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

What's happening, people?

Welcome back to the show.

It is the end of 2025 and, to celebrate, I've put together a collection of my favorite moments from the podcast over the last 12 months.

Some huge episodes that you probably saw, some other episodes that maybe you missed, and I've put them all together in an interesting flow and pacing, and I really loved all of these.

I love all 1040 of my podcast children, but these were just some highlights from 2025.

Uh, i appreciate you all for being here.

I appreciate you all for making modern wisdom the eighth biggest podcast in the world according to spotify wrapped this year, which is insane.

And uh, thank you for all the support and all the shares and all the everything.

Thank you for staying patient with me when uh, i've tried to bring in new ideas and guests that you've never heard of.

I really, really do work hard to try and curate a nice art gallery that, even if you don't know who the artist is, you're probably going to enjoy their work.

So thank you for sticking with me as I go down rabbit holes that you didn't know, that you were going to enjoy and commenting, and all of the support and everything, especially this year, more than ever, it's meant an awful lot to me.

So yeah, I appreciate every single one of you.

Before we get into it, you need to do an end of your review, and the review process that I use for myself, that I've stolen from all the best productivity guys on the planet, is at chriswillxcom.

Slash review.

100000.

Literally hundreds of thousands of people have recorded it and done their work on it already.

And you can get it for free.

Copy into your notes app and do your end of your review.

So chriswillx.com slash review.

Anyway, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year.

Let's get into it.

The worst outcome in the world is not having self-esteem.

Why?

Yeah, it's a tough one.

Well, I look at the people and I don't want to offend anybody, but I look at the people who don't like themselves.

And that's the toughest slot because they're always wrestling with themselves.

And it's hard enough to face the outside world.

And no one's going to like you more than you like yourself.

So if you're struggling with yourself, then the outside world becomes an insurmountable challenge.

And it's hard to say why people have low self-esteem.

It might be genetic.

It might just be circumstantial.

A lot of times I think it's because they just weren't unconditionally loved as a child.

And that sort of seeps in at a deep core level.

But self-esteem issues can be the most limiting.

One interesting thought is that you know, to some extent, self-esteem is a reputation you have with yourself.

You're watching yourself at all times, you know what you're doing and you have your own moral code.

Everyone has a different moral code.

But if you don't live up to your own moral code, the same code that you hold others to, it will damage your self-esteem.

So perhaps one way to build up your self-esteem is to live up to your own code very rigorously.

Have one and then live up to it.

Another way to raise your self-esteem might be to do things for others.

If I look back on my life and you know what are the moments that I'm actually proud of, there's very far and few between.

And it's not that often.

It's not the things you would expect.

It's not the material success.

It's not having learned this thing or that.

It's when I made a sacrifice for somebody or something that I loved.

And that's when I'm actually ironically most proud.

Now, that's through an explicit mental exercise, but I'll bet you, at some level I'm recording that implicitly.

So that tells me that even if I am not being loved, then the way to create love is to give love, to express love through sacrifice and through duty.

And so I think doing things like that can build up your self-esteem really fast.

It's interesting when you talk about sacrifice, because a lot of the time people say well, I sacrificed so much for my job.

It's like yeah, but that was you sacrificing something that you wanted less for something that you wanted more, as opposed to genuinely taking some sort of cost.

And yeah, I wonder whether, if self-esteem, is you adhering to your internal, your actions and your values aligning um, even when it's difficult, or perhaps even more so when it's difficult?

I wonder whether there is a price that people who are more introspective, high integrity, pay because you think well, you've got this uh, heaviest set of overheads that you need to pay in some way.

Well, if being ethical were profitable, everybody would do it, right?

So at some level, it does involve a sacrifice.

But that sacrifice can also be thought of as you're thinking for the long term rather than the short term.

For example, the virtues are the set of beliefs that if everybody in society followed them as individuals, it would lead to win-win outcomes for everybody.

So if I am honest and you are honest, then we can do business more easily.

We can interact more easily because we can trust each other.

So, even though there might be a few liars in the system, as long as there aren't too many liars and too many cheaters, a high trust society where everybody's honest is better off.

And I think a lot of the virtues work this way, right?

If I don't go around sleeping with your wife and you don't sleep with mine, and you know if I don't take all the food that's at the table first and so on, then we all get along better and we can play win-win games.

In game theory, the most famous game is Prisoner's Dilemma.

But that's all about everybody cheating and the Nash equilibrium, the stable equilibrium there is.

Everybody cheats.

And the only way you can play a win-win game is if you have long-term iterated moves.

But that's not actually the most common game played in society.

The most common game played is one called a stags hunt where, if we cooperate, we can bring down a big stag and both have big dinners.

But if we don't cooperate, then we have to go hunt like rabbits and we each have small dinners.

And that game has two stable equilibriums.

And one could be where we're both hunting the rabbit and one could be where we're hunting the stag.

So the Hytra society is a more virtuous society where I can trust you to come hunt the stag with me and show up on time and do the work and divide it up properly.

So you want to live in a system where everybody has their own set of virtues and follows them, and then we all win.

But I would argue you don't need to do that for sacrifice.

You don't need to do that for other people.

You can do it just purely for yourself.

You will have higher self-esteem.

You will attract other high-virtue people.

Would I go on a stag hunt with me?

Correct.

Yeah, that's right.

And if you're the kind of person who long-term signals ethics and values virtues, then you will attract other people who are ethical and virtuous.

Whereas if you are a shark, you will eventually find yourself swimming entirely amongst sharks, and that's an unpleasant existence.

But again, this goes back to the equivalent of the marshmallow test.

And by the way, the marshmallow test does not replicate.

I saw the complication crisis of hods recently.

But it is about trading off the short term for the long term.

And so I think for a lot of these so-called virtues, there are long-term selfish reasons to be virtuous.

Did you deal with self-doubt in the past?

Is that something that was a hurdle for you to overcome?

Yes and no.

I think I dealt with self-doubt in the sense that oh, I don't know what I'm doing and I need to figure it out.

But I didn't doubt myself in the way of somebody else knows better than me for me, or that I'm an idiot or I'm not worthwhile or anything like that.

I guess I had the benefit of I grew up with a lot of love.

The people around me love me unconditionally.

And so that just gave me a lot of confidence.

Not the kind of confidence that would say I have the answer, but the kind of confidence that I will figure it out and I know what I want.

Or only I am a good arbiter of what I want.

Yeah, that level of self-belief, I suppose, allows you to determine what is it that matters to me.

My self-esteem, should I chase this thing or not?

I can make a fair judgment on that as opposed to being so swayed.

But it's such a good point about.

Even if you think you're not consciously logging the stuff that you're doing, there is some that's in the back of your mind.

Was it the daemon?

Is that what the ancient greeks, or something, used to talk about?

Yeah, also in computer science, like there's a concept of a daemon, which is a uh, a program that's always running in the background.

You can't see it okay um, but yeah, it probably comes from the ancient greek daemon.

But yeah, what you know that you don't even know, you know is far greater than what you know you know.

You can't even articulate most of the things you know.

There are feelings you have that have no words for them.

There are thoughts you have that are felt within the body or subconsciously, that you never articulate to yourself.

You can't articulate the rules of grammar, yet you exercise them effortlessly when you speak.

So I would argue that your implicit knowledge and your knowledge that is unknown to yourself is far greater than the knowledge you can articulate and that you can communicate.

And So at some level, you're always watching yourself.

That's what your consciousness is, right?

It's the thing that's watching everything, including your mind, including your body.

So if you want to have high self-esteem, then earn your own self-respect.

I had this idea, the internal golden rule.

So the golden rule says, treat others the way that you should be treated, you want to be treated.

The internal golden rule says, treat yourself like others should have treated you.

And it was a...

A riposte to maybe people that didn't grow up with unconditional love in that way.

On the love thing.

One of the interesting things about love is you can try to remember the feeling of being loved.

So go back to when someone was in love with you or someone did love you.

And really remember that feeling.

Really sit with it and try to recreate it within yourself.

And then go to the feeling of you loving someone.

And when you were in love, and I'm not even talking about romantic love necessarily.

So be a little careful there.

I'm talking more about like love, for sometimes get complex if you're talking about past romantic love right, a sibling or a child or something like that, or a parent.

And think about when you felt love towards someone or something.

And now which is better?

And I would argue that the feeling of being in love is actually more exhilarating than the feeling of being loved.

Being loved is a little cloying.

It's a little too sweet.

You kind of want to push the person away.

It's a little embarrassing.

And you know that if that person is too much into it that you feel constrained.

On the other hand, the feeling of being in love is very expansive.

It's very open.

It actually makes you a better version of yourself.

It makes you want to be a better person.

And so you can create love anytime you want.

It's just that craving to receive it that's the problem.

I went to this, uh, daytime house music party in Austin on Saturday.

It's called mushroom cowboy.

So it's a microdose to kind of event.

I don't know.

I think they're kind of hinting at that, but it's in a coffee.

Well, it was outside of a coffee shop of Congress.

Yeah.

So I turn up at half 10, it started at 10 and the queue is 250 yards long for coffee.

And there must've been 1500 people there.

One guy brought a baguette was raving with his baguette.

Those dogs, you know, pretty sober looking from the outside.

Maybe some people smoking weed.

But I think this is maybe the beginning of us seeing the end of like hardcore drink culture.

If you've looked at how few of Gen Z now drink.

Yes.

It's, I think, maybe 20%.

The interesting thing is like the theories on why.

Because there's obviously, they have to be theories, right?

We don't actually know exactly.

Yeah.

One of them is that people, the youth views drinking as like what their parents did.

Right.

So that's like that's naturally uncool.

Yeah.

My fucking lame ass dad drinks like I don't I'm not interested.

And so that's one thing.

The other part of it is that this uh group of people uh, that are the youth right now are so much more informed on what the negative aspects of drinking and what it can do to you that they're just like why would i, you know, why would i, yeah to something like that, and that they've found this whole other.

You know, when you want to take the edge off, there's a lot more options and it's also a lot more accepted today than it was 20 years ago.

Like the idea that you could microdose or do edibles or smoke, or, you know what I mean?

And then there's like all the, you know, ketamine and everything is like, I have it.

I have different things that I do when I want to have a recreational good time.

Um, and yeah, but it's, it's undeniable that it's, it's definitely way down.

There's more daily users in the U S of weed now than there are of alcohol.

Is that for real?

Overtaken, or at least that was the most recent study that I saw.

In the US, there are more daily or near daily marijuana users than daily or near daily alcohol users.

And that thought was just completely like if you're a teen right now, you don't understand how preposterous that sounds coming from like if you were growing up in the 80s and 90s, like you were just like.

Those were like the fringe people almost.

You know what I mean.

Like yes, it was popular, but it was not like a respectable person really wasn't doing that.

You know, it was like the arts, it was like hippies and and yeah it was.

I mean people thought of it as like the absolute worst thing that could happen.

I mean people from like my dad's generation likened marijuana to heroin.

They didn't even see like really a difference.

They're just like you're a junkie, it's like.

But what for smoking a joint?

And like yeah, that's the way they viewed it.

So the fact that it's that accepted now it's it's mind blowing to me.

I wonder if some of it is that drinking in the house on your own feels pretty fucking bad.

Yeah.

Smoking in the house on your own.

You're like, I'm just watching, I'm playing call of duty.

Leave me alone.

But if you, if you're six beers deep playing call of duty, it's a different story.

Yeah.

And you're not playing well at that.

You're just like, I don't know how well people are playing on weed either, but yeah.

Yeah.

You're probably more likely to yell out pejorative slurs.

Um, yeah, I, I think that, um, I mean, look, smoke smoking is still not good for you.

So like you're probably, but.

But we've discovered that you know there's other ways to ingest and like consume.

And that's that's what I think is part of like this youth culture thing about staying away from drinking is they're like, whatever, I do droplets in this or I, you know, I I have my gummy or whatever, however they want to consume.

But they're just they're definitely not drinking, man.

They're not drinking like they like everybody else before them did.

I used to run nightclubs for ages.

And one of the big downturns we've seen has been in nightlife industry.

I think the UK is losing a nightclub a week.

There's not like an unlimited number of nightclubs.

It's like one is shutting down pretty much every single week.

And I asked a friend who's still in the industry why he thought that was the case.

And he said, smartphones, man.

Back in the day, you could be as loose as you wanted.

You could sort of have that Larry, louty drinking spirit, at least in Britain.

They don't want to be recorded.

Of course.

Like if you mess up and like shit yourself in the middle of a nightclub In 2002, it's a story that you can deny the next day and then, after six months, most people have probably forgotten.

Whereas if that happens in 2025, that's now concretized on the internet for everybody to know and bring back up and make memes out of for the rest of time.

I mean, can you imagine how the pro athletes of the 80s and 90s and early 2000s would just go out and just just destroy, just destroy a woman's hopes and dreams?

And then now they're all?

Yeah, they're like everyone's on edge.

Yeah, everyone's got a phone out.

It's just yeah, it's.

It's a totally different.

By the way, do you ever think about why as i still remember that like why was house music and dancing in general so much bigger in europe than here?

People here were never like let's go dance.

I'm not sure.

I mean, I guess, why does any scene of any kind appear anywhere?

We certainly have in the UK a good house music culture.

A lot of people didn't have much else to do other than go out and party and drink.

If the weather's bad, then we're not going to go out to the ranch, we're not going to go and see the sunset, we're not going to go to the beach because it's fucking freezing cold all the time.

So you kind of just zero in on the one thing that's reliable, which is beer, yeah.

Pubs or clubs yeah yeah, no.

I just remember like so many times, like being in the states and having like european friends were like why don't you guys?

You guys don't like to go dance?

And i was like no no, we're not going dancing, bro.

Like like No.

And and then I would remember like studying abroad being like, oh, yeah, we would.

That's that was like a normal thing.

Just go to a place that was just like packed and everybody just loud music dancing.

It just was one of those things where I was like, it just didn't translate over here.

I mean, there's still clubs, obviously, but it just wasn't the same type of.

Oh, I just want to go listen to this and literally dance like that's what people I felt, like we're doing a lot more in Europe than here.

These are the three decisions that I think everyone makes every moment.

First, you're doing it right now.

What are you going to focus on?

You're going to be focusing on the story I'm telling you.

You're going to be focusing on the next question you're going to ask.

You're going to be focusing on how your stomach feels if you've not eaten.

There's a million things you could focus on, literally.

But we don't experience life.

We experience the part of life we focus on.

And so the bottom line is I know my father and I had a different experience because we had different focuses that I was focused on his food.

You know, what a concept.

This is cool.

He was focused on that.

He had not taken care of his family.

And I know that because, you know, he said it about 20 times under his breath.

And my mother echoed it, of course.

Um, the second decision, though the minute you focus on something, your brain has to decide, what does it mean?

And meaning is what creates emotion and emotion is where your life is.

Right.

And so, um, the quality of your life is the quality of your emotions.

If you got a billion dollars in every day, you're pissed off and angry.

Your life's quality is called pissed off and angry.

If you got three beautiful children, a husband or wife you love, but you worry all the time.

Your life is worry, you know.

So his focus and then his meaning, that was the worst part.

The meaning he gave it was that he was worthless and didn't belong here.

And that usually leads to the third decision, which is what are you going to do?

And Like if you think the meaning is something happens, you say this person is dissing me, you know disrespecting me, or is this person challenging me?

Or is this person coaching me?

Or is this person loving me?

If you think they're dissing you, you're going to have a very different emotional reaction than if you think they're coaching you or loving you.

And then of course, that's going to change what decision you make.

Because if you're angry, you're going to make a different decision than if you're playful or generous or whatever the case may be.

So those three decisions control our lives.

But so your viewers or listeners.

I give them an opportunity to take a look at it because there's some patterns that you can make some simple patterns and change your whole life of focus.

So the first one is, and I'd ask you two questions for you.

One, Chris, is what do you think most people's answer to this question is?

And the other is what's yours?

If you're ready, ready to play.

All right.

It's real simple.

We all have a pattern of focusing on what we have and at times on what's missing.

Which one do you think most people spend more time focusing on what they have or what's missing?

What's missing?

What do you focus more on?

What's missing?

Yes.

It isn't something that comes.

The focus on what's missing is not something that comes with someone who is a failure.

It comes very much with people who are very successful.

And the question then becomes, if you're always focused on missing, how can you sustain happiness?

You're in a permanent place of lack.

That's correct.

So scarcity is there.

So you'll have drive. right?

To keep staying on the hamster wheel of achievement, but you're not going to see much fulfillment, and not in a sustainable way.

It's impossible.

And it has nothing to do with you or me, right?

It's just software.

And we got a soul.

We're not software, but you run your software so often you start thinking your mind is you versus my mind is a tool that I'm going to use.

Or if I don't use it, it's going to use me.

So the majority of people do that.

And by the way, during COVID, that number exploded.

Because so many things were taken from people, they were constantly focused on what's missing, and that produces nothing but pain.

Second question, and I think I know your answer to this one.

Which do you tend to focus on more?

What do you think most people focus on more, what they can control or what they can't control?

And then which one do you focus more on?

I think most people would probably focus on what they can't control.

I'm an even balance, I would say, between the two.

I'm working quite hard to try.

I was going to say you strive, as part of your philosophy right to focus on what you can control, right?

So that's part of the stoicism, the whole philosophy of stoicism, right?

But most people, you're absolutely right.

Now in my seminars it's different, because I got 15000 20000 people ask that question and the vast majority of them say they're focused on what's missing.

But the vast majority of them say they do focus on what they can control.

That's why they came.

Why would they spend their money and time?

They want to take control of their business or their body or their relationship, whatever the case may be.

So they have a different belief structure.

If you have both of those out of whack, you've got some real challenges.

Most people have at least one out of whack, which creates stress.

And then the third one, and there's many more than these, but just quickly for the people at home, and I'm asking them to do this for themselves if they want to.

Where do you tend to focus more?

Your past, your present, and your future.

We all spend all three, but where do you spend more of your time?

What do you think most people do?

Where do you?

Let's say that you only had 10 exercises.

For the rest of time to build the best body that you could.

What are you going to choose?

Talk me through the philosophy.

I've got a roster set up.

So, when it comes to legs, I think that the idea of a crazy heavy squats or leg press all the time as a quad builder it just wouldn't be it for me.

Cause I've had periods of time where I basically did a leg extension exclusively.

Usually when I diet my leg extension volume increases because I mean squeezing wise, activation wise.

You know, if you slapped electronic pulse indicators maybe you could get a real readout of how much they're activating.

But for me, like if i had to pick a quad movement, i would just kill it on the leg extensions because you can really pump them up, go a little heavier, like there's.

If i had to pick one, there'd be they, that would be it.

