Chris Williamson On Champion Mindset, Greatness, Loneliness, Ambition & Burnout | FO512 Raj Shamani

35:31It's the freest discipline and motivation you'll ever get. And then once it becomes a part of your identity, you kind of coast on that for the rest of your life. The same with the gym for me. I just, even sometimes my training's more dialed, sometimes it's less styled but i usually end training because i was obsessed with it for a decade and a half and now i just it's good it just takes over and it's nice it's a part of me and i think the same thing is true for most other obsessions as well true i was speaking to one of the um one of one of the doctors who's an expert in addiction and he said obsession is just a better word for addiction.

36:09That far off. It's like everybody is addicted to something. People who don't understand what they're addicted to, they usually are driven towards substances. Yeah. Well, I mean, look. And it's like addiction is just like a nature. So everybody's addicted. Some call this addiction and some very early on by some incident or an experience, they find some pursuit which becomes their obsession that's actually just an addiction and if you're going to take that thing away from them, they're either going to go mad or they're going to find a new thing to be obsessed with. It's not that they're obsessed being number one, it's just that they're obsessed.

36:54Obsession is the feeling that they're craving. Let's get back to the conversation of becoming a goat. I think I like that for a little being. The ambition part that we're talking about because we We talked about how bad that is. We shat on ambition for a bit. Let's make it good again. We shat on it quite a lot. So we should talk about the good side because I think I talk a lot about ambition. I'm very, very upset. And I want probably in an ideal world, everyone who's listening to this should be ambitious in whatever field. It can be just being ambitious with having the best relationship in the world.

37:30Of course. Or best family in the world. Best mother. Or it can be just like materialistic things in the world. Good. Go and get it all. Right. So first was talking about goat. Why do you think everyone's name is Michael, man? That's true. You know, Michael first, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, Michael Jordan, the actor now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the number one name for NBA players is Michael as well. Interesting. I didn't know that. So do you think arrogance is important to become the goat? Oh, yeah, I think a level of self delusion is very important. Some people are driven by a lot of self criticism, which is great, because it causes you to pay a lot of attention.

38:14You need to really, really scrutinize why am I? Why am I speaking in that way? Why do I keep on using the word like as my filler words when I do a podcast? Or how come I interrupt a guest? I feel uncomfortable with silence or I keep on offering up options when I ask a question and I need to stop doing that. the level of scrutiny that you need to pay to your own performance, Michael Phelps obsessing over every inch of his stride and how he jumps off of the board, et cetera, et cetera. A lot of that comes from deep self-judgment and self-criticism. So it's good. But on the other side of that, you need to believe that you can do something that's never been done before.

38:52And the only way that you can do that is to kind of have a type of delusion where you go, this has never been done or the incumbent champion is better than me and more highly regarded than me and i'm going to beat them but i haven't yet beaten them that's nothing that is at best confidence but realistically delusion right well-informed delusion i think one of the best things that people can be is cultivated delusion would be a good a good way because one of the problems that you have of overthinking too much is that you'll usually think your way out of things more than you think your way into things.

39:31It causes you to hesitate. It causes you to be a little bit more realistic. And don't want to be realistic. If you want to do, if you want 27 year old, 28 year old Chris to sit in front of you, I wasn't realistic about anything that I did. I wasn't realistic about trying to move to America and talk to people on the internet as a job. I wasn't realistic about trying to do these live tours as someone who's never done live before and see if I can sell out the largest venue, the largest theater in London, which is the Apollo. And we did that last year and we'll do it again this year, three and a half thousand people.

40:02But none of these things are realistic, but it's not blind confidence. It is a type of type of arrogance, I think. But it's also a degree of delusion. And I think strategic ignorance is probably another good thing that you can do. Right. strategic ignorance of not actually having to overthink it that much just letting your foot off the gas a good place to start you said three words explain each of them very nicely you said cultivated delusion right explain what is because difference between straight up delusion and cultivated delusion would be you need to know where you can believe beyond your capacity so it needs to be done in a manner that's

40:56conscious straight delusion causes you to become a crazy person which you don't want you know so cultivating your delusion in this area i'm going to allow my dreams to become boundless but not around my health or my sleep or my partnership or whatever right not around my finances should not there's a few areas that we can guarantee you should not be delusional around and your finances are one of them right right there's a bad idea right you become bankrupt right it's a very very bad idea uh but in the ability of you to impact other people's lives to grow very quickly like these are these are things that are good delusion yeah yeah yeah Yeah, cultivated.

41:40Okay, so that's delusion. Because I also believe I'm dreamy and delusional. And I believe everyone should have irrational optimism in at least one field in their life. Not like every field. And one field. Well, that's the problem. You know, you have irrational optimism everywhere. And you're like, you're jumping off cliffs trying to fly. Yeah. Yeah. There are people who have tried that. Yep. So that's one. Second term was strategic arrogance. Yes. What do you mean by that? Very similar, but that you don't want to be arrogant everywhere. You need to be a good operator behind the scenes. You know, let's say, let's take a sports star or a musician, right?

42:18You need to deal with the venues that you work with and the roadies that are supporting you or the referees at your game. You don't want to be, are you going to be arrogant with the people who are there to kind of make the thing that you do happen? No, that's a bad idea, right? You're a poor operator if you do that. but your arrogance with, I am better than these people. I am better than the estimations that everybody around me has, the limitations that I placed on myself. You're basically overclocking your confidence would be a way to think about it. I'm just tuning up my confidence a little bit more than it is so that I push my limits further so that I believe that I can do more than I can.

43:01At what point do you think people, people who are trying to do something, they start believing in it and then they actually become like almost delusional about it and they get arrogant about it? Like what's that point? Because I'll quote a specific thing. I was speaking, when I was speaking to Michael, Michael said, oh, there was a point which is like it's fitting right here, right? He said, I was asking him, were you not worried that the other guy will beat you right and he said i was more prepared to beat a shark in water forget humans i was the most prepared person or living being on planet earth yeah i knew it like in that race format no one can touch me maybe in the ocean people can but in that yeah i was more prepared to beat a shark and i was like yeah yeah that's cool what is that point where you become that like you're so delusional and arrogant i don't think that's arrogance dude i mean obviously he's being hyperbolic right talking about a shark you put a shark in the water with michael phelps and only one of those animals is going to come out um but i bet michael will come out yeah that's right he's got it in a headlock um after a while dude you you really do feel that you're untouchable and you know like floyd mayweather and you look at that guy especially toward the mid-end of his career, he was just unstoppable, like absolutely unstoppable.

44:29It's a combination of high ambition and high proof. You combine those two things and you're overclocking that confidence, right? And you're adding in more fuel. Each success furthers your ability to say, I'm going to keep going, keep doing, keep going. Who do you think out of all your guests or out of everyone who you have spoken to? Who do you think is closest to this mindset? Well, that's a good question.

45:03Ross Edgeley has a very interesting mindset. He's the first man to swim around the UK. So he basically swam six hours on, six hours off. So slept biphasically for most of a year and swam around the UK. He's the first person to have ever, I think the only person to have ever done it. And, um, he has such a fascinating mindset because he's not doing it from a place of pain. He's doing it from a place of suffering strategically managed. That's how he refers to it. Suffering strategically managed. He knows it's going to hurt, but he knows that he can handle it. And I just, I really, really admire the way that he approaches this stuff.

45:46Uh, I think some of the athletes that I've spoken to, at least because who I'm interested in, they tend to be the ones that are deeply unsure and still succeeded in spite of that. So they're kind of Phelpsian, Floyd Mayweather, Michael Jordan, I am the best of all time thing. I haven't been exposed to as many of those people. But Ross is one of these guys who you just put, I mean, he did a triathlon with a tree. He called it the triathlon. He's got the longest ever single distance river swim that he did in Canada. And it was like 300 miles without touching land, without stopping, 50 hours. He swam for two, over two days without stopping.

46:35It was unbelievable, dude. It's absolutely insane. And yeah, it's crazy. But he's driven by just a desire to see what he can do. Like it's so, he's like an explorer, but he's an explorer of himself. He's an explorer of his own limits. I think that's a really cool approach. That's this new word I'm fascinated by. Strategically, strategic, suffering, managed. Yeah, suffering, strategically, managed. Suffering, strategically, managed. Yes. Explain. How can people implement that in their life? He understands that pain and difficulty is just made of component parts. There's some willpower, there's physical discomfort, there's ego depletion, there is going to be fatigue.

47:21And he just looks at each of these things and says, well, I'm going to get tired, so I use caffeine. I'm going to run out of fuel, so I'm going to eat. I'm going to be in pain, so I'm going to have little moments of joy. throughout the swim that keeps me going. I'm going to... Each different point of where am I... Before you try to take on any challenge, you can simply ask yourself the question, where are the potential trapdoors that I could fall down? Or when I'm doing my thing, I want to lose weight. I want to lose weight. I want to get in shape. Okay. When you've tried to lose weight previously, what have been the pitfalls or just imagine game out for me over the next six months.

