#1008 - Angelo Sommers - Why Life Feels So Pointless (and what to do)

34:08And you say, oh, that's great. Like, you know, me starting out on my journey, like Warren Buffett, I should just read books and the FT all day. And you go, well, what did he do when he started? No, he was a hustler. You know, he didn't sleep much. He didn't have good work-life balance. He didn't have a set, you know, whatever. Like, I think looking at what people did when they were at your stage, not what they do now. And this is the issue that most of the people who have the platform to be able to give lots of advice have only reached that because of being successful. But as they're more successful, that makes them more out of touch with most of the people who are consuming the content.

34:39They are an outlier by design, which means that the things they now do are not strategies that are accessible, applicable to people that are watching or them when they were in the position of the people that were watching you know what i mean yeah and then they look back and they say like oh no i was never like that it's the same we were talking about earlier there's like a i'm not sure on that at least i think if you if you like so what did you do when you were my stage there we go actually yeah yeah yeah yeah i did do that i did you're right you're right i did send the fuck out of it i did burn the candle at three ends like okay there we go but i do the model the rise, not the result.

35:17It's just a really lovely reminder. Like if you get the opportunity to sit down with Warren Buffett, like don't ask him how he spends his day. That's of no use to you until you're 90 and a billionaire. Like, what did you do when you were 31? Like, can you remember? Like, what was that like? What would you do if you were at X stage? Because that's the most applicable. And that's one of the issues that people who are super successful really struck. It's easy to know what you did two steps ago. It's pretty hard to remember what you did 20 steps ago. So leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, which is the advantage of writing regularly, talking regularly and recording it, et cetera, is I can't really recall the challenges, not viscerally, like you were saying, I can run the virtual computer of, I was interested in productivity when I was 32 years old, whatever.

36:03But I actually have this little time capsule of, well, look at what I was obsessed about for 50 episodes. Nearly half of them were about spaced repetition and the ebbing house forgetting curve and studying and whatever it might be. And then I moved on to this and I moved on to that. So with the internet advice thing, I think one of the issues and the dynamic that I know you've talked about before is that certainty is a proxy for expertise that someone who's ardent about this is the way looks like they know what they're talking about because most of us are chronically uncertain. And if you see somebody who's unequivocating in their perspective, you assume that that's because they have expertise and they know this shit super deep.

36:51Maybe they are, fluency is not a proxy for truthfulness and certainty is not a proxy for expertise, but we can't help but think, well, fuck, if I was that certain and unequivocating about something, I would have to know it inside out, front and back. I'd have a 20-year career of understanding this stuff. That's exactly the way I need to have my relationship. That's exactly be the way that I should train and eat and sleep and do whatever else. Yeah, we're not really good at understanding that other people can be very different from us. And just because you wouldn't do something, you wouldn't act that certain if you weren't certain doesn't mean other people won't.

37:28And also like there's the self deception thing. Sometimes they truly believe they're certain. And that's why I think this show has done really well is because you haven't really been a finger pointing teacher. You've been, you know, the whole building in public thing. You've been learning in public and people learning out loud. Yeah. And people watch that and they learn alongside you. And that, um, kind of did you see like, there's this Michelle Thomas way of, um, learning languages. It's great. It kind of like separates you from the language learning process by, uh, their audio tapes and there'll be somebody teaching another student.

38:04And then there'll be a third person that's like kind of helping them along. And you just listen to this student learn. and the whole kind of prompt they give you at the beginning is like do not try to remember any of this like don't try to learn don't try to learn the language just listen to this other person learning it and listen to the way they get confused and stumble when they're trying to say a certain thing and like your brain maps the language so much faster no way doing it that way yeah that's so cool what's that called michelle thomas they're like they're quite famous a while back i think in the language learning things but like it works way better than duolingo and stuff like that where you're i mean i did it for like a few weeks and then moved on because google translate exists but um but yeah it's kind of a similar thing where i think if you try if you're like really trying to do something often you can like sort of get in your own way trip up over your own feet in a lot of ways um but yeah no the show works really well for that reason i think In other news, Shopify powers 10 % of all e-commerce companies in the United States.

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39:43Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that I use with Newtonic on Shopify. Right now, you can sign up for a$1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below are heading to shopify.com slash modern wisdom, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash modern wisdom to upgrade your selling today. I hope so. It's a thinly veiled autobiography of shit that I've been struggling with. And I think I'm good at finding talent early and I'm good at finding ideas early. You're one of them. I've got a list. I got a list. I did it on a vlog the other day. you Dwarkash Patel although he's massive now but I met him the first day I ever moved to Austin I flew in on the Saturday and I met him on the Sunday he's now like a million subs Joe Folley who does unsolicited advice I'm a little late to the party with Joe Alex O 'Connor I was listening to in 2018 and we became friends since 2019 yeah exactly yourself Elliot Buick do you know Elliot he does Next Generation podcast Dylan O'Sullivan Delano on Substack fucking money like just this like super reader irish autist living in greenwich now just north of new york he's part of jim or shaughnessy's like weird commune of fucking super geniuses writing stuff and editing books so my point being that um being able to see ideas early and go like that's interesting i'll investigate it i think is is good but another um separation that's interesting is this line between intellectual avoidance and true introspection.

41:22And I think that

41:27using learning as a prophylactic against actually having to do stuff or having to engage fully with the discomfort of having not done stuff is this weird, it's good for you, it's better for you than probably scrolling TikTok. But then if it actually stops you from going out and doing something maybe it's even worse for you you know what i mean all of that there's a um if you like if you select a bunch of like again it's sort of in the moral sphere so they have to be kind of like political statements or something but you give people a bunch of statements and tell them to write a list of pros and cons as fast as they can and you time it um the people who have higher iqs um will be able to write a whole lot more so firstly they're right whether or not they agree with the sentiment or not.

42:17Of the ones that they agree, so they'll have two lists of arguments for each statement, for and against. And people with higher IQs, there's a direct correlation between your IQ and the amount of for arguments you can make, but not against if you're for it. And there's a correlation between the amount of against arguments you can make, but not for one. So basically whatever intuition or belief that you have about that certain thing, your IQ just makes you a lot better at coming up with reasons why you believe what you already believe it doesn't actually make you much better at arguing from different perspectives like you really have to take the time to like set your intention to do exactly that and try to like distance yourself and your own sort of like um dog in the fight in order to be able to do that but that's not what people do when they think when people think they're in the shower they're scrubbing their balls they're not you know actually thinking you know what I'm gonna do I'm gonna do 30 minutes of considering this evening disagreeing with myself yeah i'm going to disagree with myself this evening like no one does that it just doesn't why would you need to do that um but yeah it's kind of scary when you think that like you know that's the double-edged sword of intelligence is that it can make you it can help you with foresight it can make you better at modeling things it has all of the obvious benefits but when you just have more horsepower up there you become a lot better at bullshitting yourself.

43:38It becomes an impediment to seeing the truth as opposed to persistence to it. 100%. And that's one thing I would actually, like, I do try, like, I want to say to people who are, like, sort of younger and are, like, in that basement situation where they're not going out is, I think, like, we can often get this sense that there's, like, an insufficiency within you, especially around intelligence. Like, people think, I'm just not smart enough. but it's almost in all cases it's character that actually correlates because there's so many super smart people who just do nothing and so like you should optimize for your character not for your intelligence and like try not to be misguidedly pessimistic about the extent to which your intelligence puts a ceiling on your potential didn't you try nihilism for a while yeah how'd that go not great um yeah it's uh that that was sort of the slow offing myself period when i was like a teenager well give me give me the story of what happened with your school career and the subsequent spirals right yes um so i never like really enjoyed school i didn't fit in too well um so i I'd always like come up with different ways to sort of convince myself to go to school, often by like sandwiching school in between two things I was excited about, which could be like a bunch of random shit.

45:05It was video games at one point. In primary school, it was unicycling at one point. I would unicycle to my primary school because it was something different and exciting. And eventually, like when I got to secondary school, it was parkour. So I was doing like a bunch of parkour going to competitions and stuff after a while and yeah I landed on my spleen on a bar of scaffolding um at this competition which had like a bunch of doctors then uh sort of a couple days later coming and trying to convince me to do like a CT scan um to see what was going on with my spleen whether or not there was a tear in the lining um which is what they were worried about but um if they did find a tear in the lining they wouldn't have been able to actually do anything anyway they were just covering their asses legally um because if there was a tear you wouldn't operate in case it bursts you would just put somebody in a bed and watch them so like can i be in a bed at home and they were like well yeah technically but you know it's very dangerous and they applied a lot of pressure i had like six different doctors come in and try and convince me i was going to die um which really 12 years old yeah i was 12 so i've really brought mortality like right up front it became like a state i was currently in rather than like a event in the future um which is i think how people generally perceive it it's like an event like your death is an event in the future versus your mortality being a state you're in like you're in the process of dying right now um and that all became like immediate way too young of an age and sort of i freaked out a little bit um but one of the side effects of that was that whenever i felt like i was wasting time i couldn't really see the the end of the purpose of a certain action it would like trigger that anxiety I felt in the hospital um it felt like I was sort of like dying again um so yeah I ended up going to see like a child psychologist and stuff to make sure I wasn't completely insane but they were just like yeah leave school um that was what I was pushing for already um and they kind of were like yeah it makes sense so yeah I wrote this like document trying to convince my my dad and my mom to let me just drop out um and I think you're glossing over wasn't it like a big PowerPoint presentation?