Okay, then hamstrings would be.

I'd be a little torn but i'd probably pick.

I'm very torn, either seated or laying curl, but either way a hamstring curl, I've got to pick one.

I'm afraid, Sam, you can't... I guess I'd have to pick the... I'd have to pick Lang.

I would have picked... So you get a little bit more stretch?

Well, I just like, Not even because of that, because you would actually in a seated position if you pull forward, would your you know hips not be more rounded over where your hamstrings tie in?

So now they're actually more stretched.

Like you feel your hamstring stretch when you bend your torso to touch your toes, not when you're laying down.

So, like the idea when people talk about there's more stretch on the laying curl, I don't even see it.

Well, that depends if you're sat, Like this, because often this handles, people press themselves up.

Yeah.

So that would be.

You've pushed this off as opposed to pulling yourself in.

So I guess it depends how you position yourself.

So I guess, but right now I'm on a kick of laying curl.

All right.

So quad extension, lying hamstring curl.

And then for back, I'd probably just have to do regular pull downs, but you can also cheat them into a row by leaning back extra far, all right okay yeah, that's that's.

That's acceptable because you've got the one machine.

It's the same hand, it's the same setup.

Okay, all right.

For me anyway, i need more lats because i want them to be wider, like the thickness of my back is actually fine.

Like i want them to extend out, like that's what really gives that sort of look illusion.

What do you think about when it comes to lap pull down, hand position cues?

What are you thinking?

Because then you can change it up pretty drastically like, if i do a lighter set, which is normally toward the end, I can put my hands extra far out and it's a bit, a little bit more like, rather than pulling my shoulders up and down, which kind of gets like a lot of my lower lats, I kind of erector, like middle thickness rather, you know, having wider hands and rotating around my shoulders.

That gets me a little more upper lats.

But or you could also make it super heavy and do a closer grip and you get a little forearm and bicep just from the nature of a like that's more of a compound movement of a row, but then you can really load it too, okay.

So, quad extension, lying hamstring curl lat, pull down with a little bit of fuckery on the handle.

What's for?

Yeah, for for chest, i think i'd have to pick.

Oh, i'm a little torn, but honestly, if i had to only pick one no, you can.

You've got 10 in total, so you can.

You get a lot of muscle groups.

You gotta at least cover your bases, okay.

So i would say there was a time when i would say incline barbell if I was on an inclined barbell kick.

But it's a little trick in your shoulders because it's very like directly mounted.

Like the only time I ever get my shoulders is usually inclined barbell when I like it.

I like it, but I wouldn't do it all the time.

So that's where I would say dumbbell.

But even then, dumbbell is very limited because you can go really heavy and the individual loading and the fact that they can move out the entire way, you'd still squeeze at the top.

You can rest a bench with a bar at the top because it's all just going through your bone structure.

Not so much with dumbbells.

You're always adjusting.

Yeah.

You're never going to relax on the top of a dumbbell.

But what I think I'd have to pick now would actually be a seated cable press.

So if you've ever seen seat here, cable here, cable here.

You pull it in.

You're kind of like this.

Okay.

Do you stay neutral throughout that?

Pretty neutral, yeah.

So you're not allowing yourself.

Not inclined, not. decline, hands up a little bit.

Because that's a much more versatile set.

Because I can do it really heavy like a conventional press, but I can also go lighter and be much more squeeze emphasized.

Because those are the two bases I basically cover for every body part.

If I do a heavy one, I'm going to counter it with a lighter squeezing.

And to do only one, I think you'd be limiting your stimulus.

So that puts us at what is it?

That's four now.

So there's definitely on incline dumbbell press which I think for every guy is always going to be up there for chest.

It feels good on your shoulders.

It's always one of the first movements that you do when you get into the gym.

You feel like it's building the bit of the chest that you want, which is up here.

But if you do a really light set, you just don't feel it the same as you do if you're on cable.

So I understand that tension, especially because you're being pulled that way, not that way, right?

So you always have that... kind of you know widening force even at the top yeah that's a good point all right so that's four so extension curl pull down cable press yeah is that on on a little incline 30 degrees just flattish okay basically flat flat loaded all right because then you could also put your hands up a little and get more upper chest put it down a little get more being very cheeky okay number five so uh five and six for arms would be uh well for triceps first I'd probably have to pick just an easy bar curl push down.

So not the V bar.

Like 90 degrees is too much.

Straight is also a little too much on your wrists.

So a little camber, more like a 120, that's about right.

Because I can also do that light and squeezing, or you can really get into it and have some heft.

What are you thinking about with cues for that?

Are you more upright?

Have you got a little bit of bend in the hips?

Yeah, decently upright.

But if you stand too upright...

Well then, now you're like turning it into an ab exercise, because you're loading your arms downward and you have to keep yourself tense to stay there.

So I'll hunch over it.

Or if I'm doing a hard one, I'll put my head to the side of the cable and kind of like wrench it a little like that.

Not for all of them, but for some of them.

Okay.

And then dumbbells is just dumbbell curls.

It's hard to beat.

Seated, standing, supinated.

With it counted as different movements?

Yes.

Got to pick one.

I guess I'd have to just pick standing. standing supinated.

So more of a regular, a classic twist of neutral your, you know, your hips into supinated.

Cause just the, with some movements being able to change the load, completely changes the style of the movement.

Cause I could do the thirties and really hold it and squeeze it.

Or I could try to do like the seventies and have it be a much heavier kind of brunt sort of thing.

So that's a, all right, we're getting close to six now.

So you got four left.

Yeah.

So six now.

I can chill on shoulders, cause I don't.

I haven't done a real shoulder workout for like years.

At this point,

Cause they're just, they're already big.

Like they don't, relative, my arms need to grow.

So I would want to add a forearm curl cable.

Okay.

So you're holding the 1D handle, you know, cable up here.

I'm loading it down this way.

Like this is the force.

Okay.

And I'm just doing this okay, and it's not a huge movement yep, but it's like enough where you actually kind of thicken this up and i used to do a ton of that and then my forearms got big enough and then i never did it again, at least back on it, because the arms have caught up.

Now i'll add a little more, but it's uh yeah, and honestly, for just i think it was a joke that hugh jackman or someone, or stallone, worked their forearms like crazy, because when you're acting You're not always shirtless, but you're usually sleeveless.

And having big forearms makes you look extra cool.

So I guess after that, I'd probably have to add a calf raise just because.

Standing, seated?

Seated.

Seated is a little bit better.

Okay.

Even though you're going to be hitting, I always get these the wrong way around.

Yeah, they say the soleus, whatever.

For me, I feel it and my calves will grow from it.

So I've got my own anecdotal evidence of it worked.

Okay.

Got two left.

So the next one has to be the cardio bike, which not many people would add because they're thinking I don't even need to do cardio because it's not on their mind.

But that's, uh, yeah.

So seated.

And then the pedals are like where my feet are over here.

It's kind of a little bit further back.

It's a reclined position and it's the easiest one.

Little backrest.

My torso does not move.

So I can pedal as much as I want.

I'm just sitting and playing with my phone for 30 minutes.

Like you can do it and also make it easy.

Have you got a preferred machine for that?

Like to pre-call, make a particularly good, Just some of them, they have little handles.

Sometimes the handles are too close to where your knees are and you'll bump your knee on them.

That's my only gripe, but I'm not picky.

The one I have at my house is like.

I mean, it's the equivalent of one that you would get for free if you picked it up from like this out of the road, but it still works.

And actually that one's harder on a.

Well, it reads harder because sometimes the math that they do to calculate calories burned it's not completely.

Because if someone like me pedaled for 30 minutes at X difficulty, at X speed, an Olympic cyclist or like a marathon cyclist could do it at the same speed and the same difficulty.

And he would actually burn less calories because he's more efficient and I'm less efficient.

So it's not necessarily always aim for the same number.

It's like, I know the feeling of like, this is hard, but it's not too hard.

Like this is the right energy expenditure level.

I did that on a.

I've been getting into incline treadmill walking to get to zone two.

Zone two for me is really hard to hit.

It's way faster than a normal walk on the road and it's way slower than a jog.

And yeah, my incline preferred is like 3.5, 5%.

Three point for me.

32 at 15 is is nice, but i don't know what the metrics are of the, whatever the machine is.

That was in the uk and it was 3215 and i was like this doesn't feel right.

Okay, i'll just keep going up.

Four like four, still doesn't feel right.

Five, what the fuck is this number?

It got to 53 and like About that speed is off.

Yeah.

Is that miles per hour?

I don't know.

Cause it wouldn't be kilometers over here.

Cause it would still be miles per hour, whatever it was.

Yeah.

The exact same.

You go, I can go to a new machine.

And after you've done, you don't even need that many sessions.

What?

20, 30 sessions before you go.

I kind of understand how I'm supposed to feel and where my heart rate is supposed to be at.

Like just by a sense of breathing.

Okay.

So you got one left.

What's left?

Yeah.

One left.

Why haven't we done?

We haven't good.

You haven't touched abs.

You haven't touched glutes directly.

You haven't touched. shoulders directly.

What else is missing?

I think that's it.

Lower back, I guess.

In a bodybuilding sphere, you'd want your lower back developed enough, where it's got like a little texture.

But if it gets too big, it'll take away from your waist.

Because the whole point is this illusion of wider shoulders and a smaller waist.

So now that they're already developed, I probably wouldn't.

I don't hit my abs because they get worked, you know, kind of secondarily from even doing dumbbell curls.

I'm keeping myself stable.

Like once they're there and you're actually still working out, they're not going anywhere.

And then every time you look at yourself in the mirror, you're going to flex them.

Like they get worked enough to be maintained.

So that's why there's not a lot of ab workouts.

Because I did a lot before and now they're just not going to go anywhere.

Like same with shoulders.

So I'd have to, I'm a little reluctant, but I can't think of anything else I'd want to do.

I'd pick the adductor machine.

So that's where you're squeezing your legs together.

Okay.

Why?

It makes your legs a little thicker in the middle because it's this whole kind of like system of like kind of it ties in kind of below your knee more hamstring, but it's this sort of just piece right in the center where, if your adductors were completely undeveloped and you just sit up straight with your knees straight, you'd have a really big gap between your legs.

And you think you wouldn't be able to fully get that with the extension?

Well, the extension is just quad.

Because that's like a knee flexion.

And this is like leg, well, you know, I don't even know what you call it.

That.

Yeah.

Yeah, the joke is the, well, it's, I don't know, there's like two versions of a joke.

Because they'll call that one the ball crusher.

That's right.

You're squeezing legs together.

But the older like the joke that people say before was, that was either the good girl or the bad girl machine.

One's forcing it apart.

One's forcing it together.

I don't want to perpetuate that name, but that's kind of a reference to those.

Okay.

Very good.

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The single greatest skill you can develop is the ability to stay in a good mood in the absence of things to be in a good mood about.

I think that tweet has been my theme for 2025.

Um, it's been, it's, it's funny cause that was the most shared tweet I've ever had.

Um, and it was, it was like, it was almost, um, not the opposite of ironic, it was fitting, right?

It was completely fitting for the year.

And it's been because, like this year, I've had just, I would say, a series of unfortunate events that has occurred and it's really tested my tools right.

Tools in the tool belt for reframing reality so that I can make my experience less, you know, miserable.

And so I thought about that.

It's like if I were to boil everything down, of all the skills that you can learn.

If everything that we do eventually becomes irrelevant, then the single greatest skill that you can develop is being in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about.

And so one of the other frames on this is most people don't question someone who's in a bad mood.

Like I'm just in a bad mood.

So it's like well, if you can be in a bad mood for no reason, it's like you might as well be in a good mood for no reason, because that one at least serves you.

And so I've been trying to exercise like cause there's on one degree, there's like let's count things to be grateful for.

On the other side it's like why do I have to have things to be grateful for in order to be in a good mood?

Why is trying to find things a requirement of being in that mood?

Can I not find things and still choose to be in a good mood?

Because I've certainly not had things to be in a bad mood about and been in a bad mood.

And so I've been trying to flex that, which is like, sure, we can find things to be grateful for.

And when those things pop up, yes.

And of course, it's a practice, you get better at it.

But like, What if I can just be in a good mood?

And so I've just tried to break that relationship between the two, because then it makes it contingent on something that I can find.

How successful have you been at that?

Mediocre.

Well look, I think it's a lovely idea in isolation, in theory, but I'm not convinced about how effective it is in practice, for the reason that humans have a negativity bias.

It's our psychological entropy.

100, your ability to detect things that are a risk to you significantly better than your ability to detect things that are just pleasant, like this morning i texted you and i was like hey man, like i really love the feeling i have of anticipation on a morning before we do a podcast.

That's a normal boring, mundane source of pleasure to me.

Yeah, if i'm not really really training myself to notice that yeah, I just, it just fucking falls away with the fact that huh, I asked for almond milk and I bet this would have been better with like, whole milk.

That's the thing that ruins the day.

And the thing is, is you do notice it though, right?

You do notice that.

Um, so I've had um one of my themes this year has been focusing on moments, and on both the positive and the negative.

And so like when we think back on, if I think back on the last year right, I don't remember probably 95 of the year

Like I, you know, I did the same things.

And so it's like, it just didn't get recorded.

Like nothing notable happened.

And so, really like, when we think about a year, we really just recall a handful of moments and that's it.

And those moments in time are usually very short.

And so I've been trying to think about the bad.

You know seasons as well.

Maybe it wasn't a bad season.

Maybe I had five bad days, or really five bad moments that i then thought about for the entire season and turned what would have otherwise been five minutes times five into an entirely bad year, and so it's like okay well, if we can do that in the negative, can we do the positive, which is, you know, obviously the thing to exercise.

But to the point that you said earlier about our, our ability to detect threat and risk at such a such better accuracy than our ability to detect good things, it's so interesting because if you use that side of your brain um, not to derail us, but like I think that has been one of the things that's helped me a tremendous amount in business.

Because when I think about a business and I want to grow it, for example, I would think okay, what are all the things that can destroy this business?

And this is Charlie Munger.

This isn't me.

Um, but basically he says, invert, always invert.

And Einstein said that too.

And it's because, like you get to use this this way, stronger horsepower engine of like, how do I grow my business?

That's, you could obviously think that way, but the alternative would be like, how would I absolutely destroy this business in the fewest possible moves?

And then when you list out those moves, you're like, cool, now let's do the opposite of that.

And that has been um.

Honestly, a lot of the some of the sources of my greatest kind of creative moments have come from these apparently obvious things that would kill us.

Well, what if we did the even more obvious thing and did the, the opposite of what would destroy us?

Um, and it's worked, it's worked, um, better than I deserve.

So this is the problem.

Yeah.

Uh, you can be rewarded professionally for focusing on things that you do not want to focus on personally.

And Ryan long taught me this.

He was talking about how he's comedian, Canadian comedian, really funny guy spends all of this time, you know, dialing in these bits and obsessing over how it could be better.

And then he says to himself, uh, Yeah, but I don't want you to do that in your relationships.

No, can you let that go when it comes to the way that you show up for your partner or your friends, or your body image or whatever?

You don't get to compartmentalize stuff like that.

And it is a very unfortunate irony of the world that the skill set you often need to become successful in business is the one you need to get rid of to be happy in your life.

Yes.

So I was thinking about what you were saying earlier with regards to risk and our ability to detect it.

So the other part of that that's been really interesting is we also not only do we detect more threats, we also overemphasize how catastrophic they could be.

And the converse of that is we rarely identify the upside.

And when we do, we typically underestimate the upside.

And I think this is something that a lot of people don't talk about as much.

Um, obviously I always have a business hat on literally.

Uh and.

But I think about this because I think this is where, like you said at the very beginning, that people complain because they cannot accurately view reality.

And so if we tie that to this concept, then it means that people will disproportionately blame the universe and then perceive significantly greater risk for them.

Asking a girl out, starting a business, taking a loan uh, you know.

Asking a stranger to buy something, making a podcast for fear of what other people on the internet will say, or people who know them.

So we catastrophize this side, but the flip side is and you hear this a lot when people do make it and whatnot, they're like I never dreamed it would be this big.

Now, some people are obsessive and absolutely have thought through everything.

I fall more on that side.

But on the other hand though, a lot of people do get there and they're like I never thought it was going to be this big.

And it's because we typically just under-emphasize the upside, which is where, from the business perspective, it's like that's where the office, that's where the outperformance exists, where most people think hey, this bet it could go to zero.

And you're like, I don't think it's going to go to zero.

But even if it did go to zero, I have a 10X here.

And so if I have a 50 shot at a 10X and the other 50 is zero, I should take that shot every single time, knowing that I'm going to be wrong half the time.

It still makes sense to take.

And so I think people are not good at making those risk-adjusted return bets, obviously financially, but even in the very micro aspect of our lives.

And so the we talked earlier about uh, you know, the cosmic irrelevance and the frame of the veteran.

But there's a third frame that I think about a lot, which is, I call it, play it out.

And so it's like let's no let's, let's sit in there because again, fear exists in the vague, not in the specific, and in the resistance.

Yes.

And so like when we have these, um, these specificities of like, okay, I'm going to start a pot.

I can't start a pocket.

Like, okay, it's this big vague thing, but no, like let's play it out.

Like, let's see what actually would happen.

So I'm going to upload something and And then people don't listen to it.

Okay.

Well, they didn't listen to it.

Okay.

Well then that's not a problem.

Okay.

Let's say people.

Let's see tons of people listen to it, which I don't know how that magically happens.

But let's say, tons of people listen to it and they all hate it.

Okay.

Immediately you have this anxiety that we're, but let's play it out.

Like what's happens next?

It's like, okay, is it going to change what I eat?

Is it going to change where I sleep?

Okay.

Let's say, let's say I, all of a sudden I lose all the money that I have.

It's like okay well, I probably have a bunch of people that if I really needed to sleep on their couch or in a spare bedroom, I could do that.

Okay.

So I'm not really going to be homeless.

And if I really didn't have enough money for food, I can go to a homeless shelter and get food.

Right.

So it was like wait.

So my worst case scenario is like I have shelter and I have food and I'm still breathing air.

So that's the downside.

And so there's this catastrophizing that we, cause we, our brains are meant to keep us alive.

We literally think if we fail, we die.

Like everyone will ostracize us from the group and we will be alone and die.

And so just actually playing it out, not one step but like two more steps after that.

You're like okay, so my actual downside risk is nothing, but my upside is everything I've wanted.

And even if I, even if I'm at 50 off on that, it's still worth the shot.

It's very healthy to have um an inner critic, but it's also, it's the there's the golden rule.

And then there's the, there's the platinum rule, right?

There's the treat others as you want to be treated.