48:11What are the things? Well, sometimes I might eat cheat meals on a nighttime. Okay. That's a potential trapdoor that you could fall into. How do you strategically manage that? If I don't have junk food in the house, I can't eat it. You can't eat the cookie that isn't there. Okay. Sometimes I miss training sessions. Okay. Well, what are some of the ways that can increase your compliance? I'm going to train first thing in the morning so I don't have time to think about it. Or I'm going to have a training partner so I have social pressure. And if I don't turn up, they're going to know. Or I'm going to get a trainer.

48:40I'm going to pay for a PT. I'm going to do classes so that I outsource my motivation to everybody else. Okay. At each different one of these points, you're able to find where is the challenge and how do I overcome it? And when it comes to suffering and strategically managing suffering, the same thing is true. It's going to be difficult for you to do three podcast episodes a week it was for me so I started doing calls with a couple of the other guys on my team so I didn't need to do it on my own like my there was suffering when I was writing you know I've done a thousand episodes writing descriptions for every single episode doing ad reads and coming up with titles and thumbnails and clips and all the rest of it I found that if I got on a call with some of my friends that worked for me, I kind of didn't mind so much.

49:30So there was some suffering and I strategically managed it by coming up with a solution. Interesting. What do you think? Like why people who come from outside, they are the ones who actually go very far. Like what in their heads causes them to win the game? What do you mean by people from outside? Think about Einstein, Newton, or even Elon. Whatever they do, first they were considered strange. They didn't have any right to win at the place or in the thing that they were going to win it. Elon had no business of making rockets, and then he won that game. Bezos, similar thing. You go back with Einstein and Newton, similar things.

50:19like even right now even the smallest thing that you pick up for example podcasting right joe is not professionally trained interviewee or interviewer or whatever he's not he's not the best journalist out there he's not prepared years and years and tried to learn the craft right he's not and he's still winning in almost every field someone from the outside they come in and then they win. Why do you think so? Like what happens cognitively in their brain that they're designed to win more? They see something that other people don't. You know, you say that Joe didn't get trained as an interviewer or an interviewee, but he'd done 10 ,000, 20 ,000 hours of onstage comedy.

51:06What is that? Comfort with speaking. It's an understanding of flow. It's the ability to communicate and play with words it's a level of safety in silence which is very important when you're having a conversation with someone if you've bombed on stage in front of an audience of people like what does it mean that you asked a question and someone thinks that you're dumb it doesn't matter so he took a tangential skill and moved it across into something else the same goes for elon you know elon's got fascinating mind regardless of what you think of him unbelievable mind okay so he looked at the problem joe looked at the problem of podcasting from the angle of somebody that had done fear factor and classic tv presenting and comedy and elon looked at rocket ships from first principles right so one of the reasons i mean look what you'll notice is that no one who spent their entire life doing baseball goes across and becomes great at cricket right because the skill of cricket is relatively linear but there are other industries where tangential first principles like orthogonal thinkers can unlock everything and it's not true for all pursuits but it's certainly true for some pursuits okay so some pursuits is it just because they've been trained in the similar skills in some other other aspect of their life which they are now using it or is it just they get some sort of edge in disrupting because i don't know because of something some the way they see or the way they cannot help but see probably both i think the the perspective that they have you know this is one of the wonderful things about being an underdog or an outlier is that you can step into an industry that you weren't supposed to be in and very quickly rise up and again we were talking about cultivated delusion proper delusion is believing that because you're good at baseball you can be great at cricket maybe but something tells me that the guys that played cricket their entire life are going to be better

53:22understanding well the same thing is probably not true for rocketry that we can look at or building electric cars that's actually a little bit different the way that I design a business experience for somebody because I come from nightlife and I'm going to make a coffee shop and my coffee shop is going to treat building a coffee experience the way that we used to build a nightclub experience, that to me seems like a pretty good place to have some delusion. We can show people a kind of food and drink experience that they can't get elsewhere because everyone that's existing within the current paradigm only sees things in the same way it's too mimetic and too cyclical it's constrained yeah but if you come from outside that's when you get to have a really new perspective and it's not just the perspective because these are the two things that you said it's a sort of skill set and perspective but the two things come side by side because where is your perspective from it's from your skill set and because the skill set's different the perspective's different you know yeah yeah tell me how do you build that mindset to see a different perspective whether you are from the inside or from the outside if you pursue or if you want to be the disruptor and you want to go really really far how do you build that mindset to see things differently from the inside is hard from the inside is very difficult because you're usually constrained by everybody else that's around you from the outside is easier um but dude for me the greatest place of of seeing opportunity is when other, I spend time with friends who are also in different industries and they speak to me about what they're dealing with.

55:05My best friend's writing a book at the moment. So he's talking to me about all of these different ideas and what he's struggling with and storytelling. He's learned so much about storytelling and from his literary approach to storytelling, I've changed my spoken approach to storytelling he has a a strategy where instead of having the lead of the story up top um so if i was to tell you let me give you a story okay so in the mid 90s there was a woman living in quiet poverty in edinburgh and she was in an abusive marriage she tried to leave her husband didn't let her leave she fled from portugal with her baby daughter and early chapters of a book that she was working on hidden in a suitcase and her partner tried to hide the manuscript to stop her from leaving she got to edinburgh said that she was clinically depressed and suicidal she used to push her daughter's pram to a cafe so that she could work in the warmth while she wrote her book because she couldn't afford heating at home, right?

56:15Her book was rejected by 12 different publishers. That's 12 different people saying in 12 different ways that you're not good enough. And this wasn't just a small slight. It was an existential crisis. Each rejection fueled her to try harder because if this book didn't work, that was the end of the road for her and her daughter. J.K. Rowling went on to sell 500 million copies in the Harry Potter franchise and became richer than the Queen. telling that story if i say dude i've got this great story about jk rowling let me tell you this it completely kills all of the intrigue up top yeah waiting until the very end and then doing the jk rowling reveal at the end gives people that that sense of satisfaction and i learned that from george my best friend and um he's telling these stories and he's telling his stories in the book and he's got this little flip reveal kind of like a miniature thriller and oh the the killer was hiding in the cupboard all along he reveals it at the end and uh like that's from a it's a literary skill set and applying it to storytelling and podcasting people in podcasting are storytellers too but they might not think about constructing it in a way that is more well established in the industry of books and writing take that put it in this thing i think it works that's cool sometimes it's not going to work sometimes you're going to try and take a dish that would work in fast food and put it in gourmet and it's total fucking nightmare but other times it might work true how taking this point where you said from the inside is difficult from the outside is it's easier right you left uk and you came here like probably now you're the outsider here right like you were the insider there what i've seen usually people who change their environments they usually carry the same wound so they become like the same dysfunction version of themselves in a new costume correct right yep very accurate yep very good how do you when you want to change your identity and change your reality how do you change that reality by going to a new place where you know that you're not going to be the same person or trying to wear the same costume you genuinely change you're not just i don't know man i i get what you mean that people's patterns in the same way as you've got the same feet that you had 10 years ago you have the same patterns and wounds that you had 10 years ago at least in my experience though it is really hard for the exact same flavor of your coping strategies and your difficulties to survive a new environment and a new job and a new culture and the more different that you can make where you're inhabiting the harder it is for those old patterns to exist so yes people can new costumes same problem that can happen but at least in my experience only for so long like your patterns aren't indestructible and if you spend time around.

59:21I mean, look, social influence is a huge part here. If you go to someone new, you move to someone new, different industry, different career, different company, different city, different relationship, you will be influenced by the people around you. Okay, what sort of person do I want to be like? Am I around people like that person? If so, you are more likely to become that person. If not, you are less likely to become that person. So think carefully about what the influence is. But doesn't that happen in a lot of cases where you change your circle, you change your people, you change your influence, but you're the same person inside.

59:52So if you were feeling inferior somewhere else, you're going to feel inferior here as well. If you were like, if you were feeling like a loser, you're still going to feel like a loser, no matter how many achievers you surround yourself with. The loser thing, it would be true. So what's the genuine mechanism of change?

1:00:11For me, I can only speak for me, desire, you have to want to change. People talk about, you know, it would be great to be in shape. Would you want to be in shape? Kind of. Okay. Do you want to live the lifestyle required to have the life? If you want the life without the lifestyle, you're guaranteeing yourself disappointment. I want to be a touring rock star. Okay. Do you want to spend 10 years playing guitar and learning chords? No. Okay. Rid yourself of the desire because you're guaranteeing disappointment if you want the life without the lifestyle you guarantee disappointment and so many people want the outcome but not the training ground that doesn't work yeah uh the loser thing or the inferiority thing is inherently relative so that is the sort of thing that can persist no matter where you go uh genuine change if you're talking about that, the confidence, inferiority, insecurity thing, I think you just need more proof.

1:01:09After a while, you can kind of crush your imposter syndrome under mountains and mountains of evidence. At least it worked for me. True. True. I've heard that you and Alex were talking about it like for a very long time and like multiple times you guys have spoken about I like that, the stack of proof thing. Talking about identity, here's something that I keep questioning and I keep observing in the people right now, at least in my generation. If you look at an average 16-year-old today, before they realize who they are, they learn to perform. Right? For the Instagram, for the world, for like constantly online.