47:16Yeah, it was like 22 pages. Yeah, like, like, yeah, I mean, it worked. I think there were more, probably not because of the content of what was in it was clearly written by a 12 year old. But the fact that I had gone and done it off my own impetus was like, I think enough for them to kind of be like, at least take the question seriously. What was your proposal? It was just like a constellation of different points around like mainly trying to outline the pros and cons and quell their biggest fears. But what did you want? What was the outcome that you wanted? I wanted to learn stuff that I was genuinely interested in, that I would actually remember and that would actually be useful.

47:57This was going to be self-directed. Originally, the idea was actually to do the curriculum at home and get through it as quickly as possible and then start learning stuff I was interested in. That didn't go too well because again when I got the textbooks I'd started to get the anxiety from the hospital experience so eventually we were just like okay we have to ditch that entirely and um yeah so I ended up just learning about things that I was actually interested in um which has worked out better than expected you know Taleb said uh uh everything that he learned in school and this is a guy that did like he did the degrees but he also spent an additional 30 hours a week reading for like 10 years and he said everything he learned off of his own interests he remembers but everything he learned teleologically which is just like achieve a different end you forget because once that purpose is served your brain deletes the information and that was happening at school all the time so I kind of felt like school was wasting my time so I wanted to leave and do it myself um and yeah wrote the document sent that to them and yeah ended up leaving um and then I I think it kind of went okay for a little bit.

49:05And then a couple of years later, like, you know, that experience people get when they leave university and they're like, oh shit, I'm alive. This is the real world. I have to figure out where I'm going and what I care about and who I am. That kind of happened like at a way, probably too young age. So yeah, after like a few, about a year of like questioning everything, that inevitably leads you towards nihilism because the method generates its own frustration it's like if you're trying to test whether or not water can be carried by getting a net and putting the net in the ocean and lifting it up and going well nope see every time i bring up the net there's no water in it and then you kind of like get a false conclusion um when you obsessively question why you do things you can end up in that exact spot um where you just end up thinking okay everything is pointless because I'm only doing this to do that and I'm doing that to do that and I'm doing that to die or like there's nothing permanent you kind of get confused in a way which is I think what nihilism is I think it is a confusion um and so you're what like 15 now yeah I was it was yeah 15 when it started going tits up yeah um and then I found out about this awesome stuff called weed um which is great and alcohol and parties and that was a good anesthetic to the sort of existential questions and you know as we were saying about the upwards and downward spirals that kick-started a downward one for the first time in my life which you know then served as further evidence that life sucks and it's all evil and I started to develop this sort of adversarial relationship with reality itself where it was like reality and the conditions I found myself in called life are sort of out to get me.

50:53They're like problematic. Um, and yeah, I think that sort of became the fuel for me to spin up various narratives that justified that sort of nihilistic, hedonistic obsession with pleasure and pain, um, which drugs obviously fit really well into. Um, and yeah, it went on like that for a couple of years. The obsession with pleasure and pain, was that just obsession with running away from pain?

51:34Yeah. It's kind of one slider in a way, like the further down you are, the more painful, the further up. I think there's some, there's certainly some people, you're right. By design, if you are in pleasure, you tend to not be in pain. But I think there's some people that are pleasure focused running toward a thing. Some people who are anti-pain focused running away from a thing. Yeah, yeah. You can be motivated by the negative or the positive of any value judgment. There's another one of Nietzsche's ideas that interested me. Value judgment can spawn out of the negative where you say, that is bad, therefore everything that's not like that is good.

52:10Or that is good, therefore everything that's not like that is bad. It's kind of the same thing. So you end up in a similar position but one is much more um kind of uh anti-life itself which is where you look at the conditions you're in and you say so much pain that is bad therefore whatever gives pleasure is good and then you chase pleasure in whatever way charlie sheen style and it just goes wrong you are a young charlie at this stage i guess just using slightly cheaper drugs yeah exactly Okay, so what, you're 16 now? Then what? Yeah, 16. It kind of just like, yeah, it just continued like, and just got worse and worse for a couple of years.

52:52What does worse and worse mean? Just like worse drugs, worse friends. How about drugs? What drugs? Not like meth and heroin or anything, but, you know, a fair degree of psychedelics and cocaine at one point. and that was sort of right at the end where I was like reaching this fever pitch where it was like there was a fork in the road and it was like okay either either I have like some radical change in the way that I live or I am like committing to never experiencing the things that I was so passionate about experiencing when I was a kid um and that was around when I was 18 so right when it became legal to drink alcohol um i had that moment and it was like probably partially because it was legal at that point which made it a lot easier again so you can drink on your own then and that's not good um so yeah there was kind of like a come to jesus moment at that point it's a strange it must have been a strange uh place to find yourself in that you hadn't fitted in at school, you find this solution, which you have to write a 20-page document in order to be able to acquire, and then the outcome of that is not liberated, perfect, self-directed learning.

54:19It's, oh, fuck, I took this risk, and this risk didn't pay off, and maybe things are even worse now. What did that teach you about risk and taking risk? Did it make you more concerned about doing it? Um, in some sense, yeah. I think I've become slightly more risk averse as I've got older, but only slightly. Like, it sounds like your tolerance for risk was pretty high already. Yeah. Maybe brought you back down to an acceptable range. Maybe. I'm still probably not quite in the acceptable range. I mean, like, um, yeah, I've always kind of wanted to jump in the deep end things and then like figured that's the quickest way to learn to swim and like burn the boats type attitude um most of the time like the first psychedelic i did was ayahuasca fuck me how did you get hold of ayahuasca in the uk uh there's people that do like retreats like yeah i'm on the mailing list for a couple of them still yeah yeah yeah so it was the whole like ritual and all of that and but this means that you've researched it on the internet managed to find a forum that's given you the private link, that's got you on the email list, that's given you the listing of where it's...

55:29Sort of. I actually met somebody in London who knew somebody who hosted... Same thing though, right? Yeah, yeah. It's just the real world equivalent of that digitally. Yeah. So that blew my brain out of my head and probably delayed the process of realizing my trajectory was off kilter a little bit, but also encoded massive benefits. And I think the entire arc that I went on during that period of time is probably where I learned some of the most important things. Because I was in direct contact with my own psychology, because there's nothing that will reveal to you the ways in which you're capable of bullshitting yourself more than addiction.

56:07It is the crucible of bullshit. And yeah, it's an intuition, but I feel like the stuff that I did learn through that period, they've proved to be so far and probably will continue to be like invaluable going forwards and it's also got that whole thing out of my system I opened the door went oh fuck closed it and now I've got the rest of my life what was on the other side of the door? everything I described you know just like a slow death where you're seeking your own destruction subconsciously to some degree and like everything that goes wrong as a result of that feeds back into the loop and becomes evidence that everything sucks and you're right to feel angry about the world.

56:52Do you see why people become apathetic and resentful? A hundred percent. I've been there, you know, a hundred percent. It's almost like more of a miracle that people don't. In some cases, there's a lot to be resentful about. Like there's many ways that you can interpret life that lead to the conclusion that, you know. It's pointless and unfair. It's pointless, it's unfair, and you're the foot of some kind of cosmic joke. I think lots of people feel that way. I definitely felt that way. Yeah, me too. A quick aside, if your sleep's been off, you're taking ages to fall asleep, waking up at random times, feeling groggy in the morning, Momentus's Sleep Packs are here to help.

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58:03So you can just buy it completely risk-free. Use it. If you don't like it, if your sleep doesn't improve, they'll just give you your money back. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get a 35 % discount on your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com slash modern wisdom using modern wisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modern wisdom. Modern wisdom at checkout. Me too, for a very long time. And still a lot of the time now, I think, at least for me, the weird thing, a few of the strange things that were formative around the same time that you were going through that was being an only child and also being very unpopular in school.

58:48Because if you've got those two things together, there is no safe base. There's no sort of foundation that feels like someone's got my back. I have to have my back, which means that I keep secrets. I have shame. I have stuff that's just for me because nobody else would understand. And if I was to tell them, they wouldn't even, what are they going to do? Oh, mom's just going to make a big song and dance. She'll go into school and tell them about the bullying or tell them about the this thing or tell them about the that. So you're like, I'll just deal with it. Like I'll become insular and I'll look after it myself.