And then there's the treat yourself as you treat others.

Most people are very kind.

Like you're nicer to me than you are to yourself.

Like if you said the shit you say to yourself to me, we wouldn't be friends.

Um, and i think that thing of like the the inner critic has to be, it's um, as long as it's process driven, i think it's, it's very, very healthy.

Yeah, it's like imposter syndrome.

Yeah okay, feel like an imposter for a while, as long as it gives you, as long as you can get that to a granular level where it gives you something to work on.

Like the inner critic can't just be, it can't just be like that's bad, it's got to be Or that didn't work.

So we need to change it.

Or that one's not going to work, so we're going to write something new.

It's got to be something that's like you're working towards something.

You're aiming up.

And I think criticism is very important.

I mean, Walt Disney used to do this thing where he had three rooms.

You know this thing of like one for creativity, one for sort of management.

Like how would you do the idea?

And then it was only in the third room that you were allowed to be critical.

It's kind of fun idea of like going to sort of compartmentalize.

Well, I do think that thing of like never refuse the muse.

If you're working in anything creative, just write it down.

If something comes to you, you just write it down.

That's the Naval one, right?

Inspiration is perishable.

Act on it immediately.

Yeah.

Yeah, Tim Ferriss says, the world rewards the specific ask and punishes the vague wish.

And I think that sort of inner critic voice can expand out into I don't feel good about the thing I did.

Okay, well, that's probably the first place that everybody gets.

I'm not really too sure about why, but there's some sense of discontent about something that just happened or something that I'm about to do.

Probably very normal.

You don't know where it's coming from and you don't know what it's about and you don't know what to do to fix it.

Okay.

So how about we get away from the vague critic and we move toward the specific coach with regards to this?

Okay, so what precisely, is it that you're concerned about?

Well, i don't feel fully prepared for the presentation i've got to give tomorrow.

Okay, is that fair?

Do you know that it's true?

Do you think that you haven't prepared enough?

Oh, i actually have prepared quite a lot.

To be honest, i think this is probably just my fear, trying to be sneaky and sort of turn itself into a way that i'm going to believe it all right.

Well, what are you going to do about it?

Well, i'll just check my notes a few more times and actually huh, it seems like i do know this pretty well the the, The inner critic.

It's not often wrong.

It's just, you can say it in a nice way.

You know, sometimes it's right.

Sometimes you fuck up.

Sometimes it's not, it wasn't good enough.

And that's okay.

It's like, it's the, it's the idea of like going, it's not repetition, it's iteration.

It's like lots of different.

You know, doing the same thing again and again doesn't make you better, but like tweaking it.

And knowing what to tweak is that you have to listen to an inner critic.

I think the – is it Hormozy?

Hormozy is so good for quotes.

But I think it was self-confidence without evidence is delusion.

Some version of that.

Confidence without competence is delusion.

Yeah.

It's so true.

And you do meet people along the way that have that incredible – confidence, or they they, they sort of exude that and then they, they don't have the, the confidence to back it up and you go well no no, you need to, you need to be able to.

So, finding that, i think it's very.

I think, without that inner critic, i think we would all be kind of delusional, wandering around, going yeah, you know yeah, george says uh, there's someone with half your talent, but five times your self-belief, making 10 times the money.

Yes, and that's that's true, for for every british person there's an american, exactly.

Well, i mean look, i i think for the perennial overthinkers, reframing this very well trodden landscape of inner criticism, A lot of the way that you can look at that is I'm fragile.

My self-belief exists on a knife edge.

It feels like I'm tightrope walking confidence, perhaps.

I think a better way to look at it is you're not fragile, you're just finely tuned.

And in the same way as a Ferrari can go really, really fast, especially around a track.

But if you don't treat it very well, it's probably going to break down quite a lot, actually.

And if you treat it really well, it's still going to have a couple of hiccups and days where it doesn't fully operate, rightly.

But yeah, you're not fragile, you're finely tuned is a nice reframe.

It's so easy to be kind to other people and sometimes so difficult to be kind to yourself.

I think you wouldn't let someone else speak to a friend like that.

You just wouldn't stand for it.

And yet you're in a critic.

You're just like yeah, say terrible things to me, just accept it as it comes.

Yeah, i uh That idea on.

You had a position and disposition.

This has happened a couple of times.

I misremember things that guests tell me.

And then I write about the thing that I misremembered.

And what you realize is that you've actually built on something that they didn't mean.

And I think I told you about this before, but I'm going to, I'm going to tell you about it again.

So, uh, this is after our first episode, 18 months ago, something like that.

My chat with Jimmy Carr a few weeks ago inspired an idea.

I've been reflecting on how your trajectory is way more important than your position.

If you're number two in the world but last year you were number one that is way worse than sitting at number 150 but being on a huge upward slope from 300 12 months ago.

There's a few reasons for this.

Recency bias.

If your value is increasing right now, that means you have to be popular at the moment.

By looking at recent trajectory, you are selecting for only the few people who are trendy right now, which is really all that we can remember.

We can also romanticize where someone will be in future if they're currently hot stuff.

How high might they climb?

Who knows?

Maybe to the top, maybe even beyond the top.

Humans struggle to realize that everything is temporary, including growth and decline.

Instead, it's easier to label people as heroes and losers based on what we know of them right now, so we don't have to predict a messy future.

There's an old saying saying that there's three types of people on a ladder.

One at the bottom, one at the middle, and one at the top.

Which one is the best to be?

The one that's still climbing.

Yeah.

No, I think, I think it's fantastic.

It's very well put.

Um yeah, I think that especially in show business, trajectory really seems to be such an important metric.

And it's like you could be half the size of some other comic, but they've been around 20 years and they always sell out the arena.

So who cares?

It's like, it's novelty dopamine.

This is new recency bias.

Yeah.

I think there's a, there's a thing this year where, um, oasis are playing uh and it's a big deal people are very excited about it and i think coldplay are doing i think it's 10 or 11 nights at wembley state everyone's like chris martin bored of you been around for ages yeah well of course you are yeah you're a big band but it's like but it's not like uh an event culturally in the same way that oasis coming together is there's a there's a narrative to that and a trajectory of kind of where they are that's and coldplay have just been steadily listen and if taylor swift does 15 nights next year it'll be a yeah yeah of course of course accepted yeah so that thing of like other people getting excited about it and i think i don't know what it feels like to be uh you know in coldplay at the moment and maybe people aren't making as much fuss i hope they're celebrating i hope they're i hope they're taking time to go this is fantastic has no longer having the olympia impacted your drive and passion in other areas of your life you know you've got the dad husband thing business desire to work on yourself in a sort of from a personal standpoint how have you found drive and motivation separate and also wrapped up in what you were doing previously mm-hmm I wouldn't say it directly decreased because there's no Olympia, but I think almost as like a byproduct of what the Olympia was for me of like a schedule of a year of like the first half of the year is X. you have some time off, you can recover, give yourself a break.

And then you start to ramp up, you travel, focus on business.

And then near the end, you go inward, you figure out what's driving you, what's pulling you back right now.

Self-reflect, spend time away from bullshit, focus on yourself, be selfish.

Work intense schedule.

And it was this organized routine.

And then all of a sudden, it was all gone.

And that, on top of the singular goal being like where do I put my energy now, I think, definitely left me in a place of feeling a little bit lost.

I'm not figuring out like, where do do I still have the passion for anything?

Where do I find that energy to put into something?

What do I put it into?

Does it even exist?

Will it exist again?

And then it kind of led to me.

Then I had an injury.

I stopped working out for a while and I just started to wake up in the morning, exhausted and not knowing what to do.

Going in and helping with this business, going on this trip, for that travel and meeting here was a distribution center of all these little things, for all these other things that weren't really like driving me.

I didn't have like an important big role in them.

I was just like kind of coasting through and I started to wake up and feel pretty lost in general, of like where do I, where am I progressing to?

Essentially

And that was when I was kind of like what I'm, honestly, I'm still working through it.

I don't have this answer, but like thing i'm working for is just like empathizing with myself that i don't need to be constantly progressing towards something, that i don't need to be getting better and have this big goal and doing x, and i can just sit and rest for a while and like, truly just like, do nothing and be good enough as that is and let something come and figure it as it goes and that's it.

That was tough for me.

It is tough for me and, speaking in proper verbiage, of figuring that out, And the funniest little thing of what has made me feel better recently was working out again on a schedule and eating five meals a day and weighing up my food and having that little bit of structure of like and not having to as well.

It's like all this stuff's going on in my life.

I don't know.

I'm kind of lost.

What can I do?

Well, I can go work out again and I don't have to.

So now I'm choosing to.

Well, why are you still working out so hard?

Why are you training so hard?

It's like, well, I just, cause I love it.

I feel good.

Why I used to do it 12 years ago.

Exactly.

And that's all of a sudden, I'm getting more and more excited to go back in the gym where even in prep last year I started.

Oh, I have to go work out.

And then all of a sudden I start to feel better day to day.

And it's these little changes.

And I realized this is truly how I fell in love with the gym and why I'm such a big advocate of weightlifting.

Like, I honestly kind of hope I don't inspire people to get into bodybuilding because it's tough.

It's fucked up.

It's not good for your health.

But I do want to inspire people to go lift weights, get in the gym and want to get jacked because it's such like oh, I'm lost.

I don't know what to do.

Just go work out, apply some discipline, work hard, find something you love.

That's like difficult, that shows you progress, builds confidence, and just go do it.

And then from there, then you can clear your mind a little bit, have self-confidence, start looking around a little bit more clear, start looking inward and figuring out what is next for you and finding that next goal and working towards it.

So for me, that's why I like, I just fucking love the gym so much.

And I'm so grateful that I'm back to a point of like loving the gym.

This is the cash value.

Oh, this was the price that you pay in retirement.

I think you know cause what you're talking about.

It's going to be difficult and things will be hard and you won't have the drive or the goal that you used to in the past.

All of those things that kind of fluffy concepts, but they come into the land.

They actually sort of meet reality with.

I woke up on the morning and didn't know what to do.

I felt tired a lot.

I didn't want to train.

I was tired, short and snappy.

With my business partners, i found myself getting distracted with lots of little tasks.

Because it made me feel important and like people needed me, i packed my calendar out and did, because a lot of the time in advance of something happening, we probably have a good idea about what it's going to be like in the macro, but what we don't know is how it's actually going to appear manifest in life and it's navigating those things.

So, for instance, i've been sick for the last 18 months or so and that's been hard and i knew, based on what the trajectory was going to be, what was going to be tough, that i was going to have a lot of self-doubt, that i was going to lose confidence and self-esteem that um, i would feel like i was moving backward.

All of these things uh, But the way that that actually appears, like the individual building block thoughts that you have, like that mean random little voice, or that one night where you ruminate about that one thing, or you're more sensitive to criticism, and that one comment from that person.

You can't really focus on your meditation as much.

Like none of those are, I am going to lose confidence.

They are the individual incidents that contribute to my confidence has gone down.

Even if you knew it was going to happen in advance.

And even if in retrospect you can say oh wow, both of these things converged, each of the little steps that occurred to make that happen kind of come out of nowhere a little bit, because you don't know the effect of each little thing.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

So it's the pack calendar, the lots of travel, the I'm tired.

I don't really want to go train.

I don't really, I'm not weighing my food.

I'm maybe eating weird diets compared with what I used to.

And this lack of structure feels alien and uncomfortable to me.

But it also feels like relapse or or uh rest or uh change or variation.

But that's also uncomfortable because it's unfamiliar.

And yeah, each of these little building blocks is contributing to that.

Like, I don't feel like me.

I don't feel like me and, and not in the way that I wanted to either.

Yeah.

And it creeps in like that and you have absolutely no idea that it's coming.

Until one day you're like I don't feel good.

Mm.

It's definitely interesting.

I feel like I've needed to treat myself like a science experiment of taking and removing pieces and see what's important.

It's like, okay, bodybuilding was creating a bit of pressure and stress in my life.

Is it everything related to that or was it the whole?

You know so, like as I pulled out like well, I'm not competing anymore, I don't need to eat on a schedule, I don't need to train at the same time, I don't need to leave my phone outside the gym and be locked in and focus as much, I don't need to wake up with my alarm, I can kind of sleep, I can do all these little things that I can let go of because now I don't have to, because the goal is different.

But then i start to not feel good and it was like okay, it wasn't those things that weren't making me feel bad, those were actually making me feel good, it was the outcome, like i said before.

So now taking those things that from bodybuilding put in the back in my life and really think, oh wait, the structure and the discipline makes me feel better, it fills me with more confidence and ability to go do other things, rather than taking it regardless of whether it's in service of becoming mr olympia.

Yeah, and i mean, i know those things but, like you said, it was All of a sudden.

I was like, oh well, I'll just cut one meal out because like I'm busy now.

Oh, well, my shoulder's injured, so I'm going to do my rehab.

But, like, I don't really want to.

You know, I'm going to take today off.

I'm not competing this year.

Like, who even cares?

Who cares?

Yeah, I'm busy.

I'm going to reply to emails in between sets.

I'm going to sleep in because I went to bed late last night.

Like, all these little things.

Next thing you know, you're like, oh, I feel like shit.

I don't want to do anything.

And you're way harder to pull yourself out of that than if you'd cut it earlier.

So that's life though.

You know, there's no direct descent to the top.

It's ups and downs and building a new self as you go.

As a dad, you got one job.

Love her.

If you want to raise successful kids, especially boys, you have one job.

Love his mom.

That's so sick.

It's crazy, but it's great in its way.

It's beautiful in its way.

Here's the funny thing.

People often ask, what do I do?

What should I teach my kids?

It doesn't matter what you tell them, language show them all that matters what you do.

So the number one predictor, for example, of kids growing up and practicing a religion is whether their father practices a religion.

There's like a 40 percentage point difference in the father and the mother practicing on the predictive ability, on the predictive capacity on how, on how the kids are going to grow up and behave.

And there's almost almost certainly the case.

It's because, i mean, when i was a little kid i thought my dad was, you know, i thought he could lift the corner of the house.

My dad was a math professor.

He could not.

Now i realized he was a nerd, but at the time i thought he was cool nerd.

Yeah, now that i'm a nerd, i recognize that.

But and my dad was very proud guy i mean he never would have bent the knee to any other man, but he was on his knees on sunday and that had a big impact on a little dude.

There's something bigger than my dad and i saw it and it's like it's in there right.

That's really important in every part of life.

If you want to teach virtue, practice virtue.

Be the person you want your kids to actually turn into, And they will become that.

Generally speaking, they'll become that person.

Yeah, I was thinking about this generation, both millennials and Gen Z, the progeny of parents who didn't have the tools to sort of relate or navigate in the same way as an infinite number of evidence-based relationship coaches and the podcast world and the self-help and all the rest of it.

Uh, I think I wonder how they should go about thinking.

Well, I didn't necessarily have the best example in front of me, because there was challenges here and we did have uh, changing dynamics and motivations around the acceptance of divorce.

And maybe I did grow up in a non intact home and such.

Uh, but that sets expectations for a good relationship is supposed to be now.

And there's this interesting uh, not a burden, I suppose, but a responsibility, opportunity to be a circuit breaker.

Right.

And to think, you know, Goggins talks about this.

So you know, he explains about how um his dad hit him a lot as a kid and he had a brother and sometimes Goggins sort of took the beatings in place of his brother.

But he also found out that his granddad would make his father stand in front of an open stove.

And if he moved, he would hit him with a belt as a kid.

So you have this lineage, this like ancestral literal, ancestral trauma, but physically being passed down.

Plus also probably epigenetically being fucking passed down as well.

Uh, and I asked David, I didn't even know that this was the case.

It was really kind of beautiful of him to say on the, on the podcast.

I said, uh, if you had a child, uh, how would you hope to raise them?

So I do have a child.

I've got a 22 year old daughter.

He'd never mentioned it previously.

And he brought it up on, on the episode.

And he said he basically sees himself as kind of like a dam, sort of a breakwater, this circuit breaker thing in between the series of mistreatments of people.

Right.

Like no more.

And I kind of think.

I often think about that example when it comes to stuff like um, your parents didn't necessarily have the tools you do.

You didn't have an example, but you have the opportunity.

And you have the metacognitive ability to manage your emotions so they don't manage you.

This is the most important thing to keep in mind.

We're talking about the psychology being biology, but we also have will.

We also have a prefrontal cortex for a reason.

That's the most important part of the neurobiology of all is the C-suite of your brain, where you're actually making decisions, notwithstanding your proclivities.

I mean, you've got these urges.

We all have these urges.

You look at a woman who's not your wife and you go, oh man, she's really really attractive and all that.

And then your prefrontal cortex, which is the behavioral activation system, the behavioral inhibition system, that's in the prefrontal cortex, BIS and BAS, behavioral inhibition and behavioral activation, right?

And behavioral inhibition is more important, because I want to hit my son and my prefrontal cortex says uh-uh no, because my father hit me and I'm not my trauma.

That's a perfect example of metacognition.

That's a perfect example of being the master of yourself.

And we actually can do that, but you gotta have knowledge.

You have to be strong, but you also actually have to have knowledge.

And that's why all this stuff matters.

That's how I teach happiness is.

Happiness is really a process of understanding the science, practicing habits that go along with the science and then teaching it to other people.

So you ingrain it in yourself and that's anything that you want to do, anything you want to get better at.

If you want to become a better golfer, learn about golf and golf and teach golf.

You know, doctors, when they're becoming surgeons, they always say, watch one, do one, teach one.

That's how you become a surgeon.

Anything in life actually follows that basic pattern.

But you must have the knowledge such that the habits that you practice are not the habits that are just kind of lurking in your limbic system and being epigenetically expressed from the misbehavior of people six generations ago or some crazy thing like that.

We should not be prisoners of that.

Yeah, this is gorgeous idea from uh.

Robert writes why buddhism is true.

That's a nice book, fuck dude, blending evolutionary psychology, i know, with buddhism.

Uh, because the book that got me into uh, ep was um, the moral animal.

Yeah, from 1991 or 1992 or something, and it's still.

This is some of the stuff little, uh replication crisis, but most of it's shit hot and i loved it.

The replication crisis, a big problem in my field.

Yeah, a lot of people make their careers, to be true, and grandma would have said uh, i mean, i can find you a study that shows that that conjugal infidelity will bring happiness.

I mean, i'm sure i could right motivated reasoning by a researcher that for darling darling honestly, i only did it.

Not only did i not love her, but i did this for us.

I know exactly, and besides, studies show so and anyway so, but and and and but.

The whole problem, if it, if a study and this is like you're talking about evolutionary psychology all the time and biology all the time, and this is my stock and trade as behavioral scientist for everybody watching If your grandma would hear this result and say that's wrong, she's probably right.

