a thinly veiled autobiography of shit that I've been struggling with.
And I think I'm good at finding talent early and I'm good at finding ideas early.
Um, you're one of them, you know, I've got a list.
I got a list.
I did it on a vlog the other day.
You Dworkesh Patel, although he's massive now, but I met him the first day I ever moved to Austin.
I flew in on the Saturday and I met him on the Sunday.
He's now like a million subs, Joe Foley, who does unsolicited advice.
I'm a little late to the party with Joe.
Alex O'Connor, I was listening to in 2018, and we became friends since 2019.
Yeah, exactly.
Yourself, Elliot Buick.
Do you know Elliot?
He does Next Generation podcast.
Dylan O'Sullivan, Dylan O on Substack.
Fucking money like just this, like super reader.
Irish artists living in Greenwich, now just north of New York.
He's part of Jim O'Shaughnessy's like weird commune of fucking super geniuses writing stuff and editing books.
So my point being that, um, being able to see ideas early and go like, that's interesting.
I'll investigate it.
I think is, is good.
But another um separation.
That's interesting is this line between intellectual avoidance and true introspection.
And I think that um, Using learning as a prophylactic against actually having to do stuff or having to engage fully with the discomfort of having not done stuff, is this weird?
It's good for you.
It's better for you than probably scrolling TikTok.
But then if it actually stops you from going out and doing something, maybe it's even worse for you.
You know what I mean?
All of that.
There's a um, if you like.
If you select a bunch of like again, it's sort of in the mall, so they have to be kind of like political statements or something.
But you give people a bunch of statements and tell them to write a list of pros and cons as fast as they can and you time it um.
The people who have higher iqs?
Um will be able to write a whole lot more.
So firstly, they're right um whether or not they agree with the sentiment or not of the ones that they agree, so that they'll have two lists of arguments for each statement for and against.
And people with higher IQs, there's a direct correlation between your IQ and the amount of for arguments you can make, but not against if you're for it.
And there's a correlation between the amount of against arguments you can make, but not for one.
So basically, whatever intuition or belief that you have about that certain thing, your IQ just makes you a lot better at coming up with reasons why you believe what you already believe.
It doesn't actually make you much better at arguing from different perspectives.
You really have to take the time to like set your intention to do exactly that and try to like distance yourself and your own sort of like um dog in the fight in order to be able to do that.
But that's not what people do when they think.
When people think they're in the shower they're scrubbing their balls.
They're not, you know, actually thinking.
You know what i'm gonna do.
I'm gonna do 30 minutes of considering this, disagreeing with myself.
Yeah, i'm gonna disagree with myself this evening, like no one does that.
It just doesn't.
Why would you need to do that um?
But yeah, it's kind of scary when you think that, like You know, that's the double-edged sword of intelligence is that it can make you, it can help you with foresight.
It can make you better at modeling things.
It has all of the obvious benefits.
But when you just have more horsepower up there, you become a lot better at bullshitting yourself.
It becomes an impediment to seeing the truth as opposed to assistance to it.
100%.
And that's one thing I would actually, like, I do try, like, I want to say to people who are like, sort of, younger and are like in that basement situation where they're not going out is i think like we can often get this sense that there's like a an insufficiency within you especially around intelligence like people think i'm just not smart enough um but it's almost in all cases it's character that actually correlates because there's so many like super smart people who just do nothing um and so like you should optimize for your character not for your intelligence and like try not to be misguidedly pessimistic about the extent to which your intelligence puts a ceiling on your potential didn't you try nihilism for a while yeah how'd that go not great um yeah it's uh that that was sort of the slow offing myself period when i was like a teenager well give me give me the story of what happened with your school career and the subsequent spirals right yes um So I never really enjoyed school.
I didn't fit in too well.
So I would always come up with different ways to sort of convince myself to go to school, often by sandwiching school in between two things I was excited about, which could be a bunch of random shit.
It was video games at one point.
In primary school, it was unicycling at one point.
I would unicycle to my primary school because it was something different and exciting.
And eventually, when I got to secondary school, it was parkour. um so i was doing like a bunch of parkour going to competitions and stuff after a while and yeah i landed on my spleen on a bar of scaffolding um at this competition which had like a bunch of doctors then uh sort of a couple days later coming and trying to convince me to do like a ct scan um to see what was going on with my spleen whether or not there was a tear in the lining um which is what they were worried about but um if they did find a tear in the lining they wouldn't have been able to actually do anything anyway they were just covering their asses legally um because if there was a tear you wouldn't operate in case it bursts you would just put somebody in a bed and watch them so that can i be in a bed at home and they're like well yeah technically but you know it's very dangerous and they applied a lot of pressure i had like six different doctors come in and try and convince me i was going to die um which really 12 years old yeah i was 12 so i really brought mortality like right up front it became like a state i was currently in rather than like a event in the future um which is i think how people generally perceive it it's like an event like your death is an event in the future versus your mortality being a state you're in like you're in the process of dying right now um and that all became like immediate way too young of an age and sort of i freaked out a little bit um but one of the side effects of that was that whenever i felt like i was wasting time I couldn't really see the, the end of the purpose of a certain action.
It would like trigger that anxiety I felt in the hospital.
Um, it felt like I was sort of like dying again.
Um.
So yeah, I ended up going to see like a child psychologist and stuff to make sure I wasn't completely insane, but they were just like yeah, leave school.
Um, that was what I was pushing for already.
Um, and they kind of were like, yeah, it makes sense.
So yeah, I wrote this like document trying to convince my, my dad and my mom to let me just drop out.
Um, And I think you're glossing over, wasn't it like a big PowerPoint presentation?
Yeah, it was like 22 pages.
Yeah.
Like, uh, like, uh, yeah, I mean, it worked.
I think there were more, probably not because of the content of what was in it.
It was clearly written by a 12 year old, but the fact that I had gone and done it off my own impetus was like, I think, enough for them to kind of be like at least take the question seriously.
What was your proposal?
Um, it was just like a constellation of different points around, like mainly trying to outline the pros and cons and quell their biggest fears.
But but what did you want?
What was the outcome that you wanted?
I wanted to learn stuff that i was genuinely interested in um, that i would actually remember and that would actually be useful.
And this was going to be self-directed um.
Originally, the idea was actually to do the curriculum at home and get through it as quickly as possible and then start learning stuff i was interested in.
That didn't go too well because again, when i got the textbooks, i'd start to get the anxiety from the hospital experience.
So eventually we were just like okay, we have to ditch that entirely and yeah.
So I ended up just learning about things that I was actually interested in, which has worked out better than expected.
You know, Taleb said everything that he learned in school and this is a guy that did like he did the degrees but he also spent an additional 30 hours a week reading for like 10 years and he said everything he learned off of his own interests.
He remembers, but everything he learned teleologically, which is just like achieve a different end.
You forget because once that purpose is served, your brain deletes the information.
And that was happening at school all the time.
So I kind of felt like school was wasting my time.
So I wanted to leave and do it myself.
Um, and yeah, where the document sent that to them and yeah, ended up leaving.
Um, and then I think it kind of went okay for a little bit.
And then a couple of years later, like You know that experience people get when they leave university and they're like, oh shit, I'm alive.
This is the real world.
I have to figure out where I'm going and what I care about and who I am.
Um, that kind of happened like a way, probably too young age.
Um, so yeah, after like a few about a year of like questioning everything um, that inevitably leads you towards nihilism, because the method generates its own frustration.
It's like if you're trying to test whether or not water can be carried by getting a net and putting the net in the ocean and lifting it up and going.
Well, no see, every time I bring up the net, there's no water in it.
And then you kind of like get a false conclusion.
When you obsessively question why you do things, you can end up in that exact spot where you just end up thinking OK, everything is pointless, because I'm only doing this to do that.
And I'm doing that to do that.
And I'm doing that to die.
Well, like there's nothing permanent, you kind of get confused in a way, which is, I think, what nihilism is.
I think it is a confusion.
Um, and so you're what, like 15 now?
Yeah, I was, it was, yeah, 15 when I started going tits up.
Yeah.
Um, and then I found out about this awesome stuff called weed um, which is great, and alcohol and parties.
And that was a good anesthetic to the sort of existential questions.
And you know, as we were saying about the upwards and downward spirals, that kickstarted a downward one for the first time in my life, which you know then served as further evidence that life sucks and it's all evil.
And I started to develop this sort of adversarial relationship with reality itself, where it was like reality and the conditions I found myself in called life are sort of out to get me.
They're like problematic.
Um and Yeah.
I think that sort of became the fuel for me to spin up various narratives that justified that sort of nihilistic, hedonistic obsession with pleasure and pain, which drugs obviously fit really well into.