59:20And yeah, I always said this line, I keep using it a lot about the idea of a personal curse. The fact that I don't know the psychology of other people, which means that I believe a lot of the mental pathologies I have are unique challenges that only I face. Like this personal curse, No one else on the planet feels this thing, has this doubt, has the shame, it manifests in this way, thinks that thought. And one of the brilliant things that I think about exists in longer form conversations like this is not really to do with. the big ideas that people come up with, but the throwaway lines that are sort of like filler that explains where somebody was at a certain time.

1:00:10Mel Robbins had this line. I was preparing to speak to somebody, Dr. Paul Conti, fucking trauma guy. I knew it would come back to me. Maybe it was Paul. I can't remember. And she said in the back of her mind, her whole life, she felt like someone was always mad at her. She just had this sense. My whole life, I'd always felt like somebody was mad at me. Like I'd done something wrong and someone was angry about it. And I was like, it was a toss away line. It wasn't the thing. It wasn't even the thing in between. It was like just this random filler sentence that she said. And, you know, that happened over and over again.

1:00:46It happened with Peterson. It happened with Rogan. It happened with Naval Ravikant. It happened with Alain de Botton from the School of Life. And that sense, at least you're less alone than you thought you were, is a big source of comfort for a lot of people. I think, holy fuck, that person who seems to be at least remotely put together in a manner that I'm not, right? Because I'm deficient, I am flawed, I am broken. That person, even if they're some unknown guy on a podcast or some random clip on TikTok, oh fuck, that means it's not just me. And I think that, you know, you can feel when you think it's not just me, like your whole fucking nervous system just releases a little bit because it's not, you're not the foot of some great cosmic joke.

1:01:38This is an endemic part of being a sensitive human. And, oh, well, at least there's two of us. And as soon as you say, at least there's two of us, you immediately infer there's probably millions. Okay. It's not just me. yeah i remember when i was like at the bat like right at the fever pitch of it all i remember sitting on the couch and there was like some news thing going on and i just felt this fucking gulf of distance between me and the well presentable news anchors on the television it was just like they came from a different universe almost and they were like they were like the non-defective puppets that got manufactured and actually went into production.

1:02:23And there was like me, this sort of defective one that was like sort of, there's a book notes from underground by, uh, Dostoevsky that captures this exact sentiment perfectly. Um, highly recommend reading it where it basically just delves into the psychology of, of resentment and and the weird shapes that it can take in your own psyche and the conclusions it can lead you to and just the sentiments that kind of the smell of it and it's not fun to be on that side and do you think maybe like that experience was the negative value judgment that's bad. Therefore that learning about human nature, good.

1:03:08Maybe. I mean, it took a long time to percolate, dude. Uh, I, I really tried to hit all of the different macronutrients of, uh, where modern society tells a young man that he should get success from before I was like, fuck, maybe I'm going to have to develop myself. It just wasn't something I considered. Even my training program was done very much to try and get people to admire me or like me or something. And this wasn't even as cool as I know it's going to be hot. It was much more fear-based. It was like, I am so insufficient and so broken and so unlovable and unlikable and unwanted by the world that I need to be able to be a bear juggling on a unicycle at the same time in order like please please please assuage my deep feelings of insecurity and inferiority if only I can be sufficiently impressive and and smooth and good-looking and successful and well-known and popular and maybe the world will accept me because it hadn't happened before when I was like trying to be me, whatever that was.

1:04:22I'm like, okay, me is unacceptable. That's an unacceptable human. I should not try and be me. Did that in school, didn't work. Evidently, I need to perform. I have to perform. And after a while, you end up gaining momentum for the persona, not the person, which means that not only have you uh built lots and lots of layers of sort of self-deception and mistruth and and um perverse incentives on top of who you are so digging back down to find out who that person is but working out who you truly are is actually really kind of a hard thing to do people say oh it should be the most obvious thing in the world it's like there's all of these layers that you've built on top of it like performance and expectation and social recognition and all this stuff.

1:05:07Not only that, but even if you did know where it was that you had to get to, people expected this other thing of you. People expected you to show up as, for me, the sort of big name on campus, party boy, club promoter person, stood on the front door, you know, runs the big events, knows everybody, has this massive afro, does the thing, like he's the guy. And that means that the gulf between the person that you truly are, which is being increasingly hidden and the person that you're showing up as is getting wider and wider even as you don't really actually know it and um one of the things i realized is that that's why if you're playing a persona praise never really comes into contact with you because people aren't applauding you they're applauding the role that you played and you know that you've basically super secret squirrel technique fugazi'd these people into like, you will like me, you will like me, let me do the thing.

1:06:05So you will like me. This is why the pickup artist movement, I think was fundamentally a fail because what it taught men was in, you can get women to sleep with you if you are so not yourself that you're basically an actor. And what's the subtext that that teaches you about your level of self worth just to be able to show up openly in the world. You are not right. You are not enough. you're flawed, broken, insufficient. And yeah, that was definitely a big lesson that I took from that. And it's all well and good saying, well, you know, it propelled me to learn about human nature and to be able to, it's like it took fucking 15 years in order for me to even pull my head out of my ass from that.

1:06:48So it wasn't a quick trajectory. No. Sometimes like those learning arcs people go on will be until they're 80 and they only have the, aha when they're 80 um doesn't make the aha less valuable just makes the journey longer do you think you posted something on instagram the other day that fucking was great kind of similar to what i was saying about the you at the beginning about true self um when something kind of affirms a moral stance that we have in somebody else we say that's their true self and when it's different we say they're not themselves anymore yep yeah yeah Yeah. How does that gel with what you were just saying about like, feeling like you were going in an inauthentic direction?

1:07:32Like, where do you think that sense actually comes from of inauthenticity? Because like, you can't really pinpoint it with words. Words are oftentimes like a terrible tool for most jobs. But like, it feels like you can, not in the moment, but retroactively, you can tell that something was off, but in the moment you're convinced. And so that brings in the question that we had earlier about like if you are just retrofitting narratives, then is that - Whoever the victor was is the one that - Whoever, yeah, exactly. So then it's like, oh, that was inauthentic. But like, I don't know, like you can make that case, but it does, it really feels like there is some like inner bullshit detector, which means there must be inner bullshit, right?

1:08:13Yeah, that's a really good point. So the essay that I wrote basically explained how we tend to see the best in our allies and the worst in our enemies, and that our allies making an error is some sort of loss of their self, and our enemies doing well is some sort of aberration or some sort of weird deviation from who they truly are. And that when it comes to the way that we see ourselves too, typically it's the fundamental attribution error, right? Like, I cut that person off in traffic because I'm late. They cut me off because they're a prick. It's that, but for everything that we do all the way down.

1:08:58You are right, though, when it comes to authenticity, what does it mean to say that this is my true self, given that it is constantly being rewritten and we're immersive, the environment around us and social conditioning and norms and all the rest of the stuff? At least for me, it's a good point to make that cognitively top down trying to say this is who I am doesn't really seem to be able to capture the question. Because if you explain why, if you ask why sufficient times, it gets back to something like it feels right. It feels like me. Usually it tends to be a bit upward aiming. and I think that that's why when you hear people who are drug addicts or sort of down on their luck and they say it's who I really am it that whenever I see that on documentaries you know movies and stuff like that that really sort of strikes at my heart because that's you know somebody who has embodied their downward trajectory and taken it as a sense a part of their sense of self and they believe it maybe only in that moment you know I'm sure that maybe at some points in your downward spiral, you thought this is who I am.

1:10:06But you know, you've also got this upward aiming this high sort of belief thing going on too. So these two things are coming into conflict. John, what's fascinating about that is maybe counterintuitively, the moment where I said, this is who I am, that was actually the inflection point where it started getting better um i think it was at that point it was undeniable that that was at least an aspect of my character and i think it's often the case that until you acknowledge that it really is impossible to fix like you can't untangle a web of bullshit it unless you're willing to look at it right um it's weird it's weird though it's weird how often

1:11:00like god knows how the mind works but it does seem interesting how often it's the case that when you shine a light on something it kind of starts fixing itself and it's only when it doesn't have that spotlight of attention that that it doesn't well i wonder how much of that's resistance that would be at least something that has to play a part of a role for this i think i am not i'm not this thing i'm not this thing i'm not this thing well in the effort of the resistance you are right you're lying to yourself about what's going on yeah i am this thing yeah yeah because if you try to control what ideas you have in your head then the ideas end up controlling you right like if you push against a wall that can't be moved it's you that ends up moving.

1:11:44And so like the more you try to control things that are literally just the case, the more they end up affecting you. It's a weird like, I don't know if there's not many cases in which Newtonian physics maps onto psychology, but I think that's one of them. Like every force does have an opposite. Yeah. So I think to sort of round this out of what I said at the start about aiming for 20, trying for 20, there is a challenge to people that have self-belief and high standards, which is when you stop meeting them, when you fall short a little bit, it's painful. And when you fall short a lot, it just feels like a total loss of your sense of self.