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Why do you think so many girls are drawn to therapy culture?

Oh, I think it's a lot of things.

Um, I do think this is kind of a cliche thing to say now, but I do think therapy culture has replaced religion.

And that's not a new thing to say.

People have been saying that for a long time.

So Christopher Lash was writing about that in the 70s.

Frank Ferudy writes about it really well now.

But in recent years, since social media I would say therapy culture has just escalated to the point where I think young women don't see it as a worldview.

They just see that as kind of life.

So they interpret everything through this therapeutic lens.

So their lives, their relationships, their emotions.

And I think it has elevated to the level of religion.

So you think of all the kind of characteristics of religion.

We just mimic them with therapy culture.

So instead of praying, we just repeat our positive affirmations.

Instead of, like seeking salvation, you'll go on like a healing journey.

Instead of resisting temptation from the devil, you'll reframe your intrusive thoughts.

And so I think, for young women in particular, who are becoming less religious, this kind of therapeutic worldview has completely replaced that void.

What does a therapeutic worldview consist of?

What does that mean?

Like seeing problems in your life kind of pathologizing problems and experiences as something medical, rather than I'm just experiencing this emotion or kind of age-old anxiety.

Now it's become a medical issue.

So things like talking in the language of attachment styles and trauma and losing the language of just ordinary hurt and disappointment and things like that.

And for some reason this is giving some kind of solace or comfort.

Yeah.

Order being brought out of chaos.

I think it gives the comfort religion gives and the consolation of like you see young women on TikTok saying things like, like they won't pray to God but they'll give a request to the universe and like have faith in that.

And so I think it gives all the comfort of religion, but it takes away the inconvenient parts.

So the, any actual demands on you or kind of restrictions on your freedom or anything like that.

Being held to standards of behavior, etc.

So it has what women are craving in modern life, I think, which is belonging and security in something and faith in something.

But it's a much easier version of religion.

Slippery religion.

Yeah, yeah.

How many of these girls are in therapy, do you think?

A lot.

There was a study recently showing 32 of all 12 to 17 year olds in america have either had therapy, been on medication or had some kind of treatment in 2023.

Um, over a single year.

One third, which is insane.

And i was talking to someone about that statistic and they were like oh, that's great, that's amazing, and i was thinking that's a bleak statistic.

Um, so yeah, i think there's.

There's the girls that are in therapy, which is a lot, but then there's also the girls who just like living in therapy culture.

So it's just, They scroll through Instagram and it's all about attachment styles, trauma.

They go on TikTok and it's like a trauma-informed therapist telling them red flags they should watch out for and stuff.

It's just like there's the actual therapy, which I'm sure there is.

There's useful therapists, but there's also just this culture, which is just the world that they're swimming in.

Yeah, so you're never able to switch it off.

I think Alain de Botton was sat in that same seat as you.

Mm-hmm, big proponent of psychotherapy, I think, trained as a psychotherapist himself too, owns a school of life which isn't just a YouTube channel but a psychotherapy facility here in London.

And even he, like the biggest proponent of it, I think, would very much say that there is a time for therapizing.

And then there is a time to not in the same way as going to the gym.

There is a time to train and then there is a time to recover.

And I wonder whether one of the criticisms that's common that I put to him was uh, lots of people online, more old school people, more sort of typical stiff upper lip type people yeah would say uh, you're not fixing your past problems, you're dwelling on them, and by dwelling on them you are ruminating too much.

There is some evidence i mean a good bit of evidence.

Rumination is not particularly fantastic for you.

And finding this line between yeah mate, we don't want to deny that bad things happen, to never alchemize them or transcend and include them into our life yeah, And then, on the other side, we don't want to wallow in them.

But I suppose if you have the online environment that you exist within permanently using this language, you're permanently having these structures and these thinking patterns reinforced.

And then it's how you begin to talk to yourself about what happens offline.

And then you also have, you know, facilitation or medication or conversations with your friends online, further embracing all of that it's you're just entrenched in this all the time.

Yeah well, i used to think and i think a lot of people think therapy culture is particularly bad for men because it it kind of has a female approach to problems and it's about you know, ruminating and often it's like if you don't have a female response, there's something wrong with you.

It's kind of a red flag if you don't go to therapy.

But i actually changed my mind on that and i actually think therapy culture is worse for women because women ruminate more, playing into the weakness that they already have or the disposition.

Yeah, if you think of an anxious young 14 year old girl, the worst thing you can tell her is to go further into her own head to get relief and to think more about her problems and to kind of search her life for symptoms.

You know that if you told me that at 14, it's the worst thing I could have heard.

So I actually think maybe some men do need to do that a little bit more, but the average young girl needs to kind of cut out.

I wonder whether Therapy language and therapy culture for girls is what gym language, gym culture SARMs testosterone, steroids at 17 is for guys.

Yeah, I think it's a form of control.

So it's like, it's our version of control.

You know, if we feel uncomfortable or feel an uneasy emotion, we're just like.

I'm going to categorize that and diagnose it.

You know, that's my attachment disorder or that's my depression.

And I think men do that.

They have their own kind of self-optimization trends and the gym stuff where that can become like a form of control to deal with kind of uneasy emotions.

And I think, yeah, this is the woman's version of that.

It's like we can't sit with it or just accept like a painful situation.

So I often think about so.

If you look at these kind of attachment style forums or girls talking about their attachment styles, Very often they'll describe just a bad relationship and then they'll say oh, it's my attachment disorder.

So they'll be like, he cheated on me and I can't get over it because of my anxious attachment.

And it's like it's so sad because actually losing the language to talk about the actual problem that they're facing, because they're trying to get control.

Because it's a lot easier to be like, oh, you know, I'm anxious or he's avoidant.

Then we have a terrible relationship and I've just wasted time, four years, with someone.

You get the control through the therapy culture.

So that's where I see it becoming a danger to girls and young women.

What's the difference between a nice guy and a good man?

Yeah.

Right about that in there, but a nice guy gets along.

Yeah, I'll do that.

They don't necessarily have discernment or judgment, not sure what they stand for or stand against.

It's like, yes, yes, yes, sure.

Yeah.

Hey, a good man has ideals that they stand for and they'll stand against.

And when they're tested, a good man is not a nice guy.

That's in the chapter of manning up.

You know, that's I was that time when I was doing the rom-coms, that's all I could do.

I was feeling like my work was just me as a nice guy.

And in life, I was not just a nice guy.

Like I said, Camilla's pregnant.

I got a child coming.

I was feral with masculinity.

And in my work, maybe I was feeling a bit neutered.

And I was like, well, I'm a good guy and a good man in life, but I'm just a nice guy at work.

Can I be roles that can be a good man?

And that was dramas.

Because in dramas, you can stand for or stand against something.

Your ceiling for pleasure and your basement for fame are up to you.

How do you feel about it?

And no direction can go, that's too much.

That's not enough.

You got too angry there.

Oh, you meant that too much.

That didn't come in a drama.

Those come in a rom-com, right?

Because the emotions and how you feel are compressed to be in a buoyant level and a threshold that's up balancing from cloud to cloud only.

Dramas are as much pain, as much evil as you want to go, as deep dark you want to go.

Get there.

Let's see how far you go.

How high you want to fly.

How close to that sun you get before you get burned.

Go.

See how far you go.

That's what you get in drama.

Much more like real life.

And so, you know, good guys, being a good man is a lot harder.

For good reason.

You're not going to be most popular.

You're not going to be always most affable.

It also doesn't mean you've got to be a dick or an asshole.

It just means...

Sometimes you're going to go, I believe in this, this is for me, and that is not for me.

And because that is not for me, if you do trespass into my space, upon me and my family, I will do my best to cause consequences.

And I'm going to let you know that.

I hope that's apparent.

Because I'm not going to intrude on you, but if you trespass that, I'm going to stand up for it.

And we can talk our way out of that?

Great.

No, it doesn't always work that way.

A good man's not looking for trouble.

But if it comes and if he or something he cares about and loves were susceptible to being trespassed on by trouble, a good man does what he can to stop that.

So Aaron Bugsy tells this story.

He famously had his house.

A robbery attempt occurred on his very nice house in Manchester.

Manchester's got some spicy individuals in it from the gang culture.

And there is a CCTV video of him.

Now, by this point, this is, I think, 21 or 22.

So he's been in the first movie.

He has had multiple huge albums, world tour, rapping, done all the things.

Most played fire in the booth, freestyle in history, all of this stuff, right?

So you might think, even though he came from below the streets sort of, he came from the sewers as a kid, he has a public image to keep up.

Maybe he's got soft, the sort of velvet prison, silk pajamas problem.

And he told me this story.

And his girlfriend rings.

She's in the house.

These men are trying to break in.

There's a barricade.

So he's driving back with his sister in the car.

He's driving back.

And there's a guy by the side of the road, and you can see he's got a brick in his hand.

So Aaron stops the car, opens the door, and immediately says, mate, is that you?

Blue shirt, that's such a nice blue shirt.

And as he's moving toward him, he puts his hands in the air like this.

He's moving toward him, he's moving toward him.

Hits this guy, brick drops, finishes him off, gets back in the car.

And this bit's captured on CCTV, and somebody overlaid it with the call to the police.

So there's a 999 call going on from, I think, his mum, who's in the house.

These men are trying to break in.

And you see him pull up in this Mercedes.

This guy, been in movies, don't know the rest of it.

And it's a van of dudes.

It's a van of men.

Trying to break in.

Yeah, trying to rob his house.

And see, it's rich.

He's got something that we want.

He's already dealt with one of them.

He might have dealt with another one of them as well.

And he pulls in in this fancy mercedes.

You see, this guy, who's got kind of world at his feet, opens the door to his mercedes, pulls his shirt off and just sprints at this van.

And he it was fucking electric, bro.

He told me this story is so electric and that's on cctv.

That's great.

There's best video he ever made right there.

Huh, so hardcore, it's so hardcore.

Um, but yeah that's, you know.

Good man, nice guy.

From the inside it's very hard to know who you are.

And one of the interesting things is how people go a bit mad when they spent too long alone.

If you spend a long time alone, you sort of you don't know, certain thoughts go a little too far.

And one of the great things about company, you know why do we need other people just to be able to kind of hold us slightly in check.

In small ways, and large they they kind of go.

No, that thought is getting a little too extreme.

Whatever they, they define us um, but also the other thing that people help us to do other people is give us a compact sense of who we are.

That eludes us.

So I see you and I go, there's Chris.

Now, when you're alone, you don't think you're Chris.

You just think I'm consciousness in the universe.

I'm just, you know, i'm just a giant net that's capturing thoughts and impressions.

You don't know that you have a name, a beginning, a middle or an end, etc.

And when we're in company, people go oh, you're that guy who does this, or you know you've.

So other people's caricatured vision of us is actually quite helpful to us because you think oh, you know i'm.

I'm that relatively simple soul that unifies us, gives us a sense of story.

Yeah, and also because If I look at you, you look unified.

You've got two eyes, a nose, a mouth.

You're relatively compact, but inside you, you don't feel any of that.

It's a vast, shapeless landscape.

Is self-esteem related to imposter syndrome?

I think imposter syndrome was already something that I was seeing a lot of, and now I'm seeing more about increasingly this sense that the world expects something of me that maybe I've even actually done previously, but I'm scared about whether or not I'm going to be able to deliver it.

Look, I think it's.

I know imposter syndrome causes people problems, but I'm reassured.

If somebody suffers from imposter syndrome, it's a sign of honesty.

It's a sign of self-awareness.

Of course, it has its extreme versions, which causes people a lot of pain.

But if someone is aware that they might be a charlatan or might be pulling off a confidence trick, That's honesty.

That's great.

That's a starting point.

It's just like somebody who knows they might be evil is a good person.

Evil people don't worry.

They might be evil.

So you're likely to be authentic and genuine if sometimes you think, am I a fake?

That's a good sign.

It's a good starting point, in the same way as identifying that you're a bad driver is a good starting point for not driving fast.

But it doesn't necessarily make you better on the roads.

So where do we go to?

Where is becoming a better driver?

Okay.

My imposter syndrome, thank you, Alain.

You've told me that I'm not so up my own ass that I can't see my own flaws.

Hooray.

What about starting to work through that?

What about starting to get a better sense of our own capacities and capabilities?

Look, a lot of it is bouncing against the world and testing yourself against reality.

It's very hard to know your talents until you've had a go at something.

And I think we all have this sense sometimes that some things come more easily to us than to others.

You but they must have a sense.

Ooh, I was able to hit that ball and that worked quite well.

Or a great writer is able to think, I was able to pull off quite a nice little sentence there.

And that's the beginning of a kind of growing confidence.

And you need that kind of start.

And I think a good life doesn't require you to do everything it.

It requires you to do the things that you feel you're capable of and that you're especially good at.

Um, it's no humiliation for me that i can't play tennis, for example.

If somebody goes, you know you're terrible because there's i don't sense a talent, but I do sense talent in that tiny area of assembling words.

That's the area that, you know, but maths I can't do, you know, architecture I can't really do, etc.

So many things I can't do.

So it's about finding those little sweet spots.

And one of the great puzzles in life is how do people find their vocation?

How do people find their core identity, their talents?

And I sometimes think of it as It's like you're passing a metal detector over the ground and very occasionally, something will let off a little beep, a beep of intensity, of interest, of heightened thoughtfulness.

And you think there's a fragment here below the ground of my true self.

Now, my true self was shattered or it came in disassembled form.

It's buried.

It's scattered over a vast area.

And the task of life is to recreate it from hints.

And I think that I think one of the big, big challenges and it happens to every young person is what should I do with my life?

It's one of these central questions of philosophy in a way.

Because unless you're a very rare person, you will have to assemble a vision of your future.

It's not going to come ready-made and there won't be a voice from the sky going you are an accountant or you are a downhill skier.

It's going to be something you have to assemble.

And you'll assemble it In bits.

You'll have to recreate the original statue of you that was shattered a long time ago and that lies across a vast area.

So like an archaeologist of the self, you have to build that up.

And you have to build it up out of those little beeps of interest.

And I think a good thing there is envy.

People speak very low and embarrassed way about envy.

You're not supposed to feel envious.

I think very often, when you feel a beep of envy, it's because there's a fragment of your true ambition and your true self in the life of another person.

And rather than go, oh, I must run away from it, go, no, this is a clue.

What is there that you are envious of?

And often envy is a very inaccurate emotion.

We envy the whole of someone when actually it tends to be a part of them that we want.

And so we go, I'm envious of that singer, actor, business person, et cetera.

You want to go, hang on, hang on.

It won't be the whole thing.

Drill into it.

What really is core here?

And you might realize it's actually not their fame, their money.

It's that they work with their hands, or it's that they live in a log cabin somewhere far away from other people, or whatever it is.

So The best thing to do with envy is to see it as a guide for your own ambition, not a sign of your innate jealousy and inadequacy.

It's a clue.

I always think about envy as the only one of the seven deadly sins that doesn't feel good.

Remind me of the other seven deadly sins.

Gluttony.

Sloth.

Sloth doesn't feel good.

You don't think sloth feels good.

Have you not spent a good sunday afternoon watching some horrible tv show?

But think of the self-disgust that sloth often brings right.

You know you're lying on the sofa and you know that you're.

You know you're scrolling instagram and you know that your better self is being eroded.

And so there's guilty sloth, good sloth and guilty sloth.

Yeah yeah, interesting.

I remember when i came out with the first book i was being interviewed, I don't know some today show or something like that.

And the guy goes.

So you lost everything in your twenties and now you're teaching people financial peace.

How did you bounce back?

And I remember it just hit me like that was stupid.

And I said, dude, when you fall that far, you don't really bounce.

It's more of a splat.

And he just looked at me.

It's just like, that wasn't the answer that fit the narrative that you're talking about.

So the thing I would say though, is if someone's watching you and I right now talk about this and they go yeah, I'm in the soup.

People do react two different ways to being in the soup.

We all have the fear, and then the momentary courage or the momentary hope, followed by uh, you know, another day, another injury, followed by another betrayal, followed by a momentary.

We all have that.

Then the choice you have to make, the individual has to make while we're in that.

And I made that choice semi-consciously was you can choose.

All right, I'm going to quit.

I'm going to adopt the victim language and I'm just going to sit down because I quit.

And those are the people that never recover from their divorce.

They never recover from their business loss.

Uh, or you can say, I don't know what I'm doing.

I'm so lost.

I don't know what to do, but I do know I'm gonna take the next step, the next step.

I'm going to take the neck.

I'm gonna do the next right thing that's in front of me and the next right thing that's in front of me.

And it might even not be the right thing, but I'm going to do the next thing.

And sitting is not an option.

I'm going to keep walking.

So keep walking.

If you're in this and the old country song, you know, if you're going through hell, keep going.

And, um, and so.

But I meet people that, uh, and they call on the show.

It's like a lady called the other day and she's talking about her divorce.

Like it happened 20 minutes ago.

And I'm like, how long ago were you divorced?

40 years.

I'm like, honey, you're still living emotionally back in that thing.

The language she was using was fresh.

Yeah.

And she's still sitting there mad at him and he's gone and gotten two other wives since then.

I mean, you know, right.

And move on.

And so, um, but that it's real easy to quit in that.

And it's not a quitter thing.

It's, um, it's just this natural reaction.

I'm going, I'm going to get up one more time, even though I don't feel like it, and walk out into the sun, get a little vitamin D, get a little prayer, meet with my buddy and let him make fun of me.

And then I'm going to get after it again.

And I'm just one more time, one more time.

Right.

Yeah.

I I remember toward the end of my twenties and I was really trying to sort of work out some of the predictors for when I felt better and when I felt worse, when I was, when I was in the soup, as you would say.

And uh, I remember I wrote it action is the antidote to anxiety, that you really don't fear the future when you're moving yourself toward it.

And it's a vicious spiral, because the very thing that's hardest to do when you are struggling is precisely the thing that would make you feel better, right.

Your motivation is at its lowest.

You don't want to get out of bed.

You don't want to go to work.

You don't want to think of a new idea.

You don't want to apply effort to something, or pick up the bar, or not eat the comfort food or whatever it is, stick to your routine.

But then when you start to roll that boulder a little bit, it accumulates an awful lot of momentum, which is exactly how you see people get unbelievable outcomes.

Like, this seems superhuman.

How does this person get so much done in a day?

How are they so successful?

How are they so balanced?

All the rest of it.

So, well, they are on the positive side of the same momentum that is currently kicking your ass.

Exactly, yeah.

We developed a little theorem around here to talk to our team about this, called the momentum theorem.

Focused intensity over time multiplied by God equals unstoppable momentum.

