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

34:14And you think you wouldn't be able to fully get that with the extension? Well, the extension is just quad, because that's a knee flexion, and this is leg, well, I don't even know what you'd call it. That. Yeah. The joke is the well it's I don't know there's like two versions of a joke because they'll call that one the ball crusher because that's what you're squeezing legs together but the older like the joke that people would say before was that was either the good girl or the bad girl machine ah one's forcing it apart one's forcing it together yeah okay I don't really I don't want to perpetuate that name but that was that's kind of a reference to those okay very good this episode is brought to you by Shopify look Look, 2026 is the year that you're finally going to launch that business you've been thinking about for ages.

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36:07I think that tweet has been my theme for 2025. Um, it's been, it's, it's funny cause that was the most shared tweet I've ever had. Um, and it was, it was like, it's always almost, um,

36:22not the opposite of ironic. It was fitting, right? It was completely fitting for the year. and it's been because like this year I've had a just I would say a series of unfortunate events um that has occurred and it's really tested my tools right tools in the tool belt um for reframing reality so that I can make my experience less you know miserable and so I thought about that it's like if I were if I were to boil everything down um of all the skills that you can learn, if everything that we do eventually becomes irrelevant, then the single greatest skill that you can develop is being in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about.

37:02And so one of the other frames on this is most people don't question someone who's in a bad mood. Like I'm just in a bad mood. So it's like, well, if you can be in a bad mood for no reason, it's like, you might as well be in a good mood for no reason because that one at least serves you. And so I've been trying to exercise like, cause there's on one degree, there's like, let's count things to be grateful for on the other side it's like why do i have to have things to be grateful for in order to be in a good mood like why is trying to find things a requirement of being in that mood like can i not find things and still choose to be in a good mood because i've certainly not had things to be in a bad mood about and been in a bad mood and so i've been trying to flex that which is like sure we can find things to be grateful for and when those things pop up yes and of course it's a you know it's a practice you get better at it but like what if i can just be in a good mood.

37:48And so I've just tried to try to break that, that relationship between the two, because then it makes it contingent on something that I can find. How successful have you been at that? Mediocre. Well, look, I think it's a, it's a, a lovely idea in isolation, uh, in theory, but I'm not convinced about how effective it is in practice for the reason that humans have a negativity bias. You know, it's our psychological entropy and your ability to detect things that are a risk to you significantly better than your ability to detect things that are just pleasant. Like this morning I texted you and I was like, hey man, like I really love the feeling I have of anticipation on a morning before we do a podcast.

38:28That's a normal, boring, mundane source of pleasure to me. If I'm not really, really training myself to notice that, I just, it just fucking falls away with the fact that, huh, I asked for almond milk and I bet this would have been better with like whole milk if that's the thing that that ruins the day and the thing is is you do notice it though right you do notice that um so i've had um one of my themes this year has been focusing on moments and on both the positive and the negative and so like when we think back on if i think back on the last year right i don't remember probably 95 percent of the year like i you know i did the same things and so it's like it just didn't get recorded like Like nothing notable happened.

39:12And so really like when we think about a year, we really just recall a handful of moments and that's it. And those moments in time are usually very short. And so I've been trying to think about the bad seasons as, well, maybe it wasn't a bad season. Maybe I had five bad days or really five bad moments that I then thought about for the entire season and turned what would have otherwise been five minutes times five into an entirely bad year. And so it's like, okay, well, if we can do that in the negative, can we do the positive, which is obviously the thing to exercise. But to the point that you said earlier about our ability to detect threat and risk at such better accuracy than our ability to detect good things, it's so interesting because if you use that side of your brain, not to derail us, but I think that has been one of the things that's helped me a tremendous amount in business.

40:10Because when I think about a business and I want to grow it, for example, I would think, okay, what are all the things that can destroy this business? And this is Charlie Munger. This isn't me. But basically, he says, invert, always invert. And Einstein said that too. And it's because you get to use this way stronger horsepower engine of like, how do I grow my business? You could obviously think that way. But the alternative would be like, how would I absolutely destroy this business in the fewest possible moves. And then when you list out those moves, you're like, cool, now let's do the opposite of that.

40:40And that has been, honestly, a lot of the, some of the sources of my greatest kind of creative moments have come from these apparently obvious things that would kill us. Well, what if we did the even more obvious thing and did the opposite of what would destroy us? And it's worked better than I deserve. So this is the problem. you can be rewarded professionally for focusing on things that you do not want to focus on personally. And Ryan Long taught me this. He was talking about how he's a comedian, Canadian comedian, really funny guy. He spends all of this time, you know, dialing in these bits and obsessing over how it could be better.

41:21And then he says to himself, yeah, but I don't want you to do that in your relationships. No, can you let that go when it comes to the way that you show up for your partner or your friends or your body image or whatever. You don't get to compartmentalize stuff like that. And it is a very unfortunate irony of the world that the skillset you often need to become successful in business is the one you need to get rid of to be happy in your life. Yes. So I was thinking about what you were saying earlier. with regards to risk and our ability to detect it. So the other part of that that's been really interesting is we also, not only do we detect more threats, we also overemphasize how catastrophic they could be.

42:11And the converse of that is we rarely identify the upside. And when we do, we typically underestimate the upside. And I think this is something that a lot of people don't talk about as much. Obviously, I always have a business hat on, literally. uh and but i think about this because i think this is where like you said at the very beginning that people complain because they cannot accurately view reality and so if we tie that to this concept then it means that people will disproportionately blame the universe and then perceive significantly greater risk for them asking girl out starting a business taking a loan uh you know asking a stranger to buy something, making a podcast and for fear of what other people on the internet will say, or people who know them.

42:58Right. And so we, we catastrophize this side, but the flip side is, and you hear this a lot when people, you know, do make it and whatnot, they're like, I never dreamed it would be this big. Now, some people are obsessive and like absolutely have thought through everything. I fall more on that side. Uh, but, uh, on, on, on the other hand though, a lot of people do get there and they're like, I never thought it was going to be this big. And it's because we typically just under emphasize the upside, which is where, from the business perspective, it's like, that's where the alpha is. That's where the outperformance exists, where most people think, hey, this bet, it could go to zero.

43:30And you're like, I don't think it's going to go to zero. But even if it did go to zero, I have a 10X here. And so if I have a 50 % shot at a 10X and the other 50 is zero, I should take that shot every single time, knowing that I'm going to be wrong half the time. It still makes sense to take. And so I think people are not good at making those risk-adjusted return bets, obviously financially, but even in the very micro aspect of our lives. And so we talked earlier about the cosmic irrelevance and the frame of the veteran, but there's a third frame that I think about a lot, which is, I call it play it out.

44:02And so it's like, no, let's sit in there because again, fear exists in the vague, not in the specific. And in the resistance. Yes. And so when we have these specificities of like, okay, I'm going to start a pocket. I can't start a podcast. Like, okay, it's this big, vague thing, but no, like, let's play it out. Like, let's see what actually would happen. So I'm going to upload something and then people don't listen to it. Okay. Well, they didn't listen to it. Okay. Well then that's not a problem. Okay. Let's say people, let's see tons of people listen to it, which I don't know how that magically happens, but let's say tons of people listen to it and they all hate it.

44:38Okay. Immediately you have this anxiety that we're, but let's play it out. Like what happens next? It's like, okay, is it going to change what I eat? Is it going to change where I sleep? Okay. Let's say, let's say I, all of a sudden I lose all the money that I have. It's like, okay, well, I probably have a bunch of people that if I really needed to sleep on their couch or in a spare bedroom, I could do that. Okay. So I'm not really going to be homeless. And if I really didn't have enough money for food, I can go to a homeless shelter and get food. Right. So it was like, wait, so my worst case scenario is like, I have shelter and I have food and I'm still breathing air.

45:10So that's the downside. And so there's this catastrophizing that we, cause we, our brains are meant to keep us alive. We literally think if we fail, we die. Like everyone will ostracize us from the group and we will be alone and die. And so just actually playing it out, not one step, but like two more steps after that, you're like, okay, so my actual downside risk is nothing, but my upside is everything I've wanted. And even if I'm at 50 % off on that, it's still worth the shot. It's very healthy to have an inner critic, but it's also, there's the golden rule and then there's the platinum rule, right?

45:53There's the treat others as you want to be treated. And then there's the treat yourself as you treat others. Most people are very kind. like you're nicer to me than you are to yourself like if you said the shit you say to yourself to me we wouldn't be friends um and i think that thing of like the the inner critic has to be it's um as long as it's process driven i think it's it's very very healthy it's like imposter syndrome it's yeah okay feel like an imposter for a while as long as it gives you as long as you can get that to a granular level where it gives you something to work on. Like the inner critic can't just be, it can't just be like, that's bad.

46:37It's got to be, oh, that didn't work, so we need to change it. Or that one's not going to work, so we're going to write something new. It's got to be something that's like, you're working towards something, you're aiming up. And I think criticism is very important. I mean, Walt Disney used to do this thing where he had like the, he had three rooms, you know, this thing of like one for creativity, uh, one for sort of, um, management, like how would you do the idea? And then it was only in the third room that you were allowed to be critical. It's kind of fun idea of like going to sort of compartmentalize.