1:12:24If you have made, if you have wrapped your identity up in being the person who has high standards and is able to meet them, I'm upward aiming and all the rest of it. And I think this is why

1:12:38stories that have someone who hits rock bottom and then bounces back out okay that's like relatively neat but it's the story that has multiple rock bottoms or maybe not even rock bottoms but serious you know like 50 pullbacks and that i thought i was fucking i thought i was getting better i thought this thing was moving in the right direction and to me there isn't enough talk, especially in sort of the advice world about what happens when you've made the commitment, you've started to make progress, and then you reach multiple pullbacks, self-inflicted, purely environmental, exclusively inside your own head.

1:13:17You totally manifest by your own self-doubt, right? There's no external imposition. You didn't break a leg. You haven't lost a family member. You haven't gone bankrupt. You know, nothing's going on other than your own self-doubt creeping back in my own mental pathology curtailed the trajectory that i had worked so hard to get back on and fuck i'm about to eat shit again god that sucks yeah i mean i've got a friend uh back in wales one of like the friends i grew up with best friend and yeah he's sort of in a cycle it kind of gets better and stops and gets better and stops and it's better and stops and like

1:13:57you know the homozy quote about like proof there's something to be said about

1:14:08each time it drops back it can serve as like another data point that gets used in like a narrative of yourself that then becomes causal it becomes its own creator of that type of behavior into the future. Like if you try to quit smoking and you fail and you fail 10 times, it actually increases the odds that you'll fail on the 11th as well. And so, and you can feel that slippage. Like each time you fail, you feel like I haven't just gone back again. I've actually lost like a strategic vantage point from which I was, I had the opportunity to make the next move. And I've lost that vantage point now because it's gone back again.

1:14:53And you can feel yourself kind of, it feels like the walls are closing in a lot of the time.

1:15:01I do like the way that Alex reframes it as saying, how can I say that I'm a man who can withstand hard things if I've never withstood hard things? And that turns pullback into nobility in that way. But you're right, you know, if you regularly try and then there is some sort of a challenge, the next time that you try, you're expecting challenge. And sometimes the challenge is really uncomfortable or results in no progress, which is, you know, the fucking rocky line of like, it's not about how hard you can hit. It's about, you know, getting knocked down, getting back up, et cetera. There's a little trite, but I think functionally ends up being really important, like is way deeper than it actually sounds.

1:15:46Because if all that happens is a straight trajectory of going up, what problem have you got? This is why people have an issue with the sort of silver spoon infant whose life appears to be smooth sailing the whole way through. We have a sort of instinctive revulsion, resentment, discontent with that person because we think, well, you didn't deserve it. You started halfway along the race and then didn't encounter a single hurdle for the rest of it. This feels unfair. And then the people who sort of bounce and then come back out, you think, oh, well, you know, there they sort of kissed death and then rose to an acceptable altitude.

1:16:31Congratulations on that. But there is something about like people who are just regularly struggling that just I don't think really gets talked about, especially if it's like a mundane struggle. Oh, well, what's the issue? The issue is that I don't really believe in myself that much. The issue is that I fear things. The issue is that I struggle to make a commitment. It's like, dude, there's people like starving. There's people who can't afford their medical bills. There's people who can't afford food. There's people who were beaten or abused or child addicted to drugs as kids like and you're so like wow my inability to believe in myself is stopping me from making progress wow i wish that i could make more risk without feeling scared about why like you and that shame i think gets laid on top for a lot of people too and this sort of generation of lost men thing uh i was dinner with rob henderson in new york he had this fucking brilliant line he was talking about why guys struggle to approach women and he said, uh, if you approach one woman and get rejected, you remember for the rest of your life, if you approach a hundred women and get rejected, it's just another Tuesday.

1:17:40Yeah. And you have this thing, as you said, the more insulated that you are, the bigger, all of these events sort of feel because there's fewer, there's less ballast, you know what I mean? In the system, there's like less sort of, uh, uh, stabilizers going on. Yeah. Yeah. Taleb has a quote that something like, um, the, the beginning of robustification, it starts with a modicum of harm. It's often true. You have to have something bad happen. You have to get hurt a little bit in order to have the compensatory response to actually heal and get better as a result. There was this theory I haven't looked into in years, but there was a psychologist called Dabrowski.

1:18:24He had this theory of positive disintegration where everybody in his time, it wasn't really much positive psychology going on as a field of study at that time. But they all were sort of painting psychological disintegration as a horrible thing and it's always bad. And he was the first guy to kind of flip that and notice these cases in which disintegration is actually like the metal thing. It's stuff getting like knocked out of place and unlocked so that you can resettle in a more integrated fashion. Literally in the case of metal, it's more integrated. and your psyche can do that too but oftentimes that's yeah catalyzed by these unpleasant experiences that we go our whole lives trying to avoid and uh you know it was it was the case that a few thousand years ago you actually couldn't avoid them it was just life like your sister's gonna die of the bubonic plague and that's gonna suck and so you know i do wonder human brains are expectant right like they the the brain when you first or a baby is kind of like a first draft and uh i think you get to a certain age and most of the neurons have already been created and then uh it's really young and from that point forwards it's actually just pruning it's getting rid of neurons as new experiences come in so you get like the marble and then it like sculpts down to the actual sculpture.

1:19:45Um, and I wonder to what extent, um, we are expectant, our brains are expectant of more suffering than we're actually getting in terms of acute suffering, right? Cause we have plenty of chronic suffering. Things are just kind of moderately shit all the time. Um, Britain basically. Yeah. I said like a true British person yeah um but that kind of moderately shit all the time doesn't actually tend to do anything for you in terms of growth or harm and so i think your friend actually had a genuinely good question of should i make my life worse in order to rebound out of it and like when i was going through that tough time i think there were elements i kind of knew that was going on i was leaning into it a little bit in my teen years because i'd i'd noticed the pattern that everybody that seems to have like reached somewhere that I want to be in terms of psychological development or like external success or whatever had a really shit period.

1:20:45Um, I'll get mine. I'll front load mine out the way when I'm 16. Exactly. Yeah. Cause then I've got my twenties, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I just want to linger on it a little bit more. That idea that this sensation that you're destined for something more, but you aren't currently reaching it and the pain of that. I think so many people feel that so many people feel it and it's a really unique type of discomfort and it sounds very luxurious but uh in reality just feels like a fucking shit ton of pain yeah well i think most of like the most like psychologically speaking most pain the most painful things are social things and um that sense that you're supposed to do more oftentimes like that's a very socially loaded sentiment supposed to yeah supposed to and also want to be seen as um that's incredibly powerful and it's often people throw stones at it like oh you care what people think of you but like no don't be a child you know like obviously i do um and yeah it's uh living with a big disconnect between the sense of how things should have gone for you.

1:22:03Who you are and who you want to be. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's the... They say true hell is when the person that you are meets the person you could have been. Right, and that happens every day. Correct, because if you set an ideal, you will constantly compare yourself to that ideal and immediately find yourself lacking. You're always going to fall short of your ideals. And this is the curse of somebody who has high standards, as far as I can see, that your dream, if you are trying for 20, you nail it, 19. Oh my God, you nearly doubled what was normally acceptable for a good performance. Yeah, but you fell short of your unreasonably high standards.

1:22:38How does that work? And do you feel that still? Because obviously from the outside, like couldn't be in a better position, but - Every day, every day. Still there? Oh yeah, every day. Is that because the goalposts move or is it for something else? In some ways, you begin, it's very slippery. In some ways, you start to change the game, not just move the goalposts. So it becomes one of, not only do I want to be able to do this thing, but I want to be able to do it with peace. And I want to be able to do it with self-awareness. And I want to be able to do it with equanimity. And I want to be able to do it whilst being a good friend.

1:23:15And I want to be able to, you can imagine some sort of tank and all you wanted to do was get the tank to go forward. But now this tank's got fucking wings and a spoiler and a baseball. And, you know, it's like, I want to be able to do all of this shit. You've augmented the challenges. That being said, the reason to win the game is so that you don't need to play it anymore. And it's a good realization from you that, look, if you say you shouldn't give a fuck about what other people think of you, I think that you have fallen at the first hurdle because we're social creatures. We're inbuilt for social validation.

1:23:51So it's way easier to say, I don't need people to care about me. If you've spent a good bit of time with people caring about you, like if you've got the social recognition, realize that it's not what it was cracked up to be then. Okay. I've rid myself of that, of that desire, right? The reason to win the game is so that you no longer need to play it. And I don't think that you can shortcut that. I think maybe you can, maybe there's a particular type of level of insight or volume of meditation, critical mass that you can reach where you sort of pierce straight through it. But honestly, the quickest route to getting past your vapid need for this external goal is just to get it.