And one of the things we talk about in the little book I did on it was just this idea that when you have negative momentum, you are better than you look.

When you have positive momentum, you are not as good as you look.

That's great.

And so don't believe the lie either way.

And so you know if you've got positive momentum, you are harvesting crops that were planted yesterday, not this morning.

That they were planted a year ago, put them in the ground.

And today I'm getting this fruit and everybody thinks I'm a genius, but it was actually a year ago.

I was a genius.

And, or you got, you got crops going in the ground.

There's nothing coming out of the ground yet.

And you're planting, you're planting, you're planting.

Nobody can see you.

Nobody knows you're there.

You're anonymous, uh, but you're a lot better than you look.

Cause wait till this rain and the sun comes, there's going to be a crop in the spring.

And suddenly you're going to be that genius.

So, you know, that's how that stuff works.

I remember talking about going through this stuff, this idea of walking, continuing to walk.

That was something that you brought up.

I love that.

We were snow skiing the other day in Telluride and I'm a mediocre snow skier for a 65-year-old dude, right.

But I like to go down the hill and go fast.

I enjoy it.

So, you know, go.

And so I'm skiing with my kids, like 40 and 30 years old, and they haul butt.

I mean, they go.

And so the old man's trying to keep up and he's huffing and puffing.

So we jumped off a lift.

We were running cruiser blues, you know, good and double blues, that kind of stuff.

We had a black every now and then, but they were cruisers, they were groomies.

So we jumped off it and there's this one run on Telluride that when you get to the top of it on black, it's a, it's a uh uh, it's a groomed black and it's unbelievably steep.

You can see downtown Telluride and it looks like you're going to fall into main street.

When you fall, i mean it's right there, it looks like a toy box and there's nothing between you and main street, it's just air.

It's that steep, it's an unbelievable.

And i pulled up on top of that thing and i looked at one of the kids you know these 30 year olds.

I'm like uh, they went, that's steep.

And i went yeah, and if i stand here about three more heartbeats i'm gonna walk back because i'm getting really scared.

So i gotta go or the fear is gonna take me over.

And i thought you know what?

That's what i've done half my life.

You gotta go or the fear is gonna take me over.

I cause if I stood there, my heart rate was going.

This was just the other day.

I was scared.

You know what I mean?

It's like, I was scared, but I thought, you know what?

If I can, I can do this stupid thing.

I can ski it.

I know I can ski it, but I, if I stand here and think about it, it's going to.

The fear is going to kill me.

There's a I want to give it a better term than cultivated stupidity conscious ignorance, maybe you could say, or tactical ignorance around things that yeah, a lot of the time there is.

There is a period where you're supposed to plan, where you're supposed to reflect and ruminate and sort of think about stuff.

But that can be a trap as well.

And I think that a lot of people who like to listen to shows like yours and like mine, they'll be thinking about their thoughts.

They'll be thinking about themselves.

They'll be strategizing.

But there is absolutely a time for straight action without having to ruminate too much.

Yeah, you can get paralysis of the analysis.

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So this was a longitudinal study that was done in a relatively sort of academic setting?

Yes, he did a large-scale longitudinal study, and he's fantastic.

Those three traits were predictive.

Conscientiousness, which is being a combination of thoughtful and kind.

You know I don't want to get too into definitions in case I misstate something, but the way I understand conscientiousness And there are different personality models, right?

And each personality model and not every personality.

There's really no one personality model that has ever gotten it completely right.

They've all been dispelled in certain regards.

But the way that I see conscientiousness as a whole across different personality models is it's got a couple of things combined.

So it's not just nice.

Nice to me can also mean low self-esteem, a pushover, trying to be liked.

Conscientiousness may not even look super smiley friendly.

It's more of an action.

So to me, it is somebody who's smart enough to actually notice and anticipate somebody's needs.

My husband is incredibly observant and it's something that continues to also bring up admiration.

So it's got that observational quality, intelligence, and then also motivation.

You can't be lazy and They're industrious.

They go and get things done.

They're industrious.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Okay.

That makes sense.

I was more thinking, I was trying to sort of interpret it, I guess, into the language of romance.

But yes, if you're talking straight up, what is conscientiousness?

I think good definition.

They are flexible psychologically.

If there is some sort of perturbment, they end up getting back to baseline in not an insane amount of time.

If something occurs, they're able to adapt to it, which is maybe distinct but kind of sounds a little bit like a subset of agency which I would put not too far away from.

It is agency.

Right.

Okay.

So you want highly agentic.

You are so smart.

Oh, thank you.

Yeah.

I'm going to have to up my game now on a different level.

And then your final one, you want a degree of openness to new experience.

Presumably that's somebody that just doesn't want to sit on their ass all the time.

It helps to keep things exciting, but that is something that you can overshoot for and you end up with someone who is going to be very open socio-sexually.

They're going to be looking for high adventurousness predicts cheating.

Yeah correct um, so okay, those.

That's interesting is three traits.

I guess a question would be uh, let's say that you are uh On an early date with someone or you're early into a relationship.

What are some of the ways that you can adjudicate how much or how little of those traits your partner has?

You know, this is the great question.

I learned about these.

I'm going to speak from my own experience, okay?

So I've experienced this because I knew about these traits before I met Ty.

And I absolutely intended to try this out.

When I learned about them, I was actually dating somebody.

We were not happy.

And that person, I would say, lacked these traits.

Both of us probably lack these traits, to be completely fair.

But we were in a conference together watching Tai Tashiro speak about this.

And I remember sitting there at this conference, not having a particularly good time with the I can do this.

I can follow instructions.

And the reason I also thought that was because Tai Tashiro was emphasizing how difficult this is, that our evolutionary brains really want.

So if we're talking about a straight female, we want that strong jawline.

We want somebody who's all brawn.

We want money.

We want height.

We want protection for our young.

And he actually did this experiment where he had everybody raise their hands if they were a straight male single.

And so you had about 100 men in this room raise their hands.

And he was mimicking the average dating experience.

So you go online, you're a straight woman, you want a straight man single.

And then he says, so how many of you are between the ages of 35 and 45?

So let's say now you've got about 50 hands up.

And then he said, how many of you are Catholic?

And you've got maybe 20 hands up.

How many of you make over 200,000 a year?

You've got, I don't know, five hands up.

How many of you are six feet tall?

One hand.

So you can see that this completely diminishes our pool.

So really, what he was doing was, in fact, the book he wrote is called The Science of Happily Ever After.

And he talks about three wishes.

Statistically speaking, you'll get married.

If that's something you want, you're going to get married.

Most people in society do.

But you really get to choose three things guaranteed, and then your pool goes down.

And if you want hotness, height and money, you might have a person who's a complete selfish asshole.

And that's where you think are those problems, ones that you're going to be able to deal with just because the person's hot in 20 years.

Or are you going to be so sick of their shit that you don't care how hot they are.

So that's really what it comes down to.

So your question was, how do we adjudicate this?

How do we find somebody with these qualities?

What I can tell you is that I knew it was going to be hard, but I also know that I love science.

And so if this was as sound as he said it was, I could do it.

And I knew that the biggest thing in my way was just to get rid of that evolutionary urge for hotness.

The night I met Ty, so I broke up with the person I was with that day.

I moved back to California.

I immediately got on Tinder.

This was 2015.

So Tinder was kind of it.

And I also didn't know what I was doing.

I was new to apps and got on Tinder.

I will tell you what.

With that mindset that I didn't care about hotness, money or height, I realized there were so many lovely eligible bachelors.

And so I was just swiping away.

Swipe, swipe, swipe.

Ty was one of the first people to respond.

He was online.

And so was this male model.

And the male model was that baseline instinct in me.

I was just like, and you, even though you're putting up a lot of like ab pictures, I just can't help it.

So I actually had two contenders.

I lived this.

And Ty, I didn't know what he actually looked like.

He was wearing a giraffe costume on his main picture, which I thought was funny.

And there were some pictures of him working, but he had like hard hat stuff.

So I really had no idea he was hot and Australian and 6'2".

I mean, I did win in this case.

But I'm texting, I'm messaging him, I'm messaging this other guy.

Ty is so wonderful.

And he's just asking me these really intelligent questions, sort of like this conversation, right?

So you're one of those rare ones who has all of those qualities.

Ladies, watch out.

But I could just tell he was wonderful.

And we're talking.

You can tell.

If you know what these three things are, I could just tell.

I just needed to be aware of them.

It was there.

And he kind of became more of a friend.

And in the meantime, this model is sending me like emojis of wet splashes and asking if I want a massage.

Granted, I was on Tinder.

I need to be fair.

And I kept talking to the model.

I just couldn't help myself.

But after about 24 hours, I was done with the model guy.

Ty was just becoming this friend.

And then something kind of scary happened with my work two weeks later.

And I realized I wanted to tell my friend about it.

And that's how it evolved.

If I was to just chuck a little bet on for something that's very, very reliably going to happen over the next three years, before the end of this administration, the mother of all blowups between Elon and Trump.

So how do you see that happening?

I've heard a lot of people, Charlemagne talks about this all the time.

Trump thinks that, sorry, Charlemagne thinks Trump is going to put him in prison.

Okay, that's a take that I hadn't heard before.

But yeah, but what do you now?

You know Charlemagne is very Democrat, like obviously he's going to have some bias that goes into this.

But what is your take and how do you see that relationship going?

I just think that when you've got two people with so much power and ego and I do think, from what I can tell, uh Elon's ego and that uh sort of self focused self belief

Like it's me, it's me.

And like, I'm going to be the center of all of this, uh, seems to be ramping up.

That is probably a pretty dangerous cocktail based on some stories and stuff that I've heard about behind the scenes from from Trump about some levels of vulnerability and then sort of like flimsy.

Uh, senses of, um, he doesn't like to be shown up.

It doesn't like to be sort of upstaged.

And uh, and I don't know if, I don't know if Elon has the emotional intelligence of JD Vance to be able to tiptoe around and yes, sir.

No, sir.

Three bags full, sir.

JD.

And why say, do not treat that man lightly.

I think he has like, he came from like poverty.

I think his mom was like a drug addict.

Like, and then he ends up going to Yale.

And then he becomes the VP of a guy that he campaigned against and said was horrible and like a tyrant.

Do you know the level of emotional intelligence it takes to go from like a broke middle America broken family to an Ivy league institution to then VP of?

For the guy who does not, he doesn't always keep in it like you can say things about Trump, but if it's advantageous for whatever his plan is, he will forgive you.

You know, he's kind of like Vince Mann in that regard, like whatever works for the thing.

But like that takes high EQ.

Even in that moment with Zelensky, he's managing Trump like he's.

He did have a moment for himself, but everything he said was and you show respect to trump and donald trump's office and what so he knows the game he's playing.

Oh that what i'm saying is don't treat him lightly.

What our coastal elites, we always do is when someone has a kind of southern accent, we think they're idiots and we and we don't, we don't even really pay attention to them.

And that man is someone.

I see a problem with jd before i see elon, but What do you think is going to happen with Elon long-term with Trump?

Nothing.

Do you think that he's going to dance through the minefield?

I don't think... I think he's acutely aware of his limitations in America.

He cannot physically be president.

If he could be president, I think there is a concern.

Because eventually he'll go when they have an impasse, he'll just go.

Well, I'll just run against you.

He cannot.

The laws dictate he cannot.

So inevitably, you're going to have to bow down at some point.

You're as high as you can go, Elon.

That's only based on the fact that you can put the outcomes that you want for your project behind your ego.

Yes.

And I'm not sure which one is going to be the bigger priority.

The only other thing he could do is leverage the Democrats, which have already made him radioactive.

Like, no Democrat can side with Elon.

So Elon is as far as he can go in America.

He can't go any further.

Like this is outside of being president.

Like there's that great line in Game of Thrones where, like Cersei is talking to Littlefinger and Littlefinger's like you know, you know Littlefinger, the character.

And Littlefinger goes you know, what I've learned over the years is that you know knowledge is power.

And there's all these guards around her and them, and she goes, guards slit his throat.

And they all walk up and put a knife to his throat.

And then she goes, guards, stand down.

Guards, take two steps back.

Guards, take six steps back.

And then she goes, power is power.

And it's just so fire.

And it's like Trump has power.

Power is power.

That is the closest Elon can get And I don't think there's another president that will allow Elon to have that access to power.

So Elon either has to hope there's another person that he could ride with and establish relationship.

And maybe that's JD, but he has to wait to the next administration anyway.

So what he can't do is sour all the Republicans on him.

Like I, I cannot see the situation where they get into trouble because there's nowhere else for him to go.

He'd either have to jump parties, which is very difficult after chastising the left all the time.

He's kind of made his bed.

And he's high.

He has access to all these things.

And I think it does benefit him the most if America is successful, because all his businesses are tied up in America.

He could jump ship to another country.

But that's not the thing I worry about, because I think he's smart enough to understand the position he's in.

Eventually you hit the end.

This is what happens with all rich people today.

That actually want to move weight around.

You hit the impasse of government and you have people who are way less successful than you, way poor than you, telling you whether you can or can't build a factory or do whatever you want to do.

And in that moment, they go, fuck, I just worked my ass off.

I got fucking yachts and everything.

And now I got to go kiss this guy's dick.

Like you saw them all lined up behind Trump during the inauguration.

Zuckerberg, Bezos.

Everybody went to kiss the ring and he set them up letting everybody else know they're kissing the ring.

And I think Elon goes, I got the best seat.

It don't get better than this.

And this guy trusts me and believes in me.

I can't fuck this up.

And he's dealt with governors, mayors, and all this other shit that he doesn't respect at all.

So he's like, it's not going to get better than this.

I don't think he can ruin it.

If they change the rule to let non-citizens become president, now we have an issue.

But Trump would never change that rule because that's his security blanket right there.

It's actually kind of like brilliantly done by Trump.

It's ride with me against the left.

Now Elon can't go to the left.

So he has to be loyal to you.

It's like he's Zelensky.

Everybody that's associated with Trump is so unspeakable and toxic.

They're never going to be allowed back.

So now you've got the loyalty built right there.

Circling back to Chris's opening question is it possible that everyone's having less sex because of the labubu male?

But seriously, maybe we do need more.

I mean, it's crossed my mind sometimes too.

Yeah, we need more polarity.

Well, look, this is... To me, this just seems like the progeny of Me Too in many ways.

That the message that a lot of men the vast majority of well-behaved, sexually disciplined, not pushy men took was I shouldn't be pushy.

It's like, well, yeah, you already weren't that pushy and maybe you actually weren't pushy enough.

So the issue with the message don't be too pushy is that the men who really need to hear it will ignore it, and the men who are already predisposed to believe it will take it to heart.

So what you end up with is this weird selection effect, where the bad actors still act badly and the ones who actually probably needed a little bit of a helping hand to go forward are like oh, holy fuck.

And maybe the labuba man is just the final form of that.

He's taking it too seriously.

At the risk of just pouring petrol on this conversation and then flinging a match in.

It strikes, you know, it strikes me that you know if your thesis is right and in fact, somewhere buried in all of this is actually a low level, of sort of low level revulsion at Le Boubouman and a yearning for a more direct and unmediated form of justice.

Masculine sexual aggression.

It has been suggested by people on the internet whose names I now forget, that this is in fact a factor in the extremely politically sensitive subject of migration into the country across the English Channel.

As in, there are progressive women who who kind of enjoy the appearance of young men who haven't been labubified yet.

Wow.

Because Labubu hasn't reached Syria.

Labubu has not reached Syria.

These guys are not noodle-armed.

These guys, in fact, have demonstrated considerable gumption in making it from wherever it is that they originated, to England.

I mean, it's a genuinely impressive level of gumption.

Yeah involved yeah um, and i don't know, maybe spicy yeah, you really so.

So i okay.

Two things okay, one is so so having having just, i'm just gonna do it, i'm gonna hand you the petrol can.

So i do actually agree with you.

I was speaking to a journalist friend recently.

You're not agreeing with me, you're agreeing with people on the internet sorry names, i don't know um, I was speaking to a journalist friend recently who had been in Calais and speaking to these guys.

It's a thing.

And he said, like what is really amazing is you'll talk to these guys about their life stories and it will be like oh yeah, so I came from Sudan and I walked across half of africa and then i got to libya and then i got enslaved and so i was taken to another country where i was a slave.

Then i was gang raped and then i somehow escaped from that and then i swam across the channel whatever it's like.

They tell this story and it's the most appalling thing you've ever heard, and they're physically.

It's evident that they've been through this and these are like 20 year old guys or something.

And then you ask them why did you do it?

And they're like just like manchester united.

They'll offer some like really weird, inadequate answer.

It's not even like I want access to the welfare state because you could have got that in other European countries.

It's quite like strange.

And I do kind of get your point that there's an element of like crazy macho-ness about it.

Wow, if you're prepared to go through all of that for Manchester United, imagine what you'd do for your family and your partner.

I suppose so.

The only thing I would say though, is the impression I get from a lot of women who are very, very invested in refugees, welcome kind of stuff, is that they really infantilize these men at the same time.

And there's a degree to which they're kind of scooping up the vulnerable.

You think this is a bit like the American pit bull ladies phenomenon?

Yeah, he's just misunderstood.

I'll just add something.

This is another one of these discourses, actually probably related obliquely to Le Bouboumanne.

It was one of these memes that sloshes around in which a certain subtype of usually single American progressive women are accused of adopting, actually obviously murderously, sociopathically dangerous rescue pitbulls as a kind of proxy for the sort of man they would never dream of admitting to fancying in real life.

So in a sense, you know, officially, they're only allowed to date the booboo man.

And that's, in fact, the only people who are within within their social circles immediately.

OK, so they adopt a pit bull to just kind of compensate.

So I see his lack of.

I see your booboo man.

Yeah.

And I raise you the newly nomenclatured himbo, which has actually come back around.

The new dream guy is beefy, placid and politically ambiguous.

Amid pitch debates about masculinity, the himbo stands stoically above it all.

As an alternative to the thinking man, the renaissance man or the family man.

Today's himbo offers just man a blurry image, a blunt political instrument, or just a caricature, the human equivalent of a smiley face.

The himbo is, in many senses, unreal, a wish-fulfillment fantasy.

His true self is concealed behind a set of doe-like eyes.

The content of his inferiority forever unconfirmed.

So is this like Ken in Greta Gerwig's?

He says towards the end if I'd realized patriarchy wasn't just about horses, I wouldn't have bothered.

Honk with a heart of gold.

I think... Who was the dude that did Magic Mike?

Who was the guy, the actor that played Magic Mike?

Channing Tatum.

Channing Tatum is often put forward as like him, but i actually channing table follows me on instagram, so i actually quite like him but hunk with a heart of gold the human equivalent of a smiley face.