And yeah, it went on like that for a couple of years.
The obsession with pleasure and pain, was that just obsession with running away from pain?
Yeah.
It's kind of one slider, in a way.
The further down you are, the more painful, the further up.
I think there's certainly some people... You're right.
By design, if you are in pleasure, you tend to not be in pain.
I think there's some people that are pleasure-focused, running toward a thing.
Some people who are anti-pain-focused, running away from a thing.
Yeah, you can be motivated by... the negative or the positive of any value judgment.
There's another one in Nietzsche's ideas that interested me.
Value judgment can spawn out of the negative, where you say that is bad, therefore everything that's not like that is good.
Or that is good, therefore everything that's not like that is bad.
It's kind of the same thing.
So you end up in a similar position, but one is much more kind of anti-life itself, which is where you look at the conditions you're in and you say so much pain, that is bad.
Therefore, whatever gives pleasure is good, and then you chase pleasure in whatever way, charlie sheen style, and it just goes wrong.
You were a young charlie at this stage, i guess, just using slightly cheaper drugs.
Yeah exactly uh okay, so what?
You're 16 now then what?
Yeah, 16?
Um, it kind of just like yeah, it just continued like and just got worse and worse for a couple of years, like i.
What does worse and worse mean?
Just like worse drugs um, worse friends.
How about drugs?
What drugs?
Not like meth and heroin or anything, but a fair degree of psychedelics and cocaine at one point.
And that was sort of right at the end, where I was reaching this fever pitch, where there was a fork in the road and it was like okay, either I have some radical change in the way that I live or I am committing to never experiencing the things that i was so passionate about experiencing when i was a kid.
Um, and that was around when i was 18.
So right when it became legal to drink alcohol um, i had that moment and it was like, probably partially because it was legal at that point, which made it a lot easier again.
So you can drink on your own then, and that's not good um so yeah, it was kind of like a come to jesus moment at that point.
It's a strange It must have been a strange place to find yourself in that you hadn't fitted in at school.
You find this solution, which you have to write a 20-page document in order to be able to acquire.
And then the outcome of that is not liberated, perfect, self-directed learning.
It's, oh fuck, I took this risk.
And this risk didn't pay off and maybe things are even worse now.
What did that teach you about risk and taking risk?
Did it make you more concerned about doing it?
In some sense, yeah.
I think I've become slightly more risk averse as I've got older, but only slightly.
It sounds like your tolerance for risk was pretty high already.
Yeah.
Maybe brought you back down to an acceptable range.
Maybe.
I'm still probably not quite in the acceptable range.
I mean like yeah, I've always kind of wanted to jump in the deep end with things and then like figured that's the quickest way to learn to swim, and like burn the boats type attitude most of the time.
Like, the first psychedelic I did was ayahuasca.
Fuck me.
How did you get hold of ayahuasca in the UK?
There's people that do, like, retreats.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm on the mailing list for a couple of them still.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Yeah, so it was the whole ritual and all of that.
But this means that you've researched it on the internet, managed to find a forum that's given you the private link, that's got you on the email list, that's given you the listing of where.
It's Sort of.
I actually met somebody in London who knew somebody who hosted... Same thing though, right?
Yeah, yeah.
It's just the real world equivalent of that digitally.
Yeah.
So that blew my brain out of my head and probably delayed the process of realizing... my trajectory was off kilter a little bit, um, but also incurred massive benefits.
And I think the entire arc that I went on during that period of time is probably where I learned some of the most important things.
Um cause I was in direct contact with, like my own psychology, because there's nothing that will reveal to you the ways in which you're capable of bullshitting yourself more than addiction.
Like it is the crucible of bullshit.
Um, And yeah, it's an intuition, but I feel like the stuff that I did learn through that period they've proved to be so far, and probably will continue to be invaluable going forward.
And it's also got that whole thing out of my system.
I opened the door, went, oh, fuck, closed it, and now I've got the rest of my life.
What was on the other side of the door?
Everything I described, you know just like a slow death where you're seeking your own destruction, subconsciously to some degree.
And everything that goes wrong as a result of that feeds back into the loop and becomes evidence that everything sucks and you're right to feel angry about the world.
Do you see why people become apathetic and resentful?
100%.
I've been there.
100%.
It's almost like more of a miracle that people don't.
In some cases, there's a lot to be resentful about.
There's many ways that you can interpret life that lead to the conclusion that, you know.
It's pointless and unfair.
It's pointless, it's unfair, and you're the foot of some kind of cosmic joke.
I think lots of people feel that way.
I definitely felt that way.
Yeah, me too.
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Me too, for a very long time.
And still a lot of the time.
Now I think, at least for me, the weird thing, a few of the strange things that were formative around the same time that you were going through that, was being an only child.
Right.
And also being very unpopular in school.
Yeah.
Because if you've got those two things together, there is no safe base.
There's no sort of foundation that feels like someone's got my back.
I have to have my back, which means that I keep secrets.
I have shame, i have stuff that's just for me, because nobody else would understand and if i was to tell them, they wouldn't even what they're going to do.
Our mom's just going to make a, a big song and then she'll go into school and tell them about the bullying, or tell them about the this thing, or tell them about that.
So you're like i'll, i'll just deal with it, like i'll become insular and i'll look after it myself.
And yeah, the um.
I always had this, this line.
I keep using it a lot about the idea of a personal curse, The fact that I don't know the psychology of other people, which means that I believe a lot of the mental pathologies I have are unique challenges that only I face.
Like this personal curse.
No one else on the planet feels this thing, has this doubt, has the shame.
It manifests in this way, thinks that thought.
And one of the brilliant things that I think about exists in longer form.
Conversations like this is not really to do with the big ideas that people come up with, but the throwaway lines that are sort of like filler that explains where somebody was at a certain time.
Mel Robbins had this line.
I was preparing to speak to somebody, Dr. Paul Conti, fucking trauma guy.
I knew it would come back to me.
Maybe it was Paul.
I can't remember.
And she said in the back of her mind, her whole life, she felt like someone was always mad at her.
She just had this sense.
My whole life, I'd always felt like somebody was mad at me.
Like I'd done something wrong and someone was angry about it.
Right.
And I was like, it was a toss away line.
It wasn't the thing.
It wasn't even the thing in between.
It was like just this random filler sentence that she said.
And, you know, that happened over and over again.
It happened with Peterson.
It happened with Rogan.
It happened with Naval Ravikant.
It happened with Alain de Botton from the School of Life.
And that sensed at least you're less alone than you thought you were is a big source of comfort for a lot of people.
I think holy fuck that person who seems to be at least remotely put together in a manner that I'm not right.
Because I'm deficient, I am flawed, I am broken.
That person, even if they're some unknown guy on a podcast or some random clip on TikTok.
Oh fuck, that means it's not just me.
And I think that you know you can feel, when you think it's not just me, like your whole fucking nervous system just releases a little bit because it's not.
You're not the foot of some great cosmic joke.
This is an endemic part of being a sensitive human.
And, oh, well, at least there's two of us.
Yeah.
And as soon as you say, at least there's two of us, you immediately infer there's probably millions.
Yeah.
Okay.
It's not just me.
Yeah.
I remember when I was like at the bat, like, right at the fever pitch of it all.
I remember sitting on the couch and there was like some news thing going on and I just felt this fucking Gulf of distance between me and the well presentable news anchors on the television.
It was just like, they came from a different universe almost.
And they were like, they were like the non defective puppets that got manufactured and actually went into production and there was like me this sort of defective one that was like sort of there's a book notes from underground by uh dostoevsky that captures this exact sentiment perfectly um highly recommend reading it where it basically just delves into the psychology of of resentment and and the weird shapes that it can take in your own psyche and the conclusions it can lead you to and just the sentiments that kind of the smell of it.
And it's not fun to be on that side.
And do you think maybe like that experience was the negative value judgment?
That's bad.
Therefore that learning about human nature, good.
Maybe.
I mean, it took a long time to percolate, dude.
Uh I, uh.
I really tried to hit all of the different macronutrients of where modern society tells a young man that he should get success from before.
I was like fuck, maybe I'm going to have to develop myself.
It just wasn't something I considered.
Even my training program was done very much to try and get people to admire me or like me or something.
And this wasn't even as cool as as I know it's going to be hot, it was much more fear-based.
It was like I am so insufficient and so broken and so unlovable and unlikable and unwanted by the world that I need to be able to be a bear juggling on a unicycle at the same time in order like please please please, assuage my deep feelings of insecurity and inferiority.