1:24:32It's to get it and realize that it wasn't it. Because trying to rid yourself of it without having got it is, at least for me with my constitution, would just always leave this this big open loop. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, it does. It's like the, reminds me of the Naval quote about achieving your material desires as far as either them announcing them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

1:25:01I think, do you think it ever reaches a fever pitch where you go, actually, I fucking smashed it. Yeah, Yeah, that's a conscious act that you need to practice. It's certainly something that's difficult to do on your own. And again, this is another curse of high standards. This idea about the curse of competence, which is if you're good at things and you regularly do well when you're faced with a challenge, success doesn't become a reason for celebration. It is simply the minimum acceptable performance. And that makes any form of success is merely okay, and any form of acceptable or even close to failure as a catastrophe, right?

1:25:48So this curse of high standards thing again.

1:25:55It definitely does reach a stage where you think, if I can't have fun now, when the fuck can I have fun? So a good example, I started doing live shows about two years ago and, you know, 35 at this point, the channel's reached a million subs. And I did a show in Manchester and Manchester was the toughest show of the run. It was a, um, classic music auditorium, like 650 people. So it was the biggest show I'd done at the time. Uh, but high ceilings, it's not a fantastic sound system. Like some of the stuff that comedians often talk about influencing the atmosphere. And I just wasn't feeling, I wasn't feeling it.

1:26:39It wasn't the performance that I wanted to get. I'd done Dublin the night before and fucking smashed it. It was a Thursday. Everyone was drunk. It was amazing. Like it was really raucous and positive and got, you know, all this stuff. And then the Manchester show, which was the Friday, was just not the same. And halfway through at the interval, I was like just in my own head about the show and I wasn't happy and my mom and dad had come to see it and loads of my ex-business partners did this was the northern show right so people from Newcastle had come people from Manchester I used to work with my mom and dad were there and uh part way through I sort of took myself into the bathroom and looked in the mirror and had a word with myself and I was like dude 650 people came to see you speak live at your second ever live show your mom and your dad are here they're healthy your ex-business partner you haven't seen in yours is here.

1:27:28Tons of people that are friends and family have come to support you and all they want to do is watch you win. Like if you can't have fun now, when the fuck are you going to start having fun? And I think asking yourself the question, like if this isn't it, and you can say that's fine. Like this isn't it. It would have been unacceptable for me 50 episodes into the podcast to say, this is it. I should be just purely driven by, you know, my desire for enjoyment and transcendent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, maybe you do need to use some toxic fuel. Maybe you should use your resentment and your bitterness and your inferiority and your desire for more and the chip on your shoulder from school.

1:28:06Maybe you should do that. But motherfucker, if it's not now, when is it? And just asking yourself, when will you start having fun? When will you start giving yourself credit? It's a wonderful question because it forces you to come to contact with a point when that needs to be. And a lot of the time we don't have that. And the more that I've consciously tried to practice, this is really fun. Like this is a Wednesday afternoon, nothing else I want to be doing than sitting and doing this. Like this is really cool. Or this is a lovely day. This is a nice walk. This is a whatever, but it is a permanent fucking uphill battle right and some people are more disposed to this than others i would put myself more in the like hard gainer category of uh of gratitude hard gainers of gratitude yeah yeah yeah it's uh i have to use gym analogies that's the only fucking language um but it's effortful it's this it is the hard gainer thing all right dude you're gonna have to lift fucking more consistently you're gonna have to sleep more you're gonna have to eat more protein you're gonna have to be more dialed in and you're going to have to work harder in order to do that.

1:29:19But okay, like fucking, what's the alternative? Rage against the fact that it was cosmically unfair that you were, well, guess what? These are the cards that you were dialed. And you've got a ton of genetic predispositions that you're fucking happy to have. You're happy with your work rate. You're happy with your vision. You're happy with your pace of learning and your curiosity or your ability to be good in social situations or your ability to be good in solitude or whatever it is. like everybody's got their unique constitution and some people got a larger overall uh um point score too right it's not just that it's 100 points spread evenly some people got 80 and some people got 120 and some people got more yeah um but fucking hell like largely finding out what your strengths are and trying to play to them is the only way that you can really play this game at least as far as I've learned and understanding, okay, what are the things for me?

1:30:15Gratitude does not necessarily come that easily to me. So it's okay. I'm going to have to lift that load. Obsession fucking say no more, dude. Like got it fucking sweet. So, okay, well, I can take my foot off the gas with regards to that and coast with it. And then with other things I can, I'm going to have to put a bit of work in it. Yeah. It's interesting. Like you kind of create this irony where it's like you're ingrateful for the amount of gratitude that you can easily acquire. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, so it like eats its own tail in a way. It's like if that's like the pair of glasses you've got on, if that's the lens through which you're seeing everything is like identifying problems to be solved and you will find problems everywhere, even in things like gratitude and you create those little circular things where it's like, damn, I wish I was more grateful.

1:31:07But yeah, I mean, there's pros and cons to either side of it. And I think that probably is an inverse relationship between having nice things and being able to enjoy them. And that's a part of the nature of not just Chris or Angelo, but just of humans. Like that's sort of what we're there to do. And like, you know, there's a great part in, I think it was in Notes from Underground as well, where Dostoevsky's talking about a potential utopia. And he said, you could give people all the land, all the houses and allow them to busy themselves with the eating of cake and the reproduction of their species.

1:31:42And they would burn it all to the ground just so that something unexpected would happen. And, um, we do that in our personal lives as well. Like there's, that there's a chance that what we're not actually after is satiety and satiation and the fulfillment of desires, but desire itself. Like Nietzsche said, ultimately it is the desire, not the desired that we truly love. And so if you're really going to play that role well, it makes sense to put yourself in this position where you're ungrateful for the amount of gratitude that you have? Because then you've won the game. You can be searching for it.

1:32:28Yeah, the great philosopher A. Tate once said, having things isn't fun, getting things is fun. Yeah. And yeah, I spoke to Dan Bilzerian about this separately before he came on the show. And I said, basically, you've sort of completed hedonism as far as I can see. do you ever wish that you'd sort of played the game more slowly because where do you go from here and jimmy carl had the same intuition which is trajectory is more important than position trajectory is more important than absolute position 100 i've experienced that in my life like the best parts of my life the best memories are when there was like a a change in in trajectory like a moment of acceleration um it's not to do with yeah where you are at all for sure um and also on the point of dan bilzerian and like completing hedonism um that's why i think what people like jordan peterson and john bavakey are doing is so important because they're they've identified that issue like the even if you are dan bilzerian you will get there and be like what what now um and yeah what people do need is that structure through which they can derive meaning or at least interpret meaning in their lives and like when you're oriented towards pleasure instead of meaning you you really are kind of shooting yourself in the foot right at the beginning of the race have you heard me do my Frankl's inverse law bit?

1:34:08I don't think so. Stinks of you. Let me give you this one. So you'll know this quote, when a man can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure. Frankl is arguing that a lack of meaning causes people to seek temporary relief in superficial pursuits rather than addressing the underlying existential void. Perhaps for many, maybe even most, this is a big issue. But there is another group who suffer with the opposite problem, Frankl's inverse law. When a man can't find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning. If ease, grace, joy, and playfulness don't come easily to you, one solution is to just ignore moment-to-moment happiness entirely and just always pursue hard things.

1:34:44You become a world champion at winning the marshmallow test. You convince yourself that delayed gratification in perpetuity is noble because you struggle to ever feel grateful. TLDR, you prioritize meaning over happiness because happiness doesn't come easily to you. That's perfect. That's perfect. 100%. There was a moment when I was a teenager where I think that happened in me it was like a very potent switch I mean like when I was 13 I was so obsessed with happiness that I like tried to write a book about it and how to be it um the child psychologist I ended up going to uh was asking for source material and we gave her that book I wrote and the first thing she said when I sat down with her was I read your book and I was like well you know bushy-tailed and puppy-eye and I was like oh yeah good ideas right and she was like so I'm guessing think you're like um struggling with a sort of depression your happiness book made me depressed yeah yeah well i don't know if it made her depressed but she could see so obviously that there was something there with me that like i was pedestalizing happiness to such yeah think about think about what the thing is what everybody is chasing is almost always the thing that they're feeling that they're lacking exactly you know this person who needs lots of wealth is because they feel like they're unsecure in their resources this person who needs lots of admiration is the one who feels inferior socially.

1:36:02The person who needs lots of beautification on the outside somehow feels ugly. And the older that I've got, the more true that has become because more people are motivated by running away from something they fear than running towards something they want. That's not to say that nobody has this perfectly balanced desire for just maximizing their time on the planet, man, you know, and I have met those people and they're fucking freaks and aliens. But I would say of the high performers that I'm around nine out of 10 of them are probably the running away from something you fear, as opposed to the just pure alchemy of something that you want.