What we've got here is basically, i think you're trying to cross the streams between labubu man uh, in terms of disposition, and front cover of a dark romance novel, in terms of presentation.

I mean, it's a tricky tightrope for women Because, on the one hand, you want and this is an eternal conundrum you want a man who is going to protect you and protect your children and provide for you in times of extreme threat.

Right,

But you also don't want someone who's going to beat you up and beat up your children. and so that's that's tricky the line that you've got to yeah yeah and so the himbo is it is i i love a himbo right and i the impression for my female friends is that himbo is a very high status over a friend talking to me about how how attractive a himbo was and she said she really really didn't want i guess a labubu man who was like excessively intellectual she said if i came home and he was like i just read something in the new york review of books i would kill myself It's not what she wants from a man, right?

Ahimbo does kind of tread that tightrope.

Like he's physically capable clearly of doing what's needed if you're at risk, but he's so sweet-hearted that he would never turn on you.

Again, I mean skipping sideways through this sort of untidy territory.

There was a piece, I think it was, in the New York Times, which is often a sort of barometer for what American middle-class women in their 30s think about stuff in general.

I think it was the New York Times, but it was somewhere in that zone, that discursive zone anyway on a fascinating new trend of women marrying down.

And what they were actually talking about wasn't actually women marrying down.

It was women marrying below their educational level.

Actually financially, they were marrying up because these were women with maybe a degree and a master's, or a degree and a PhD or something, but no money and a mountain of debt.

It's like complex hypergamy.

Who were marrying construction entrepreneurs, or a successful plumber with several employees who was turning over chunks of change.

And so you know, in straightforward financial terms, you know, it's at least a match, if not marrying up.

But in intellectual and in terms of a particular type of caste, as distinct from straightforward economic levels.

You know she was – you know some of these women were experiencing it as kind of marrying down.

And I think there's something – you know, I think that speaks to your himbo in the sense that, very sensibly, these extremely overeducated women –

I've married some guy who's going to appreciate their brains and also be able to pay the mortgage without trying to compete.

It seems like the himbo is economically prepared and maybe educationally underdeveloped, whereas the labubu man is maybe economically underdeveloped and overeducated.

I mean, would you rather have a guy who can talk contemporary literature but can't afford to buy you dinner?

Or some guy who can fix the plumbing when it goes wrong and just doesn't care what you think about books.

I have a funny story about this.

It occurs to me that my parents technically have that dynamic.

Because my mum has a PhD and my dad has an undergraduate degree and then became a lawyer.

But anyone who knows, PhDs don't translate into big money, right?

So my dad's always earned a lot more.

But there was this funny story about a time when he was at work.

This is the age for the internet, and someone referred to King Lear in talking about office politics.

He was like, oh, someone's behaving like King Lear in relation to someone.

He didn't understand what they were saying.

So he called my mom very quietly and said, what happens in King Lear?

It was a funny example of this.

But there's something there.

Yeah.

How much do women find that endearing?

How much do women find needing to intellectually coddle their partner up to a certain point?

How much do they find that as, oh, noble savage?

I personally find that endearing.

I don't know if I'm representative.

If he's also sort of generally red-blooded in his bearing and behaviour and is also capable of fixing stuff around the house, that goes wrong, I don't really see the problem.

What about if it's the opposite, though?

What about if it's somebody who can tell you what has been happening in the New York Review of Books, but needs to call his dad if there's something broken in the toilet at your house?

I mean, competence is very hot.

Right, but this is competence within a particular domain, because you could say the noble savage is incompetent when it comes to his intellectual development.

I mean, I suppose, zooming back a bit, you could probably make the case that we're currently in an age of flux where this never-ending growth really does feel like it's come to an end.

Politics is quite uncertain.

We've got war in Europe for the first time in a very long time.

And all kinds of things don't feel as certain and safe and stable as they used to.

And it could be that, in fact, some of these very instinctive mating patterns are going to shift, or are perhaps already shifting, in the light of how people assess their own prospects in that very much more uncertain world.

People want to become more high agency, presumably.

We've said it's important.

We've identified what it is, how it works, some ways that people can fall into traps to stop them from being it, some beliefs that those people have.

Are there... Give me something... Give me a pair of breasts.

Give me something tangible.

Uppies.

I'd say... So there's a few, right?

So the first one that I've mentioned a few times, but I really want to actually get into it, which is the does it defy the laws of physics?

Question.

Because...

Okay, going back to the brain is a question answering device.

So if you say, what's great about my life?

It'll start finding answers.

If you say, what's awful about my life?

It will start finding answers.

And let's say we go to a venue together and the guy on the front door says sorry, not tonight, mate.

Then you go.

Okay, accept that social reality and it's.

Does it fundamentally defy the laws of physics?

Does it go against newton's laws of motion chris, getting into um tiger?

Tiger tonight, no um.

Does it defy einstein's relativity?

No, and that point sounds trite.

But when, when you actually begin to understand that well, you go.

Well, as long as it doesn't defy the laws of physics, Anything is theoretically possible with human knowledge.

And again, it sounds trite saying that, but you just look at the last few hundred years since the enlightenment.

When you have this period before it where nothing happened in humanity, we would just your great great great great great great, great great granddad's life looked the same as yours.

And meanwhile we have this change and the ability for humans to understand how things work and implement it into reality and happen to life and shape their environment that we just now completely take for granted.

Like me, getting annoyed at the flat diet coke on the emirates flight um is a big thing.

The second thing, which is probably a little less esoteric, that i i really really like as a a metaphor, is when you're in the complete low agency and everything is super general and it's like i don't even know.

I don't even know where to begin.

I don't even know where to start.

One thing I love doing a little experiment I got was going okay.

Let's say, have a problem right now.

Um, of had a friend at the minute who uh, he's an extreme, but a friend we both know.

Actually he's an extreme workaholic to a point that I've never, I've never seen before.

And he was talking about how it's a problem.

He just doesn't know where to start.

And I said to him, I go, okay, where are you at right now?

Out of 10 and it suddenly takes this kind of general infinite universe all the way down to okay.

Well, a bit of a binary choice, and you can never say seven, right.

So he goes, I'm at a three.

And I go, okay.

And I go, why are you at a three, by the way?

Like, why aren't you at a two?

And he goes to be honest with you, because I've actually not worked tonight and I've come here to see you.

I go, okay, so we're getting some specificity here.

And I go, okay, but what would take it up to a four?

And he goes, well, If I left the office before 8 p.m., I'd give that a four.

I go, okay, great.

I've got a little step there.

I go, what would take it to a five?

What would take it to a six, seven, eight, nine, 10?

I go, okay, first off, let's just do the four immediately.

And then as soon as you have that, you have momentum.

One of the things I love and I'll probably put it in a piece of like a template that people can use is just what I call the video game Apple Note.

So you have let's say, for example, to-do list in Apple Note build a website.

The problem with that is that, starting the video game on level 56 so one i had this fascinating realization that, um two sorry, one person that i knew was the laziest person i've ever met couldn't like open his mail, i couldn't get out of bed and like make himself some food, but was one of the best video game players at that specific game in the world.

I would spend 16 hours a day on this video game and i go well.

Do they have an agency problem?

Or is there a reality, just a poorly designed video game?

So the video game Apple Note is just level one.

Let's say whatever it is, whether it's from opening mail to going to Kitty Hawk and taking the planes into the sky, there's always a level one.

And that's what video games are incredible at that they adapt to where you're at and then just slowly move you up again.

Completely the opposite of school.

So level one is always just dump down thoughts on topic.

And what I love about that is the matter, how complex the thing is.

From curing cancer to flying planes, to opening the mail, you can always dump down thoughts and then you check it off.

And level two is create the next five levels based off level one.

And what's beautiful is when you check level one.

Level one's small enough to start, but isn't overwhelming.

So you have that video game bit of dopamine.

Then when you check it off, you're like, fuck, let's go.

I'm on level two.

And then each step is enough.

So key thing with video game design is Is it's enough of a step to feel a challenge, but without overwhelm?

And if you, if it's too big of a step, like level 56 build website, that's too big of a step.

You just are constantly in frustration.

So you just quit the video game.

It's a terribly designed video game, but breaking things down into micro steps is such a uh a key thing in video game design and ultimately, increasing agency.

Yeah.

I mean, this is the productivity 101.

You write your epigraph, you.

You work in seven-year seasons, you work in three-year blocks, you work in one-year sprints, broken down into 90-day chunks, broken down into daily actions and, minute by minute, you've got your life planned out.

And it's kind of trite because it's so obvious.

But the smallest first step imaginable is how the Wright brothers managed to get their plane together.

It's how you launched your marketing agency in a different country.

It's how this podcast started.

Yes.

And yeah, you need to be able to if you can figure out ways that you can constantly make that first step, because 50 of the battle is that first step.

So if you have that, great tool.

Another tool more related to, so we spoke earlier about the four tenets of high agency.

You have clear thinking skills.

You have bias to action.

You have resourcefulness and disagreeability.

On the disagreeability point, which I think is a huge, huge part of it,

The question I like to ask people is who's your favorite podcaster, creator, thinker.

So let's say, all the people listen to it right now who have the Spotify wrapped with you, top of the list.

What do you disagree with Chris on?

Because there'll be a percentage of nothing, right?

It's all good, baby.

But there'll be a percentage of the audience unfortunately, probably less so with your audience but there'll be a percentage of the audience that says Chris says sky is red.

Therefore, sky is red.

And that's actually a great disagreeability test, because the amount of times I put gurus on a pedestal and then they'll start.

They'll say a lot of why, and then i'll just start drifting out over their skis yeah yeah, and then they'll start drifting and i'll just go with them.

But that ability to say who do you admire the most and what do you disagree with them on is a great disagreeability test.

That's really lovely.

Another one is who do you disagree like?

Who do you uh, what's the maybe the strongest held opinion that you have, whether that's politically business-wise theoretically, And who's the best person on the other side that you've heard?

Yeah.

Can you answer those two questions?

Have you ever read Richard Feynman's love letter to his wife?

No, I read the pleasure of finding things out.

Okay.

But I love Feynman.

Love, love, love.

I mean, you can see a lot of influence.

I might not be able to say this without crying, which is going to be very embarrassing, but I'm going to try.

October 17th, 1946.

Darlene, I adore you, sweetheart.

I know how much you like to hear it, but I don't only write it because you like it.

I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write you.

It is such a terribly long time since Alash wrote to you almost two years but I know you'll excuse me because you understand how I am stubborn and realistic and I thought there was no sense to writing.

But now I know, my darling wife, that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing and that I have done so much in the past.

I want to tell you I love you.

I want to love you.

I will always love you.

I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead, But I still want to comfort and take care of you And I want you to love me and care for me.

I want to have problems to discuss with you.

I want to do little projects with you.

I never thought until now that we can do that.

What should we do?

We started to learn to make clothes together Or learn Chinese Or get a movie projector.

Can't I do something now?

No I am alone without you.

And you were the idea woman and general instigator of all our wild adventures.

When you were sick, you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed.

You needn't have worried.

Just as I told you then, there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways, so much.

And now, it is clearly even more true.

You can give me nothing.

Yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else, but I want you to stand there.

You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.

I know you will assure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don't want to be in my way.

I'll bet you are surprised that I don't even have a girlfriend, except you sweetheart, after two years.

But you can't help it darling, nor can I.

I don't understand it, for I have met many girls, and very nice ones, and I don't want to remain alone.

But in two or three meetings, they all seem ashes.

You only are left to me.

You are real.

My darling wife, I do adore you.

I love my wife.

My wife is dead.

Tough. to play the reverse out.

It's like, would I want Layla to write that letter?

And I don't think I would unless she was happy writing that letter.

But if the removal of me as a contingency of reinforcement for her, um, meant that she couldn't, find that in somebody else um would sadden me and so i've already so like with lay life i've told her i tell her a lot um i was like i'm going to die before you statistically there's i'm for sure gonna die before you she's a little younger she's younger and i'm female like and she exercised like she's for sure gonna live longer and i was like i want you to spend as little time as humanly possible from the time that i die to finding somebody else um you do me no service by making yourself miserable and you do not discredit or dishonor me by finding somebody else to spend your life with so yeah just i i only think about that from a verse there's a the joy of melancholy yeah is an interesting kind of emotion that's kind of just complex you know this strange like wallowing satisfaction and wistfulness um and yeah wallowings maybe a little a little more loaded um but melancholy i you know there can be odd joy and sadness and and a kind of beauty that you get to experience after something is gone that you can't experience during it i've not had anybody in my life die only child with a mother and a father that's still alive like i've got there's no one must be nice yeah yeah fuck um but there's not been many things that i've lost and this is me fucking monday morning quarterbacking uh i don't know but maybe what's a mood setter Modern women see Layla and think, I'll wait to establish myself in my career before I date or get married or have kids.

But they forget we got married when she was 23 and we built this together.

Love is one of the rare times you don't do life in order, but rather, all at once you find someone that makes your world go round and makes the world make sense to you, where you both look at the same thing and say oh, you saw that too, like I feel like I was the only one.

I think that for high achieving individuals, finding someone who sees the world the same way is incredibly rare, and when you find that person, you should stop what you're doing and then you should get them to stay with you.

And it's been, you know, one of the best decisions of my entire life marrying Layla.

And there's, there's this, especially unfortunately for women right now there's this huge, you know, put it off, delay.

There's no rush, but it doesn't actually take into consideration two things.

One is that biology hasn't advanced with culture and society.

You can't have kids past, you know, 35.

I mean you can, but you're a geriatric, you know it's a geriatric pregnancy past 35, ruthless time.

Yeah, i'm just being real right yeah um, and so i mean i i, this is like super prevalent and i know this is a much more common theme on the show and i don't touch it very much, but it's it just.

I just say it more like because it i think it sucks um, it's unfair, It's not.

Yeah, it's objectively it's not fair.

Guys can wait the rest, you know, their whole lives.

They can do everything.

Um, and you have to, if you go to college, graduate college at 21 or 22.

And if you want to have four kids, assuming that you have perfect pregnancies and you have exactly one year, you know 18 months between each one.

Okay.

That's six years by the time you're done.

And so if we, if we rule out geriatric, geriatric pregnancies are last, and then it means that we have to basically have or we, you have to have your first kid at 29.

Well, okay.

Maybe it'll take, let's just tack one year on of marriage to have the kid and be married.

Okay.

28, you're married.

All right.

Do you want to marry somebody within six months of meeting them?

Let's give it two years to give our logical, you know, brain in.

Okay.

So 26, 26, you graduate at 22, you have 48 months.

And I think that Again, this is if you have if you don't want kids, then all of this is null.

If you do, then you have a very small window to piece that together.

Now, of course, there's surrogates, and maybe in the future, you know like I I'll say in general betting on, I'll smoke.

I'll smoke cigarettes now because by the time I'm old, they'll have a cure for it.

I don't know.

I just I don't make those bets.

And so it's easier to work with reality.

The way it is, not the way you hope it's going to end up landing.

Yeah.

To to knowingly incur basically a guaranteed price for the potential of maybe a non-existent solution is probably not the best decision-making process.

And to be clear, I say this, Layla and I, you know, we don't have kids.

She's not 35.

Um, but I think that we have these unrealistic expectations that someone is going to make our lives, that they're going to complete us in some way.

When I think that, for me, the best thing that a partner can do is help you be the best version of yourself.

I love what you said about really appreciating small victories, so forth.

To go back to the nobility and I kind of relate to that in an early Buddhist frame of.

These are the truths for noble beings, not noble by birth but noble by effort.

There's a nobility in letting yourself feel deeply or be revealed deeply.

Like to go back to that maybe conversation at dinner that went bad to say.

You know, at the end of the day I was there in good faith.

Maybe I was unskillful.

I said this or that.

There's lessons to learn for the future.

I was there in good faith.

I was there with my whole heart deep down.

And I was brave enough to be earnest and sincere enough to kind of, Lay it out.

Yeah, take pride in that.

Healthy pride.

Appreciate yourself for that.

The heroism, the nobility in that, and the uncommonness of that.

To me, that's where real bravery is.

That's really cool.

Yeah, I love that.

I get the sense as well that this is one of the reasons why allowing yourself to be puppeted by your own fear to not show up.

There's an equivalent in the world of content creation, which is audience capture.

So uh, continuing to throw red meat that is predictably going to be liked by the audience but doesn't necessarily resonate with you as a person.

It's actually, you know the word grifter, have you?

You're familiar with that, right?

Okay um, so i asked.

It's a word that gets thrown around on the internet a lot of all manner of different individuals, And I genuinely was interested.

I said Hey, for the people that use the word grifter, what is the best working definition of what that word means for you?

Because it's just, it's just kind of a slight, it's a slur.

It's a calling.

Yeah.

It's just a very odd, nebulous term that that people tend to use for someone that you think might not be fully authentic.

Like, I mean, come on, like let's get a bit more specific.

And somebody said, um, and I actually really appreciated this.

And this is currently my working definition.

Uh, somebody promoting a product or staking a claim that they wouldn't use or don't believe themselves.

So it's, here is what i'm doing out front.

This is what i believe in private, behind as i.

Huh, that's okay, i can work with that.

That's like a functional definition, i think, for what people think they mean when they say that word.

And my point is with the audience capture thing it's you not being you.

It's you uh trying to be manipulative in a way.

Uh, it's this sort of meta, you it's playing persona, not person, it's projecting, etc.

And um, that conversation at the restaurant that was ungainly or didn't go the way that you wanted um, the difference between you showing up with vulnerable sincerity, but just straight up sincerity like this is me and this is the position that i hold and i said it all right.

Could i have said it with a little bit more deafness?

Yeah, probably.

And you know, like I could have delivered it, but I tried, like I gave it a crack and that was actually what I meant.

I said what I meant and that, you know, I can take some lessons from it.

The difference between that and the lessons that you can take from that situation and a situation where you didn't say what you meant and you were still rejected is the kind of the last bastion of well.

I tried and you know, like, I guess, you know, you can kind of laugh it off.

There's, there is a there is an ability to do humor in that, but where is the humor that you find that I compromised myself to try and be somebody else?

And that was rejected.

There's, there's a, an additional level of difficulty in getting past it.

And I think it's just a nice justification for yeah.

Showing up sincerely, showing up earnestly, um you know sort of playful seriousness, I think, is huh why I have this additional level of protection for all of the fear that you are going to have by being seen.

And by this being me and by a rejection of that, not being a rejection of a projection, but a rejection of a person.

And that person happens to be myself.

What you do gain in that is, well, I, At least I was myself.

At least this weird character I tried to play, this role that I tried to perform wasn't rejected.