If only I can be sufficiently impressive and Smooth and good-looking and successful and well-known and popular and a bubba bubba bubba bubba bubba, Maybe the world will accept me, because it hadn't happened before, when I was like trying to be me, whatever that was, and okay, me is Unacceptable.
That's an unacceptable human.
I should not try and be me.
Did that in school didn't work like that that I?
Evidently I need to perform.
So digging back down to find out who that person is.
But working out who you truly are is actually really kind of a hard thing to do.
People say, oh, it should be the most obvious thing in the world.
It's like there's all of these layers that you've built on top of it, like performance and expectation and social recognition and all this stuff.
Not only that, but even if you did know where it was that you had to get to, people expected this other thing of you.
People expected you to show up.
As for me, the sort of big name on campus party boy club promoter person stood on the front door.
You know runs the big events, knows everybody has this massive afro, does the thing like he's the guy.
And that means that the gulf between the person that you truly are, which is being increasingly hidden, and the person that you're showing up as, is getting wider and wider, even as you don't really actually know it.
And one of the things I realized is that That's why, if you're playing a persona, praise never really comes into contact with you, because people aren't applauding you.
They're applauding the role that you played.
And you know that you've basically super secret squirrel technique, Fugazi these people into like you will like me, you will like me, let me do the thing.
So you will like me.
This is why the pickup artist movement, I think, was fundamentally a fail, because what it taught men was in you can get women to sleep with you if you are so, not yourself, that you're basically an actor and what's the subtext that that teaches you about your level of self-worth, just to be able to show up openly in the world?
Yeah, you are not right, you are not enough.
You're flawed broken, insufficient and uh yeah, that was.
That was definitely a big, a big lesson that i took from that.
And you um, it's all well and good, saying well, you know, it propelled me to learn about human nature and to be able it's like it's fucking 15 years yeah, like in order for me to even get pull my head out of my ass from that.
So it wasn't a, it wasn't a quick trajectory.
No sometimes, like those learning arcs, people go on will be until they're 80 and they only have the aha when they're 80.
Um, doesn't make the aha less valuable, just makes the journey longer.
Do you think?
You posted something on instagram the other day that fucking was great?
Yeah, kind of similar to what i was saying about the you at the beginning about true self.
Um, when something kind of affirms a moral stance that we have in somebody else, we say that's their true self, and when it's different, we say they're not themselves anymore.
Yep yeah, yeah.
How does that gel with what you were just saying about like, feeling like you were going in an inauthentic direction?
Like, where do you think that sense actually comes from of inauthenticity?
Because, like you can't really pinpoint it with words.
Words are oftentimes like a terrible tool for most jobs.
But like it feels like you can not in the moment, but retroactively you can tell that something was off, but in the moment you're convinced.
And so that brings in the question that we had earlier about like, if you are just retrofitting narratives, then is that- Whoever the victor was, is the one that- Whoever?
Yeah, exactly.
So then it's like, oh, that was inauthentic.
But like I don't know like you can make that case, but it does.
It really feels like there is some like inner bullshit detector, which means there must be inner bullshit right.
Yeah, that's a really good point.
So the essay that I wrote basically explained how we tend to see the best in our allies and the worst in our enemies, and that our allies making an error is some sort of loss of their self and our enemies doing well is some sort of aberration or some sort of like weird deviation from who they truly are.
And that, when it comes to the way that we see ourselves too, typically it's the fundamental attribution error right.
Like I cut that person off in traffic because I'm late.
They cut me off because they're a prick.
It's that, but for everything that we do all the way down.
You are right though, when it comes to authenticity, what does it mean to say that this is my true self?
Uh, given that it is constantly being rewritten, and the remorse of the environment around us, and social conditioning and norms and all the rest of the stuff, at least for me, it's a good point to make that uh, cognitively top down, trying to say this is who I am.
Yeah.
Doesn't really seem to be able to capture the question, because if you explain why, if you ask why sufficient times, it gets back to something like it feels right, it feels like me.
Usually it tends to be a bit upward aiming.
And I think that that's why when you hear people who are drug addicts or sort of down on their luck and they say it's who I really am, it that whenever I see that on documentaries, you know, movies and stuff like that, that really sort of strikes at my heart because that's, you know, somebody who has embodied that downward trajectory and taken it as a part of their sense of self and they believe it.
Maybe only in that moment.
You know, I'm sure that maybe at some points in your downward spiral you thought this is who I am.
But, you know, you've also got this upward aiming, this high sort of belief thing going on too.
So these two things are coming into conflict.
Do you know?
What's fascinating about that is maybe counterintuitively, the moment where I said this is who i am.
That was actually the inflection point where it started getting better.
Um, i think it was at that point it was undeniable that that was at least an aspect of my character, and i think it's often the case that until you acknowledge that it really is impossible to fix like, you can't untangle a web of bullshit unless you're willing to look at it right.
Um, it's weird.
It's weird, though.
It's weird how often, like god knows how the mind works, but it does seem interesting how often it's the case that when you shine a light on something, it kind of starts fixing itself, and it's only when it doesn't have that spotlight of attention that that it doesn't.
Well, i wonder how much of that's resistance.
That would be at least something that has to play a part of a role for this.
I think I am not, I'm not this thing.
I'm not this thing.
I'm not this thing.
Well, in the effort of the resistance, you are right.
You're lying to yourself about what's going on.
Yeah.
I am this thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Cause if you try to control what ideas you have in your head, then the ideas end up controlling you, right?
Like if you push against a wall that can't be moved, it's you that ends up moving.
And so, like the more you try to control things that are literally just the case, um the more they end up affecting you.
It's a weird like.
I don't know if there's not many cases in which Newtonian physics maps onto psychology, but I think that's one of them.
Like every force does have an opposite.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I think, to sort of round this out what I said at the start about aiming for 20, trying for 20, there is a challenge to people that have self-belief and high standards, which is when you stop meeting them, when you fall short a little bit, it's painful.
And when you fall short a lot, it just feels like a total loss of your sense of self.
If you have made, if you have wrapped your identity up in being the person who has high standards and is able to meet them.
I'm upward aiming and all the rest of it.
And I think this is why.
Stories that have someone who hits rock bottom and then bounces back out.
Okay.
That's like relatively neat.
But it's the story that has multiple rock bottoms, or maybe not even rock bottoms, but serious, you know, like 50 pullbacks.
And that I thought I was fucking, I thought I was getting better.
I thought this thing was moving in the right direction.
And to me there isn't enough talk, especially in sort of the advice world, about what happens when you've made the commitment, you've started to make progress, and then you reach multiple pullbacks self-inflicted, purely environmental, exclusively inside your own head, like you, totally manifest by your own self-doubt, right like there's no external imposition.
You didn't break a leg, you haven't lost a family member, you haven't gone bankrupt, you know it's nothing's gone on other than your own self-doubt creeping back in.
My own mental pathology curtailed the trajectory that i had worked so hard to get back on and fuck, i'm about to eat shit again.
God, that sucks Yeah.
I mean I've got a friend uh, back in Wales, one of my friends I grew up with best friend and yeah, he's sort of in a cycle.
It kind of gets better and stops and gets better and stops and it's better and stops.
And, like you know, the the homozy quote about like proof.
There's something to be said about each time.
It drops back.
It can serve as like another data point that gets used in, like a narrative of yourself that then becomes causal.
It becomes its own creator of that type of behavior into the future.
Like, if you try to quit smoking and you fail and you fail 10 times it actually increases the odds that you'll fail on the 11th as well.
And you can feel that slippage.
Like each time you fail, you feel like, I haven't just gone back again.
I've actually lost like a strategic vantage point from which I was.
I had the opportunity to make it the next move and I've lost that vantage point now because it's gone back again and you can feel yourself kind of.
It feels like the walls are closing in a lot of the time.
I do like the way that Alex reframes it as saying uh, how can I say that I'm a man who can withstand hard things if I've never withstood hard things?
And that turns pullback into nobility in that way.
But you're right.
You know, if you regularly try and then there is some sort of a challenge, the next time that you try you're expecting challenge.
And sometimes the challenge is really uncomfortable or results in no progress, which is, you know, the fucking rocky line of like it's not about how hard you can hit.
It's about, you know, getting knocked down and getting back up, et cetera.
There's a little trite, but I think functionally ends up being really important.
Like is way deeper than than it actually sounds, because if all that happens is a straight trajectory of going up, what problem have you got?
This is why people have an issue with the sort of silver spoon infant whose life appears to be smooth, sailing the whole way through.
We have a sort of instinctive revulsion resentment, discontent with that person, because we think well, you didn't deserve it.