47:15Well, I do think that thing of like, never refuse the muse. If you're working in anything creative, just write it down. Something comes to you, you just, That's the Navar one, right? Inspiration is perishable. Act on it immediately. Yeah. Yeah, Tim Ferriss says, the world rewards the specific ask and punishes the vague wish. And I think that sort of inner critic voice can expand out into, I don't feel good about the thing I did. Okay. Well, that's probably the first place that everybody gets it.

47:49I'm not but something that just happened or something that I'm about to do, probably very normal. You don't know where it's coming from and you don't know what it's about and you don't know what to do to fix it. Okay, so how about we get away from the vague critic and we move toward the specific coach with regards to this? Okay, so what precisely is it that you're concerned about? Well, I don't feel fully prepared for the presentation I've got to give tomorrow. Okay, is that fair? Do you know that it's true? Do you think that you haven't prepared enough? Oh, actually, I've prepared quite a lot.

48:23to be honest. I think this is probably just my fear trying to be sneaky and sort of turn itself into a way that I'm going to believe it. All right, well, what are you going to do about it? Well, I'll just check my notes a few more times. And actually, huh, it seems like I do know this pretty well. The inner critic, it's not often wrong. It's just you can say it in a nice way. You know, sometimes it's right. Sometimes you fuck up. Sometimes it wasn't good enough. And that's okay. It's the idea of going, it's not repetition, it's iteration. Doing the same thing again and again doesn't make you better, but tweaking it.

49:06And knowing what to tweak, is that you have to listen to an inner critic. I think the, is it Hormozy? Hormozy's so good for quotes, but I think it was self-confidence without evidence is delusion. Some version of that. Confidence without competence is delusion. Yeah. It's so true. And you do meet people along the way that have that incredible confidence, or they sort of exude that, and then they don't have the confidence. And you go, well, no, no, you need to be able to. So finding that, I think without that inner critic, I think we would all be kind of delusional wandering around going, yeah, you know.

49:49Yeah, George says, does someone with half your talent but five times your self-belief making ten times the money? Yes, and that's true for every British person. There's an American. Exactly. Well, I mean, look, I think for the perennial overthinkers, reframing this very well-trodden landscape of inner criticism, a lot of the way that you can look at that is I'm fragile. You know, my self-belief exists on a knife edge. It feels like I'm tightrope walking confidence, perhaps. I think a better way to look at it is you're not fragile, you're just finely tuned. And in the same way as a Ferrari can go really, really fast, especially around a track.

50:36But if you don't treat it very well, it's probably going to break down quite a lot, actually. And if you treat it really well, it's still going to have a couple of hiccups and days where it doesn't fully operate rightly. But yeah, you're not fragile. You're finely tuned is a nice reframe. It's so easy to be kind to other people and sometimes so difficult to be kind to yourself. I thought you wouldn't let someone else speak to a friend like that. You just wouldn't stand for it. And yet you're in a critic. You're just like, yeah, say terrible things to me. just accept it as it comes yeah i uh that idea on you had a position and disposition this has happened a couple of times i misremember things that guests uh tell me and then i write about the thing that i misremembered and what you realize is that you've actually built on something that they didn't mean and i think i told you about this before but i'm gonna i'm gonna tell you about it again so uh this is after our first episode 18 months ago something like that.

51:33My chat with Jimmy Carr a few weeks ago inspired an idea. I've been reflecting on how your trajectory is way more important than your position. If you're number two in the world, but last year you were number one, that is way worse than sitting at number 150, but being on a huge upward slope from 300 12 months ago. There's a few reasons for this. Recency bias. If your value is increasing right now, that means you have to be popular at the moment. By looking at recent trajectory, you are selecting for only the few people who are trendy right now, which is really all that we can remember. We can also romanticize where someone will be in future if they're currently hot stuff.

52:05How high might they climb? Who knows? Maybe to the top, maybe even beyond the top. Humans struggle to realize that everything is temporary, including growth and decline. Instead, it's easier to label people as heroes and losers based on what we know of them right now, so we don't have to predict a messy future. There's an old saying saying that there's three types of people on the ladder. One at the bottom, one at the middle, one at the top. which one is the best to be the one that's still climbing yeah no i think i think it's fantastic it's very well put um yeah i think that especially in show business trajectory really seems to be such an important metric and it's like you could be half the size of some other comic but they've been around 20 years and they always sell out the arena so who cares it's like it's novelty dopamine this is new recency buyers yeah i think there's a there's a thing this year where um oasis are playing uh and it's a big deal people are very excited about it and i think cold player doing i think it's 10 or 11 nights at wembley state everyone's like chris martin bored of you been around for ages yeah well of course you are yeah a big band but it's like but it's not like an event culturally in the same way that Oasis coming together is there's a narrative to that and a trajectory of kind of where they are that's and Coldplay have just been steadily listen and if Taylor Swift does 15 nights next year it'll be a yeah of course of course accepted yeah so that thing of like other people getting excited about it and I think I don't know what it feels like to be you know in Coldplay at the moment and maybe people aren't making as much fuss I hope they're celebrating I hope they're taking time to go, this is fantastic.

53:53Has no longer having the Olympia impacted your drive and passion in other areas of your life? You know, you've got the dad-husband thing, business, desire to work on yourself from a personal standpoint. how have you found drive and motivation separate and also wrapped up in what you were doing previously i wouldn't say it directly decreased because there's no olympia but i think almost as like a byproduct of what the olympia was for me of like a schedule of a year of like the first half of the year is x you have some time off you can recover give yourself a break and then you start to ramp up you travel focus on business and then near the end you go inward you figure out what's driving you what's pulling you back right now self-reflect spend time away from bullshit focus on yourself be selfish work intense schedule and like it was just like organized routine and then all of a sudden it was all gone and that on top of the singular goal being like where do i I put my energy now, I think definitely left me in a place of feeling a little bit lost.

55:06I'm not figuring out like, where do, do I still have the passion for anything? Where do I find that energy to put into something? What do I put it into? Does it even exist? Will it exist again? And then it kind of led to me, then I had an injury. I stopped working out for a while and I just started to wake up in the morning exhausted and not knowing what to do, going in and helping with this business, going on this trip for at travel a meeting here with a distribution center of all these little things for all these other things that weren't really like driving me i didn't have like an important big role in them i was just like kind of coasting through and i started to wake up and feel pretty lost in general of like where do i where am i progressing to essentially and that was when i was kind of like what i'm honestly i'm still working through it i don't have this answer but a thing i'm working for is just like empathizing with myself that I don't need to be constantly progressing towards something that I don't need to be getting better and have this big goal and doing X and I can just sit and rest for a while and like truly just like do nothing and be good enough as that is and let something come and figure it as it goes and that's it that was tough for me it is tough for me and speaking in proper verbiage of figuring that out and the funniest little thing of what has made me feel better recently was working out again on a schedule and eating five meals a day and weighing up my food and having that little bit of structure of like and not having to as well it's like all this stuff's going on my life i don't know i'm kind of lost what can i do well i can go work out again and i don't have to so now i'm choosing to well why are you still work out so hard why are you training so hard it's like well i just because i love it i feel good why i used to do it 12 years ago exactly and that's all of a sudden i'm getting more more excited to go back in the gym where even in prep last year i started but i have to go work out and then all of a sudden i just start to feel better day to day and it's these little changes and i realized this is truly how i fell in love with the gym and why i'm such a big advocate of weightlifting like i honestly kind of hope i don't inspire people to get into bodybuilding because it's tough it's fucked up it's not good for your health but i do want to inspire people to go lift weights get in the gym i want to get jacked because it's such like oh i'm lost i don't know what to do just go work out apply some discipline work hard find something you love that's like difficult that shows you progress builds confidence and just go do it and then from there then you can clear your mind a little bit have self-confidence start looking around a little bit more clear start looking inward and figuring out what is next for you and finding that next goal and working towards it so for me that's why like i just fucking love the gym so much i'm so grateful that i'm back to a point of like loving the gym this is the cash value or this was the price that you pay in retirement i think you know because what you're talking about it's going to be difficult and things will be hard and you won't have the drive or the goal that you used to in the past.

57:52All of those things that kind of fluffy concepts, but they come into land. They actually sort of meet reality with, I woke up on the morning and didn't know what to do. I felt tired a lot. I didn't want to train. I was short and snappy with my business partners. I found myself getting distracted with lots of little tasks because it made me feel important and like people needed me. I packed my calendar out and did because... a lot of the time in advance of something happening, we probably have a good idea about what it's going to be like in the macro, but what we don't know is how it's actually going to appear, manifest in life.

58:35And it's navigating those things. So for instance, I've been sick for the last 18 months or so, and that's been hard. And I knew based on what the trajectory was going to be, what was going to be tough, that I was going to have a lot of self-doubt, that I was going to lose confidence and self-esteem that I would feel like I was moving backward, all of these things. But the way that that actually appears, like the individual building block thoughts that you have, like that mean random little voice or that one night where you ruminate about that one thing, or you're more sensitive to criticism and that one comment from that person, you can't really focus on your meditation as much.