1:36:45And I suppose you could look at it as alchemy too. Like, you know, this is something bad and you've turned it into something good and congratulations, that's an upward aiming trajectory. But if you 13 year old writes a book about happiness, why, where do you do you think that comes from? It comes from a huge lack of happiness. Yeah, that was kind of the basis for the whole dating advice video that I did, which is that like, it's the exact same dynamic at play. When you feel like there's a lack there, you're just going to become obsessive about it. I don't know, I wish there was a different way to frame human motivation, because it's got a tinge of like, cosmic joke in it, doesn't it?

1:37:23Where it's like, you're just going to be on the hamster wheel that's you know suited to your deepest fear but i don't think that's all it because that i've noticed at least in my life like as i've overcome certain fears like with respect to failure and stuff like that like thing you say overcome it's a sliding scale right like it decreases it doesn't just some things just turned it down a little i've turned down the dial and some things do just disappear like magic tricks when you see how they're done psychologically but most things are sliding scale and and like of those things that i've managed to decrease a fair bit um it can leave you feeling kind of directionless in some sense like i had a big moment of that this year where i think like for a lot of my life i was hugely motivated by like the applauds and stuff like praise um and like i think that was all wrapped up in some subconscious thing around like like jealousy in relationships and stuff.

1:38:22And that was a big problem for me for like a really long time. And I thought I had a big jealousy problem. Turns out I just had a really big problem with being jealous. What's that mean? What's the difference? Well, if you have a big jealousy problem, then you actually are a problem. And, you know, your jealousy is like a parasite that's living on top of you and making you feel the wrong things and say and do the wrong things. But if you just got a problem with your jealousy, jealousy is just a normal part of the human experience, right? As are many of the... So it's the story that you told yourself about what being jealous meant.

1:38:53Yeah, it's partly that and also partly just a visceral rejection of the emotion of how it feels in your body. This shouldn't be the way it is. Yeah. You shouldn't be feeling this. Well, guess what? You are. Yeah, exactly. So I thought I had a jealousy problem. Turns out it was just a problem. I had a problem with being jealous. And when the problem dropped away, I realized, actually, I'm not fucking Satan for feeling this. I'm actually just an ape. That's resistance again. You know, we were talking before. It's a resistance thing. Yeah. And as that sort of, um, resistance drops away, um, you, you can often be completely unaware of how much that was being the toxic fuel that you talk about in the background.

1:39:31Like you don't really notice it. And like, I think lots of my, um, sort of desire to sort of overcompensate on the social dimension, like start a YouTube channel last year and post as fast as I can, like three videos a week. When I started a lot of that, I think came from this like excessive desire to overexpand that backed into this sense that i was inferior and like this was the proof that i was inferior this is uh have you looked at the courage to be disliked or any adlerian stuff yeah yeah so it feels like i'm not super deep in it but at least from a little bit of the stuff that i've learned adler believed that inferiority or the fear of inferiority is one of the big drivers psychically for humans.

1:40:13And I think that's a really lovely framing because it captures both of the things that we've talked about today, which is who do I think I should be and where am I compared with that? And who are the people around me and where am I compared with that? I'm inferior to my own standards and inferior to the performance of the people that are around me. There's this weird asymmetry that I really love. And I realized in my twenties though, that we get to see the inner landscape of our own minds, which includes all of our self-doubt and foibles and failures and uncertainty from a front row seat a million times a second, right?

1:40:48As our brain was back and forth. But we only get to see the psychological landscape of other people in the actions that they take, which is one to a million bit rate difference, right? You know, the resolution that we see someone else's interior machinations compared with our own. Because I only get to see what emerges from you. Even if fucking like we're both on psychedelics at the same time and the most transparent ever, how many words a minute can you speak? How much body language can I infer from you? It's not that much. When you think about the depth of your own thoughts versus the black and white 360p of everybody else's behavior in front of you, which always is going to put you on the wrong side of assuming everyone else is a well-put-together, slick, rational human who is well-built.

1:41:41And I am a wavering idiot by comparison. You know what I mean? Oh, 100%. Like unraveling that perception of other people, I think is one of the most powerful things you can actually do to improve the quality of your life and your relationships. It's very hard because it often, it means you have to acknowledge the nasty parts of other people which is sometimes easy if they're your enemy you want to see the nasty parts but when they're your friends that's not that's not easy at all um and the even harder part acknowledging those within yourself like my example with the jealousy like until that's like fully integrated into your personality it will be like a saboteur in the background like for your entire life adults don't exist dude i've spent you know the last few years around some of the richest most famous most successful people on the planet and it's fucking idiots all the way up like it really is no one has any idea what they're doing and the small number of people that actually do probably don't talk about it that much um but you know you were saying about is it a weird sort of cosmic joke that this trajectory and habituation just ever ratchets up the difficulty of what you have to do.

1:42:55Like I need to achieve more to be satisfied. But now that the bar has been set higher, that means that the next achievement needs to again be higher in order for me to again be higher and again be higher. Oh, I've completed that game. So then I do what I was talking about before, which is, oh, I changed the game. It's do that with this. It's do that in a different domain. It's do that, not just again, a thousand times, it's do it with this twist on it, or it's do it in a, oh, it's going to be in a more gentle style, whatever it might be. And I can start to see, I might be being prescient here, I'm not too sure, it might just be because I was sat up as a Dr.

1:43:26K yesterday. I can start to see this as the genesis of the spiritual arc of people who have reached success, that it's an entire universe that people have tried to complete. And maybe they've managed to tick off a lot of the different quests and side quests that go on inside of that. And they go, maybe it's not in this realm. Maybe the entire

1:43:54avenue of nourishment needs to be different. It has to come from a different place. And I've been trying to drink water to make myself not hungry anymore. And you go, I'm using the wrong pathway here. I need to do something else. And I can at least in some ways begin to see why asceticism come spiritual practice with all of that stuff helps you to play a little bit of a different game uh but it's the trajectory thing is certainly a challenge because every time that you have a big leap forward in progress hooray isn't this great I have a great advantage point. Boo, this is now higher from which to fall at the same time.

1:44:42Like, oh, I've got something to lose. And that's terrifying. It is. I think it would definitely be a lot worse of a situation if it was the case that it's the desired that we really love. But that switch from Nietzsche, that it's the desire that you like, changes the entire thing. From Mr. Tate. Yeah, he does it as well. But that changes the game because then it's like, oh, thank God, there's always going to be a new thing to strive for because if that's like really the juice of life is this like pushing yourself up against the boundaries and the hard edges of reality and seeing what gives like it's incredibly fulfilling and if you ran out of things to achieve um you might find yourself incredibly bored um so yeah i wonder i wonder how much of human life is like a as you say thinly veiled attempt at quelling boredom I think what do you make of your generations struggles with masculinity and goals

1:45:48um I think it backs into that thing we said at the beginning about adventure the the lack of adventure in young dudes lives is palpable and it's immediate. And I think the whole picture of masculinity as some sort of, um, divine solution to that, where all you need to do is become more masculine. And then all of a sudden, you know, all of the, the kind of dullness of life will be solved. You'll be, um, getting all the girls that you want to get, you'll be starting the business and swinging it around wherever you go. It's a really attractive meme to young guys who feel like they are kind of half alive.

1:46:37And it has the added fuel of backing into insecurities. It's very easy to sort of make masculinity the measure of a man and then promote that message and make everybody feel like, oh shit maybe that's true maybe you can make a case for it in retrospect and then everybody hears that case and starts measuring themselves against it and feels like they've come up lacking um and uh that makes it very easy to sell courses and very easy to um sort of do like a pop psychology type offer like a general solution to personal problems which is really uh really effective because i think most of the issues that people actually have to deal with in their lives are hyper specific and nuanced based on like their actual immediate problem in their life maybe they're addicted to weed or they've got a bad relationship with their mom and these are the things they actually need to solve and they're really uncomfortable to solve and so instead you have somebody come along online and say actually you know the reason you're dissatisfied is not because of you know your personal issues that i know nothing about it's because of this like grand cosmic narrative going on where like they're trying to cut your balls off and what you need to do is go and retake it and like all good stories like all popular stories that's invested with a with a modicum of truth um in that you know they're young men are sort of growing up in a world that is not allowing them the wiggle room to express those natural, um, parts of themselves.

1:48:21And then it layers a bit of shame on top of it with the sort of woke stuff. Um, and it becomes very, like the woke stuff is very pervasive. It's sort of everywhere. Um, and it's easy to internalize that, especially when, you know, we didn't have sort of religious stories or anything growing up. Most of us, we just had Hollywood movies. and that's, you know, the morals of those stories are going to be subject to all of the personal preferences of the people that made the movies and wrote them, which might not be reflective of what's actually best for you. It might be reflective of what would be more convenient for them.