You started halfway along the race and then didn't encounter a single hurdle for the rest of it.
This feels unfair.
And then the people who sort of bounce and then come back out you think, oh well, you know there, they sort of kissed death and then rose to an acceptable altitude.
Congratulations on that.
But there is something about people who are just regularly struggling that just I don't think really gets talked about, especially if it's like a mundane struggle.
Oh, well, what's the issue?
The issue is that I don't really believe in myself that much.
The issue is that I fear things.
The issue is that I struggle to make a commitment.
It's like dude.
There's people like starving.
There's people who can't afford their medical bills.
There's people who can't afford food.
There's people who were beaten or abused or child addicted to drugs, as kids like, and you're so like.
Wow, my inability to believe in myself is stopping me from making progress.
Wow, i wish that i could make more risk without feeling scared about what.
Like you, and that shame, i think gets laid on top for a lot of people too, and this sort of generation of lost men thing.
Uh, I was dinner with Rob Henderson in New York.
He had this fucking brilliant line.
He was talking about why guys struggle to approach women.
And he said uh, if you approach one woman and get rejected, you remember for the rest of your life.
If you approach a hundred women and get rejected, it's just another Tuesday.
And you have this thing as you said, the more insulated that you are, the bigger all of these events sort of feel, because there's fewer, there's less ballast.
You know what I mean.
In the system, there's like less sort of stabilizers going on.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Taleb has a quote that's something like Um the the beginning of robustification, it starts with a modicum of harm.
It's often true.
You have to have something bad happen.
Like you have to get hurt a little bit in order to like have the compensatory response to actually heal and get better as a as a result.
There was this theory of uh, I haven't looked into in years but there was a psychologist called Dabrowski.
Um, you had this theory of positive disintegration. where everybody in his time it was it wasn't really much positive psychology going on as a field of study at that time um but they all were sort of painting psychological disintegration as a horrible thing and it's always bad and he was the first guy to kind of flip that and and notice these cases in which disintegration is actually like the metal thing it's stuff getting like knocked out of place and unlocked so they can resettle in a more integrated fashion literally in the case of metal it's more integrated and your psyche can do that too but oftentimes that's yeah catalyzed by these unpleasant experiences that we go our whole lives trying to avoid and uh you know it was it was the case that a few thousand years ago you actually couldn't avoid them it was just life like your sister's gonna die of the bubonic plague and that's gonna suck and so you know i do wonder what human brains are expectant right like they the the brain when you first are a baby is kind of like a first draft and uh i think you get to a certain age and most of the neurons have already been created and then uh it's really young and from that point forwards it's actually just pruning it's getting rid of neurons as new experiences come in so you get like the marble and then it like sculpts down to the actual sculpture um and i wonder to what extent um we are expectant our brains are expectant of more suffering than we're actually getting in terms of acute suffering, right?
Because we have plenty of chronic suffering.
Things are just kind of moderately shit all the time.
Britain, basically, in a sense.
Yeah, I said like a true British person.
Yeah.
But that kind of moderately shit all the time doesn't actually tend to do anything for you in terms of growth or harm.
And so I think your friend actually had a genuinely good question of should i make my life worse in order to rebound out of it?
And like when i was going through that tough time, i think there were elements i kind of knew that was going on.
I was leaning into it a little bit in my teen years because i i'd noticed the pattern that everybody that seems to have like reached somewhere that i want to be in terms of psychological development or like external success or whatever, had a really shit period.
Um, i'll get mine, i'll front load mine out of the way when i'm 16, exactly yeah, because then i've got my 20s right.
Yeah yeah, Yeah.
I think I just want to linger on it a little bit more.
That idea, that this sensation that you're destined for something more but you aren't currently reaching it, and the pain of that.
I think so many people feel that.
So many people feel it and it's a really unique type of discomfort and it sounds very luxurious but uh, in reality just feels like a fucking shit ton of pain.
Yeah.
Well, I think most of like the like, psychologically speaking, most pain, the most painful things are social things and um, that sense that you're supposed to do more oftentimes like that's a very socially loaded sentiment, supposed to yeah, supposed to, and also want to be seen as um, that's incredibly powerful and it's often people throw stones at it like oh, you care what people think of you, but like no, don't be a child, you know.
Like obviously i do um, and Yeah, it's living with a big disconnect between the sense of how things should have gone for you.
Who you are and who you want to be.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the.
They say true hell is when the person that you are meets the person you could have been.
Right, and that happens every day.
Correct, because if you set an ideal, you will constantly compare yourself to that ideal and immediately find yourself lacking.
You're always going to fall short of your ideals.
And this is the curse of somebody who has high standards.
As far as I can see, that your dream, if you are trying for 20.
You nail it.
19.
Oh, my God.
You nearly doubled what was normally acceptable for a good performance.
Yeah, but you fell short of your unreasonably high stance.
How does that work?
Do you feel that still?
Because obviously from the outside, like, couldn't be in a better position.
Every day.
Every day.
Oh, yeah, every day.
Is that because the goalposts move or is it for something else?
In some ways.
It's very slippery.
In some ways, you... start to change the game, not just move the goalposts.
So it becomes one of not only do I want to be able to do this thing, but I want to be able to do it with peace.
And I want to be able to do it with self-awareness and I want to be able to do it with equanimity.
And I want to be able to do it whilst being a good friend.
And I want to be able to you start.
You can imagine some sort of tank and all you wanted to do was get the tank to go forward.
But now this tank's got fucking wings and a spoiler and a baseball.
And you know, it's like, I want to be able to do all of this shit.
You've augmented the challenges.
That being said, the reason to win the game is so that you don't need to play it anymore.
And it's a good realization from you that look, if you say you shouldn't give a fuck about what other people think of you, I think that you have fallen at the first hurdle.
Because we're social creatures.
We're inbuilt for social validation.
So it's way easier to say I don't need people to care about me if you've spent a good bit of time with people caring about you.
If you've got the social recognition realized that it's not what it was cracked up to be, then okay, I've rid myself of that desire, right.
The reason to win the game is so that you no longer need to play it.
And I don't think that you can shortcut that.
I think maybe you can.
Maybe there's a particular type of level of insight or volume of meditation critical mass that you can reach, where you sort of pierce straight through it.
But honestly, the quickest route to getting past your vapid need for this external goal is just to get it.
It's to get it and realize that it wasn't it.
Because trying to rid yourself of it without having got it is, at least for me, with my constitution would just always leave this, this big open loop.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
Yeah, it does.
It reminds me of the Naval quote about achieving your material desires is far easier than announcing them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think... Do you think it ever reaches a fever pitch where you go, actually, I fucking smashed it?
Yeah, that's a conscious...
That's a conscious act that you need to practice.
It's certainly something that's difficult to do on your own.
And again, this is another curse of high standards.
This idea about the curse of competence, which is, if you're good at things and you regularly do well when you're faced with a challenge, success doesn't become a reason for celebration.
It is simply the minimum acceptable performance, and that makes any form of success is merely okay and any form of acceptable uh, or even close to failure, as a catastrophe, right you.
So this curse of high standards thing again um it.
It definitely does wreak a stage where you think, if I can't have fun now, when the fuck can I have fun?
So a good example.
I started doing live shows about two years ago and you know 35.
At this point, the channels reached a million subs and I did a show in Manchester, and Manchester was the toughest show of the run.
It was a, um, classic music auditorium, like 650 people.
So it was the biggest show I'd done at the time.
Uh, but high ceilings, not a fantastic sound system.
Like some of the stuff that comedians often talk about influencing the atmosphere.
And I just wasn't feeling, I wasn't feeling it.
It wasn't the performance that I wanted to get.
I'd done Dublin the night before and fucking smashed it.
It was a Thursday.
Everyone was drunk.
It was amazing.
Like it was really raucous and, and, and positive and got, you know, all this stuff.
I was like just in my own head about the show and I wasn't happy.
And my mom and dad had come to see it.
And loads of my ex business partners did.
This was the Northern show, right?
So people from Newcastle had come, people from Manchester.
I used to work with my mom and dad with that.
And uh, partway through I sort of took myself into the bathroom and looked in the mirror and had a word with myself.
And I was like, dude, 650 people came to see you speak live at your second ever live show.
Your mom and your dad are here.
They're healthy.
Your ex-business partner you haven't seen in years is here.
Tons of people that are friends and family have come to support you, and all they want to do is watch you win.
If you can't have fun now, when the fuck are you going to start having fun?
And I think asking yourself the question, if this isn't it, and you can say that's fine.
This isn't it.
It would have been unacceptable for me 50 episodes into the podcast to say, this is it.
I should be just purely driven by.