59:16Like none of those are, I am going to lose confidence. They are the individual incidents that contribute to my confidence has gone down. Even if you knew it was going to happen in advance, and even if in retrospect, you can say, oh, wow, both of these things converged. Each of the little steps that occurred to make that happen kind of come out of nowhere a little bit because you don't know the effect of each little thing. Does that make sense? Yeah. So it's the pack calendar, the lots of travel, the I'm tired, I don't really want to go train. I don't really, I'm not weighing my food. I'm maybe eating weird diets compared with what I used to.

59:50And this lack of structure feels alien and uncomfortable to me, but it also feels like relapse or, or, uh, rest or, uh, change or variation, but that's also uncomfortable because it's unfamiliar. And yeah, each of these little building blocks is contributing to that. Like, I don't feel like me. I don't feel like me and, and not in the way that I wanted to either. Yeah, and it creeps in like that and you have absolutely no idea that it's coming until one day you're like, I don't feel good. So it's definitely interesting. And I feel like I've needed to treat myself like a science experiment of taking and removing pieces and see what's important.

1:00:35It's like, okay, bodybuilding was creating a bit of pressure and stress in my life. Is it everything related to that?

1:00:47or was it the whole you know so like as i pulled out like well i'm not competing anymore i don't need to eat on a schedule i don't need to train at the same time i don't need to leave my phone outside the gym and be locked in and focused as much i don't need to wake up with my alarm i can kind of sleep i can do all these little things that i can let go of because now i don't have to because the goal is different but then i started to not feel good and it was like okay it wasn't those things that weren't making me feel bad those were actually making me feel good it was the outcome like i said before so now taking those things that from bodybuilding put in the back in my life and really think oh wait the structure and the discipline makes me feel better it fills me with more confidence and ability to go do other things rather than taking regardless of whether it's in service of becoming mr olympia yeah and i mean i know those things but like you said it was all of a sudden it was like oh well i'll just cut one meal out because like i'm busy now oh well my shoulder's injured so i'm gonna do my rehab but like i don't really want to you know i'm gonna take a day i'm not competing this year like who even cares i'm busy i'm gonna reply to emails in between sets i'm gonna sleep in because i went to bed late last night like all these little things next thing you know you're like i feel like shit i don't want to do anything and you're way harder to pull yourself out of that than if you caught it earlier so that's life though you know there's no direct descent to the top it's ups and downs and building a new self as you go as a dad you got one job love her if you want to raise successful kids, especially boys, you have one job, love his mom.

1:02:12That's so sick. It's crazy, but it's great in its way. It's beautiful in its way. And it's, it, what, what, look, I mean, see, here's the funny thing. I mean, people often ask like, you know, what do I do? What should I teach my kids? It doesn't matter what you tell them. You could talk to them in a foreign language. Show them. All that matters is what you do. So the number one predictor, for example, of kids growing up and practicing a religion is whether their father practices a religion. There's like a 40 percentage point difference in the father and the mother practicing on the predictive ability on the predictive capacity on how on how the kids are going to grow up and behave and there's almost it's almost certainly the case it's because i mean when i was a little kid i thought my dad was you know i thought he could lift the corner of the house my dad was a math professor he could not now i realize he was a nerd at the time i thought he was cool nerd yeah now that i'm a nerd i recognize that.

1:03:03But, and my dad was a very proud guy. I mean, he never would have bent the knee to any other man, but he was on his knees on Sunday. And that had a big impact on a little dude. There's something bigger than my dad. And I saw it and it's in there, right? That's really important in every part of life. If you want to teach virtue, practice virtue, be the person you want your kids to actually turn into. And they will become that. Generally speaking, they'll become that person yeah i i was thinking about um you know we're this generation both millennials and gen z uh the progeny of parents who didn't have the tools to sort of relate or navigate in the same way as an infinite number of evidence-based relationship coaches and the podcast world and the self-help and all the rest of it uh i think i wonder how they should go about thinking, well, I didn't necessarily have the best example in front of me because there was challenges here.

1:04:01And we did have, uh, uh, changing dynamics and motivations around the acceptance of divorce. And maybe I did grow up in a non-intact home and such. Uh, but that sets expectations for a good relationship is supposed to be now. And there's this interesting, uh, not a burden, I suppose, but a responsibility opportunity to be a circuit breaker and to think, you know, Goggins talks about this. So, you know, he explains about how, um, his dad hit him a lot as a kid and he had a, a brother and sometimes Goggins sort of took the beatings in place of his brother, but he also found out that his granddad would make his father stand in front of an open stove.

1:04:47And if he moved, he would hit him with a belt as a kid. So you have this lineage, this like ancestral, literal ancestral trauma, but physically being passed down, plus also probably epigenetically being fucking passed down as well. And I asked David, I didn't even know that this was the case. It was really kind of beautiful of him to say on the podcast. I said, if you had a child, how would you hope to raise them? I do have a child. I've got a 22 year old daughter. he'd never mentioned it previously and he brought it up on on the episode and he said he basically sees himself as kind of like a dam sort of a breakwater with this circuit breaker thing in between the series of mistreatments of people right like no more and i kind of think i often think about that example when it comes to stuff like um your parents didn't necessarily have the tools you do yeah you didn't have an example but you have the opportunity and you have the metacognitive ability to manage your emotions so they don't manage you.

1:05:46This is the most important thing to keep in mind. I mean, we're talking about the psychology being biology, but we also have will. We also have a prefrontal cortex for a reason. That's the most important part of the neurobiology of all is the C-suite of your brain, where you're actually making decisions, notwithstanding your proclivities. I mean, you've got these urges. We all have these urges. You know, you look at a woman who's not your wife and you go, oh man, she's really, really attractive and all that. And then your prefrontal cortex, which is the behavioral activation system, the behavioral inhibition system.

1:06:16That's in the prefrontal cortex, BIS and BAS. Behavioral inhibition and behavioral activation, right? And behavioral inhibition is more important because, you know, I want to hit my son. And my prefrontal cortex says, uh-uh, no, because my father hit me and I'm not my trauma. That's a perfect example of metacognition. That's a perfect example of being the master of yourself. and we actually can do that, but you got to have knowledge. You have to be strong, but you also actually have to have knowledge. And that's why all this stuff matters. That's how I teach happiness is happiness is really a process of understanding the science, practicing habits that go along with the science and then teaching it to other people so you ingrain it in yourself.

1:06:58And that's anything that you want to do, anything you want to get better at. If you want to become a better golfer, learn about golfing, golf and teach golf. You know, doctors, when they're becoming surgeons, they always say, watch one, do one, teach one. That's how you become a surgeon. Anything in life actually follows that basic pattern, but you must have the knowledge such that the habits that you practice are not the habits that are just kind of lurking in your limbic system and being epigenetically expressed from the misbehavior of people six generations ago or some crazy thing like that.

1:07:28We should not be prisoners of that. Yeah. There's this gorgeous idea from Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is True. That's a nice book. fuck dude blending evolutionary psychology i know with buddhism uh because the book that got me into uh ep was um the moral animal yeah from 1991 or 1992 or something and it's still there's some of the stuff little uh replication crisis but most of it's shit hot and i loved it the replication crisis is a big problem in my field yeah a lot of people make their careers to be true and grandma would have said uh i mean i can find you a study that shows that that conjugal infidelity will bring happiness i mean i'm sure i could motivated reasoning by a researcher that for darling darling honestly i only did it not only did i not love her but i did this for us i know exactly and besides studies show so and anyway so but and and and but the whole problem if if a study and this is like you're talking about evolutionary psychology all the time and biology all the For everybody watching, if your grandma would hear this result and say that's wrong, she's probably right.

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1:09:51Why do you think so many girls are drawn to therapy culture? Oh, I think it's a lot of things. I do think this is kind of a cliche thing to say now, but I do think therapy culture has replaced religion. And that's not a new thing to say. People have been saying that for a long time. So Christopher Lash was writing about that in the 70s. Frank Faroodi writes about it really well now. But in recent years, since social media, I would say, therapy culture has just escalated to the point where I think young women don't see it as a worldview. They just see that as kind of life. so they interpret everything through this therapeutic lens so their lives their relationships their emotions um and i think it has elevated to the level of religion um so you think of you think of all the kind of characteristics of religion we just mimic them with therapy culture so instead of praying we just repeat our like positive affirmations um instead of like seeking salvation you'll go on like a healing journey.

1:10:58Instead of resisting temptation from the devil, you'll reframe your intrusive thoughts. And so I think for young women in particular who are becoming less religious, this kind of therapeutic worldview has completely replaced that void. What does a therapeutic worldview consist of? What does that mean? um like seeing problems in your life kind of pathologizing problems and experiences as something medical rather than i'm just experiencing this emotion or kind of age-old anxiety now it's become a medical issue um so things like talking in the language of attachment styles uh and and trauma and losing the language of just ordinary hurt and disappointment and things like that and for some reason this is giving some kind of solace or comfort yeah order being brought out of chaos i think it gives the comfort religion gives and the consolation of like you like you see young women on tiktok saying things like um like they won't pray to god but they'll give a request to the universe and like have faith in that yeah and so i think it gives all the comfort of religion, but it takes away the inconvenient parts.