1:48:58Maybe it would be more convenient if you're a little bit less loud and if you shut up a little bit and if you just sat down at your desk at school and didn't bother the teacher. Like, it's convenient, but oftentimes not for the person who the rule is aimed at. so it's a weird blend of modicums of truth mixed with like opportunism on the part of people who recognize the insecurity in others that they feel in themselves and use it to sort of create this sort of circle jerk of interesting sort of first mover advantage of here is a point of pain that I feel in myself I can push that button in other people too yeah which Peterson says is the definition of evil funnily enough I've just made this connection as we speak, but the reason you don't think a lion is evil when it kills a sheep is because it's not out there to, one, it doesn't know what it's doing in a metacognitive sense.

1:49:54It's just doing it. It doesn't know that it is doing it. That's a human trait. And that backs into self-awareness. You need to have one, you need to know that you exist in order to know that you know something. And the whole idea that Peterson gives about the Adam and Eve story is that it's like a revelation of your own vulnerability, how easily you are harmed and how easily you're hurt and that life is going to include a lot of suffering. And when you realize you're in that position, everyone else is in that position too. And I can fuck with them now. I know exactly, I know what's going to really hurt me.

1:50:33That means I know what's also going to really hurt you. And it's the utilization of that knowledge that is exclusive to humans that I've heard Peterson. The theory of mind thing. The theory of mind, yeah. He points at that as evil. So I think there is something, yeah, not very great about it. I don't think it's oftentimes done fully consciously, so I wouldn't point a finger at it and call it evil. Well, I think most people are motivated by believing that they're doing the right thing. Yeah, yeah, 100%. and as well you know if this is a if this is a mechanism of sedation or anesthesia for this person I go hey I fixed it like all of the guys that said your problems with girls will be sorted if you just ask them about the midget fight that happened outside neg them take them to three different locations on one night you know like all of the PUA 101 stuff you go well yeah I mean like it did it did that is true that is true lots of guys do have problems with women and this is a strategy that reliably will like surface level fix what you think is the problem but the problem wasn't the problem the problem wasn't i can't get laid it's i don't feel comfortable around women and i don't have fun when i'm with girls yeah like you're still not having fun yeah you're like goal oriented in there yeah um all very profitable though and all very catchy because like you i've been on the receiving end of it as well when i as a teenager like what like i think as most guys are at this point you kind of get exposed to every potential solution to the problems that you're currently experiencing lots of them as the red pill stuff and it's super attractive it really is it like sort of um there's something about it that tends to it tends to like point responsibility away from you a little bit i find as well it's like um obviously because like especially on the ideological side that stuff is coming out of people oftentimes as a response to certain pains so it's like perfectly adapted to the type of pain that young guys experience in the dating world um so it spreads super super fast because of the network effect um but yeah the that an idea convinces you should not serve as evidence that it's true just that it's convincing um so yeah the red pill can be very convincing but it doesn't necessarily mean it's the whole truth it often is true within like a certain if you like a hyper selective about your context in your frame um and a lot of that like selection is cherry picking and it's smuggled in in the subtext of stuff it's not explicit it's oftentimes implicit like that the goal is just to get laid like that's something that's implicit in the pickup stuff um but lots of guys will come there with the problem that the real problem and then they're kind of like experiencing this new way of looking at things that has that implication that the goal is just to get laid that feels nice because it divorces them from all of the other shit they might have to do and so they don't i want to feel comfortable with a woman yeah i want to feel i want to have fun with it um but by shifting the goalposts in the implication uh like implicitly shifting the goalposts you can interact with that whole way of thinking and start to feel really good like there's an alleviation of pain because you're not engaging with it anymore yeah you're actually a real thing yeah it's like you are solving something but it's like a different problem to what you set out to and you haven't noticed that the problem is switched there's an interesting uh positioning that happens i think with a lot of guys advice which is it it has the right amount of uh autonomy baked into the solution just enough autonomy baked into the solution to give you the i am masculine man doing it on my own uh justification because i don't think that guys would go for the pure victimhood narrative that would feel too icky.

1:54:43But also, you can't go the level of autonomy and you should look at yourself in the mirror kind of stops at your morning routine. It doesn't go to, you need to do therapy, dude, or you need to journal a lot. You need to work out what the drive for your desperate requirement for social validation, like where's that coming from? Oh, it's because you don't feel good enough. And that is something that needs to be unpacked slowly and internally. And going to the gym is going to make you feel really great, but your problems are still going to be waiting for you when you get home. And that doesn't mean that you shouldn't go to the gym, but you cannot confuse going to the gym for doing the work that is getting rid of the problems.

1:55:31And this also means that a world where you just work on your problems and don't go to the gym is worse than one way you get to do both but you can't confuse the thing which is frankly easier to do for the one that includes the hard thing this is you know the emotions piece trying to um live below the neck as i call it uh i like that yeah um is has been a bit of an obsession but i understand as well that it's made at least the show over the last 12 months, like a lot more fluffy. Uh, you know, I've got kind of homosey and sebum sat on each shoulder. And Alex is saying, stop being such a pussy, just work harder.

1:56:10Don't care about your emotions. And Chris is saying, you should start a family, go lie in a hammock, go for a walk. And these two things are, and I've definitely been more sebum energy than I have Alex energy this year. And I think Alex has actually been more sebum energy than he has been Alex. The most recent conversation we had was specifically around this. He's like taking a more holistic look at what's going on. And, uh, I understand that that makes for a fluffier and in many ways, much less sexy, much messier, you know, this, the sort of chat that we've had today, there's hopefully something useful and interesting in there, but it's not as linear as, you know, get up on time, eat your veggies, go to the gym, one gram per pound of body weight protein.

1:56:50Like, you know, it's not as linear as that. And that doesn't mean that it's in any way more elevated, right? There's just as many layers of obfuscation and cope and need for protection from feeling things, but at least it kind of accepts, all right, the game is not just out there and the game is not just like out there as me, but it's really fucking turning it inward and trying to feel feelings and trying to work out where they come from and taking a pretty sort of hard luck, not just in the mirror, but like in the sort of mirror of your soul and thinking, okay, I, I look, this is an unteachable lesson, right?

1:57:34I, a thousand episodes of this podcast, move to America, do all of the things for me to say, fame won't fix your self-worth money. Isn't going to like improve your happiness. You don't love that girl. She's just hot and difficult to get. You should see her parents more don't work so hard. Like all of these things, they are only, as far as I can see realizations you can arrive at by completing them. Like you need to go through the video game, get to the end and go, all right, well, congratulations. That thing that everyone clichedly said, like with fucking religious revelation, I now get why they said it.

1:58:10Like it's because it's either one of two things, right? It's either that is the truth or people who get to the end of a particular game and start proselytizing about how the game wasn't the game and nobody else should be playing it, is part of some weird secret society that all successful people are a part of to like con the peons into not playing the game just to keep all of the success for themselves. It's like, why is it that people so reliably get to the end of these sorts of games and say, it was good in some ways, but largely unfulfilling in others. And there was an area of me, I thought it was going to satisfy and it didn't.

1:58:49And fuck, it's still there. and now I'm going to have to look at something else. Why do you think so many people keep saying that? Why is that the place that they go to? I think it's how we're built. I really do. I think that is what it is to be a human, is to be perpetually dissatisfied. And that's just the case. And it's not a nice case. It's not pleasant, but it is the case. And so it'll always be there. there'll always be an element of like shit i thought this was going to be like sunshine and rainbows and you know it has its moments but ultimately like no matter where i am there i am i'm still i gotta be with myself um and sometimes right sometimes it is because people spend their entire lives chasing the wrong thing and they get to the end of it and they go fuck like that was pointless and those are the people you hear you hear from because those are the people who are rich and famous because rich and famous is what you go for when you're chasing something that wasn't originally your plan um so you hear that message a lot partially it's just like the selection bias of that like um but you know you hear people who are also happily married and have beautiful families and they're still kind of dissatisfied um because at the end of the day like the floor feels like the fucking floor my stomach hurts i've got a bit of a headache and like i've got to do stuff today that i didn't i wouldn't choose to do if i could do whatever i wanted that's like the human condition and like i think a good part of personal growth is actually not like optimizing so that you're like some bastion of gratitude your whole life and going about in this perfect zen flow state of like everything's super enjoyable and i'm and i'm getting gratitude but i'm not like sort of uh falling back on my motivation like i'm grateful and motivated as if that's like a thing you can do um and to reach this like sort of it's like a picture you have in your head of what could be possible to live and it's a great thing to strive for because it will make you do things and it'll preoccupy you um but like at the end of the day there has to be some concession to the general day-to-day human experience because that is what your life is like narratively your your life gets defined as like a few really important moments reaching a billion plays like doing this doing that that's what you connect the dots at the end because that's what you put on your one page sheet that goes at your funeral to explain what your life was it's just one page my grandma died last year and it struck me because there was a an explanation of her life and it was one page and i remember being like that's a whole life someone's been on the planet for decades and it's reduced down to an a4 sheet to it literally and And I remember being like, huh, shit.