You know my desire for enjoyment and transcendent blah blah blah blah, blah.
It's like, maybe you do need to use some toxic fuel.
Maybe you should use your resentment and your bitterness and your inferiority and your desire for more and the chip on your shoulder from school.
Maybe you should do that.
But motherfucker, like if it's not now, like when is it?
And just asking yourself, like, when, when will you start having fun?
When will you start giving yourself credit is a wonderful question, because it forces you to come into contact with a point when that needs to be.
And a lot of the time we, we don't have that.
And the more that I've consciously tried to practice, this is really fun.
Like this is a, It's a Wednesday afternoon.
Nothing else I want to be doing than sitting and doing this.
Like, this is really cool.
Or this is a lovely day.
This is a nice walk.
This is a whatever.
But it is a permanent fucking uphill battle, right?
And some people are more disposed to this than others.
I would put myself more in the, like, hard gainer category of gratitude.
Hard gainers of gratitude.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I have to use gym analogies.
That's the only fucking language I know.
Um, but it's effortful.
It's just, it is the hard gainer thing.
All right, dude, you're going to have to lift fucking more consistently.
You're going to have to sleep more.
You're going to have to eat more protein.
You're going to have to be more dialed in.
You're going to have to work harder in order to do that.
But okay.
Like fucking.
What's the alternative?
Rage against the fact that it was cosmically unfair that you were.
Well, guess what?
These are the cards that you were dealt.
And you've got a ton of genetic predispositions that you're fucking happy to have.
You're happy with your work, right?
You're happy with your vision.
You're happy with your pace of of of learning and your curiosity, or your ability to you know, be good in social situations, or your ability to be good in solitude, or whatever it is.
Like everybody's got their unique constitution.
And some people got a larger overall, uh, Um, point score too, right?
It's not just that it's a hundred points spread evenly.
Some people got 80 and some people got one, 20 and some people got more.
Um, but fucking hell like largely.
Finding out what your strengths are and trying to play to them is the only way that you can really play this game.
At least as far as I've learned and understanding.
Okay.
What are the things for me?
Gratitude does not necessarily come that easily to me.
So it's okay.
I'm going to have to lift that load.
Obsession, fucking say no more.
Dude, like got it fucking sweet.
So okay well, i can take my foot off the gas with regards to that and coast with it, and then with other things i can.
I'm gonna have to put a bit of work in.
Yeah, it's interesting like you kind of create this irony where it's like you're ungrateful for the amount of gratitude that you can easily acquire absolutely absolutely yeah, so it like eats its own tail.
In a way, it's like if that's, if that's like the pair of glasses you've got on, if that's the lens through which you're seeing.
Everything is like identifying problems to be solved.
And you will find problems everywhere, even in things like gratitude, and you create those little circular things where it's like damn, I wish I was more grateful.
But yeah, I mean, there's pros and cons to either side of it and I think there probably is an inverse relationship between having nice things and being able to enjoy them.
And that's a part of the nature of not just chris or angelo but just of humans like that's that's sort of what we're there to do and like you know there's a great um part in i think it was in notes from underground as well where dostoevsky's talking about um a potential utopia and he said you could give people all the land all the houses and allow them to busy themselves with the eating of cake and the reproduction of their species and they would burn it all to the ground just so that something unexpected would happen and um We do that in our personal lives as well.
There's a chance that what we're not actually after is satiety and satiation and the fulfillment of desires, but desire itself.
Nietzsche said, ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we truly love.
And so if you're really going to play that role well, it makes sense to put yourself in this position where you're ungrateful for the amount of gratitude that you have.
Cause then you've, you've won the game.
You can be searching for.
Yeah.
The, uh, the great philosopher, a Tate once said, having things isn't fun.
Getting things is fun.
Yeah.
And yeah, I, I spoke to Dan Bilzerian about this separately before he, uh, came on the show.
And, uh, I said, basically you've sort of completed hedonism as far as I can see.
Do you ever wish that you'd sort of played the game more slowly?
Because where'd you go from here?
And Jimmy Carr had the same intuition, which is trajectory is more important than position.
Trajectory is more important than absolute position.
100%.
I've experienced that in my life.
Like the best parts of my life, the best memories are when there was like a change in in trajectory, like a moment of acceleration.
Um, it's not to do with yeah, where you are at all for sure.
Um, and also on the point of dan bilzerian, and like completing hedonism um, that's why i think what people like jordan peterson and john bavaki are doing is so important, because they're they've identified that issue.
Like that, even if you are dan bilzerian, you will get there and be like what, what now?
Um, and yeah, what people do need is that structure through which they can derive meaning or at least interpret meaning in their lives.
And like, when you're oriented towards pleasure instead of meaning you, you really are kind of shooting yourself in the foot right at the beginning of the race.
Have you heard me do my frankl's inverse law bit?
I don't think so.
Stinks of you.
Let me give you this one right, So you'll know this quote when a man can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.
Frankl is arguing that a lack of meaning causes people to seek temporary relief in superficial pursuits rather than addressing the underlying existential void.
Perhaps for many, maybe even most, this is a big issue.
But there is another group who suffer with the opposite problem, Frankl's inverse law.
When a man can't find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning.
If ease grace, joy and playfulness don't come easily to you, one solution is to just ignore moment to moment happiness entirely and just always pursue hard things.
You become a world champion at winning the marshmallow test.
You convince yourself that delayed gratification in perpetuity is noble, because you struggle to ever feel grateful.
TLDR, you prioritize meaning over happiness because happiness doesn't come easily to you.
That's perfect.
That's perfect.
100%.
There was a moment when I was a teenager where I think that happened in me was like a very potent switch.
I mean, like when i was 13, i was so obsessed with happiness that i like tried to write a book about it and how to be it.
Um, the child psychologist i ended up going to, uh was asking for source material and we gave her that book.
I wrote, and the first thing she said when i sat down with her was i read your book.
And i was like all you know, bushy tails and puppy eye.
And i was like, oh yeah, good ideas, right.
And she was like so i'm guessing you're like um, struggling with a sort of depression.
Your happiness book made me depressed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know if it made her depressed, but she could see so obviously that there was something there with me that, like I, was pedestalizing happiness.
Yeah.
Think about.
Think about what the thing is, what everybody is chasing.
Happiness is almost always the thing that they're feeling, that they're lacking.
This person who needs lots of wealth is because they feel like they are insecure in their resources.
This person who needs lots of admiration is the one who feels inferior socially.
The person who needs lots of beautification on the outside somehow feels ugly.
And the older that I've got, the more true that has become.
Because more people are motivated by running away from something they fear than running towards something they want.
That's not to say that nobody has this perfectly balanced desire for just maximizing their time on the planet.
Man, you know, and i have met those people and they're fucking freaks and aliens um, but i would say of the high performers that i'm around nine out of ten of them uh, probably the running away from something you fear uh, as opposed to the just pure alchemy of something that you want.
And I suppose you could look at it as alchemy too.
Like, you know, this is something bad and you've turned it into something good and congratulations.
That's an upward aiming trajectory.
But if you 13 year old writes a book about happiness, why, where do you think that comes from?
It comes from a huge lack of happiness.
Yeah.
That was kind of the basis for the whole uh dating advice video that i did, which is that like it's the exact same dynamic at play.
When you feel like there's a lack there, you're just going to become obsessive about it.
I don't know, i wish there was a different way to frame human motivation, because it it's got a tinge of like um, cosmic joke in it, doesn't it, where it's like you're just going to be on the hamster wheel that's, you know, suited to your deepest fear.
But i don't think that's all it, because that i've noticed, at least in my life, like as i've overcome certain fears, like with respect to failure and stuff like that like thing you say overcome.
It's a sliding scale right, like you, it decreases.
It doesn't just some things just turned it down a little.
I've turned down the dial and some things do just disappear like magic tricks when you see how they're done psychologically.
But most things they're sliding scale and and like of those things that i've managed to decrease a fair bit um, it can leave you feeling kind of directionless in some sense.
Like i had a big moment of that this year where i think, like for a lot of my life i was hugely motivated by like the applauds and stuff, like praise um, and like i think that was all wrapped up in some subconscious thing around like jealousy and relationships and stuff, and that was a big problem for me for like a really long time and i thought i had a big jealousy problem.
Turns out i just had a really big problem with being jealous.
Um, what's that mean?
What's the difference?
Well, if you have a big jealousy problem, then you actually are a problem.
And you know your jealousy is like a parasite that's living on top of you and making you feel the wrong things and say and do the wrong things.
But if you just got a problem with your jealousy, jealousy is just a normal part of the human experience, right?