1:12:21So any actual demands on you or kind of restrictions on your freedom or anything like that. Being held to standards of behavior, etc. So it has what women are craving in modern life, I think, which is belonging and security in something and faith in something, but it's a much easier version of religion. Slippery religion. Yeah. Yeah. How many of these girls are in therapy, do you think? a lot um there was a study recently showing 32 of all 12 to 17 year olds in america have either had therapy been on medication or had some kind of treatment in 2023 um in over a single year one third which is insane and i was talking to someone about that statistic and they were like oh that's great that's amazing and i was thinking that's a bleak statistic um so yeah i think there's there's the girls that are in therapy which is a lot but then there's also the girls who just like living in therapy culture so it's just they scroll through instagram and it's all about attachment styles trauma they go on tiktok and it's like a trauma-informed therapist telling them like red flags they should watch out for and stuff it's just like there's the actual therapy which i'm sure there is there's useful therapists but there's also just this culture which is just the world that they're swimming in yeah so you're never able to switch it off i think um alanda barton was sat in that same seat as you big proponent of psychotherapy i think trained as a psychotherapist himself too onto school of life which isn't just a youtube channel but a psychotherapy facility here in london yeah and even he like the biggest proponent of it i think would very much say that there is a time for therapizing.

1:14:11And then there is a time to not, in the same way as going to the gym, there is a time to train, and then there is a time to recover. And I wonder whether one of the criticisms that's common that I put to him was lots of people online, more old school people, more sort of typical stiff upper lip type people would say, you're not fixing your past's problems, you're dwelling on them. And by dwelling on them, you are ruminating too much. There is some evidence, I mean, a good bit of evidence, rumination is not particularly fantastic for you. And finding this line between, yeah, mate, we don't want to deny that bad things happened and never alchemize them or transcend and include them into our life.

1:14:52And then on the other side, we don't want to wallow in them. But I suppose if you have the online environment that you exist within permanently using this language. You're permanently having these structures and these thinking patterns reinforced. And then it's how you begin to talk to yourself about what happens offline. And then you also have facilitation or medication or conversations with your friends, further embracing all of that. You're just entrenched in this all the time. Yeah. Well, I used to think, and I think a lot of people think therapy culture is particularly bad for men because it kind of has a female approach to problems and it's about you know ruminating and often it's like if you don't have a female response there's something wrong with you it's kind of a red flag if you don't go to therapy but I actually changed my mind on that and I actually think therapy culture is worse for women because women ruminate more they co-ruminate more.

1:15:46So it's playing into the weakness that they already have or the disposition. Yeah if you think of an anxious young 14 year old girl the worst thing you can tell her is to go further into her own head to get relief and to think more about her problems and to kind of search her life for symptoms you know that if you told me that at 14 it's the worst thing i could have heard um so i actually think maybe some men do need to do that a little bit more but the average young girl needs to kind of cut out i wonder whether therapy language and therapy culture for girls is what gym language, gym culture, Psalms, testosterone, steroids at 17 is for guys.

1:16:30Yeah, I think it's a form of control. So it's like, it's our version of control. You know, if we feel uncomfortable or feel an uneasy emotion, we're just like, I'm going to categorize that and diagnose it you know that's my attachment disorder or that's uh my depression um and i think men do that kind they have their own kind of self-optimization trends and the gym stuff where that can become like a form of control um to deal with kind of uneasy emotions and i think yeah this is the woman's version of that it's like we can't sit with it or just accept like a painful situation so i often think about so if you look at these kind of attachment style forums or girls talking about their attachment styles very often they'll describe just a bad relationship and then they'll say oh it's my attachment disorder so they'll be like he cheated on me and i can't get over it because of my anxious attachment and it's like it's so sad because actually losing the language to talk about the actual problem that they're facing because they're trying to get control.

1:17:35Because it's a lot easier to be like, oh, you know, I'm anxious or he's avoidant than we have a terrible relationship and I've just wasted four years with someone. You get the control through the therapy culture. So that's where I see it becoming a danger to girls and young women. What's the difference between a nice guy and a good man? Yeah. Right about that in there, but a nice guy gets along. Yeah, I'll do that. Yeah, I'll do that. They don't necessarily have discernment or judgment, not sure what they stand for or stand against. It's like, yes, yes, yes, sure. Yeah, hey. A good man has ideals that they stand for and they'll stand against.

1:18:17And when they're tested, a good man is not a nice guy. That's in the chapter of manning up. And, you know, that's, I was that time when I was doing the rom-coms. That's all I could do. I was feeling like my work was just me as a nice guy. And in life, I was not just a nice guy. Like I said, Camilla was pregnant. I got a child coming. I was, I was feral with masculinity.

1:18:45And in my work, maybe I was feeling a bit neutered. And I was like, well, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm a good guy and a good man in life, but I'm just a nice guy at work. Can I be a roles that can be a good man? And that was dramas. Because in dramas, you can stand for, stand against something. Your ceiling for pleasure and your basement for pain are up to you. How do you feel about it? And no direction can go, that's too much. Or that's not enough. You got too angry there. Oh, you meant that too much. That didn't come in a drama. Those come in a rom-com, right? Because the emotions and how you feel or compressed to be an buoyant level and a threshold that's up bouncing from cloud to cloud only.

1:19:29Dramas are as much pain, as much evil as you want to go, as deep, dark you want to go, get there. Let's see how far you go. How high you want to fly, how close to that sun you get before you get burned, go. Let's see how far you go. That's what you get in a drama. Much more like real life. And so, you know, good guys, being a good man is a lot harder. for good reason. I'm not going to be most popular. I'm not going to be always most affable. It also doesn't mean you got to be a dick or an asshole. It just means sometimes you got to go, I believe in this is this for me, this is for me. And that is not for me.

1:20:13And because that is not for me, if you do trespass into my space upon me and my family, there will be, I will do my best to cause consequences. And I'm going to let you know that. I want to, I hope that's apparent because I'm not going to intrude on you, but if you trespass that, I mean, I'm going to stand up for it. And that we can talk our way out of that. Great. No, it doesn't always work that way. You know, my good man's not looking for trouble, you know but if it comes and if he or something he cares about and loves were susceptible being trespassed on by trouble a good man does what he can to do to stop that so Aaron Bugsy tells this story he famously had his house a robbery attempt occurred on his very nice house in Manchester Manchester's got some spicy individuals in it from the gang culture.

1:21:19And there is a CCTV video of him. Now, by this point, this is, I think, 21 or 22. So he's been in the first movie. He has had multiple huge albums, world tour, rapping, done all the things. Most played fire in the booth, freestyle in history, all of this stuff, right? So you might think, even though he came from below the streets, sort of, he came from the sewers, uh, as a kid, he has a public image to keep up. Uh, maybe he's got soft, the sort of velvet prison, silk pajamas problem. And he told me this story and, uh, his girlfriend rings, she's in the house. These men are trying to break in. There's a barricade.

1:22:04So he's driving back with his sister in the car. He's driving back and there's a guy by the side of the road and he can see he's got a brick in his hand so uh Aaron stops the car opens the door and immediately says mate is that you blue shirt that's such a nice blue shirt and he's moving toward him he puts his hands in the air like this he's moving toward him he's moving toward his move to what hits this guy brick drops finishes him off gets back in the car and this bit's captured on cctv and somebody overlaid it with the call to the police so there's a 999 call going on from i think his mom who's in the house these men are trying to break in and you see him pull up in this mercedes this guy been in movies and all the rest of it and it's a van of dudes it's a van of men trying to break in yes yeah you're trying to rob his house and see it's rich he's got something that we want he's already dealt with one of them he might have dealt with another one of them as well and he pulls in in this fancy mercedes you see this guy who has got kind of world at his feet opens the door to his mercedes pulls his shirt off and just sprints at this van and he it was fucking electric bro he told me this story is so electric and that's on cctv that's great there's best video he ever made right there huh so hardcore it's so hardcore um But yeah, that's, you know, good man, not a nice guy.

1:23:31From the inside, it's very hard to know who you are. And one of the interesting things is how people go a bit mad when they spent too long alone. If you spend a long time alone, you sort of, you don't know, certain thoughts go a little too far. And one of the great things about company, you know, why do we need other people? Just to be able to kind of hold us slightly in check in small ways and large, they kind of go, no, that thought is getting a little too extreme, whatever. They define us. But also, the other thing that people help us to do, other people, is give us a compact sense of who we are that eludes us.

1:24:09So I see you and I go, there's Chris. Now, when you're alone, you don't think you're Chris. You just think I'm consciousness in the universe. I'm just a giant net that's capturing thoughts and impressions. You don't know that you have a name, a beginning, a middle or an end, etc. And when we're in company, people go, oh, you're that guy who does this. So other people's caricatured vision of us is actually quite helpful to us because you think, oh, I'm that relatively simple soul that other people - It unifies us, gives us a sense of story. Yeah. And also because if I look at you, you look unified.

1:24:44You've got two eyes, a nose, a mouth, you're relatively compact, et cetera. But inside you - Terminal. We don't feel any of that. It's a vast, shapeless landscape.