1:01:52So they want a version of them to be liked. how do how can somebody find themselves in a world where before they even realize who they are they end up becoming just performers yeah well look they keep changing themselves based on just a different version of performance and validation that they want i don't know how new this is i'm aware that it's been amplified i don't think it's that new okay what do you mean by that i think that for almost all of human history people have tried to make themselves appear better than they are the only difference now is that we're able to do it globally 24 hours a day in real time and we're able to compare ourselves to 8 billion others so yes it's been tuned up but i don't think that the dynamics new and i i try to hesitate laying too much at the feet of the modern world because it makes people feel like this is an unfair challenge on them now that other people didn't have to deal with.

1:02:55And I think realistically, this is something that humans have had to deal with for all of their lives. We want to be perceived in a good light. So we curate our persona and our presentation to try and achieve that so that people make us feel good so that other people see us as good so it's not i i wonder how new it is not to say that it's not been amplified when it comes to stopping the performing thing the the number one solution for this is to be around people who you feel like yourself around give you around friends where you don't need to perform i just did i just like you i just i just want to hang with you like you're funny and sometimes you fuck up or whatever but like i'm just i like you for you it's very rare that people say it out loud but the way to judge if that's the case is do you feel like you can be yourself are these are the people that you're spending time with able to encourage you to dig deeper do you feel more like you or less like you when you're around them once you've finished up do you feel more whole or more broken and if you're moving in the right direction i think what you very quickly become comfortable with i don't need to be anybody else my friends like me or my partner likes me or my family like me or my colleagues like me i don't need to do anything else but what you're talking about the performance is inherently relative it's not something that you do on your own it's performing for someone else right and you're performing for someone else in the hopes of reflectively being made to feel enough or happy or whatever fulfilled but that means that what is powered or broken in union needs to be fixed in union too with somebody else so just be around people that you want to be yourself around do you think being around people and friendships it's getting messed up and messed up just because is more and more people are falling in to this trap of actually choosing their friends.

1:05:06Oh, as opposed to those four people in your tribe that are of your age? Yeah, just like, you know, the whole friendship, the purpose of friendship, forget purpose, like just the friendship was supposed to be, you end up meeting four jerks just like you, random dudes, and you don't judge them based on ROI. You don't judge them based on like, Like what's going to be, are they making me better? Are they making me worse? Am I going to get, I mean, something out of them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All this, you're the average of five people, all that bullshit has actually probably made friendship worse.

1:05:40It made it more transactional, for sure. So the essence of friendship is not transactional. It shouldn't be, but then you also don't want to be friends with someone who makes your life worse. Yeah. Right, that's not a very good friend. Yeah. Right. I don't think that it's a malady of the modern times to say that cutting toxic people out of your life is a good idea. Right. It's a great idea to do that. That's not new. You should have done that. But what's the thin line of being able to balance both in friendships? Because one can be extremely transactional and you're only trying to fit in in the room.

1:06:17Probably you don't belong and you don't even enjoy. But there's something to offer to you. You said it there, like enjoy it. So there's maybe two broad categories here. One is emotionally fulfilling, socially make you feel like you belong. The other is strategically useful, furthers your ambitions for life. And sometimes the two cross over, but other times they don't. Everybody has a boss or a colleague or a person in their industry or whatever. the mother of a son that your son plays with you don't really like the mother but you know that the son likes their son i'm going to be friends with the mother that i don't like because strategically it's useful there's a guy in your industry who's real powerful it seems to like you but he's a bit annoying okay like fine like it's transactional it's there to be transactional but you know that it is the problem is when you apply that mindset to what should be your emotionally fulfilling friendships.

1:07:17Does that make sense? Yeah. So asking yourself the question, what do I get out of this person with the right parameters? I don't think is a bad question. Like, do I feel good? Do they make me feel happy? Do they make me feel more like myself? Can I sit in silence with them and not need to fill it? Dude, I'm just chill. I'm just happy being here with you. Isn't this cool? Isn't this nice that we get to have this dinner? We get to go for this walk. are we going to go on that trip and it's good like that's great so making sure that your friendships are places for you to feel whole and not to perform very important not the same when it comes to your business relationships or the parents of the kids that your your kid plays with slightly different true true do you think knowing a lot of these frameworks and like just listening, reading, understanding all this information about friendships and dating and optimizing yourself actually makes you worse or better?

1:08:22It made me worse for a while. I mean, it made me tactically better, but emotionally more challenged. But one of the reasons that as you've been talking today, I've had to sort of pull myself back into a more tactical style of speaking is that I don't really think in this kind of a way that much anymore. I really try to just vibe code my way through a lot of life. Does this make me feel good? I already know I've got, I've managed to avoid the addictions, the gambling, the porn, the video games, the alcohol. I'm like, because if you say, does this make me feel good? You'll tend to revert to the bottom of the brainstem, right?

1:09:05You'll do the caveman-y, very limbically hijacked stuff. But assuming that you've managed to beat those and you've put, you know, frameworks and constraints in place, which is what I spent most of my twenties and thirties doing. But now I'm just kind of, kind of going to follow what feels good. Who do I want to hang around with? And a lot of the friends that I want to hang around with strategically, tactically, I don't get anything out of but in as much as feeling good is the only reason that we're fucking here in any case i get everything out of them and it means that my performance improves because the next morning i wake up like i had such a great dinner last night and i learned nothing and i thought it was brilliant i had no stories to tell on the podcast but i feel good and because i feel good i'm going to operate better yeah yeah at what point somebody should start operating like this it takes a while you can't do it at the start you can't code your way through this is why we said it earlier i think we said it before we got started you need to learn the rules of the game before you can break the rules of the game breaking the rules of the game having not learned them is just not playing the game right and this is why somebody like joe for instance the secret to joe's success one of the secrets to joe's success in podcasting is that he is able to ask a question with a statement.

1:10:22So he says statement that encourages an answer from the guest. So he treats statements as questions. What that sounds like is you hearing someone just talk. It's just a conversation, not an interview. And the fact that he's cultivated that, now he's hands off the wheel. Maybe he was native, maybe it was natural, maybe it was the way that you came into it but even if it wasn't he just says a statement and he gets an answer back as if he'd asked a question that's brilliant that's fucking genius it's the simplest thing say a statement get an answer don't need to ask questions in the same way and then when you do ask a question it's more pointed and more direct and that's brilliant too you can't do that from the off because you need to learn what a good and a bad question is like what a good and a bad statement is like and only after that the number of times on the pod for instance that i just say why or what do you mean by that like very short snappy questions i love doing that but if you haven't built up the understanding of when you can deploy that because if you do that too much it sounds very harsh it sounds kind of almost confrontational but if you have understood the and i didn't even think about it i'm not thinking about i used to think about it i can ask the why question now because i feel like i've got enough warmth between me and the guests to show that this isn't a pointed difficult question um it takes time it takes time to learn but i would say no sooner than five years and no later than 20 years but your results may vary that's a good framework to think like at least for five years play by the rules play by the rules exactly learn how i mean look even with elon the fucking rocket thing first principles but remember where he took the first rocket designs from they were the publicly available nasa blueprints and only after that did he do like falcon and he did the uh uh raptor raptor engine right did three then two then one or one then two then three and it gets progressively simpler over time if you look at the first one you've seen that image right the first one the second one the third one the first one's what is this there's some crazy contraption there's all of these different and you get down to the final one and it's this sleek design super simple but you had to learn the rules before you could break the rules breaking the rule because how do you know to get to this how do you know what is surplus requirements if you haven't put everything in and then eliminated individually.

1:12:59Yeah. You know, talking about rules, you talk a lot about men, right? And their way of dealing with the world and loneliness and stuff like that. There's one rule which men have been taught. And this is, I believe, everywhere around the world is to not be a woman. They're not taught mostly about how to be a man. They're usually taught about how not to be a woman. So every time you ask a man, what does being a man mean like? Or does it feel like? They just talk about strength and not crying and everything which is not woman. And you ask a woman about what is about being a woman and they start mentioning the qualities.

1:13:46What do you think? What happens to a brain of a man when they're just perpetually trained to be not something, not to be something? Well, it makes them very confused. It's very confusing. If you're defined around what you are not, and in the modern world, at least in the West at the moment, I don't know how it is in India, men are told actually by much of the contemporary advice that if they were only less masculine, they would be better, right? Right. Your main problem, men, is your masculinity. If you were more like the women, if you spoke more about your emotions, if you were softer, if you were less concerned with conquer and mastery and emotional containment, you'd be fine.

1:14:28So what you're right to say that. Do you feel that true? It certainly is in terms of the advice publicly. I don't think that it's true, but that's what men are being told. uh and yeah it's horrendous like this it opens up all of the doorways for guys to feel confused without any of the solutions and then it blames men for not knowing what direction to go in and then it says that they're in a position of privilege for being part of a patriarchy they no longer feel a part of and a cut adrift with no advice and are told that the main problem that they have is with masculinity which was poorly defined to begin with it's confusing it's confusing time to be a guy i'm glad that i'm old uh i'm glad that i'm older because uh it was less confusing when i was growing up and that means that even though it's still confusing now i've i had a little bit of time before it became insane tell me because you said because you said uh be more like women and that's the way to be, et cetera, et cetera.