As are many of the... So it's the story that you told yourself about what being jealous meant?
Yeah, it's partly that, and also partly just a visceral rejection of the emotion or how it feels in your body.
This shouldn't be the way it is.
You shouldn't be feeling this.
Well, guess what you are.
Yeah, exactly.
So I thought I had a jealousy problem.
Turns out it was just a problem.
I had a problem with being jealous.
And when the problem dropped away, I realized actually I'm not fucking Satan for feeling this.
I'm actually just an ape.
That's resistance again.
You know, we were talking before.
It's a resistance.
Yeah.
And as that sort of resistance drops away, um you, you can often be completely unaware of how much that was being the toxic fuel that you talk about in the background, like you don't really notice it and like i think lots of my um, sort of desire to sort of overcompensate on the social dimension like start a youtube channel last year and post as fast as i can, like three videos a week when i started, a lot of that i think came from this like excessive desire to overexpand.
That backed into this sense that I was inferior.
And like, this was the proof that I was inferior.
Have you looked at the courage to be disliked or any other stuff?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it feels like I'm not super deep in it, but at least from a little bit of the stuff that I've learned, Adler believed that inferiority, or the fear of inferiority, is one of the big drivers psychically, for humans.
And uh, i i think that's a really lovely framing, because it it it captures both of the things that we've talked about today, which is who do i think i should be and where am i compared with that?
And who are the people around me and where am i compared with that?
I'm inferior to my own standards and inferior to the performance of the people that are around me.
There's this weird asymmetry that i really love, and i realized in my 20s though, that we get to see inner landscape of our own minds, which includes all of our self-doubt and foibles and failures and uncertainty, from a front row seat a million times a second right, as our brain was back and forth, but we only get to see the psychological landscape of other people in the actions that they take, which is one to a million bit rate difference.
Right, you know the resolution that we see someone else's interior machinations compared with our own, because i only get to see what emerges from you, even if fucking like we're both on psychedelics at the same time, and they're the most transparent ever.
How many words a minute can you speak?
How much?
How much body language can i infer from you?
It's not that much when you think about the depth of your own thoughts versus the black and white 360p of everybody else's behavior in front of you, which always is going to put you on the wrong side of assuming everyone else is a well put together slick, rational human who is well built, and i am a wavering idiot by comparison.
You know what i mean.
Oh, 100 percent like.
Unraveling that perception of other people, I think, is one of the most powerful things you can actually do to improve the quality of your life and your relationships.
It's very hard because it often it means you have to acknowledge the nasty parts of other people, which is sometimes easier.
If they're your enemy, you want to see the nasty parts, but when they're your friends, that's not easy at all.
And the even harder part, acknowledging those within yourself, like my example, with the jealousy, like until that's like fully integrated into your personality.
It will be like saboteur in the background, like for your entire life.
Adults don't exist, dude.
I've spent, you know, the last few years around some of the richest, most famous, most successful people on the planet, and it's fucking idiots all the way up, like it really is.
No one has any idea what they're doing, and the small number of people that actually do probably don't talk about it that much.
Um, but you know you were saying about.
Is it a weird sort of cosmic joke that this trajectory and habituation just ever ratchets up the difficulty of what you have to do?
Like I need to achieve more to be satisfied.
But now that the bar has been set higher, that means that the next achievement needs to again be higher in order for me to again be higher and again be higher.
Oh, I've completed that game, so then I do what I was talking about before, which is oh, I change the game.
It's do that with this.
It's do that in a different domain.
It's do that not just again a thousand times, it's do it with this twist on it, or it's do it in a oh it's going to be in a more gentle step.
Whatever it might be.
And I can start to see I might be being prescient here, I'm not too sure.
It might just be because I was sat opposite Dr. K yesterday.
I can start to see this as the genesis of the spiritual arc of people who have reached success.
That it's an entire universe that people have tried to complete.
And maybe they've managed to tick off a lot of the different quests and side quests that go on inside of that.
And they go, maybe it's not in this realm.
Maybe the entire universe avenue of nourishment needs to be different.
It has to come from a different place.
And I've been trying to, I've been trying to drink water to make myself not hungry anymore.
And you go, I'm using the wrong pathway here.
I need to do something else.
And I can at least in some ways begin to see why asceticism, come spiritual practice with all of that stuff, helps you to play a little bit of a different game.
Uh, but it's, the trajectory thing is certainly a challenge, because every time that you have a big leap forward in progress hooray, isn't this great, i have a great advantage.
Point boo, this is now higher from which to fall at the same time like oh, i've got something to lose and and that's terrifying it is.
I think it would definitely be a lot worse of a situation if it was the case that it's the desired that we really love.
But that switch from nature that it's the desire that you like, changes the entire thing.
Cause then like, yeah, he does it as well, but that changes the game.
Cause then it's like, Oh, thank God.
There's always going to be a new thing to strive for.
Cause, if that's like really the juice of life, is this like pushing yourself up against the boundaries and the hard edges of reality and seeing what gives like incredibly fulfilling.
And if you ran out of things to achieve um, you might find yourself incredibly bored um so yeah, i wonder, i wonder, how much of human life is like a, as you say, thinly veiled attempt at quelling boredom.
I think what do you make of your generation's struggles with masculinity and goals?
Um, i think it backs into that thing we said at the beginning about adventure the, the lack of adventure in young dudes lives is palpable and it's immediate.
And i think the whole picture of masculinity as some sort of um divine solution to that, where all you need to do is become more masculine and then all of a sudden you know all of the, the kind of dullness of life will be solved.
You'll be um, getting all the girls that you want to get.
You'll be starting the business and swinging it around wherever you go, like it's a really attractive meme um, to young guys who feel like they are kind of half alive um, and it has the added fuel of backing into insecurities.
Um, it's very easy to sort of make masculinity the measure of a man and then uh, promote that message and make everybody feel like, oh shit, maybe that's true, maybe you can make a case for it in retrospect.
And then everybody hears that case and starts measuring themselves against it and feels like they've come up lacking um and uh, that makes it very easy to sell courses and very easy to um sort of do like a pop psychology type offer, like a general solution to personal problems, which is rarely uh, rarely effective, because i think most of the issues that people actually have to deal with in their lives are hyper specific and nuanced, based on like, their actual immediate problem in their life.
Maybe they're addicted to weed, or they've got a bad relationship with their mom, and these are the things they actually need to solve and they're really uncomfortable to solve.
And so instead you have somebody come along online and say actually, you know, the reason you're dissatisfied is not because of you know your personal issues that I know nothing about.
It's because of this like grand cosmic narrative going on where, like they're trying to cut your balls off and what you need to do is go and retake it.
And like all good stories, like all popular stories, that's invested with a modicum of truth, in that you know they're young men, are sort of growing up in a world that is not allowing them the wiggle room to express those natural um parts of themselves.
And then it layers a bit of shame on top of it with the, the sort of woke stuff.
Um, and it becomes very like the woke stuff is very pervasive.
It's sort of everywhere.
Um, and it's easy to internalize that, especially when you know we didn't have sort of religious stories or anything growing up.
Most of us, we just had Hollywood movies, and that's you know.
The morals of those stories are going to be subject to all of the personal preferences of the people that made the movies and wrote them, which might not be reflective of what's actually best for you.
It might be reflective of what would be more convenient for them.
Maybe it would be more convenient if you're a little bit less loud and if you shut up a little bit and if you just sat down at your desk at school and didn't bother the teacher.
Like It's convenient, but oftentimes not for the person who the rule is aimed at.
So it's a weird blend of modicums of truth mixed with, like opportunism on the part of people who recognize the insecurity in others that they feel in themselves and use it to sort of create this sort of circle, jerk of Interesting, sort of first mover advantage of.
Here is a point of pain that I feel in myself.
I can push that button in other people too.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, which Peterson says is the definition of evil, funnily enough.
I've just made this connection as we speak.
But the reason you don't think a lion is evil when it kills a sheep is because it's not out there to one.
It doesn't know what it's doing in a metacognitive sense.
It's just doing it.
It doesn't know that it is doing it.
That's a human trait.
And that backs into self-awareness.
You need to know that you exist in order to know that you know something.
And the whole idea that Peterson gives about the um the Adam and Eve story is that it's like a revelation of your own vulnerability.
Um, how easily you are, you are harmed and how easily you're hurt.
And it's the life is going to include a lot of suffering.
And when you realize you're in that position, everyone else is in that position too.
And I can fuck with them now.
I know exactly.
I know what's going to really hurt me.
That means i know what's also going to really hurt you and it's the utilization of that knowledge that is like exclusive to humans that.