1:24:56Is self-esteem related to imposter syndrome? I think imposter syndrome was already something that I was seeing a lot of, and now I'm seeing more about increasingly this sense that the world expects something of me that maybe I've even actually done previously, but I'm scared about whether or not I'm going to be able to deliver it. Look, I think it's, I know imposter syndrome causes people problems, but I'm reassured if somebody suffers from imposter syndrome, it's a sign of honesty. It's a sign of self-awareness. Of course, it has its extreme versions, which causes people a lot of pain. But if someone is aware that they might be a charlatan or might be pulling off a confidence trick, that's honesty.

1:25:42That's great. That's a starting point. It's just like somebody who knows they might be evil is a good person. Evil people don't worry they might be evil. So you're likely to be authentic and genuine if sometimes you think, am I a fake? That's a good sign. It's a good starting point in the same way as identifying that you're a bad driver is a good starting point for not driving fast. 100%. But it doesn't necessarily make you better on the roads. So where do we go to? Where is becoming a better driver? Okay, my imposter syndrome, thank you, Alain. You've told me that I'm not so up my own ass that I can't see my own flaws.

1:26:15Hooray. what about starting to work through that what about starting to get a better sense of our own capacities and capabilities look a lot of it is bouncing against the world and testing yourself against reality it's very hard to know your talents until you've had a go at something and i think we all have this sense sometimes that some things come more easily to us than to others you know i don't know how great tennis players start but they must have a sense oh, I was able to hit that ball and that worked quite well. Or a great writer was able to think, I was able to pull off quite a nice little sentence there.

1:26:48And that's the beginning of a kind of growing confidence. And you need that kind of start. And I think a good life doesn't require you to do everything. It requires you to do the things that you feel you're capable of and that you're especially good at. It's no humiliation for me that I can't play tennis, for example. If somebody goes, you know, you're terrible at this, because I don't sense a talent, but I do sense talent in that tiny area of assembling words. That's the area that, you know, but maths, I can't do, you know, architecture, I can't really do, et cetera, et cetera. So many things I can't do.

1:27:29So it's about finding those little sweet spots. And one of the great puzzles in life is how do people find their vocation? How do people find their core identity, their talents? And I sometimes think of it as, it's like you're passing a metal detector over the ground, and very occasionally something will let off a little beep, a beep of intensity, of interest, of heightened thoughtfulness. And you think, there's a fragment here below the ground of my true self. Now, my true self was shattered or it came in disassembled form. It's buried, it's scattered over a vast area. And the task of life is to recreate it from hints.

1:28:07And I think that one of the great challenges, I mean, I think one of the big, big challenges, and it happens to every young person, is what should I do with my life? It's one of these central questions of philosophy in a way. Because unless you're a very rare person, you will have to assemble a vision of your future. It's not going to come ready-made and there won't be a voice from the sky going, you know, you are an accountant or you are a downhill skier. It's going to be something you have to assemble and you'll assemble it in bits. You'll have to recreate the original statue of you that was shattered a long time ago and that lies across a vast area.

1:28:45So like an archaeologist of the self, you have to build that up and you have to build it out of those little beeps of interest. And I think a good thing there is envy. People speak very low and embarrassed way about envy. You're not supposed to feel envious. I think very often when you feel a beep of envy, it's because there's a fragment of your true ambition and your true self in the life of another person. And rather than going, oh, I must run away from it, go, no, this is a clue. What is there that you are envious of? And often envy is a very inaccurate emotion. We envy the whole of someone when actually it tends to be a part of them that we want.

1:29:26And so we go, I'm envious of that singer, actor, business person, et cetera. You want to go, hang on, hang on. It won't be the whole thing. Drill into it. What really is core here? And you might realize it's actually not their fame, their money. It's that they work with their hands or or it's that they live in a log cabin somewhere far away from other people, or whatever it is. So the best thing to do with envy is to see it as a guide for your own ambition, not a sign of your innate jealousy and inadequacy. It's a clue. I always think about envy as the only one of the seven deadly sins that doesn't feel good.

1:30:02Remind me of the other seven deadly sins? Gluttony? Gluttony? Sloth? Sloth doesn't feel good? You don't think sloth feels good? Have you not spent a good Sunday afternoon watching some horrible TV show on the town? But think of the self-disgust that sloth often brings, right? You know, you're lying on the sofa and you know that you're scrolling Instagram. And you know that your better self is being eroded. And so there's guilty sloth. Good sloth and guilty sloth. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I remember when I came out with the first book, I was being interviewed, I don't know, some Today show or something like that.

1:30:38And the guy goes, so you lost everything. in your twenties and now you're teaching people financial peace. How did you bounce back? And I remember it just hit me like that was stupid. And I said, dude, when you fall that far, you don't really bounce. It's more of a splat. And he just looked at me just like, that wasn't the answer that fit the narrative that you're talking about. Yeah. And so the thing I would say though, is if someone's watching you and I right now talk about this and they go, yeah, I'm in the soup. But people do react two different ways to being in the suit. We all have the fear and then the momentary courage or the momentary hope followed by, you know, another injury, followed by another betrayal, followed by a momentary.

1:31:25We all have that. Then the choice you have to make, the individual has to make while we're in that. And I made that choice semi-consciously was you can choose. All right. I'm going to quit. But I'm going to adopt the victim language, and I'm just going to sit down because I quit. And those are the people that never recover from their divorce. They never recover from their business loss. Or you can say, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm so lost, I don't know what to do. But I do know I'm going to take the next step, the next step. I'm going to do the next right thing that's in front of me and the next right thing that's in front of me.

1:32:06and it might even not be the right thing, but I'm going to do the next thing. And sitting is not an option. I'm going to keep walking. So keep walking if you're in this and the old country song, you know, if you're going through hell, keep going. And, um, and so, but I, I meet people that, uh, and they call on the show is like a lady called the other day and she's talking about her divorce. Like it happened 20 minutes ago. And I'm like, how long ago were you divorced? 40 years. I'm like, honey, you're still living emotionally back in that thing. The language she was using was fresh and she's still sitting there mad at him.

1:32:41And he's gone and gotten two other wives since then. I mean, you know, right. And move on. And so, um, but that it's real easy to quit in that. And it's not a quitter thing. It's, um, it's just this natural reaction. I'm going to, I'm going to get up one more time, even though I don't feel like it and walk out into the sun, get a little vitamin D, get a little prayer, meet with my buddy. and let him make fun of me and then I'm going to get after it again. And I'm just one more time, one more time, right? Yeah, I remember toward the end of my 20s and I was really trying to sort of work out some of the predictors for when I felt better and when I felt worse when I was in the soup, as you would say.

1:33:22And I remember I wrote it, action is the antidote to anxiety, that you really don't fear the future when you're moving yourself toward it. And it's a vicious spiral because the very thing that's hardest to do when you are struggling is precisely the thing that would make you feel better, right? Your motivation is at its lowest. You don't want to get out of bed. You don't want to go to work. You don't want to think of a new idea. You don't want to apply effort to something or pick up the bar or not eat the comfort food or whatever it is, stick to your routine. But then when you start to roll that boulder a little bit, it accumulates an awful lot of momentum, which is exactly how you see people get unbelievable outcomes.

1:34:03Like it seems superhuman. How does this person get so much done in a day? How are they so successful? How are they so balanced? All the rest of it. So, well, they are on the positive side of the same momentum that is currently kicking your ass. Exactly. Yeah. We developed a little theorem around here to talk to our team about this called the momentum theorem. Focused intensity over time multiplied by God equals unstoppable momentum. And one of the things we talk about in the little book I did on it was just this idea that when you have negative momentum, you are better than you look. When you have positive momentum, you are not as good as you look.

1:34:42That's great. That's really, really good. And so don't believe the lie either way. And so if you've got positive momentum, you are harvesting crops that were planted yesterday, not this morning. They were planted a year ago, put them in the ground. And today I'm getting this fruit and everybody thinks I'm a genius, but it was actually a year ago. I was a genius. And, or you got, you got crops going in the ground. There's nothing coming out of the ground yet. And you're planting, you're planting, you're planting. Nobody can see you. Nobody knows you're there. You're anonymous, uh, but you're a lot better than you look because wait till this rain and the sun comes, there's going to be a crop in the spring and suddenly you're going to be that genius.

1:35:23So, you know, that that's how that stuff works. I remember talking about going through this stuff, uh, this idea of walking, continuing to walk. That was something that you brought up. I love that. We were snow skiing the other day in Telluride and I'm a mediocre snow skier for a 65 year old dude. Right. Uh, but I like to go down the hill and go fast. I enjoy it. So, you know, go. And so I'm skiing with my, uh, kids and they're like 40 and 30 years old and they, they haul, but I mean, they go. And so the old man's trying to keep up and he's huffing and puffing. So we jumped off a lift. We were running cruiser blues, you know, good and double blues, that kind of stuff.

1:35:56We had a black every now and then, but they were cruisers. They were grooming, groomedies. So we jumped off it. And there's this one run on Telluride that when you get to the top of it on black, it's a, it's a, uh, uh, it's a groomed black and it's unbelievably steep. You can see downtown Telluride and it looks like you're going to fall into main street when you fall. I mean, it's right there. It looks like a toy box and there's nothing between you and main street. It's just air. It's that steep. It's an unbelievable. And I pulled up on top of that thing. And I looked at one of the kids, you know, these 30 year olds.