1:15:37So let's boil it down to be vulnerable. Is that vulnerable? Vulnerability, right? So that's the word. Do you think it's good to show vulnerability or no? I do, personally. I think that - You don't? I do. You do. I think vulnerability is the only way that you can have true strength. I think if there's nothing on the line, if you're not risking anything, then there's no such thing as courage. courage is not not being scared courage is being scared and doing it anyway it has to be there's no bravery if there's nothing risked because you just didn't feel anything like if if i say to you we're going to toss a coin and you can just pick and say what bravery is involved in just picking first say we're going to toss a coin and it's for your entire net worth like fucking hell well you might say it's just uh delusion at that point not not bravery um we're gonna run into that house and everybody's got nerf guns with foam bullets you know how much bravery do you need for that not much we're gonna run into that house and everyone's got real guns you need a lot because there's something on the line without any risk there can be no such thing as courage and vulnerability to me is speaking your truth even when it's scary If it's not scary, then what does it matter?

1:17:01I think that vulnerability, it depends on what your definition is. I think a lot of people see vulnerability as crying, oversharing emotions unnecessarily. And it's not. It's saying what's true for you, regardless of how scary it feels. At what point did it strengthen and at what point it becomes weakness? uh well we praise suppression as strength right that's not the same thing suppressing your emotions is not the same thing as being strong like strength is feeling your feelings and doing it anyway moving through them embodying them allowing them to become part of you and continuing uh it is not it is absolutely not suppressing what you feel

1:17:53But you know how a lot of people actually, I mean, that's what they say, that if you show a lot of weakness, or not weakness, if you show a lot of emotions, if you show a lot of vulnerability, people start, like people stop relying on you too much. People stop seeing you in a very strong way. that's true yeah i mean if you look it's it's not just necessarily showing emotion if your emotion was excitement people probably don't see you and what you're talking about is a lack of emotional containment right that your emotion has come up at the wrong time yeah right there's a big difference like emotional leakage that's what i'm talking about of course you know and yeah i think so if you're the leader of a military platoon now is not the time to cry in the middle of a war but when you get back and you're with your group i i don't know maybe you're right that you get less respect if you get back to the base and you show emotion about how much that meant to you but there's very specific situations where this is true and i think that far fewer of them are true than people think um there are very few situations when done at the right time where more emotion contained appropriately, not out of control, more openness, more emotion, more openness about emotion.

1:19:17I think we're in an increasingly autistic culture, right? It's one that fears emotions or demonizes them. Um, it's, I'll give you this, a lot of guys, especially and hard-charging ambitious people, use the mantra, fuck your feelings, just work harder, to get them to push aside their emotions in order to keep on with the mission. That's great. And I think that that is a huge step that lots of people can take. But that's only level one. If you pray at the altar of, fuck your feelings, just work harder, how can you be surprised when you achieve but you don't feel? Think about that for a second Fuck your feelings, just work harder Then you reach the top of the mountain And you complain about the fact that it's Passed through you Well, you have cause and effect Happening right in front of your eyes Of course you do The very fuel that got you here Is the thing denying you your satisfaction Once you arrive Fuck your feelings, just work harder I don't feel when I achieve That's the same thing, dude so what are you doing it for if if the only way that you can achieve success is to deny yourself the one reason that you did the success for i don't know man it feels like an overly complex solution and um i'm just i'm i'm way less impressed by somebody that's successful now i'm way more impressed by somebody who is embodied in their success like who feels it like just all that success is, is appropriate strategy, good timing and consistency for a significantly long enough duration.

1:21:08Largely anybody can achieve success through that. Yeah, there's limitations, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Okay. Not everyone's got the same head start, et cetera. But to do that and feel it is way rarer, way rarer. So for me now, I'm much more interested and impressed by people who have managed to do it and feel it, not just do it. Yeah, I agree. You know, I found myself living in this duality. Like I'm sort of, it's different context, it changes, right? When there's some shit happening in my team, you will never see me panicking. You will never see me showing any emotion, And even though like inside I'm burning, the world's ending and I wanna cry out loud.

1:21:53It's the job of a leader. Yeah, like nobody will ever get to, I'm this feelings and work harder kind of person, right? And not always like work, work, work, work, work. And I almost like the price to pay for that is because I don't feel paranoid and I don't panic at the time when everything is breaking, I don't enjoy the high. I don't celebrate. Yeah, you have to feel it all. Yeah, so I don't do either. but then when i'm back home uh when i'm with my family with my girl and like just i become this baby and i'm crying like a good i'm crying like a kid good i think it's good dude i think it's good but don't show the guys don't show the guys it's important but sometimes i question myself i'm like which part of me is is true because no i don't think i think that you can be a professional i think you're allowed to be a professional uh you know there are times for you to show emotion and there are times for you to show up and do your fucking job and sometimes those things can cross over but sometimes they shouldn't there's this great uh book called endurance by alfred lansing and it's about ernest shackleton's crossing of the antarctic and it's a for the people that haven't read the book and don't know the story it didn't go well it was a real challenge for a long time they were stuck in antarctica and uh what you find is that shackleton who was the leader of the exposition publicly all of his team only saw him as competent contained he always had a plan he knew what he was doing he was confident about what was going to go on but you read his diary and he's drowning in self-doubt he's permanently self-pitying him I have no idea what I'm doing.

1:23:40I don't know if this is going to work. And then closes the book, goes outside, does his job. He's a profession. Same thing for you. And how cool is this not what a Renaissance man is? Somebody that's able to fully feel the fear privately and then step out? Because again, if you didn't have the soft side, where would the glory be on the other side of it? And that's not to say, look, people have varying levels of emotional depth, varying levels of emotional exposure. There's nothing less about being someone who feels less. But you are going to live a less rich life. There are types of experience that you will have access to, a sort of resolution.

1:24:22You can see the world in 4K. Other people kind of see it in 720p. And this is a blessing and a curse. It's a double-edged sword of feeling things deeply. You get to do the thing. that's great man it's gonna hold you back and you're gonna feel it but i don't know it seems like a good deal to me talking about being a man we were talking about and i if you left the thread open if i if i have to compare india versus the west world okay in india a boy becomes a man because he goes through certain rituals okay it's like you're almost told that you have to take care of the family there are responsibilities in some parts there's a proper ritual where you're being handed over like you're the man of the house now right and it almost like your path is paved you have to walk a certain thing there's society pressure there's responsibility in the western world nothing's like that you're not being told to do certain things you don't have to maybe follow a strict way of religion or family responsibility that's not it's much more lenient here right which one do you think is better like knowing a path where you're gonna be become a man or a boy or whatever versus i think i think that definitely helps i think that like knowing a part yeah i think coming of age rituals are really useful and it's a shame that we don't have them in the West anymore.

1:25:54I think it would have made me happy to have had a little bit more of an understanding about the path that I was taking and the route that I would go down. What do you think can be one ritual? Oh, that's good.

1:26:11I think something around, you know, 14, 16, 18, some transitionary moment, something that feels like an occasion or a ritual. okay childhood is over adulthood has begun i think that's kind of important you know in the west what's the closest thing we've got getting a driver's license maybe that's like it you know uh there isn't an equivalent and i i think it would help a lot of young boys realize that they're supposed to take on more responsibility earlier and feel pride in it right as opposed to obligation or this weird, I used to have fun doing this and now I can't sensation, you know, like, oh, this is, I've arrived and I should behave as such.

1:27:00Yeah. There is, in India, there is that moment in every household. When? In their different age groups, different people, different backgrounds, different financial freedom levels but at some point in your house you're made to realize either by a ceremony or by just making you sit down amongst the other group of like other family members that you're going to be next and your time's coming and it's now you better start behaving good i like that i think it's good yeah and then almost like at the time when you're when the head of the family like if your father or grandfather somebody dies then there's a ritual called pagdi which is like a turban right it's it's like a hypothetical turban it's like it's turbans being given to you that now you're the head of the family so like 20 50 100 people whoever you consider family now you are the caretaker of that so from that point a boy becomes responsible i like it yeah so what do you think if there if you had to pinpoint one ritual or experience which turns a boy into a man what would that be i don't know man i mean i'm i'm i'm constrained by the culture that i grew up in there wasn't one it wasn't is it the first time you have sex is it when you get your driver's license is it when you move out of the house is it when you get your first job or a first bank account there wasn't a demarcation there wasn't a line uh i i honestly don't even know what that would look like i honestly don't know what it would look like but what do you think it would look like think think about it what one experience can if you feel like like okay maybe this pain this suffering this particular thing look do you do a misogi like a japanese misogi where you've got 50 chance of success are you thrown out into the wilderness for 40 days to fend for yourself i think i think what you guys have done there it seems like a good start because it needs to be done socially it needs to everybody else sees you as different and treats you differently i think that seems to be a a clever idea but uh i mean you know you can do it an 18th birthday and have somebody call out this is who you are now in front of all of your family and friends and for you to feel that and take on that new identity i think that would be a good start i grew up in india which means i've grew i've grown up with colonial hangover right there are there are so many things in our head in our history books which has just taught us that britishers came over they ruled us hundreds of years so we grew up with almost there's a sense of dislike hatred revenge avenge a lot of societies and sociology and my thinking and everyone's thinking around me it's shaped by either hating Britishers or pleasing Britishers right because a lot of the rules that you guys said I mean the Britishers said ended up becoming where we wanted to just please and we just played the rule because we thought that's the ultimate supremacy and you know that's it and exactly opposite is like revenge like how the...