2:01:41And I was thinking to myself, like, is that all life is? Just like a few important moments and everything else is just fluff? And I was like, no, it's the exact fucking opposite of that. It's that those few moments don't matter that much. They matter to the ego. They matter to the identity because they are the proof that you are who you said you are and all that stuff. But like real life is just day to day. And like your relationship with the fucking walls and with the floor and with your own body in your own the voice that's in your head that is where like if you're talking about maximizing uh general fulfillment in life like your relationship with those things i think is actually the only level that really matters because whether you get the big thing or not like it will be a high and then a low and then you base then you baseline that's just like structurally functionally what you are it's not even like a personality trait it's just like definitionally the case um and we we argue against that because we want to believe in the utopia of like 400 virgins and bliss for the rest of your life but that doesn't happen um and that's not to say you can't be deeply fulfilled in life you can it's just that that fulfillment doesn't look like bliss and excitement in perpetuity there was when i was playing around eight years ago with, I knew I wanted to start the show, but I didn't know what to call it.

2:03:05And I had a short list of pretty bad names. Brains and Brawn, one of them. Glad that I didn't go for that. And Modern Wisdom is the only time in my entire copywriting marketing career, which has lasted a very long time, had to come up with names for club nights a lot because they fail a lot, which means you permanently need to be reinventing them. the only time I ever got divine inspiration was modern wisdom. And I woke up at three in the morning and was like, that's the name, wrote it down in my phone. So I didn't forget it. And I've never looked back. But one of the other names that was on the cutting room floor that I didn't go for was crushing a Tuesday.

2:03:42Crushing a Tuesday comes from Tim Ferriss. And even though I would probably like, because I'm all elevated now and I say cross-legged, I would call it enjoying a Tuesday or peaceful on a Tuesday. His argument is basically people optimize for peak experiences, but your life is made up of ordinary Tuesday. and your goal should be that your average Tuesday is just pretty good, right? Because your life is made up of ordinary Tuesdays. And I think that that's what you're talking about. Yeah, that's exactly the same thing. Yeah. Modern wisdom is perfect as well. Thank you. It's really good. It fills the exact fucking hole that is there today that needs to be filled, which is how do you be wise when the fucking log has been pulled out underneath us and there's no like source material that we're going to mismatch the environment yeah yeah yeah it's uh i think that's fundamentally the question a lot of people are asking themselves because we're at this we are a generation or you know a bunch of generations that have the curse of awareness of, holy shit a lot of the things that we used to rely on that were comforting stories maybe they're not quite so true we've got things that are phenomenal contributors to our quality of life got the entire world's fucking corpus of human history now in a chatbot there you can talk to it you're never going to be lonely for the rest of your life here in a driverless car there was no one in the driver's seat yeah the way most yeah they're crazy yeah um yeah all of these things and yet at the same time all of the stories and all of the levels of comfort have gone out of the window this is one of the great insights alex o 'connor taught me i think he actually taught me this in a vlog not in a on a podcast episode but he was stood in that lobby outside and uh he was saying the problem with the modern atheist movement and the sort of rationalist movement is that it is selling people on statistics, data, and the scientific method and telling them to get rid of archetype myth and story.

2:05:43The issue is the human brain finds archetype myth and stories a thousand to one more compelling than the numbers. So you are telling people to dispense with the thing that feels most real to them and believe in the thing that feels most fake. And I think that that sense of, I really don't fucking know how to operate. This is a very novel, fast moving world. And all for all the humans are adaptable creatures. We're adaptable on like genetic timescales, right? We're not adaptable. And we're not bad, right? Modern world, wifi signals, we seem to be surviving-ish. There was a pandemic not long ago.

2:06:19Everyone got through that kind of, okay. But like psychologically, it's a challenge for a lot of people. And then when you layer on top the shame of what was your line? The majority of your life is spent in relative physical comfort, but psychologically life feels anything but comfortable. How could this be? You live at the high point of human history and your biggest question is whether or not life is worth living. Um, it's, it's fucking true. And this additional layer of, I don't feel good. And I don't feel good that I don't feel good. I don't have legitimacy in this discontent. And my melancholy feels shameful.

2:07:03Yeah. You know? Yeah. Like measuring your success against your happiness is a surefire way to ensure that every moment of unhappiness doesn't go unmultiplied then you're not just unhappy you're also failing which is twice unhappy because that's the metric of success and like the meaning thing is exactly where we get the sense that life is worth living we don't really get it from doing like a fucking moral calculus of pleasure and pain and then seeing which comes out more like if there was 51 % pleasure and 49 % pain would that still be worth living if that was the entire sort of story. Well, I don't know.

2:07:42So meaning and stuff is definitely where we get that from. And you can use a myth to explain why we are so confused on that front. Have you heard of Procrustes? No. So Procrustes was an innkeeper in Greek mythology that was like on a road from Athens to somewhere else. And as bandits walked, as people walked across, there was lots of bandits. But he would offer people free accommodation. So people would come in and say, oh yeah, this is great. This is a long road. I'm very tired and stuff. And then, uh, they would lie down in his bed, except for if they were too short to fit the bed, then he would stretch them.

2:08:18So they fit it perfectly. And if they were too long, he would chop off the excess limbs so that they fit really nice. So he was doing them a service, you know, making sure that they fit perfectly, obviously not a service. This is really fucked up, but it's, it's often used to the idea of a Procrustean Bed is used to explain this compulsion of humans to map messy reality into arbitrary but neat straight lines. And so words always do this. Like whenever you use a word, you're invoking a category and categories all put like boundaries around certain patterns and exclude context from content. But by doing that, you are literally by adding any sort of category and excluding the context from the content, you are then no longer capable of dealing with contextual questions.

2:09:09And the meaning of life is a contextual question. So whenever you go about like trying to answer, what am I doing this for in a way that you could explain to somebody else, you're like trying to lift up water with a net and being... Could you give me a modern example of the christian bed bureaucracy is one there's like a million cases where um people like have to just like select an arbitrary like like box ticking they just they need to check the boxes and they're like there was a story in david graber's bullshit jobs about a guy that wanted to move his computer from one room to the other and it in total it included like four different companies two moving vans uh like 20 pieces of paperwork or something crazy like that because they had to check the boxes that they moved the computer in the right way because it was a military computer and he could have done it himself and it ended up paying like six people like a few thousand dollars because as it expanded it was just like you needed someone to verify the verifiers of the and so like that can be a procrastinate situation you often see it in science where people have like a totalizing theory for a messy reality and then instead of adjusting their theory to map the reality, they adjust their perception of reality to map the theory.

2:10:23And so psychologists do this a lot. The first psychologist I went to see did this with me where she, you know, had the degrees on the wall, but she mapped my experience onto her theories, which all told her to amplify, um, uh, and validate, uh, her, uh, um, patients, which made me just sink deeper into, oh yes these are real problems i do have like a disease in my brain and it is very real and everybody else needs to accommodate them otherwise i'm gonna like drown and and it just got worse and like um i think yeah we are allergic to

2:11:07messiness and whenever reality is too messy or it's messy in a way that we find distasteful we'll try and like force it into a procrastinate bed of our own left hemisphere sort of yeah there's a idea from gwenda bogel called the golden hammer when someone usually an intellectual who has gained a cultish following for popularizing a concept becomes so drunk with power he thinks he can apply that concept to everything every mention of this concept should be accompanied by a picture of Nassim Taleb. Nassim Taleb's the perfect one because, well, there's another reason I think Nassim Taleb's ideas span such a wide variety of things.

2:11:50It's because, like, if you read his books, he's talking about literature and then art and then economics and trading and stuff. But it's because all of the insights, like anti-fragility and stuff, really they're insights about people and not really about the thing at hand. And so all you then need to do is map how this thing that people do interacts in these different things. And it seems like you've got a new information about all these different industries simultaneously, but it's people that you're really talking about. Dude, you're great. I'm really, really impressed with what you're doing.

2:12:21What can I do? What can I do for you? If I was to give you a favor, you don't need to choose it now, but you've got a favor on the table from me. So whatever it is that you need, I'm happy to facilitate. I don't know. Have me back on again. I enjoyed it. fuck yeah where should people go to keep up to date with what um so i'm on youtube at angelo summers s-o-m-e-r-s um and uh yeah that's the main thing i've got this like uh web app software thing i'm coming up with uh like wisdom tools um that's at the compass dot diy um oh and i have a newsletter i just started called nav notes it's on sub stack and also if you go to angelo summers.com you can put your email in and do it on kit.

2:13:06But yeah. Okay, people should go and watch your YouTube, dude. You crush. Thank you. I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories. And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life-changing reads that I've ever found. And there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And it's completely free. and you can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.