1:36:29I'm like, uh, they went that's steep. And I went, yeah. And if I stand here about three more heartbeats, I'm going to walk back. Cause I'm getting really scared. So I got to go or the fear is going to take me over. And I thought, you know what? That's what I've done half my life. You got to go or the fear is going to take me over. Cause if I stood there, my heart rate was going. This was just the other day. I was scared. You know what I mean? It's like, I was scared. But I thought, you know what? I can do this stupid thing. I can ski it. I know I can ski it. But if I stand here and think about it, the fear is going to kill me.

1:37:05There's a, I want to give it a better term than cultivated stupidity. Conscious ignorance, maybe you could say, or tactical ignorance around things. that, yeah, a lot of the time there is a period where you're supposed to plan, where you're supposed to reflect and ruminate and sort of think about stuff. But that can be a trap as well. And I think that a lot of people who like to listen to shows like yours and like mine, they'll be thinking about their thoughts. They'll be thinking about themselves. They'll be strategizing. But there is absolutely a time for straight action without having to ruminate too much.

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1:38:54That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. So this was a longitudinal study that was done in a relatively sort of academic setting? Yes, he did a large-scale longitudinal study, and he's fantastic. Those three traits were predictive. Conscientiousness, which is being a combination of thoughtful and kind. You know, I don't want to get too into definitions in case I misstate something, but the way I understand conscientiousness, and there are different personality models, right? And each personality model, and not every personality, there's really no one personality model that has ever gotten it completely right.

1:39:37They've all been dispelled in certain regards. But the way that I see conscientiousness as a whole across different personality models is it's got a couple of things combined. So it's not just nice. Nice to me can also mean low self-esteem, a pushover, trying to be liked. Conscientiousness may not even look super smiley friendly. It's more of an action. So to me, it is somebody who's smart enough to actually notice and anticipate somebody's needs. My husband is incredibly observant, and it's something that continues to also bring up admiration. So it's got that observational quality, intelligence, and then also motivation.

1:40:21You can't be lazy. They're industrious. They go and get things done. They're industrious, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. I was more thinking, I was trying to sort of interpret it, I guess, into the language of romance. But yes, if you're talking straight up, what is conscientiousness? I think good definition. They are flexible psychologically. If there is some sort of perturbment, they end up getting back to baseline in not an insane amount of time. If something occurs, they're able to adapt to it, which is maybe distinct, but kind of sounds a little bit like a subset of agency, which I would put not too far away from consciousness.

1:40:58It is agency. Right, okay. So you want highly agentic partners. You are so smart. Oh, thank you. Yeah, I'm going to have to up my game now on a different level. And then your final one, you want a degree of openness to new experience. Presumably that's somebody that just doesn't want to sit on their ass all the time. It helps to keep things exciting, but that is something that you can overshoot for and you end up with someone who is going to be very open sociosexually. They're going to be looking for - High adventurousness predicts cheating. Yeah, correct. So, okay, that's interesting. It's three traits.

1:41:34I guess a question would be, let's say that you are on an early date with someone or you're early into a relationship. What are some of the ways that you can adjudicate how much or how little of those traits your partner has? You know, this is the great question. I learned about these. I'm going to speak from my own experience, okay? So I've experienced this because I knew about these traits before I met Ty. And I absolutely intended to try this out. when I learned about them I was actually dating somebody I we were not happy and that person I would say lacked these traits both of us probably lacked these traits to be completely fair but we were in a conference together watching Tai Toshiro speak about this and I remember sitting there at this conference not having a particularly good time with the person I was with and thinking I can do this.

1:42:38I can follow instructions. And the reason I also thought that was because Tai Tashiro was emphasizing how difficult this is, that our evolutionary brains really want, so if we're talking about a straight female, we want that strong jawline. We want somebody who's all brawn. We want money. We want height. We want protection for our young. And he actually did this experiment where he had everybody raise their hands if they were a straight male single. And so you had about 100 men in this room raise their hands. And he was mimicking the average dating experience. So you go online, you're a straight woman, you want a straight man single.

1:43:20And then he says, so how many of you are between the ages of 35 and 45? So let's say now you've got about 50 hands up. And then he said, how many of you are Catholic? And you've got maybe 20 hands up. How many of you make over$200 ,000 a year? You've got, I don't know, five hands up. How many of you are six feet tall? One hand. So you can see that this completely diminishes our pool. So really what he was doing was, in fact, the book he wrote is called The Science of Happily Ever After, and he talks about three wishes. Statistically speaking, you'll get married. If that's something you want, you're going to get married.

1:44:01Most people in society do, but you really get to choose three things guaranteed and then your pool goes down. And if you want hotness, height, and money, you might have a person who's a complete selfish asshole and that's where you think, are those problems ones that you're going to be able to deal with just because the person's hot in 20 years? or are you going to be so sick of their shit that you don't care how hot they are? So that's really what it comes down to. So your question was, how do we adjudicate this? How do we find somebody with these qualities? What I can tell you is that I knew it was going to be hard, but I also know that I love science.

1:44:44And so if this was as sound as he said it was, I could do it. and I knew that the biggest thing, the biggest thing in my way was just to get rid of that evolutionary urge for hotness. The night I met Ty, so I broke up with the person I was with that day. I moved back to California. I immediately got on Tinder. This was 2015. So Tinder was kind of it. And I also didn't know what I was doing. I was new to apps and got on Tinder. I will tell you what, And with that mindset that I didn't care about hotness, money, or height, I realized there were so many lovely eligible bachelors. And so I was just swiping away.

1:45:29Swipe, swipe, swipe. Ty was one of the first people to respond. He was online. And so was this male model. And the male model was that baseline instinct in me. I was just like, and you, even though you're putting up a lot of like ab pictures, I just can't help it. So I actually had two contenders. I lived this. And Ty, I didn't know what he actually looked like. He was wearing a giraffe costume on his main picture, which I thought was funny. And there were some pictures of him working, but he had like hard hat stuff. So I really had no idea he was hot and Australian and 6 '2". I mean, I did win in this case.

1:46:06but um i'm texting i'm messaging him i'm messaging this other guy ty is so wonderful and he's just asking me these really intelligent questions um sort of like this conversation right so you're one of those rare ones who has all of those qualities ladies watch out um but he i could just tell he was wonderful and we're talking you can tell if you know what these three things are I could just tell I just needed to be aware of them It was there and he kind of became more of a friend and in the meantime this Model is sending me like emojis of Wet splashes and asking if I want to massage and granted I was on tinder.

1:46:49I need to be fair But and I kept talking to the model. I just couldn't help myself But after about 24 hours, I was done with the model guy ty was just becoming this friend And then something kind of scary happened with my work two weeks later. And I realized I wanted to tell my friend about it. And that's how it evolved. If I was to just chuck a little bet on for something that's very, very reliably going to happen over the next three years before the end of this administration, the mother of all blowups between Elon and Trump. So how do you see that happening? I've heard a lot of people, Charlemagne talks about this all the time.

1:47:24Trump thinks that, sorry, Charlemagne thinks Trump is going to put him in prison. Okay, that's a take that I hadn't heard before. But yeah, but what do you, now, you know, Charlamagne is very Democrat, like obviously he's going to have some bias that goes into this, but what is your take and how do you see that relationship going? I just think that when you've got two people with so much power and ego, and I do, from what I can tell, Elon's ego and that sort of self-focused self -belief, like it's me and I'm going to be the center of all of this, seems to be ramping up. that is probably a pretty dangerous cocktail based on some stories and stuff that I've heard about behind the scenes from Trump about some levels of vulnerability and sort of like flimsy senses of he doesn't like to be shown up, doesn't like to be sort of upstaged.

1:48:21And I don't know if Elon has the emotional intelligence of J.D. Vance. to be able to tiptoe around and yes sir no sir three bags false sir jd and why i say do not treat that man lightly i think he has like he came from like poverty i think his mom was like a drug addict like and then he ends up going to yale and then he becomes the vp of a guy that he campaigned against and said was horrible and like a tyrant do you know the level of emotional intelligence it takes to go from like a broke middle America, broken family to an Ivy League institution to then VP for the guy who does not, he doesn't always keep in it.

1:49:06Like you can say things about Trump, but if it's advantageous for whatever his plan is, he will forgive you. You know, he's kind of like Vince McMahon in that regard, like whatever works for the thing. But like that takes high EQ. Even in that moment with Zelensky, he's managing Trump. like he's he did have a moment for himself but everything he said was and you show respect to trump and donald trump's office and what so he knows the game he's playing oh that what i'm saying is don't treat him lightly what our coastal elites we always do is when someone has a kind of southern accent we think they're idiots and we and we don't we don't even really pay attention to them.