1:30:12Like, we're not going to follow anything that these guys do, right? So we grew up with that. I want to understand when you grew up in a country where that country has colonized everybody, you're the colonizer. Your history is, you literally taught that you are the supremacist. You guys went ahead, set the world order, structured things right. Do you grow up differently? Good question. I got to say, I didn't ever grow up feeling like British people owned the world. I felt like Americans owned the world. You know, I was born in 88. And most of my school time when I would have learned this would have been the 90s and the early 2000s.

1:30:54I didn't feel like we were some global force. I learned stuff about how we responded in World War II. I learned the Battle of Hastings and the War of the Roses. and, you know, our history being invaded by the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans and things like that. That was what I learned. I never learned about. Yeah, and then we, you know, kind of went and took Australia and took India and Canada. We made them colonies and then we, you know, had a, we stopped the Atlantic slave trade and we started there, the East India Trading Company and da-da-da-da. We didn't really learn about that. And I don't know whether that's the schooling system trying to sweep it under the rug or if it's just not seen as being that important but i've i don't know any british person who thinks that by virtue of their nationality they own the world especially not now i mean maybe 100 years ago they would have had some sort of vestige of past glory but the uk is putting both feet in its mouth at the moment it's not showering itself in in wonder at the moment it's like the a lot of in a lot of ways it's one of the laughingstocks of the world like look at this fallen empire even 200 years ago you guys had everything and now you can't even secure your own borders or you have these insane benefit scams going on or you have all of this strife internally and no one can agree on how the country's supposed to be run wasteful spending and inefficiency and you know like the uk i love the uk i love all of my friends that are there i'm very very grateful for what it did for me but it's not exactly it's it's it's not in its golden era at the moment i don't think and holding on to past victories of some sort apart from world war ii i never really thought about that but are you guys taught like were you guys ever taught that you colonized india or australia or stuff like that never no and nobody even talks about that that's Interesting.

1:32:54No one talks about it. And do you ever get to know about, like, I mean, at some point you must be knowing about it, right? That British used to own the world at some point. To a degree, yeah. Yeah, I suppose so. I mean, I think I learned that through novels and historical dramas and stuff like that. Interesting. I didn't learn it in school. Why do you think they're hiding this part of the history? Good question. Maybe shame, maybe just a lack of importance. You know, you don't have that much time in terms of history, right? you've got an hour a week two hours a week there's some pretty important cool stuff that we've got but i suppose one challenge that you have in the uk is especially england we have a thousand years of history right unbroken uninvaded history there's a lot to get through and for india what might be the most important thing for us is you know a footnote as a part of a thousand years a millennia of learning like from 1066 right all the way up to today so much stuff to go through yeah this is also debatable now in india that this is also just a footnote in indian history because our civilizational history is the oldest in the world so we should be taught about that not just like these 200 years there's a lot uh focused around the sort of british yeah colonizer that's interesting well so what because they did the they wrote our schooling system no really yeah a lot of it is still followed but do you think that is uh the british trying to indoctrinate indian people into understanding we came civilized this nation we should be held up as some sort of glorious why do you think they would have tried to put that in to do so the so the version which is most known and most people who like most people what they know about is britishers tried to build a schooling system in a way where we only learn to follow orders and learn to become and get into professions which will serve them not become innovators not become uh you know let's say like original thinkers or not become risk takers so all the professions which are still till date being very celebrated by the masses are the ones which are an administration.

1:35:16What like? Let's say government bodies. People who are in the position of power in the government, not the elected ones, but the officials who are selected for administrating things. That's one of the highest, like one of the most chaste professions in the country. But it's inherently kind of servitude. You're serving in that way. You're not breaking new ground. You're not being innovative. because see all our lives we were i mean at least in the schooling books now it's getting changed we were taught that british's came here they ruined everything and they were the ones who were celebrating yeah what about cricket what what about it was the cricket in india before we came no cricket's good yeah we did one good thing look i'm gonna i'm gonna try and i feel like i'm being I feel like I'm having to apologize for an entire nation here uh but I'm desperately clamoring for something that we've done that's good I'm gonna take cricket I'm gonna take cricket if that's one of the options now we dominate it yeah that's true I was gonna say yeah we shouldn't have taught you that we should have kept you in business administration so you didn't learn cricket so that we would have been able to win the world cup more effectively I was just telling you like the kind of stuff that we read it's it's pretty different than what you have read so that's why I was like...

1:36:35It's not the same, dude. But it's nice that... Not nice. Like, it's fascinating that you guys don't even talk about it. Never. I would have never talked about it in school. Do you think people around you, like your friends or anyone, like just Britishers in general, you've ever felt your privilege and entitled?

1:36:59Inside of the country? Inside of the country. No. Never. I'm as working class as you can get, right? I come from a town which is famous only for having the highest teen pregnancy rating in the UK. And then it lost that. So the very unremarkable working class, northern British town, nobody thinks that they're special. Nobody feels like they're entitled at all, at all. everybody in the uk is obsessed with class absolutely obsessed with class and status we have the word posh do you know the word posh is yeah okay so somebody's sort of from an upper class background but not necessarily from money right in the us you would say rich right or well to do or uh maybe you might even say upper class but you wouldn't say posh posh is a kind of old money way of speaking and behaving um but it's all internal we don't think about ourselves I never, ever, ever thought about British culture in relation to other cultures.

1:38:00I never thought about a level of superiority. It was all within the hierarchy of the country. That person went to that school. Oh, that's an expensive school. They must be. But at no point was I thinking me or my friends or my family or whatever as just some random little community in England had anything over the rest of the world at all interesting why do you think people obsess with class because they're obsessed with class in India as well in India well in India you have a little bit more of a rigid system um I think in the UK one of the reasons for that was kind of the aristocracy this history for a very long time of um birth right who are your parents what do they do do they own land uh another thing is the population density of the uk is 10 times that of the us so we only have 50 million people 50 60 million people the us has got five times more people but in like 50 times more land so we've got like 10 times the population density it's crazy so that means everyone's very close there's not really that much room to escape you can see what everybody is doing but it's part of the culture dude people are obsessed with class in the uk absolutely obsessed with it and talk about it's it's status games but it's not i will never not be working class i will never not be working class in not too dissimilar of a way i suppose to second it's just but what's more sneaky about it is it's never spoken about no one would ever say oh you're working class but they know where i went to school what my parents did, where I was born, the sort of house I grew up in.

1:39:48I've got two degrees and moved to America and own a bunch of businesses, but I'm still working class. And I always will be no matter what I do. So. And they will never be able to see you in the same light as them? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, it depends what we're talking about here. Cause my generation is more influenced, I think by America meritocracy, you know, you are what you do and you are as good as you do it, as opposed to you are who your parents are, and you're as good as your schooling and your accent and your place of birth and stuff like that. But not your parents' generation.

1:40:25Parents what? The parents' generation would still see you as working class versus… Two degree. Yeah. Two degree. Yeah. Interesting. So, it's diminishing as we speak with generation i think so i think so yeah the influence of meritocracy of people the world becoming more globalized especially the influence of america and why do you think it's in terrible shit right now like why is it going down you're gonna you're gonna get me in trouble um i've just had to apologize for all of the crimes that we committed against india and now i'm gonna have to try and work out why it's in such a shithole um there is a there is holding on to some of the past victories some of the glories of the past kind of does happen a little bit in the uk but not over other countries but in a sort of laziness lackadaisical taking for granted that well i mean you know, what a wonderful heritage and history that we have as a country.

1:41:29We don't need to maybe be quite so efficient. We don't maybe need to be quite as well thought out internally. There's this high speed train line, it's called HS2. And the country has been trying to build this high speed train line from the middle of England to London. So the people who work way outside, you know, a three hour drive could maybe get into London in less than an hour, HS2. This has had an infinite amount of money poured into it, like an unlimited amount of money. It's not even remotely close to being started, let alone finish. And it's been going on for decades. The NHS in the UK, the National Health Service is just, it's a mess.

1:42:07Up until I think 10 years ago, they were using Windows XP. They still use fax machines, right? It's just, if you have a system, this is my current working theory. If you have a system which is very old which our country is it takes so long to just update the systems and if you have that as the mindset the u the u.s is move fast break things there is innovation in places like india we're going to we don't quite know how to put this together but we're going to do it we're going to come up with a solution that actually makes this thing work the uk is just a bit less it's still very spit and sawdust but it's way less innovative you know the uk has the same number of graduates out of the top 10 universities in the world.

1:42:52The UK has the same number of graduates as the US does, but graduates from those universities in the US become entrepreneurs at five times the rate. So the US produces five times more graduates out of the top 10 unis than the UK does, despite us having basically the same number of people graduating. Why? I don't think that there's a culture of innovation. I don't think that there's a culture of moving fast and breaking things. But one of the advantages of that is the bar is set incredibly low. So if you are somebody who's got some agency and some innovation and is able to pick yourself up by your bootstraps in the UK, you can very quickly make a change.

1:43:29You can very quickly rise above because the culture is holding everyone back. And if you just about manage to reach escape velocity, you can very quickly set yourself apart from everyone else because the competition is not as strong as it would be somewhere else. You said like it's holding you back. Is it because of the will? Like people don't have the will and the intention to grow? To a degree, the influence. I think a lot of people want to, but there's very much a tall poppy syndrome sense. You do not want to do something different in the UK. If you do, you stand out, you're mocked for it. It's not upheld.