I've heard peterson, the theory of mind thing.
The theory of mind yeah, he points at that as evil.
So i think there is something, um yeah, not very great about it.
I don't think it's.
It's oftentimes done like fully consciously, so it's.
I wouldn't point a finger at it and call it evil.
Most people are motivated by believing that they're doing the right thing.
Yeah, yeah, 100%.
And as well, if this is a mechanism of sedation or anesthesia for this person, they go hey, I fixed it.
All of the guys that said your problems with goals will be sorted if you just ask them about the midget fight that happened outside.
Neg them, take them to three different locations on one night.
All of the PUA 101 stuff.
You go, well, yeah, I mean, like it did.
It did.
That is true.
That is true.
Lots of guys do have problems with women.
And this is a strategy that reliably will like surface level fix what you think is the problem.
But the problem wasn't the problem.
The problem wasn't I can't get laid.
It's I don't feel comfortable around women.
And I don't have fun when I'm with girls.
Yeah.
Like you're still not having fun.
Yeah.
You're like goal oriented.
Yeah.
Yeah. all very profitable though.
And all very catchy.
Cause like you, I've been on the receiving end of it as well.
When I was a teenager, like what, like I think, as most guys are at this point, you kind of get exposed to every potential solution to the problems that you're currently experiencing.
Lots of them as the red pill stuff.
And it's super attractive.
It really is.
It like sort of um, there's something about it that tends to, it tends to like point responsibility to from you a little bit, I find as well.
It's like obviously because like, especially on the ideological side, that stuff is coming out of people, oftentimes as a response to certain pains, so it's like perfectly adapted to the type of pain that young guys experience in the dating world.
So it spreads super, super fast because of the network effect.
Um, but yeah, the that an idea convinces you should not serve as evidence that it's true, just that it's convincing.
Um, so yeah, the red pill can be very convincing, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's the whole truth.
It often is true within like a certain, if you like, a hyper selective about your context, in your frame.
Um, and a lot of that like selection, um is cherry picking and it's smuggled in in the subtext of stuff.
It's not explicit, it's oftentimes implicit, like that the goal is just to get laid, like.
That's something that's implicit in the pickup stuff.
Um, but lots of guys will come there with the problem that, the real problem, and then they're kind of like experiencing this new way of looking at things that has that implication that the goal is just to get laid.
That feels nice because it divorces them from all of the other shit they might have to do, And so they don't.
I want to feel comfortable with a woman.
Yeah, I want to feel... I want to have fun with it.
But by shifting the goalposts in the implication, like implicitly shifting the goalposts, you can interact with that whole way of thinking and start to feel really good.
Like there's an alleviation of pain.
Because you're not engaging with it anymore.
Yeah, you're actually... Engaging with the real thing.
Yeah, it's like you are solving something, but it's like a different problem to what you set out to and you haven't noticed that the problem is switched.
There's an interesting positioning that happens, I think, with a lot of guys advice, which is it has the right amount of autonomy baked into the solution, just enough autonomy baked into the solution to give you the I am masculine man doing it on my own uh justification, because i don't think that guys would go for the pure victimhood narrative.
That would feel too icky yeah, but also you can't go.
The level of autonomy and you should look at yourself in the mirror kind of stops at your morning routine.
It doesn't go to.
You need to do therapy dude, or you need to journal a lot.
You need to work out what the drive for your desperate requirement for social validation like.
Where's that coming from?
Oh, it's because you don't feel good enough.
And that, that is something that needs to be unpacked slowly and internally.
And going to the gym is going to make you feel really great.
But your problems are still going to be waiting for you when you get home.
And that doesn't mean that you shouldn't go to the gym.
But you cannot confuse going to the gym for doing the work that is, getting rid of the problems.
And this also means that a world where you just work on your problems and don't go to the gym is worse than one way.
You get to do both.
But you can't confuse the thing, which is frankly easier to do.
Yeah. for the one that includes the hard thing.
This is, you know, the emotions piece trying to, um, live below the neck as I call it.
Uh, I like that.
Yeah.
Um, is has been a bit of an obsession, but I understand as well that it's made at least the show over the last 12 months like a lot more fluffy.
Uh, you know I've got kind of Hormozy and Sebum sat on each shoulder and Alex is saying stop being such a pussy, just work harder, don't care about your emotions.
And Chris is saying, you should start a family, go lie in a hammock, go for a walk. and these two things are and i've definitely been more sebum energy than i have alex energy this year i think alex has actually been more sebum energy than he has been alex the most recent conversation we had was specifically around this he's like taking a more holistic look at what's going on and uh i understand that that makes for a fluffier and in many ways much less sexy much messier you know this the sort of chat that we've had today there's hopefully something useful and interesting in there but it's not as linear as you know get up on time eat your veggies go to the gym one gram per pound of body weight protein like you know it's not as linear as that and that doesn't mean that it's in any way more elevated right it's it's it's there's just as many layers of obfuscation and cope and and need for um protection from feeling things but at least it kind of accepts all right the game is not just out there and the game is not just like out there as me but it's really fucking turning it inward and trying to feel trying to feel feelings and trying to work out where they come from and taking a pretty sort of hard look not just in the mirror but like in the sort of mirror of your soul and thinking okay i i look this is an unteachable lesson right i it a thousand episodes of this podcast move to america do all of the things for me to say fame won't fix your self-worth money isn't going to like improve your happiness you don't love that girl she's just hot and difficult to get you should see your parents more don't work so hard like all of these things they are only as far as i can see realizations you can arrive at by completing them like you need to go through the video game get to the end and go all right, well, congratulations.
That thing that everyone clichédly said, like with fucking religious revelation.
I now get why they said it.
Because it's either one of two things, right?
It's either that is the truth or... people who get to the end of a particular game and start proselytizing about how the game wasn't the game and nobody else should be playing it is part of some weird secret society that all successful people are a part of to like con the peons into not playing the game just to keep all of the success for themselves.
It's like why is it that people so reliably get to the end of these sorts of games and say It was good in some ways, but largely unfulfilling in others?
And there was an area of me I thought it was going to satisfy, and it didn't.
And fuck, it's still there.
And now I'm going to have to look at something else.
Why do you think so many people keep saying that?
Why is that the place that they go to?
I think it's how we're built.
I really do.
I think that is what it is to be a human is to be perpetually dissatisfied um, and that that's just the case, and it's not a nice case, it's not like pleasant, but it is the case and um, and so it'll always be there.
There'll always be an element of like shit.
I thought this was going to be like sunshine and rainbows and you know it has its moments, but ultimately like, no matter where i am, there i am, i'm still.
I gotta be with myself um, and sometimes right, sometimes it is because people spend their entire lives chasing the wrong thing and they get to the end of it and they go fuck, like that was pointless.
And those are the people you hear, you hear from, because those are the people who are rich and famous, because rich and famous is what you go for when you're chasing something that wasn't originally your plan, um.
So you hear that message a lot partially.
It's just like the selection bias of that like um.
But you know you hear people who are also happily married and have beautiful families and they're still kind of dissatisfied um, because at the end of the day, like the floor feels like the fucking floor, my stomach hurts, i've got a bit of a headache and like i've got to do stuff today that i didn't i wouldn't choose to do if i could do whatever i wanted.
That's like the human condition and like i think a good part of personal growth is actually not like optimizing.
So you're like some bastion of gratitude, your whole life and going about in this perfect zen, flow state of like everything's super enjoyable and I'm getting gratitude, but I'm not like sort of falling back on my motivation, like I'm grateful and motivated, as if that's like a thing you can do and to reach this like sort of it's like a picture you have in your head of what could be possible to live and it's a great thing to strive for because it will make you do things and will preoccupy you.
But like, at the end of the day, there has to be some concession to the general day-to-day human experience, because that is what your life is.
Narratively, your life gets defined as a few really important moments, reaching a billion plays, doing this, doing that.
That's what you connect the dots at the end, because that's what you put on your one-page sheet that goes at your funeral to explain what your life was.
It's just one page.
My grandma died last year, and it struck me, because there was a an explanation of her life and it was one page and i remember being like that's a whole life someone's been on the planet for decades and it's reduced down to an a4 sheet to it literally and i remember being like huh shit and i was thinking to myself like is that all life is just like a few important moments and everything else is just fluff and i was like no it's the exact fucking opposite of that is that those few moments don't matter that much matter to the ego they matter to the identity because they are the proof that you are who you said you are and all that stuff but like real life is just day to day and like your relationship with the fucking walls and with the floor and with your own body and your own the voice that's in your head that is where like if you're talking about maximizing uh general fulfillment in life like your relationship with those things i think is actually the only lever that really matters Because whether you get the big thing or not, like it will be a high and then a low and then you baseline.