1:49:44And that man is someone, I see a problem with JD before I see Elon, but. What do you think is going to happen with Elon long-term with Trump? Nothing. Do you think that he's going to dance through the minefield? I don't think, I think he's acutely aware of his limitations in America. He cannot physically be president. If he could be president, I think there is a concern because eventually he'll go, But when they have an impasse, he'll just go, well, I'll just run against you. He cannot. The laws dictate he cannot. So inevitably, you're going to have to bow down at some point. This is the highest.

1:50:21You're as high as you can go. That's only based on the fact that you can put the outcomes that you want for your project behind your ego. Yes. And I'm not sure which one is going to be the priority. The only other thing he could do is leverage the Democrats, which have already made him radioactive. Like, no Democrat can side with Elon. So Elon is as far as he can go in America. He can't go any further. Like, this is outside of being president. Like, there's that great line in Game of Thrones where, like, Cersei is talking to Littlefinger and Littlefinger is like, you know, you know Littlefinger, the character.

1:50:56And Littlefinger goes, you know, what I've learned over the years is that, you know, knowledge is power. and there's all these guards around her and them. And she goes, guards slit his throat and they all walk up and put a knife to his throat. And then she goes, guards, stand down. Guards take two steps back. Guards take six steps back. And then she goes, power is power. And it's just so fire. And it's like, Trump has power. Power is power. That is the closest Elon can get to power. And I don't think there's another president that will allow Elon to have that access to power. So Elon either has to hope there's another person that he could ride with and establish a relationship, and maybe that's JD, but he'd have to wait to the next administration anyway.

1:51:46So what he can't do is sour all the Republicans on him. Like, I cannot see the situation where they get into trouble because there's nowhere else for him to go. He'd either have to jump parties, which is very difficult after chastising the left all this time. Like, he's kind of made his bed. And he's high. He has access to all these things. And I think it does benefit him the most if America is successful because all his businesses are tied up in America. He could jump ship to another country. But that's not the thing I worry about because I think he's smart enough to understand the position he's in.

1:52:22Eventually, you hit the... This is what happens with all rich people that actually want to move weight around. You hit the impasse... of government. And you have people who are way less successful than you, way poor than you, telling you whether you can or can't build a factory or do whatever you want to do. And in that moment, they go, fuck, I just worked my ass off. I got fucking yachts and everything. And now I got to go kiss this guy's dick. Like you saw them all lined up behind Trump during the inauguration. Zuckerberg, Bezos, everybody went to kiss the ring and he set them up, letting everybody else know they're kissing the ring.

1:52:57And I think Elon goes, I got the best seat. It don't get better than this. And this guy trusts me and believes in me. I can't fuck this up. And he's dealt with governors, mayors, and all this other shit that he doesn't respect at all. So he's like, it's not going to get better than this. I don't think he can ruin it. If they change the rule to let non-citizens become president, now we have an issue. But Trump would never change that rule because it's his security blanket right there. It's actually kind of like brilliantly done by Trump. It's ride with me against the left. Now Elon can't go to the left.

1:53:35So he has to be loyal to you. It's like he's Zelensky. Well, everybody that's associated with Trump is so unspeakable and toxic that they're never going to be allowed back. So now you've got the loyalty built right there. Circling back to Chris's opening question, is it possible that everyone's having less sex because of the la booboo man but seriously like i mean it's crossed my mind sometimes we need more polarity well look this is to me this just seems like the progeny of me too in many ways that the message that a lot of men the vast majority of well-behaved, sexually disciplined, not pushy men took was, I shouldn't be pushy.

1:54:26It's like, well, yeah, you already weren't that pushy, and maybe you actually weren't pushy enough. So the issue with the message, don't be too pushy, is that the men who really need to hear it will ignore it, and the men who are already predisposed to believe it will take it to heart. So what you end up with is this weird selection effect where the bad actors still act badly and the ones who actually probably needed a little bit of a helping hand to go forward like oh holy fuck and maybe the labuba man is just the the final final form of of that he's taking it too seriously the risk of the risk of just pouring um petrol on this conversation and then flinging a match in um it it strikes you know the it strikes me that you know if if your thesis is right and in fact um somewhere buried in in all of this is actually a low level of sort of low-level revulsion at Le Bou Bou Man and a yearning for a more direct and unmediated form of masculine sexual aggression.

1:55:24It has been suggested by people on the internet whose names I now forget that this is in fact a factor in the extremely politically sensitive subject of migration into the country across the English Channel. As in, there are progressive women who kind of enjoy the appearance of young men who haven't been labubified yet. Wow. This is not my thesis. Because labubu hasn't reached Syria. Labubu has not reached Syria. These guys are not noodle armed. These guys, in fact, have demonstrated considerable gumption in making it from wherever it is that they've originated to England. I mean, it's a genuinely impressive level of gumption involved.

1:56:16And I don't know, maybe... That's spicy. Hmm? What did you say? That is so spicy. Yeah, you really... So, okay, two things. One is... So having just... I'm just going to... I'm going to hand you the petrol can. So I do actually agree with you. I was speaking to a journalist friend recently. No, you're not agreeing with me. You're agreeing with people on the internet. Sorry. Those names I don't know. I was speaking to a journalist friend recently who had been in Calais and speaking to these guys who are trying to come over the channel. And he said, like, what is really amazing is you'll talk to these guys about their life stories and it will be like, oh, yeah, so I came from Sudan and I walked across half of Africa and then I got to Libya and then I got enslaved.

1:57:00And so I was taken to another country where I was a slave and then I was gang raped. and then I somehow escaped from that and then I swam across the channel whatever it's like they tell this story and it's the most appalling thing you've ever heard and they're physically it's evident that they've been through this and these are like 20 year old guys or something and then you ask them why did you do it and they're like just like Manchester United they'll offer some like really weird inadequate answer it's not even like I want access to the welfare state because you could have got that in other European countries it's it's it's quite like strange And I do kind of get your point that there's an element of like crazy macho-ness about it.

1:57:34Wow. If you're prepared to go through all of that for Manchester United, imagine what you do for your family and your partner. I suppose so. The only thing I would say, though, is that the impression I get from a lot of women who are very, very invested in refugees welcome kind of stuff is that they really infantilize these men at the same time. And there's a degree to which they're kind of scooping up the vulnerable, you know. You think this is a bit like the American pitbull ladies phenomenon? Yeah, he's just misunderstood. I'll just add something. Get it in there, it's okay. This is another one of these discourses, actually probably related obliquely to Le Boubou Man.

1:58:12One of these memes that sloshes around in which a certain subtype of usually single American progressive women are accused of adopting actually obviously murderously sociopathically dangerous rescue pitbulls as a kind of proxy for the sort of man they would never dream of admitting to fancying in real life. So in a sense, you know, officially they're only allowed to date Lububu Man and that's in fact the only people who are within their social circles immediately. And so they adopt a pitbull to just kind of compensate his lack of... I see you're Lububu Man and I raise you the newly nomenclatured himbo, which has actually come back around.

1:58:55The new dream guy is beefy, placid, and politically ambiguous. Amid pitch debates about masculinity, the himbo stands stoically above it all. As an alternative to the thinking man, the Renaissance man or the family man, today's himbo offers just man, a blurry image, a blunt political instrument, or just a caricature, the human equivalent of a smiley face. The himbo is, in many senses, unreal, a wish-fulfillment fantasy. His true self is concealed behind a set of doe-like eyes, the content of his inferiority forever unconfirmed. So is this like Ken in Greta Gerwig's movie? He says towards the end, if I'd realized patriarchy wasn't just about horses, I wouldn't have bothered.

1:59:32Hunk with a heart of gold. Hunk with a heart of gold. I think, who was the dude that did Magic Mike? Who was the guy, the actor that played Magic Mike? Channing Tatum. Channing Tatum is often put forward as like him. I actually, Channing Tatum follows me on Instagram, so I actually quite like him. But Hunk with a Heart of Gold, the human equivalent of a smiley face, what we've got here is basically I think you're trying to cross the streams between Le Boo Boo Man in terms of disposition and front cover of a dark romance novel in terms of presentation. I mean, it's a tricky tightrope for women.

2:00:08Because on the one hand, you want, and this is an eternal conundrum, you want a man who is going to protect you and protect your children and provide for you in times of extreme threat, right? But you also don't want someone who's going to beat you up and beat up your children. And so that's tricky. the line that you've got to yeah yeah and so the the himbo is it is i i love a himbo right and i the impression from my female friends is that himbo is a very high status i remember a friend talking to me about how how attractive a himbo was and she said she really really didn't want i guess a labubu man who was like excessively intellectual she said if i came home and he was like i just read something in the new york review of books i would kill myself it's not what she want to a man right um a himbo does kind of tread that tightro like he's physically capable clearly of doing what's needed if you're at risk but he's so sweet-hearted that he would never so again i mean skipping sideways through this this sort of untidy territory there was a there was a piece i think it was in the new york times which is often a sort of barometer for what uh what american middle-class women in their 30s think about stuff in general there was i think it was the New York Times, but it was somewhere in that zone, that discursive zone anyway, on a fascinating new trend of women marrying down.