1:44:07In the US, if you do something, if you try and fail, people in the US will usually support you. if you try in the uk you're going to get the piss taken out of you um there's a line in the us people want to see you succeed in case you take them with you in the uk people want to see you fail in case you leave them behind and i think that that's pretty true it's it's interesting i'm thinking where is india and middle india is in middle i guess there are places and states and cities and organizations where people just want you to go out and be disruptors and go out and you'll get supported by millions of people and then there are places where it's same like uk where you're going to be pulled down but no matter what you do because so there's a saying that this is the best like in the world right now the best place to be alive is india because it's growing there's insane amount of opportunities so even if you are a little focused there's so many people and so many things which are still about to come so that's why you're going to make you're going to be more successful in this part of the world than any other place and then there's a saying that don't try too much because you're going to be pulled down because india doesn't have like a part of india doesn't have good relationship with failure but just changing now i'm asking you is that same in uk that because in us what i've seen you're not being called out if you fail like they have a good relationship with failure it's like if you're a second second time failed entrepreneur you're still going to get a chance for the third time it's true you're not going to get despite not having a great track record yeah um i think you're right i think in the uk again if you're obsessed with uh status uh what you're saying by trying to do something different is I am better than where I am now.

1:46:05And implicitly in that is while my status isn't an accurate representation of who I am, but we know that it is. We know that your status, really your class, the level of posh that you're supposed to be, your working class, or your lower middle class, or your middle class, or your upper class, or your very well to do. So I think that's part of it. And also there's just a big unspoken competitive landscape in the UK. No one really calls it out. So everybody is competing, but nobody wants to be seen like they're competing. So one of the benefits that you have for this is if you can find a pocket of friends, like I have.

1:46:40A lot of my best friends are from the UK and have moved, no longer live there.

1:46:48they all of us have done really really well to hold on to each other because we found a community but these aren't geographic these aren't really even cultural they're subcultural you know they're just a little it's one person from each town or three people from each town who maybe meet each other or meet people from other towns and go oh you like to improve or try and build businesses or work on yourself or get in shape or do whatever, I'm going to become friends with you because it's really hard to find other people that are like you. And yeah, that's why, I mean, you know this, the UK had the second highest millionaire exits in 2024.

1:47:25Number one was China, even though they've got, you know, 20 times the population. And the UK was number two. Like 10 ,000 people, I think, left China, 3 ,000 millionaires left the UK in 2024. that we do not have that many millionaires. The founder of Revolut left. And I think his tax bill is the equivalent of tens of thousands of normal people. He left because the entrepreneurial landscape is not fantastic. Now, dude, I love the UK. I miss my friends in the UK. There's lots of things that I like about it. But the quality of life is not that fantastic. The weather fucking sucks. The weather blows.

1:48:06and you get taxed very, very highly. Plus the culture is not particularly supportive. It's not a supportive environment to try and do something different or to be an entrepreneur. And that is a death spiral because fewer and fewer people will try and of the people that do and succeed, they leave. So this is why the UK is struggling a little bit at the moment. And it's a top down, there need to be more pro-entrepreneurial initiatives so that people want to do it. And it needs to be bottom up as well. The culture needs to change. People need to start to celebrate those that are doing different things, that are trying, even if they're failing.

1:48:41Interesting. And the same, something similar, the stat, I also read that in Dubai, I was just reading specifically about Dubai and UAE, the highest number of buyers who were foreign, who had never been, like newcomers, were British in 2025. Doesn't surprise me. Doesn't surprise me. Dubai is like, for Indians, it's like a hub. We almost call it, it's a part of India. It's so close to us. There's a joke that the most expensive city in India is Dubai. Brilliant. Even after that, the newcomers, people who are coming for the first time and buying their houses and living there, were highest with Britishers.

1:49:20So they are just moving all around the world now. I think Dubai took the highest number of millionaire exits from the UK, I think, of one country. Dubai is not that big, dude. It's basically a very large city. Yeah. There's one very large city. True. It's not even large. well yeah that's right and some desert around it and the sea so yeah yeah crazy coming back to a uk us india conversation okay i really love that what do you think is this so okay let me just point out things that you said you said there are people in us who who think that they're entitled to be some you know sometimes i think there are people like some adults who want something because they thought as when they were growing up, they were promised a war.

1:50:06Now they're not being given that war. Also, just to add another wrinkle in that is if you live in a meritocracy, especially a capitalist meritocracy, which the US absolutely is, if the people who win are worthy of their successes, what does that say about the people that lose? They're worthy of their losses, right? You are completely in charge of the outcomes that you get in life. And that means that if you don't get the outcomes you want in life, it feels like a personal insult. It feels like you are not enough. You're not good enough. You should have been better. And if only you'd worked harder or done something else, you could have become that.

1:50:42Whereas in the UK, your path is kind of predestined a little. And I think that that restricts what people believe and hope, but it also makes them kind of take their hands off the wheel somewhat. you know how high could i climb how high could i climb for instance i remember this when i used to play cricket when i was uh 11 or 12 years old so you'll know this do you have the term thanks for coming in india when you play cricket it's called a tfc thanks for coming and it's when you don't bat and you don't bowl okay and the captain the captain at the end of the game shakes your hand and goes thanks for coming mate because all you've done is field yeah right and um i remember that i used to sometimes have this weird sense of satisfaction if i had a tfc because i knew that i didn't have the opportunity to fail you know i didn't bat so i couldn't get out or score low i didn't bowl so i couldn't have bowled a couple of overs and got taken off because i bowled badly or something like that got hit for 18 in two overs or something and then the captain's like sorry mate take a take a spell um and that i think is partly you know fear it's avoidance it's certainly a bit of me i'm not saying that british culture's got that much to do with it but i certainly do see uh people in the uk inoculating themselves from failing publicly by assuring their failure privately by not even engaging right if i don't try i can't fail at least publicly and remember when status is such a big deal and if trying and failing is this huge big catastrophe you don't want to try and fail it would be easier just to not try yeah yeah i agree this is same in india by the way but shame embarrassment attached to failure yeah i came off a moped in bali 10 years ago so i'm just the most garden variety standard issue stupid white tourist thing to do I rent a moped for 50 cent a day.

1:52:43Okay. And I'm riding down the street, truck pulls out in front of me. I pull both of the brakes. The back brake is completely gone because the bike was worth 50 cent a day. The front brake goes, the bike slides out from underneath me. You'll remember when you were riding a push bike as a kid, you pull the front brake, the bike goes. And I come off the bike and the whole side of my arm up on my shoulder, the outside of my knee, the top of my foot, just me versus Balinese road in a tiny pair of swim shorts and a vest. I lost, right? Balinese road won. It was a TKO. The first emotion that I felt as I stood up, having just come off this bike, bleeding, covered in grazes and scrapes and, you know, no skin left on one side of my body.

1:53:26The first emotion that I felt was embarrassment. The first emotion that I felt was shame. It wasn't fear for my own life, my own health, whether or not I'm going to get infected. How am I going to deal with this? Can I get home safely? it was this sort of British, are people seeing, are they laughing at me? That was the first emotion that I had. But isn't that good? Because that actually motivates you to become better. I think so. Let me be more specific with the shame question on this. Do you think if a society, if you're born in a society where you're motivated or demotivated by shame and you attach your sense of worth by the fact how much shame you're going to be experiencing in the eyes of society.

1:54:13Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It certainly makes sure that people behave in a pro-social manner, right? The judgment of others. People don't want that. So that's good. I don't like shame as an emotion. I don't think it's a powerful tool. I think that you're better off trying to get people to do what they should do. through incentivizing them as opposed to punishing them. I think punishment largely is, especially in the modern world, unless somebody's broken the law and done something, you know, like genuinely unethical, you get shamed for trying and failing. Really? Really? That's the middle.

1:54:51I felt the fear of shame of bowling and bowling badly or of batting and not scoring well or of coming off a moped and it being because of my skill on a moped, which it wasn't. I mean, I also don't have great skills on a moped, but it was because I got a bike that I hadn't checked the brakes of fully. I didn't think that you would be able to rent a bike where the back brake didn't work. Okay, but is that really worthy of shame? I don't think so. So look, shame can be useful, but it needs to be useful around very specific things. Does it incentivize people to work harder? Kind of, but I would rather encourage them to work harder than punish them to work harder.

1:55:33Do you think then people should become shameless? No, no, you need your shame. It's very important. This is where I will stand up for my British heritage. It's very important to have shame, right? Because without shame, you can become a very anti-social psychopath. You can start to use people in ways that are unethical. You can hurt people and do things that you shouldn't do. So I think shame is important. So let's make it easy for people, okay? So because I like this conversation and a lot of people would relate to it because we've all felt embarrassed and shame, shameful in some part or some situation of our lives, right?

1:56:04Give me some sort of framework or something to think about in what kind of situation I should feel shame and in what situation I should not. Okay, that's interesting.