That's just like structurally, functionally what you are.
It's not even like a personality trait.
It's just like definitionally the case.
And we argue against that because we want to believe in the utopia of like 400 virgins and bliss for the rest of your life.
But that doesn't happen.
And that's not to say you can't be deeply fulfilled in life.
You can.
It's just that that fulfillment doesn't look like bliss and excitement in perpetuity.
There was when i was playing around eight years ago with i knew i wanted to start the show but i didn't know what to call it and i had a short list of pretty bad names uh brains and brawn of them.
Glad that i didn't go for that and modern wisdom is the only time in my entire copywriting marketing career, which has lasted a very long time, had to come up with names for club nights a lot because they fail a lot, which means you permanently need to be reinventing them.
The only time I ever got divine inspiration was Modern Wisdom.
I woke up at three in the morning and was like, That's the name.
Wrote it down in my phone so I didn't forget it.
And so I've never looked back.
But one of the other names that was on the cutting room floor that I didn't go for was Crushing a Tuesday.
Crushing a Tuesday comes from Tim Ferriss.
And even though I would probably like because I'm all elevated now and I sit cross-legged I would call it Enjoying a Tuesday or Peaceful on a Tuesday.
His argument is basically people optimize for peak experiences, but your life is made up of ordinary Tuesdays.
And your goal should be that your average Tuesday is just pretty good right, because your life is made up of ordinary tuesdays, and i think that that's that's what you're talking.
Yeah, that's exactly the same thing.
Yeah, modern wisdom is perfect as well.
Thank you, it's really good.
It fills the exact fucking hole that is there today that needs to be filled, which is how do you be wise when the fucking rug has been pulled out underneath us and there's no like source material that would mismatch the environment?
Yeah yeah yeah, it's uh.
I think that's fundamentally the question that a lot of people are asking themselves, because we're, at this, weird.
We are a generation or I, you know a bunch of generations that have the curse of awareness of holy shit.
A lot of the things that we used to rely on that were comforting stories.
Maybe they're not quite so true.
We've got things that are phenomenal contributors to our quality of life, got the entire world's fucking corpus of human history now in a chat bot there you can talk to it.
You're never going to be lonely for the rest of your life.
Here in a driverless car, there was no one in the driver's seat.
Yeah, the way most.
Yeah, they're crazy.
Yeah um yeah, all of these things and yet, at the same time, all of the stories and all of the levels of comfort have gone out of the window.
This is one of the great insights alex o'connor taught me.
I think he actually taught me this in a vlog, Not in a on a podcast episode, but it was stood in that lobby outside.
And uh, he was saying the problem with the modern atheist movement and the sort of rationalist movement is that it is selling people on statistics, data and the scientific method and telling them to get rid of archetype myth and story.
The issue is, the human brain finds archetype, myth and stories, a thousand to one, more compelling than the numbers.
So you are telling people to dispense with the thing that feels most real to them and believe in the thing that feels most fake?
And I think that that sense of, I really don't fucking know how to operate.
This is a very novel, fast moving world.
And all for all the humans are adaptable creatures.
We're adaptable on like genetic timescales, right?
We're not adaptable and we, we, we're not bad, right?
You know, Modern world wifi signals.
We seem to be surviving ish.
There was a pandemic not long ago.
Everyone got through that kind of okay.
But like psychologically, it's a challenge for a lot of people.
And then when you layer on top the shame of what was your line?
Uh, the majority of your life is spent in relative physical comfort, but psychologically life feels anything but comfortable.
How could this be?
You live at the high point of human history and your biggest question is whether or not life is worth living.
Um, it's, it's fucking true.
And this additional layer of, I don't feel good.
And I don't feel good that I don't feel good.
I don't have legitimacy in this discontent.
My melancholy feels shameful.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
Like measuring your success against your happiness is a surefire way to ensure that every moment of unhappiness doesn't go unmultiplied.
Then you're not just unhappy, you're also failing, which is twice unhappy, because that's the metric of success.
And, like the meaning thing is exactly where we get the sense that life is worth living.
We don't really get it from doing like a uh fucking moral calculus of pleasure and pain and then seeing which comes out more, like if there was 51 pleasure and 49 pain, would that still be worth living?
If that was the entire sort of story, well i don't know like.
So meaning and stuff is definitely where we get that from.
And you can use a myth to explain why we are so confused on that front.
Have you heard of Procrustes?
No.
So Procrustes was an innkeeper in Greek mythology that was on a road from Athens to somewhere else.
And as people walked across, there was lots of bandits.
But he would offer people free accommodation.
So people would come in and say, ah, yeah, this is great.
This is a long road.
I'm very tired and stuff.
And then they would lie down in his bed, except for if they were too short to fit the bed, then he would stretch them, so they fit it perfectly.
And if they were too long, he would chop off their excess limbs so that they fit really nice.
So he was doing them a service, you know, making sure that they fit perfectly.
Obviously not a service.
This is really fucked up.
But it's often used to.
The idea of a Procrustean bed is used to explain this compulsion of humans to map messy reality into arbitrary but neat straight lines, and so words always do this.
Like whenever you use a word, you're invoking a category, and categories all put like boundaries around certain patterns and exclude context from content.
But by doing that, you are literally by adding any sort of category and excluding the context from the content.
You are then no longer capable of dealing with contextual questions.
And the meaning of life is a contextual question.
So whenever you go about trying to answer, what am I doing this for in a way that you could explain to somebody else you're trying to lift up water with a net.
Could you give me a modern example of the Procrustean bed?
Bureaucracy is one.
There's like a million cases where people like have to just like select an arbitrary like like box ticking.
They just they need to check the boxes and they're like there was a story in david graber's bullshit jobs about a guy that wanted to move his computer from one room to the other and in total it included like four different companies, two moving vans, uh like 20 pieces of paperwork or something crazy like that, because they had to check the boxes, that they moved the computer in the right way, because it was a military computer and he could have done it himself and it ended up paying like six people like a few thousand dollars because as it expanded it was just like you needed someone to verify the verifiers of the and so like that can be a procrastinate bed situation.
You often see it in science where people have like a totalizing theory for a messy reality.
And then, instead of adjusting their theory to map the reality, they adjust their perception of reality to map the theory.
And so psychologists do this a lot.
The first psychologist I went to see did this with me, where she, you know, had the degrees on the wall.
But she mapped my experience onto her theories, which all told her to amplify um uh and validate her her um patients, which made me just sink deeper into.
Oh yes, these are real problems.
I do have like a disease in my brain and it is very real and everybody else needs to accommodate them.
Otherwise I'm going to like drown and blah, blah, blah.
And it just got worse.
And like um, I think yeah, we are allergic to messiness, and whenever reality is too messy or it's messy in a way that we find distasteful, we'll try and like force it into a Procrustean bed of our own left hemisphere, sort of.
Yeah.
There's a idea from Gwenda Bogle called the golden hammer.
When someone, usually an intellectual who has gained a cultish following for popularizing a concept, becomes so drunk with power he thinks he can apply that concept to everything.
Every mention of this concept should be accompanied by a picture of Nassim Taleb.
Nassim Taleb is the perfect one because well, there's another reason I think Nassim Taleb's ideas span such a wide variety of things is because Like, if you read his books, he's talking about literature, and then art, and then economics and trading and stuff.
But it's because all of the insights like anti-fragility and stuff, they're really their insights about people and not really about the thing at hand.
And so all you then need to do is map how this thing that people do interacts in these different things.
And it seems like you've got a new information about all these different industries simultaneously, but it's people that you're really talking about.
Dude, you're great.
I'm really, really impressed with what you're doing.
What can I do?
What can I do for you?
If I was to give you a favor, you don't need to choose it now, but you've got a favor on the table from me.
So whatever it is that you need, I'm happy to facilitate.
Um, I don't know.
Have me back on again.
I enjoyed it.
Fuck yeah.
Where should people go to keep up to date with what?
Um, so I'm on YouTube at Angelo Summers, S O M E R S. Um, and, uh, yeah, that's the main thing.
I've got this like a web app software thing i'm coming up with uh, like wisdom tools.
Um, that's at the compassdiy um oh, and i have a newsletter i just started called nav notes.
It's on substack and also if you go to angelosummerscom you can put your email in and do it on kit um but yeah okay, people should go and watch your youtube dude, you crush, thank you.
I get asked all the time for book suggestions.
People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories.
And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read.
These are the most life changing reads that I've ever found.
And there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them.
And it's completely free.
And you can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books.
That's chriswillx.com slash books.