Because to be honest, that's kind of more pitiful than the other way around.

That's so true.

I'm thinking the ways in which playfulness is a great aid to aspiration without attachment.

And if we're incredibly creative, Not just earnest, but if we're self-righteous or pompous about our pursuit of even a wholesome goal, that's not so good.

But to be playful about it.

I think about I made a play, using the word, for a woman in my late 20s.

I was part of this whole personal growth context, kind of half a cult.

I won't name it now.

And so everybody was really deep in each other's business, kind of all knowing each other.

And there was a woman in a relationship with like the head dude.

So I was like a layer or two down from Alpha.

And she was with Alpha Boy.

And I fully played, went for it.

It was public.

It was known.

I wrote these nice little notes.

I told them what I was doing.

And I went full out.

And I didn't know if I would get it.

I didn't.

And she was relatively kind and it was okay.

But at the end of the day I felt good about myself that I little Ricky, kind of the dork, had still stuck my neck out and made a play for a particular woman.

And I feel great.

I went for it.

If I hadn't gone for it, I'd be thinking, you wussy.

You should have gone for it.

Why not?

Take the risk. but what enabled it is there was a playfulness about it.

It was like an improbable goal and I could be playful about it, which helped me be less attached to the outcome.

My friend Charlie did a wonderful video breakdown of Jordan Peterson's most recent debate against 20 atheists.

It was on the Jubilee YouTube channel, so it's a series called surrounded uh and it's it's doing huge numbers.

It's really cool, kind of like uh, speed dating for debate.

I guess is kind of the way that.

What a format.

Yeah, we used to call them a fishbowl.

You're in the fishbowl and you've got 10 or 20 people around you okay yeah yeah yeah um, and each person comes in individually and you do a bit and then they move on and so on and so forth, and um, He does this comparison between Jordan when he did that Kathy Newman interview in 2019.

So what you're saying is that really famous one in front of the purple background, and this most recent one.

And Charlie is very interested in charisma.

And he's talking about likability, being into playfulness.

And he's very deep into self-work and mindfulness, too.

So I think that sort of percolates through.

And he has this.

It just compares them side by side.

And I'd never even thought of this, because the way that people change, especially over a long period.

It's been six years, maybe seven years, since that first debate came out.

And then there's this new one.

And if someone changes slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, you kind of you don't really notice.

Right.

It's like, when did you get fat?

I don't know.

One day at a time.

And he just makes a really lovely distinction between Jordan in that first one, where Kathy's sort of pointing her finger at him and saying so what you're saying is this thing

And he goes, no, I'm not saying that at all.

I think that's silly.

I think that's really, I think that's, I do.

I think that's really silly.

And you just have this, it's keeping him regulated.

It feels more casual.

It's much easier to get on side.

It's much more likable approach.

Now he's standing his ground.

But he's standing his ground in a sort of, you know, really fluid sort of Bruce Lee kind of way, where You've sort of touched on them a few times.

But just do a rundown for me of the most common places that people are getting exposed to the highest levels of microplastics.

Yeah.

So the most I would say common places.

One is drinking out of bottled water like bottled plastic bottles, right?

Like a lot of people drink out of plastic bottles.

That would be a big source.

Tap water that's unfiltered.

So tap water, again, also has microplastics.

Unfortunately, our oceans are contaminated.

So microplastics are also found in a lot of fish, and particularly they accumulate in the digestive tract of fish.

So if you're eating shellfish or clams or oysters or anything where you're eating the whole digestive tract, or a sardine whole, whole sardine, then you're going to be getting microplastics.

Heat is a big, big one.

Okay.

I would say that is one of the main you know culprits.

When you're combining that with plastic, so a lot of your to-go coffees that you're drinking from starbucks starbucks, anything like that, is going.

That is a huge one because you're you're, you know there's been studies looking at bpa leaching into liquid.

When it's when heat, like boiling water, is applied, it increases, increases the leaching by 55 times, which is huge, and It also increases microplastic.

You know breakdown right.

Because you're breaking down the plastic itself.

Not only are you getting more, you're making the plastic smaller, which allows it to be permeating through the gut more effectively.

Exactly.

I can't tell you how many, like, to-go coffees I've had in my life.

And, you know, another big source now, this is like new coming out.

I mean, there's been a couple of studies that have come out on this, is tea bags.

Because you're adding hot water to tea and the tea bags themselves are made of either polypropylene, they're made of nylon or they're made of interestingly cellulose, which you would think wouldn't have microplastics.

But I think there must be a mixture of stuff in there.

And this new study came out, you know, really just a couple of months ago, showing that you can get anywhere between millions to billions of microplastic particles per milliliter of.

I mean per milliliter.

How much is that compared with the normal sort of – that's a large dose?

It's a lot.

Okay.

It's a lot.

What I'm getting at is, you know, there's not – I think what's happening is the heat is breaking the plastic down.

These tea bags are made of plastic.

And so, you know, consuming these tea bags, again, when you're getting to go tea –

It's like I now I'm like, all I can think about is like I'm consuming a plastic tea.

Yeah.

But you have to remember there's a lot of studies, at least with green tea, showing that green tea has huge benefits for cognition.

It delays dementia.

It might even offset the microplastics you've had to consume.

Yeah.

So, I mean, clearly people are drinking tea out of probably tea bags.

So it's not like, at least with green tea, it seems like there's some benefits.

But so those are some of the major sources.

And then there's also, it's in our salt.

And then air, right?

So like that's another one if you're living in a polluted place, if you're, again, you know.

Internally venting your dryer.

Dryer ventilation in your house.

That's another major source.

And then another one would be also to consider would be black plastic.

So I know you're like, what?

This is kind of some new data coming out.

Black plastic is often made from recycled electronics.

You mean bits of plastic that are black?

I mean black utensils like your black spatula, or black plastic you know, forks and knives or your black plastic lid on a coffee to go coffee cup.

Black sushi the bottom of a sushi container, bottom of like a rotisserie chicken.

If you've ever bought a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store, that black, right?

Black plastic.

It's often made from recycled electronics, and recycled electronics are often have chemicals in them that are added to prevent fires from starting, like they don't want electronics starting fires.

So they add these brominated flame retardants, which are carcinogenic.

They are not supposed to be in food.

You don't suck on your electronic.

They're not supposed to go in your mouth, right?

So these black plastics have very high levels of carcinogens that are normally not even found in regular plastics that we're, you know, in things that we're consuming.

And there was a study out of the University of Plymouth that found black utensils, black toys for babies.

You know they're putting in their mouth.

They contain between 30 to 40 times the safe limit of these brominated flame retardants and other carcinogens and endocrine disruptors in them than safe.

So that's another sort of, and think about it, if you're buying like a rotisserie chicken or like you get it to go pho or whatever soup And it's in like a black container.

You got the heat.

That's the added factor on top of that, right?

So that's another major source.

What about dermal stuff?

Yes.

So again, we mentioned the phthalates, right?

Which are in personal hygiene products.

And that's something I do want to mention, because you might think oh, I'm looking at the ingredient list and there's no phthalate on there.

But there's two different chemicals that are very, very sneaky because they mean they're phthalates.

And they're in a lot of personal hygiene products.

One is fragrance.

If the word fragrance is in the ingredients list, that means they're phthalates.

And parfum.

Not perfume, but parfum.

That is another chemical that means they're phthalates.

So you really want to look for phthalate-free Personal hygiene products again very important, especially for people that are considering conceiving, because those are the chemicals that are associated with disrupting sexual development in boys.

And then the other one is receipts.

And this is a really big one because maybe not for you and I, right?

Receipts are, they're a thermal paper.

And so essentially they're coded with BPA, because there's a thermal reaction that happens when heat is applied to the BPA.

It prints, it prints text on the receipt without actual ink.

So that's how it works.

And if you ever see like a white coating on the receipt, like that, that's BPA.

So the BPA in like plastics, at least it's kind of contained in a plastic matrix.

Like this is just, it's purposefully liberated.

Yes, exactly.

It's like free for all on the receipt.

And so there's studies looking at people that handle a lot of receipts, like when i was in the airport, stuff and stuff.

Yeah, i was in the airport on coming coming here and you know, i the the guy that was like handling the receipt.

He's like do you want the receipt?

I'm like no, and i saw him take it out and put it in the trash and like i thought about, there's this huge line of people you're doing that 500 times a day exactly, and i looked at the guy and i was like i was like hey dude, you know, i just want to tell you that these receipts are lined with endocrine disruptors that disrupt hormones.

And he goes, you mean... I wish somebody had recorded this.

Oh, my God.

This lady is going through the airport.

I met this lady earlier on today.

She started ranting and raving about the receipts, said it's sort of covered in this magic dust that's killing me or something.

I couldn't help myself.

I felt like I couldn't not say something.

Yeah.

And he looks at me and goes, you mean like testosterone?

I was like, yes, testosterone.

It's been correlated with a decrease in testosterone.

I was like, you need to wear nitrile gloves.

So bottom line is BPA, it's lined on the receipts.

Nitrile gloves can stop people from absorbing it.

So people that are, like you know, basically any kind of cashier, anyone that's handling a receipt multiple times a day, highly recommend they wear nitrile gloves.

Latex doesn't do that.

Also, if you wear cream or hand sanitizer, it's been shown to increase the dermal absorption of BPA by a hundredfold.

Fuck off.

Some people are like I don't want to get my hands on the, I don't want to get COVID or whatever right.

A hundred X. A hundred X absorption.

Think about how many times these... I've seen them do it, you know, and then they touch the receipt.

So I think this is like something that is not really talked about.

And Here, I am worried about my one-time exposure.

So for people out there, it's like, yeah, you can opt for no receipt.

Two-decade career of working in Target or something like that.

So the first time that I ever learned about receipts.

You won't know who this is, but Owen Schroyer, who is Alex Jones's sort of second-in-command.

I went for dinner with him when I first moved to Austin forever ago.

It was him and a bunch of other people.

There was a couple of girls at the table with us as well, just downtown in Austin.

And the receipt came out, and I was like, I'm sort of new here.

I'll get the mail.

It'd be nice.

It'd be a nice thing for me to do.

So I did it.

And as I'm going to get the receipt out, one of the girls that sat around the table hits my hand away.

I'm like, what?

She's like, what are you doing?

As if I was about to walk out into open traffic.

I'm like, I was going to take the receipt and I was going to put the tip on.

She's like, are you crazy?

You're going to touch that?

I'm like.

So it kind of does show that the fringe insight from three years ago, some of that stuff, ends up being a bullseye and sort of percolates around.

Now, I'm not saying that all of it is.

But some of the stuff ends up being legit.

Right.

It is.

It's definitely legit.

And it is a concern, particularly for people that are handling them daily, multiple times a day.

And I don't know that I've really... I've seen a couple people wearing gloves at cash registers.

They've got special ones that are like finger things.

Have you seen those?

Right.

I've seen those.

Individuals.

So maybe just the sort of your first two fingers and your thumb or something, rather than having to wear sweaty gloves all day.

Right.

And I imagine that's i mean significant.

Well, it gets through latex as well, it gets through latex.

There is no way of getting it perfect.

There is no complete, no finish line, no done.

There is simply what's the next experiment?

There is only play.

Yeah yeah, so the yeah.

So the way i think about that one is uh, so when is an oak tree perfect?

When it's an acorn, when it's like a sapling, when it's like 100 years old, when it's 200 years old, like when is it perfect?

But yet, somehow or another, we have to be perfect.

But it's not, it's just iteration, it's just, it's just evolution.

Evolution doesn't end.

The only thing that ends is an idea in our head and our egos.

Egos can't exist.

If you actually really understand that there is no end, the ego has to evaporate.

Say more on that right.

So oftentimes the people who are searching for enlightenment they think once they get the enlightenment, then it'll be done.

That's just the ego talking.

That's just, oh, there is gonna be this end point where then I'm gonna be happy.

That is an ego thought process so you can whip yourself and beat yourself up to get to that place.

And it is just a way to convince yourself that what you want can't be found right now.

So if I said to you right now, without going into the past, without going into the future, you can't find any evidence from the past or any evidence in the future, Find a problem with you.

Yeah, that's funny.

Yeah, there's none.

You can't find it.

So you need an end, because the only other choice is to be in this moment, which is where the ego doesn't get to exist.

I wrote this quote from Van Gogh this week in my newsletter.

That said If I'm worth anything later, I'm worth something now.

For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is grass in the beginning.

Oh, I like that.

That's so fucking good.

The same thing you're talking about, right?

It is.

The acorn.

Wheat is wheat, even if people think it is grass in the beginning.

I'm going to geek out.

Let me geek out for just a second.

So today I got a text from somebody who is a Zen teacher that I know and he was worried about AI and uh, and so found out that i'm working.

You're the guy to ask yeah, apparently i'm yeah, are they coming for my zen teaching?

Say again are they coming for my zen teaching?

Tell me joe, yeah and uh.

And my response was um, just like everything, this river is going to find the lowest ground, so where it's going to end up is already determined.

And it's the same thought process that you just said there, like even the action that I take and that all the people will take towards influencing AI, like all of that is set in a in for from that same kind of point of view.

So our job is the same.

It's like show up with love, do what you're called to do.

You know, draw the boundaries, say the truth that you can see.

And.

But the whole idea of like I have to manage my entire world to get to the place is just, it's just a huge amount of stress.

It's all self-talk yeah, not real.

Again, to sort of fly the flag for the insecure overachievers out there the uh the, the desire for control.

You know, if i can prepare sufficiently well, if i can know every different permutation of every different outcome yeah, then i reduce down the play within the system.

So it's so precise, so that what i think is going to happen and what is going to happen end up being so tightly correlated that there's no variance at all.

Ah okay, there we go.

There's a bit of certainty, isn't that nice?

Isn't that death?

Yeah, i want, i want this wholly under control and absolutely predictable existence.

Yeah, i mean.

Yeah, I think about this in a slightly different way, but there is no life without tension.

A cell doesn't exist without tension.

Your lungs don't exist without tension.

A salad?

Cell.

No, cell.

A salad doesn't exist without tension.

Dude, i had this vision.

I had this vision in my mind.

I was like why is it?

Has he got like bits of fucking lettuce leaf hanging across a string?

I had the like a tightrope walk, but it's just individual leaves of lettuce hanging over a salad bowl.

Holy fuck wow yeah okay, getting back to it.

A cell doesn't exist without tension.

Yeah, there's just so.

Life doesn't exist without tension.

So the idea that you're going to be at peace when there's no tension is The idea that you're going to be at peace when you've narrowed everything down so that you don't have to actually feel that tension is death.

So you don't find peace by having no tension.

You find peace by enjoying the tension, welcoming the tension, looking forward to the tension.

Is safety got anything to do with it here?

Is there a degree of unsafety?

There is no safety.

Safety is an illusion.

What the fuck is safe?

Like we're sitting in like we're in Austin, Texas and a cool thing.

Like, yeah, it's pretty safe.

But hurricane earthquake fire, they're like.

Safety is just something that we like to pretend exists.

Yeah.

And also like a form of death.

If it feels scary to say it's important.

If it feels scary to say, not saying it will hurt your connection.

If it feels scary to say, not saying it prioritizes their imagined reaction over your truth.

Yeah.

Why?

So I'm not scared to say things that aren't important to me and vulnerable to me.

So I could qualify that and say that quote.

I could qualify that quote and say with an open heart, to say it with an open heart.

And I think that would probably be more accurate.

But if I'm scared to say it, it means that there's something important and it's something vulnerable.

If I say the important thing to you and I'm vulnerable with you, our connection deepens.

Always the case.

Mm-hmm.

If i am not willing to say that, it means i'm scared of a reaction that you're going to have for me, which means i'm prioritizing you more than i'm prioritizing my own needs.

Yes yes, i'm actually prioritizing my fear over our connection as well, and over yourself, and yeah, and over myself.

That's right, so it's, and so this is how i run my business, it's how we run our marriage, it's how everything it's like, And this prevents resentment.

It's amazing.

If I find something that doesn't feel right, I will speak to it.

I might not speak to it right now.

It might take a day, because I'm not going to be heartless and not pay attention to the person or have compassion or empathy for where they're at.

But I'm going to say the thing that's scary to say or the thing that's bothering me.

And my expectation with the 18 or so people in our organization is that they do the same thing.

We tell them that's the job. you've got to say the hard thing.

We actually start our meetings with, what's the scary thing you're not saying?

Because that's what keeps relationships clean.

That's what keeps the problems at bay.

That's like stepping into it instead of trying to avoid it.

I was trying to think about the difference between selfish and selfless.

And this is a third one that's not either of them.

So you're not being selfish because you're actually hurting yourself in it.

You're not being selfless because you're killing the connection and like what the fuck is this?

And you're and you're not trusting them.

Yeah, it's like, what is it?

It's not.

You know, it's one of those interesting situations where it's neither selfish nor selfish.

Yeah yeah that's, that's really cool.

Yeah, there's no uh, it's just destroyed.

Well, it's actually.

It's kind of it's destructive to the self and it's destructive to the other as well.

I guess that's one way to put it.

Yeah right, it's like it's bad on all fronts.

Yeah, i remember having this moment where So I, we did this in our company and I was just like we, we do this.

We're going to, if something's upsetting anybody, we talk about it.

That's how we're doing.

And one day I came into, and I was the woman who I, at the time worked with most closely.

Um, and she, her name's Sarah.

She's amazing.

Anybody who's worked in our, or done anything in our organization knows Sarah.

She's amazing.

And I walked in, I was like frustrated.

I was like, oh God.

And she goes, oh, I'm so excited that you're frustrated.

I was like, what?

She goes every time you're frustrated.

It means that you're seeing something that we're not seeing and we're going to make a big improvement.

So what is it?

Totally like changed the whole, like my, the way I hold my own frustration, it changed that.

And then it also changed like how I like looked at the whole business, because I was, oh wow, this is really important.

It's like alchemy.

Yeah.

Doing that.

Exactly.

Why do you think it is that people are drawn to relationships that are very tough, that from the outside look turbulent difficult, challenging the classic I can fix him meme.

What have you come to believe about that?

Yeah, I could go in reverse there.

So you're not going to fix anybody.

I have to tell folks out there, it's a common belief.

People almost seem to have it as sport or hobby, right?

Like I'm going to fix, go fix people.

It almost just never, such low odds that that ever ends up working out.

Why?

Because people are stable.

There's these really beautiful studies of personality where they track people for 40 or 50 years, from the time they're in their teenage years to the time that they're retired.

And if you were neurotic when you were highly neurotic when you were a teenager, you're like the grumpy person at the retirement home.

You know it's just like a stable kind of thing.

You know also, if you were the sweetheart, really nice, always helping people out kind of person in high school, you're doing the same thing, do you reckon?