1:56:19I think shame is useful. Shame is certainly useful when your actions have damaged or hurt other people, not just you. You know, if I bat badly, yeah, I guess it's influenced the team, but really shame around that. Did you try? I think another thing is, did you try to do this? Good example. I was thinking about, you should feel shame if you said to your captain that you're going to turn up and play. But you didn't. You just didn't want to and you didn't tell him and he played with 10 men. Or had to get his uncle who doesn't play cricket. You shouldn't feel shame if you set off on time but hit traffic and got locked up in some insane traffic jam on the way there.

1:57:02You'll feel the same, oh my God, I've let my captain down. But in one of those, you could have done differently and didn't. And in another, it was kind of out of your hands. Also, if you do something that's just on you, where you did something that's brave and courageous and kind of aligned with what is generally pro-social values, good. Keep going. If it's not, like, the way you do some crypto pump and dump rug pull thing, like, yeah, feel a fuck ton of shame. You should do. That was a bad thing to do. Get this to, like, let's extrapolate this particular insight to speaking out freely. Should people be shameful without, when they say something which they're thinking about and probably can be not aligned with the societal values.

1:57:50I guess it depends on what they say, you know? But it's so subjective because freedom of speech is so subjective. Of course it is. In like some countries, you can be jailed for saying one thing. In another country, it's completely fine. Of course. So should people be feeling shameful? Well, it depends what you say. It very much depends what you say. So how do they actually put out the filter? Wisdom. right this is what taste the difference between good and not good that's what we're looking to try and achieve here and this is why as people get older they tend to become wiser because it takes experience you can't speed run this stuff it's going to take you time to work out how do i have a difficult conversation with my partner in a way that doesn't hurt them and that seems genuine and honest and gentle but firm and it holds a boundary that's very skillful very very skillful how do i hold this bat correctly how do i play a nice cover drive okay it's going to take a little bit of time to do and it's accumulated one step one day one interaction one iteration at a time do you think it's important to have that kind of experience to learn wisdom yeah yeah you i don't think you can speed run wisdom do you think it's important to actually also suffer in order to get there it's certainly useful because when things go badly or when you suffer you assess your actions with a level of dexterity and resolution that you don't when things are going well when you're brushing up against the grain of life you look at your actions so much more closely as opposed to when you're just going with the flow when things are going well you know like i'll assess how stuff is but i don't really need to look at it that closely but if you've just gone through a breakup or you've lost a parent or your business has gone under, you're going to try and work out why that happened.

1:59:40And you're going to try and make sure it doesn't happen again. And that's why you assess things very, very closely. And I think that that's great periods of growth. It's this wonderful line, adversity is a terrible thing to waste. Adversity is a terrible thing to waste because during your toughest moments, that is when most growth is available, but not everybody is catalyzed by adversity. Some people are crushed by it. And it's a case of asking, how are you going to respond? Life has kicked you in the nuts. how are you going to respond? Who do you think are the people who actually come off better out of adversaries versus people who don't?

2:00:19People who are able to alchemize it into something good. People who are able to say that situation was very difficult to me and I'm going to keep going. I mean, it's definitely not the people that give up. I can guarantee that the one way to ensure that you fail is to give up when you face adversity that feels a lot like victim blaming right you don't know how hard it is i hate dude i get it break up and lost a mom and broke a leg in the same week that's rough but you do have two choices when this situation happens like either give up or not and for me i think the not is always the way to go because you're wired that way or somebody taught you this Why the way?

2:01:03And I want to be that way Because I want to be that way More Are they two different things? I think so I think there's a difference between What is my disposition or predisposition And where do I want to be Like your predisposition might be to be fat And out of shape But I don't want to be that way I want to train I want to be in good shape I want my health to be good for me So that I can operate well So I can enjoy life So I can have a long healthy life So that I can support my family Pick my kids up and my wife okay that's not your disposition right that's not your traits but it is what you've trained yourself into doing and self-authorship self-determination agency they're very very important to me very important do you think people who change and come off better they're always operating from the point of i'm not enough it's a great question so there is certainly a limit to how much personal development you should rabidly do right if you're in your late 60s and still operating from the not enough energy i get the sense especially if you've been doing it for a long time if you've just entered the world of personal development in your 60s sorry dude you got to pay your dues right but i think there's a period usually as far as i can see between sort of five and 15 years where people work off of the not enough energy uh i need to change myself in order to be worthy, loved, belong, to matter.

2:02:32And then after a while you realize, I'm really glad that I made these changes, but I don't like the place that that motivation is coming from. And that is the next stage that you tend to get into. I certainly think that you can generate a lot of growth through shame, right? But after a while it just becomes toxic fuel and it's sapping you from enjoying the one thing that you were here to do in any case right the reason that you wanted to grow ultimately was so that you could enjoy life yeah and if you're making yourself miserable in the pursuit of the thing which is supposed to make you happy what are you doing what are we doing here right you have to at some point begin to congratulate yourself at least a little bit and what's that point again it's very subjective but typically it's when people have done a lot of the things that they thought they needed to do got themselves in shape they fixed their attachment system they've done some therapy they've built a business they've got some kind of financial freedom they found a partner and related to them in a really deep and meaningful way okay i've done a lot of these things and i've got a meditation practice and i learned that skill and i got myself in shape all right i've done these things, at what point do I feel like I've arrived?

2:03:51There's this idea called the arrival fallacy, which is we are constantly running toward goals like a man running toward the horizon. Every step that we take toward it, the goal moves one further step away. And if you have dedicated a good bit of time to trying to really make yourself into the sort of person you want to be, eventually you need to actually enjoy it. Or else this is just going to be a perpetual run toward the horizon, but you're not running toward the horizon, you're running toward your grave. And you will fall into that grave looking back on a series of miserable successes, as opposed to, wow, I really did that.

2:04:28Isn't that cool? Look at how much I changed myself. And I helped the people around me too. That's good. Now you need to congratulate yourself, dude. I don't think people congratulate themselves anywhere near enough. Another thing which I like, which is India versus the West, because we're talking about, and I'm going to end in this way only, right? A couple of questions on this. it's do you know about the concept of arranged marriage yeah so in our part of the world arranged marriage is most popular your love marriage which one do you think because you i read your newsletter like they're all about men women dating and all that stuff what do you think is better i mean the successes of arranged marriage seem pretty high so if you're just looking for outcome i mean i don't know how happy everybody is they seem pretty happy i don't know indian weddings are fucking epic dude They last for like five weeks.

2:05:13Your guys' weddings last for months. See, happiness level, they both, if you talk about both parts of the world, people aren't happy. It's just, here you can file for a divorce. There, probably if 100 people want to file divorce, maybe 0.1 % people. Because rest of the people, they have been told to compromise and be in a broken marriage because societically, it's a side according to society it's a bad thing it's a bad sign so you have to live under that yeah yeah yeah are you being ostracized if you decided to do it i i don't know dude i mean look the the success of marriage at the moment in the west is not fantastic do we go to an arranged marriage solution i'm not sure but uh i certainly think that there's a lot there's a lot to be said for the prob the the challenges of optionality like too much choice is a really it sounds like something that you want but functionally ends up being an absolute catastrophe if you can always sort of swipe your partner away how why why stick about to make this work it's hard relationships are hard and if you know that there is an infinite number of people coming down the path i think people leave marriages and relationships sooner than they should there's a certain cohort of people that leave away later or don't leave at all and should have done and i understand but it seems to me like a little bit more india would perhaps be some more of that social pressure might be useful What do you think is the single most uncomfortable thing which men and women today needs to hear about why relationship is failing in the world where it looks like there are unlimited options?

2:07:12It's very hard to force desire. And this is maybe one of the biggest challenges of arranged marriage. the people that we desire and the things that we like are not really of our making like yeah being around someone can cause you to become familiar with them and that familiarity can lead to desire but you don't really get to choose who you love and assuming that you want to be in love with the person that you're partnered with you can't really force that and that's both magical because it means that it kind of comes out of nowhere and now it feels like a blessing and terrifying because it can take a be taken away from you or be taken away from your partner without them choosing and really without you doing anything you can't engineer your way into love in the same way as you can engineer your way into a good body or something like yeah there's ways that you can reliably make someone more or less likely to fall in love with you or more or less likely to fall out of love with you we don't get to we don't get to force desire in that way and i think we we don't like to hear that because it makes our relationship feel like it's outside of our control both as the person who may fall into love and the person who may fall out of love uh is that's that's pretty uncomfortable but desire is a tricky thing right like you just can't operate out of desire no of course not but a relationship that has no desire in it yeah that's also bad it's gonna be horrendous but this the relationship which is only built on the foundation of only desire it's also not good no no you need compatibility you need to have a degree of regulation friendship like i think that everybody should get into a relationship with a podcaster i think that's my that's that's my that's my number one piece of advice and the reason is hold on i know this sounds self-serving uh the reason is a relationship is basically one long conversation the sort of person that you're looking for is someone you can speak to for 20 000 hours and not get bored because ultimately that's what you're going to be doing you're going to be relating to this person talking are they do they interest you do they surprise you with their opinions are they learning and growing do they make you become more of you can you sit in silence and not need to fill it can you speak without a filter like these are really really important things i guess one other interesting insight around relationships most the success of most relationships is determined by the bad times not the good ones so you don't want to judge whether or not your partner is the right person based on how many peak moments you have.

2:10:13You should judge it based on how well you deal with the bad ones because far more relationships end because a challenge occurs that you can't get through than because there are insufficient peak experience moments. Right? It's the bad times, not the good times that make or break a relationship. People break up over arguments. they don't break up over slightly subpar holidays you know what i mean yeah yeah okay last two questions okay one is about because we're on topic of men and women and relationships there's something which i read from your uh post or like a newsletter i think a while ago i'm loosely paraphrasing it it's about a lot of men they they choose their partner based on who's going to elevate their status in the room some stuff like that right is it is that true uh i certainly think that people have trophy wives and trophy husbands yeah so a lot of people choose so this is a men and women i'm gonna let me paraphrase it right rightly men choose their partner based on who's going to elevate their status in terms of looks women choose their partner based on who's the probably highest status or highest protector or highest like based on power so looks versus power do you think that's true to a degree yeah i would say that uh well i and it seems to show up in the data that men are more concerned with looks than women are on average and that women are more concerned with resources and status than men are very few guys will say or fewer guys will say well you know she's she's not that hot or that cool but dude she's got a great job and again that's not to say that lots of women would want that relationship in the reverse but it's more likely to hear that kind of thing again massive generalizations rah rah rah but that's what the data says your like your newsletter also spoke about certain data and research around it yeah yeah yeah so yes i think that the trophy wife trophy husband thing tends to be more trophy wives than trophy husbands why do you think men choose looks and women choose more power this is evolutionary i would guess again it's changing so they should things should be changed straight no we are our preferences take a long time to update dude you know a few million years to build us into the creatures that we are because we don't need the same level of resources as we did 10 000 years ago when we weren't agriculturally developed and we didn't know whether or not we were going to have a meal tomorrow um the dynamics that drove us then are still driving us now right like men are looking for fertility fertility is largely in youth it's in long hair and good skin and good nails and women are looking for a guy that can protect them again like this is the ancestral version of this what is money like what is money when it comes to a mating market perspective yeah it's this person has been able to accumulate a lot of spare resources uh and what are lux well this person has got good genes and fertility like that it i was looking at a baby this morning as i walked to the coffee shop and this kid was so cute it had this the corner of a cinnamon roll and it was shoving the cinnamon roll in its face like the cinnamon roll was this big and its mouth was this big i'm trying to shove the cinnamon roll in its face I remember looking at it and going, that is the fucking cutest thing.

2:14:07But the only reason that I think it's cute is because I have evolved to see that as cute. Some alien from another planet would see that baby and me as an equally disgusting or cute creature, right? There's nothing special about that. It's simply because big eyes, blobby face, fat arms, small stature, like boneless sort of floppy thing that's cute but that's cute because it's evolutionary advantageous for it to be cute to us and the same thing goes for this like we can't go oh well you know babies have got daycare so we don't need to find them cute anymore well we do there's the same reason that we find symmetrical faces attractive because it means that there's a low mutation load but why do we find symmetrical faces attractive because the only way you can get a symmetrical face is with a low mutation load which means that the perfect example of this do you know why most formula one drivers are good looking have you ever thought about this formula one drivers all of them are super chad they're all like models you know why why would that be the case well if you're performing at the absolute peak of reaction speed and ability to do spatial reasoning and and and uh spatial rotation you need to have unbelievably slick and well aligned genetics like your predisposition has to be very, very, very good.

2:15:24And that means that's going to show up in your face. That's why all of the Formula One drivers are fucking good looking. I just thought that was funny. That's true though. There might be some truth to it. I think it is. I think it is true. I just don't want to be chatting up a ton of Formula One drivers. Yeah. Do you think then to increase your mating value or like your value in the market? Try Formula One. no just pursuit of power is good yeah i think so i think as a guy that you can be a terrible person inside and just oh i think i mean there's lots of there's lots of terrible people that are powerful and i've got into relationships i wouldn't want to be in one with them i wouldn't want to be in a relationship but they attract more uh to a degree yeah i think so people look at uh power and uh bravado and they see it as competence which it's not right you can fake competence with confidence and and ego and uh slick speaking uh and again this is why to me somebody that's merely achieved becomes less interesting less attractive somebody who's achieved and has embodied it has felt it has overcome some difficulties like that's they've really got some skin in the game and you know you can actually make that thing about world as well right if you depict power you almost win in almost every game at least for a short term yeah and like look at the world leaders right now but you also don't need to get power in a way which is unethical you can't accumulate power by being a good person now it might be quicker or easier to accumulate power whilst being a bad person but you don't need to again i'm not that interested in people that have accumulated power i'm interested in people that have accumulated power and kept their humanity do you think we should change this definition to what you are saying because we just celebrate people who are power we don't care about are they human anymore or not correct so i mean a good example here is kanya west kanya west just sold out two nights at sofi stadium in uh california in in la uh i think his music's great he hasn't been the best person over the last half decade right lots of things that i'm sure that he regrets saying lots of actions i'm sure he regrets taking.

2:17:43Sold out. SoFi Stadium, two nights in a row. Everybody just three hours of straight bangers. If you're successful and powerful, people will forgive an awful lot of crimes. Kanye West. So here's my second last question to you, which is about on the power thing how like what do you tell to let's say an 18 year old or a 20 year old who's listening to this right now who seems to look around and see that every powerful person is being celebrated so that person just wants power because he sees a powerful jerk in his college or school gets to get along with the best girls he sees the most powerful guy whether ethical or unethical gets to become the president of the world.

2:18:36Like just power is being celebrated. Being bully is being celebrated. Being just bravado is being celebrated without being human. How do we change definition in someone's head who's 18? Be like, hey, being human is also good way to celebrate your life. People look at powerful people who are jerks and assume that the reason they're powerful is because they're a jerk. But that's not true. They're powerful in spite of being a jerk. and people don't want to be around jerks. They do want to be around people that are powerful. So if you're a powerful jerk, you've done it in spite of your jerkiness. It's as simple as that.

2:19:15You don't need to be a bad person in order to become successful. And what's that line about you sell your soul and win the world? Like you do not want to do that. You'll look back on a series of miserable successes that you don't want to tell anybody about.

2:19:30Look, or alternatively, you're 18, 20 years old. like try it try and try and accumulate power as quickly as possible find out that it's hollow win complete your ambitions so that you can be free of them win the game so you know that you don't need to play it anymore and then go and play something more important it's fine like if you're really really driven to accumulate a ton of power have a go have a go see how it works out for you i don't need i don't need to teach you that you shouldn't do it i think it's quicker to achieve your ambitions than it is to rid yourself of them so just go and achieve the ambition find out that it's hollow remember this bit of this podcast go fuck okay well now i've done it i can be free of it yeah yeah what's power for you i don't think about power all that much i really don't define power influence influence uh the the ability the ability to do what you want the ability to get other people to follow you when needed uh i don't think about power all that much I want sovereignty.

2:20:27I want not to be told what to do by other people. I want to be able to determine my own life. I want agency. I want to be able to be intentional. Not so fussed about power. But you never achieve complete agency ever? No, not ever. But I try and get close to it. Thank you so much. I appreciate you, man. Thank you. My first Indian podcast. We did it. Yes. I've recolonialized the internet. I love the fact that you apologized. I'm sorry. I felt like I was being fucking shouted at for a while. But, dude, I appreciate the hell out of you. Thank you. This has been really lovely. Thank you so much. Appreciate you, man.

2:21:06Gentlemen, how are you? Good to see you, man. Hello, sir. Hello. How are you? Just booked me. It's cracking. How are you? I'm good. I was talking to the boys. I'm a little jet-lagged. I think I'm more jet-lagged than you guys are. You're coming from a street. I'm from Beringus. Oh, thank you so much. I was hoping that you were going to get this. From Beringus, dude. you've done a good job with this dude well done thank you turning around a simple airbnb into a uh yeah fully fledged studio wow i'm excited man thank you for doing this no you're welcome thank you thank you for coming out i appreciate it's not exactly around the corner so no but it's nothing like your studio man your the way you produce is insane thank you why do you do that like i was just very curious to know that as a podcaster i like pretty things i like aesthetic stuff dude like i i think um podcasting's great because it's seamless and anybody can do it but i i don't know i think it elevates the experience a little bit to look at something beautiful uh while listening to something interesting as opposed to just listening to something interesting while looking at something a bit ugly you keep changing it like you just want to make instead well if you're a band and you release a new album and the album's got a different feel to it you change the artwork right if i'm having a conversation that's really dark and moody i don't want to do it in a big airy space i want to do it somewhere that feels a bit gritty and then if i'm having a conversation that's sort of soft and fluffy with a woman i don't necessarily want to do that somewhere that feels really hardcore so i don't know it just feels like but do you have a question that maybe then that oh

2:22:49Brilliant. We've got another BTS now. That's okay. Good, good, good. Look, dude, even I can't open my own drinks without exploding them everywhere. It's fine. Thank you so much for watching this episode till the end. Now you have to do three things. Number one, subscribe to this channel right now. The more you subscribe, the better the guests we will be able to get for you. Number two, please comment and let us know what did we do wrong and what did we do right? because the more you give us feedback, the better we will be able to make episodes for you. And number three, please share this episode with at least one person because one conversation can change someone's entire life.

2:23:29I'll see you next time. Until then, keep figuring out.

2:23:45you