Do you reckon that's the same for socio-sexuality?

If you were the girl that was sleeping around a load in high school, you're still the girl that's sleeping around the road in the retirement home.

Well, you know that is concerned actually with older adults right now.

So there's this um STD concerns.

One of the places it's most acute in public health is among older adults.

Phenomenal.

Yeah.

Phenomenal.

Which is amazing.

So yeah, people don't change because traits are stable.

And folks might see these articles every now and then that you can change your personality.

And that is true to an extent.

But the number of people who will change their personality...

Like the rough way to put, that is about 20 to 25 of people like, for example, who are neurotic, will turn themselves into not neurotic people anymore.

The remaining 75 to 80% will show stability over time.

And the reason I like to put things that way is if you're in a position of choosing a partner, you know this is a bet, really right.

And you're saying, okay, so I have this person who's high in neuroticism.

Do I think that's going to change forever?

80, 75 chance.

Yeah, maybe exactly the same way for the rest of my life 25 chance they change.

That's not a bet i would probably want to make you know.

Yeah, it's interesting when you think about sort of what people are doing when they first find a partner.

They're kind of i get the sense and you may tell me that uh, my belief in personal growth and malleability is misguided and must be subdued.

But um, you're trying to find somebody that is as close to the bullseye of what it is that you're looking for uh, whilst making the decision rationally before you get into passionate love, using evidence-based insights from somebody as educated as yourself.

Trying to find somebody that's close to the bullseye but also has, I would guess, as strong of a capacity to grow, to work on themselves, to be able to update their beliefs, uh the way that they operate, as possible.

Um, and it seems like those two variables, um, How close are you?

Where's the starting point?

And how capable are they of running and maneuvering towards something that is more healthy?

Yeah, I know exactly.

So you're kind of identifying this trait that sits outside of personality a little bit, right?

Which is this interest and this persistence to grow as a person.

And I think you're... Gosh, if people want to put something in our top three...

That would be another great trait to put in their top three.

Capacity for growth.

Yeah, it's capacity for growth.

And that dogged commitment to it.

Because it's one thing you and I probably both know people who have some bright idea every other month about.

Oh, I'm totally going to change myself in this way.

Usually has the word radical in front of it, you know?

I engage in radical self-disclosure or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Radical honesty, radical painting.

Yeah, and I'm always like, you know, what I'm more interested in is, I mean, that's cool.

And that's part of it.

It's a necessary first step.

But but then how many people now have the dogged determination to actually make that happen?

Cause it's so hard, right.

Over the course of really years to you know, turn that huge ship around and make it so that you have There's a better range in your personality.

You've got to be dead ass committed if you are going to actually do anything.

I mean, yeah, you're right.

I think the way to look at it is these forces personality, whether it's infant upbringing, genetic predisposition time place confluence nature nurture, whether it's personality, whether it's attachment style, whether it's values, whether it's ideological belief, all of that stuff.

No matter which of those you're playing with, it is a marathon to try and get that to be nudged.

That's where the 20% sits.

For the most part.

I imagine there's not many people that fluke themselves into lowering the neuroticism.

It's probably you know the people that listen to podcasts like this one.

You know the the uh insecure, overachieving personal growth maximizers uh, who are really sort of trying to better themselves within the world.

They're thinking very carefully.

They're very reflective.

Um, you know they they, they're really trying to work on themselves, but that's a terrifying minority of most people.

That's, that's, that's so true, you know?

So maybe for some of your listeners who, you know, maybe are really into fitness, for example.

If you think about, I'm always annoyed like January 2nd in the gym when you can't get on anything right.

It's this overrun with- All the creatines taken.

That's right.

All these New Year's resolution people.

I mean, the same exact mindset and outcomes could apply to something like personality.

Like okay, someone could have this really bright idea, like they want to get fit or they want to change their neuroticism.

But who's going to be there even in March?

You know, who's going to be there much less in December?

And you know, as your listeners know, who are really committed to fitness.

It's not even a year, right.

It's a course of numerous years and being really disciplined and constantly evolving and learning about new things in nutrition and technique and other things that actually lead to a meaningful change in their body composition and their fitness and their health.

Same thing with your mental health and your psychological health.

It's that degree of commitment and obsessiveness to make some sort of long-lasting change.

I want to talk about something that's really important to me.

So you're big into inequality, as am I. I grew up as working class as is possible.

The only thing that was famous about the town that I grew up in in the UK is it had the highest teen pregnancy rating in the UK.

And then it lost that.

So it didn't even have that anymore.

Fatherlessness.

Boys who grow up apart from their biological father are about two times more likely to land in prison or jail by age 30.

Fatherlessness is a better predictor of incarceration than race or growing up poor.

Young men are more likely to end up in prison or jail in the US than they are to graduate from college if they are raised in any non-intact family set up.

Regardless of family income, children in intact families are about half as likely to be diagnosed with depression.

What do you make of that?

I make it to be a serious crisis.

And I make it, I believe in family.

And I believe we have got to create the conditions for young people to be good dads and good moms and to raise healthy children.

Thinking about some of the groups that you brought up today.

One of the ones that's obvious in its absence is men.

Why have the left tended to not talk about men's issues, do you think?

That's a good question.

And I think, I mean, we saw it with...

I think the underlying issue is that for a very long time, women were second class citizens in this country.

And people were saying does it make sense that you have women who cannot become police officers soldiers carpenters governors, presidents of the United States?

And that's wrong.

If we believe in equality, we want to give everybody an equal opportunity.

So I think there was that focus on that.

I think the issue you're raising is getting more discussion, and it needs far more.

Is that what we have seen right now?

And I was on a plane coming from Washington back to Vermont, sitting next to a woman and she's visiting her daughter at the University of Vermont.

And we were chatting and she mentioned to me that something like over 60 of the college of the kids in her daughter's class were women.

Correct.

Okay.

Two women for every one man completing a four-year college degree, basically, yeah.

All right.

Not a good situation.

That's a bigger gap than when Title IX came in 50 years ago in the other direction.

This is a serious issue.

And I think it is not incompatible to say that we believe in women's rights, the right of women to control their own body, that we don't want women to be second-class citizens.

But say the same thing, of course we want our young men to be able to have all of the opportunities that they deserve as well.

And there has not been the kind of focus on that that I think needs to be.

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That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom.

Do you know Richard Reeves?

He does the American Institute for Boys and Men.

Policy one.

I have heard of it.

Yeah, he wrote of boys and men.

So this is just a passage from an article he wrote a little while ago.

I just want to get you to react to this.

Suicide rates among men under 30 have risen by 40 since 2010 and are four times higher than among young women.

Male suicides account for as many deaths as breast cancer.

Men are less likely than women to go to college or to buy a home.

They're more likely to be lonely and more vulnerable to addiction.

Young white men from lower-income homes are worse off than their fathers on almost every economic and social indicator.

There is a bigger gender gap on campuses today than in 1972, when the government passed Title IX to prevent sex-based discrimination in education.

But today, the disparities in college enrollment and performance are the other way around.

There is no strong evidence that young men are turning against gender equality, but they have turned away from the left because the left has turned away from them.

The problems of young men are not the confections of reactionaries.

This is a story of elite neglect, not voter chauvinism.

The Democrats have failed to address these issues.

Under the Biden administration, the Centers for Disease, Center Control and Prevention has refused to acknowledge the gender disparity in suicide rates.

The White House Gender Policy Council has not tackled a single issue primarily facing boys and men.

There have been initiatives to promote women in STEM and construction, but nothing about encouraging men into teaching on men's health.

There is women's health research initiatives, but no office on men's health.

The Democrats and progressive institutions have a massive blind spot when it comes to male issues, and this was exposed in the election.

At worst, men are seen as not having problems, but as being the problem.

That was Richard.

He's as policy wonky, DC, fluffy as you get.

I agree with much not All what he's saying, I think, look, here is the issue.

The world in the fight for women's equality, the world has changed.

50, 60 years ago, men were the breadwinners in most households, right?

Men were the bosses.

Men made the most money.

Men were the governors.

Men were the presidents.

Men were the senators.

It was a man's world.

That's changed.

And the fact that we have fought and achieved more equality for women is a positive thing.

I agree.

All right.

But, but you're suddenly seeing, and I think half of what he says is very true.

You're suddenly seeing men feel, does anyone give a damn about me?

What's going on in my life?

Good.

We want women's equality.

What about me?

Have we paid enough attention to that?

I think we have not, and I think we need to do a better job.

I don't believe that everything that Reeves is saying is accurate.

I understand.

I was watching that now infamous – interview that you and AOC did on CNN last week.

It was infamous?

Was Fox television picked up on it?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, it's just gone everywhere.

It's gone everywhere, right?

What was infamous about it?

Well, this is what we're talking about.

And then you kind of blew through when it was asked, is this going to be a challenge?

That wasn't what I was interested in primarily.

What I thought was real interesting was she said the reason that Republicans have appealed to young men is a dangerous way They are able to radicalize and target and exploit a generation of young boys in particular, away from healthy masculinity and into an insecure masculinity that requires the domination of others who are poorer browner, darker or a different gender than them.

Do you think Democrats have done a good job of giving men a positive vision about themselves?

She's saying that this is an insecure masculinity as opposed to a healthy one.

You know, I'm not a great expert on this.

I think this is a real issue.

And I think we've got to pay a lot more attention to it.

90% of anxiety is anticipatory, not about events, but about control over them.

And this link between uncertainty and anxiety being intrinsically related is so true.

There's this wonderful idea called compensatory control.

What is it called?

Compensatory control.

I'm going to speak in a language that you may not be familiar with, British.

Um, My husband went to high school in Britain.

Okay, good.

I just don't understand the big words.

Compensatory control?

Yeah, to compensate.

Oh, compensate.

Okay, gotcha.

Compensatory control.

Okay, gotcha.

Um, when people were told to imagine an uncertain medical diagnosis okay, they were more likely to see patterns in meaningless static on a tv, really.

So basically, if you have a sense of threat coming from the outside, if you feel like control and uncertainty are very common in your life, you are more likely to construct narratives and personify and create archetype and myth and believe in conspiracy and attach meaning where it's not there.

This is from Matthew Syed.

It was in the Times forever ago.

It was actually around COVID.

And he basically made this point that this is before lab leak, hypothesis stuff was supported or disproven or anything.

It was just a notion at the time.

And what he basically said was it is far easier to believe that the release of some global pandemic is the plan of a malign scientist than it is the chance mutation of a silly little micro.

Because, at least if it's a scientist, we understand there's motivation and there's desire and it feels like it's within our realm.

And I think for many people, what feels like control in life is actually just a reminder of how little control we have.

Because we have the illusion of control.

I can tell you what the weather is going to be in Tampa, Florida tomorrow within a pretty tight timeline.

If a nuclear bomb went off in Russia tomorrow, Starbucks would open in Austin, Texas.

Okay, so I have acute predictability, but I have long-term chaos.

And trying to match these two, trying to work out, well...

We've always not had control over the things that we haven't had control over.

But never before have we had such an illusion that we might be able to have control over them.

We've got this illusion of mastery.

Wow, the modern world, I can message anybody on the planet immediately.

I can consume the entire world's news 24 hours a day directly streamed into my face.

So...

Maybe I should have more control than I do.

And it's blurred the lines.

I think it's made distinguishing what we should let go of and what we should try and have agency over.

Those lines have become more blurred than ever before.

And I think that uncertainty about the future combined with the sense that I might be able to get some sort of a change enacted if I push.

I think that those two worlds blending together has made it very difficult for people.

And I think that's where the anxiety might be coming from.

One of the things that's interesting about anxiety, having been somebody that has struggled with it for most of my life and not understood it and not understood what to do in those moments, and probably made every single mistake personally to make it worse.

And also being a mom who had kids, who had anxiety and making every mistake, single mistake you could make.

So I am personally responsible.

You've got skin in the game.

Not only skin in the game dude.

I have bruises and broken bones when it comes to this game because I have fucked it up, because I didn't know.

I didn't know.

And if you're somebody that has really struggled with anxiety and you then have somebody around you that's anxious, it then makes you anxious.

And I can see now in hindsight all of the things that I did wrong.

This is why I pay gladly for my children to go to therapy adult children because I'm like I fucked you up in so many ways and I didn't mean to.

Allow me to compensate.

Yeah well, let me support you in identifying the things that don't work and let me support you in working with somebody who can help you change the settings in your mind and who can help you understand when life triggers you because it's going to.

But to that point, on anxiety that I want to talk about.

I actually believe now that anxiety, if you can simplify what is happening in the moment, it will help you apply what every expert tells you you have to do.

Because the world is so overwhelming right now.

Whether you're talking about the world at large and AI coming, or the headlines that are distressing, or you're talking about the issues going on in your life, whether you are struggling to pay your bills or you're scared about the rising cost of living, or maybe you have somebody in your life that's struggling and you don't know how to help them.

And any one of these things can cause you, in this present moment, to start to feel anxious about what's going to happen.

And so in that moment, God, I wish I knew this.

I wish I knew this decades ago.

I wish that decades ago, somebody could have explained to me that any time you feel that alarm going off, because that's what anxiety is

It's just an alarm system in your body that is designed to wake your ass up in this moment, either because there's something that you care about that you need to do, So it's coming online as an alarm to wake up your body and your brain, to help you perform.

That's one type of anxiety, like performance anxiety that a lot of people get.

Or you have the kind of more nagging, chronic anxiety which is what I had, which is this nagging sense that something is about to happen.

And you then have this moment. where you separate from your own ability to handle it.

Like I love Dr. Russell Kennedy's work.

I love Russell.

Yes.

And yes.

And the fact that he says that all anxiety is separation anxiety.

I'm like, what the hell are you talking about?

It's not separate.

I'm a grown ass woman.

It's not separation anxiety.

My son, you know, is not have separation anxiety.

He's like, it's not separation from another person.

It's separation from self.

Because you know if you've got a situation.

Let's just take, for example Something that I'm seeing and you're probably seeing this too from a global fan base people around the world feeling incredibly anxious about AI, incredibly anxious about whether or not they're going to lose their job, incredibly anxious about the changes that it's going to have in the world.

First of all, that's a normal thing to feel, because it is completely out of your control if you get fired or not.

It's completely out of your control if your job's redundant or not.

It's completely out of your control how this is all going to play out.

And so, in the moment where you feel this alarm going off, what happened in that moment is you started to go?

What if this happens?

What if that?

Oh, my God.

You separated from the one thing you can't control, which is your response to it.

And so instead of going up here and going, what if this?

What if that?

What if the other thing?

Which only makes the alarm that you're feeling worse, because when you go up here, you now double down on doubting your ability to handle it.

And so in that moment, if you could take a breath and drop back into your body and into the moment go, wait a minute.

Okay, so I don't know what's going to happen with AI.

I don't know, you know, what's going to happen with the state of the world.

But here's what I do know.

I know that through my attitude, my actions, I can handle it.

I know that, even though I don't know what's going to happen, or what if this, or what if that, I can also say what if it works out.

What if something bad happens?

And I surprise myself and I'm able to just figure it out as much as it may suck.

When you start to drop back in and double down on the truth.

And the truth is you can.

Through your attitude and through the actions that you take, you can handle even terrible things that happen.

It doesn't mean you deserve it.

It doesn't mean that it's not going to be terrible.

But doubling down on your capacity is what will quiet the alarm and it is what will retrain you to know that in those moments because those moments are coming and they're there for all of us in those moments when life really overwhelms you, there's nothing you can do about life, But there's so much you can do to support yourself through it.

And you know what I can now see if you look at somebody like David Ross Marin, professor at Harvard Medical School, and he's also the one that has all the things are called the anxiety centers.

They're all over the US.

He said, the single thing that people do wrong with anxiety is the moment you have that separation.

Oh God, what is this?

And I can't handle it.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

And then you like send yourself into a state of complete panic.

You freeze and now you avoid the thing you're scared of.

So most people right now.

If you're worried about your job, I guarantee you you know what they're doing.

You're probably doing what Mel Robbins used to do.

You're bitching to your friends.

You're worrying about it.

You're frozen about it.

You're pissed off about it.

But you know what you're not doing?

You're not doing the one thing that you can do, which is fucking update your resume, learn new skills.

If you're scared about it, lean into it.

Ask yourself, do I even like what I do?

Maybe now is a time to tighten the belt and cut back on all the spending I don't need, so that I can create a longer runway and figure out what changes I want to make.

Because you're not stuck in the job.

You're not stuck where you are.

At any moment, you can fucking change.

But if you do what I used to do, which is separate from your power to change and separate from your ability to change your attitude or to learn from somebody like you or to get the support that you need, then you're going to trigger a bigger alarm and you're going to become the single biggest reason why you stay stuck.

And it's in these moments, in these moments where life overwhelms you, that's the mistake I made for years.

And then the mistake I made as a parent?

Oh, Jesus.

My kid would be overwhelmed.

And as a mom, you're like, okay, no problem.

You can do a sleep under, not a sleep over.

Oh, no problem.

You can sleep on the floor of our bedroom for six months since you're scared to be in your room.

You know what I'm signaling as a parent?

I'm signaling, I don't think you can handle it.

And so you should be scared because I'm showing you that I don't think you can handle it.

If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom reading list.

It is 100 books that you should read before you die.

The most interesting, life-changing and impactful books I've ever read, with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them.

And you can get it right now for free by going to chriswillx.com slash books.

That's chriswillx.com slash books.

[2025년의 회고: 자존감, 인간관계, 그리고 성장의 기술]-[#1036 - The Best Moments of Modern Wisdom (2025)]

📋 Summary

2025년 회고: 삶을 지탱하는 본질적인 질문들

1. 자존감: 스스로와의 약속을 지키는 것

2. 세 가지 결정이 삶의 질을 결정한다

3. 불안과 위기의 시대: '상황'이 아닌 '대응'에 집중하라

4. 인간관계와 성장의 역설

결론: 벼는 처음엔 풀처럼 보여도 결국 벼다

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[2025년의 회고: 자존감, 인간관계, 그리고 성장의 기술]-[#1036 - The Best Moments of Modern Wisdom (2025)]

📋 Summary

2025년 회고: 삶을 지탱하는 본질적인 질문들

1. 자존감: 스스로와의 약속을 지키는 것

2. 세 가지 결정이 삶의 질을 결정한다

3. 불안과 위기의 시대: '상황'이 아닌 '대응'에 집중하라

4. 인간관계와 성장의 역설

결론: 벼는 처음엔 풀처럼 보여도 결국 벼다

ListenLeap으로 딥러닝 학습

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

ListenLeap이 실제 문맥에서 학습하도록 이끌어줌