2:01:26And what they were actually talking about, but what they were talking about wasn't actually women marrying down. It was women marrying below their educational level. Actually, financially, they were marrying up because these were women with maybe a degree and a master's or a degree and a PhD or something, but no money and a mountain of debt. It's like complex hypergamy. Who were marrying construction entrepreneurs or a successful plumber with several employees who was turning over chunks of change. And so in straightforward financial terms, it's at least a match if not marrying up. But in intellectual and in terms of a particular type of caste as distinct from straightforward economic levels, some of these women were experiencing it as kind of marrying down.

2:02:13And I think that speaks to your himbo in the sense that very sensibly, these extremely overeducated women have married some guy who's going to appreciate their brains and also be able to pay the mortgage without trying to compete. It seems like the himbo is economically prepared and maybe educationally underdeveloped, whereas the labubu man is maybe economically underdeveloped and overeducated. I mean, would you rather have a guy who can talk contemporary literature but can't afford to buy you dinner? Or some guy who can fix the plumbing when it goes wrong and just doesn't care what you think about books?

2:02:49I have a funny story about this. It occurs to me that my parents technically have that dynamic. Because my mum has a PhD and my dad has an undergraduate degree and then became a lawyer. But anyone who knows, PhDs don't translate into big money, right? So my dad's always earned a lot more. But there was this funny story about a time when he was at work, this is the age for the internet, and someone referred to King Lear in talking about office politics. He was like, oh, someone's behaving like King Lear in relation to someone. He didn't understand what they were saying. He called my mom very quietly and said, what happens in King Lear?

2:03:21It was a funny example of this. Well, there's something there. How much do women find that endearing? How much do women find needing to intellectually coddle their partner up to a certain point? How much do they find that as, oh, noble savage? I personally find that endearing. I don't know if I'm representative. If he's also sort of generally red-blooded in his bearing behaviour and is also capable of fixing stuff around the house that goes wrong, I don't really see the problem. Read-life fiction is very girly. What about if it's the opposite, though? What about if it's somebody who can tell you what has been happening in the New York Review of Books, but needs to call his dad if there's something broken in the toilet at your house?

2:04:00I mean, competence is very hot. Right, but this is competence within a particular domain. Because you could say the noble savage is incompetent when it comes to his intellectual development. I suppose, zooming back a bit, you could probably make the case that we're currently in an age of flux, where this never-ending growth really does feel like it's come to an end. You know, politics is quite uncertain. You know, we've got war in Europe for the first time in a very long time. And all kinds of things don't feel as certain and safe and stable as they used to. And it could be that, in fact, some of these very instinctive mating patterns are shifting, are going to shift or are perhaps already shifting in the light of how people assess their own prospects in that very much more uncertain world.

2:04:44People want to become more high agency, presumably. We've said it's important. we've identified what it is how it works some ways that people can fall into traps to stop them from being it some beliefs that those people have are there give me something give me a pair of breasts give me something tangible upies sake um i'd say so there's a there's a few right so the first one that i i've mentioned a few times but i really want to actually get into it which is the um does it defy the laws of physics question because okay um the going back to the brain is a question answering device so if you say why or what's great about my life it'll start finding answers if you say what's awful about my life it will start finding answers and let's say we go to a venue together and the guy on the front door says sorry not tonight mate and then you go okay accept that social reality and it's well does it fundamentally defy the laws of physics does it go against Newton's laws of motion, Chris getting into Tiger Tiger tonight?

2:05:48No. Does it defy Einstein's relativity? No. And that point sounds trite, but when you actually begin to understand that, well, you go, well, as long as it doesn't defy the laws of physics, anything is theoretically possible with human knowledge. And again, it sounds trite saying that, but you just look at the last few hundred years since the enlightenment, when you have this period before it where nothing happened in humanity we would just your great great great great great great great great granddad's life looked the same as as yours um and meanwhile we have this change and the ability for humans to understand how things work and implement it into reality and happen to life and shape their environment that we just now completely take for granted like me getting annoyed at the flat diet coke on the emirates flight um is a big thing the second thing which is probably a little less esoteric that i i really really like as a a metaphor is when you're in the complete low agency and everything is super general and it's like i don't even know i don't even know where to begin i don't even know where to start one thing i i love doing a little experiment i got was going okay let's say have a problem right now um of i had a friend at the minute who uh he's an extreme but a friend we both know actually he's an extreme workaholic to a point that i've never i've never seen before and he was talking about how it's a problem he just doesn't know where to start and i said to him i go okay where are you at right now out of 10 and it suddenly takes this kind of general infinite universe all the way down to okay well a bit of a binary choice and you can never say seven right so he goes he goes um i'm at a three and i go okay and i go why why are you at a um a three by the way like why aren't you at a two he goes to be honest with you because i've actually like not worked tonight i've come here to see you okay so we're getting some specificity here and i go okay well what would take it up to a four and he goes well if i left the office before 8 p.m i'd give that a four i go okay great i've got a little step there i go what would take it to a five we'll take it to a six seven eight nine ten i go okay first off let's just do the four immediately and then as soon as you have that you have momentum one of the things i love and i probably put it in the piece of like a template that people can use is just what i call the video game apple note so you have let's say for example to-do list in apple note build a website the problem with that is that's starting the video game on level 56 so one i had this fascinating realization that um two sorry one person that i knew was the laziest person i've ever met couldn't like open his mail i couldn't get out of bed and like make himself some food but was one of the best video game players at that specific game in the world i would spend 16 hours a day on this video game and i go well do they have an agency problem or is their reality just a poorly designed video game so the video game apple note is just level one let's say whatever it is whether it's from opening mail to going to kitty hawk and taking the planes into the sky there's always a level one and that's what video games are incredible at that they adapt to where you're at and then just slowly move you up again completely the opposite of school so level one is always just dump down thoughts on topic and what i love about that is the matter how complex the thing is from curing cancer to flying planes to opening the mail you can always dump down thoughts and then you check it off and level two is create the next five levels based off level one and what's beautiful is when you check level one a level one's small enough to start but isn't overwhelming so you you have that video game bit of dopamine then when you check it off you're like fuck let's go i'm on level two and then each step is enough so key thing with video game design is it's enough of a step to feel a challenge but without overwhelm and if you if it's too big of a step like level 56 build website that's too big of a step you just are constantly in frustration so you just quit the video game it's a terribly designed video game but breaking things down into micro steps is such a uh a key thing in video game design and ultimately increasing agency yeah i mean this is the productivity 101 you write your epigraph you work in seven year seasons you work in three-year blocks you work in one-year sprints broken down into 90-day chunks broken down into daily actions and you know minute by minute you've got your life planned out uh and it's kind of trite because it's so obvious but the smallest first step imaginable is how the right brothers managed to get their plane to go it's how you launched your marketing agency in a different country it's how this podcast started yes and yeah you need to be able to if you can figure out ways that you can constantly make that first step because 50 % of the battle is that first step.

2:10:45So if you have that, great tool. Another tool more related to, so we spoke earlier about the four tenets of high agency. You have clear thinking, you have bias to action, you have resourcefulness and disagreeability. On the disagreeability point, which I think is a huge, huge part of it, the question I like to ask people is who's your favorite podcaster, creator, me thinker so let's say all the people listen to it right now who have the spotify wrapped with you top of the list yeah what do you disagree with chris on because there'll be a percentage nothing right it's all good baby but there'll be a percentage of the audience unfortunately probably less so with your audience but there'll be a percentage of the audience that says chris says sky is red therefore sky is red and that's actually a great disagreeability test because the amount of times I put gurus on a pedestal and then they'll start, they'll say a lot of wise shit and then I'll just start drifting out over their skis.

2:11:43Yeah. And then they'll start drifting and I'll just go with them. But that ability to say, who do you admire the most? And what do you disagree with them on? It's a great disagreeability test. That's really lovely. Another one is who do you disagree? Like, who do you, what's the, maybe the strongest held opinion that you have, whether that's politically business-wise theoretically and who's the best person on the other side that you've heard yeah can you answer those two questions have you ever read richard fineman's love letter to his wife uh no i read the pleasure of finding things out okay but i love fineman love love love i mean you can see a lot of influence i might i might not be able to say this without crying which is going to be very embarrassing but i'm going to try October 17th, 1946 D 'Arlene, I adore you, sweetheart I know how much you like to hear it But I don't only write it because you like it I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write you It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you Almost two years But I know you'll excuse me because you understand how I am Stubborn and realistic And I thought there was no sense to writing But now I know, my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing and that I have done so much in the past.

2:13:00I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you. I will always love you. I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead. But I still want to comfort and take care of you. And I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you. I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until now that we can do that. What should we do? We started to learn to make clothes together, or learn Chinese, or get a movie projector. Can't I do something now? No. I am alone without you. And you were the idea woman, and general instigator of all our wild adventures.

2:13:42When you were sick, you worried, because you could not give me something that you wanted to, and thought I needed. You needn't have worried, just as I told you then. There was no real need, because I loved you in so many ways, so much. And now, it is clearly even more true. You can give me nothing, yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else. But I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive. I know you'll assure me that I am foolish, and that you want me to have full happiness, and don't want to be in my way. I'll bet you are surprised that I don't even have a girlfriend except you, sweetheart.

2:14:24after two years. But you can't help it, darling. Nor can I. I don't understand it, for I have met many girls, and very nice ones, and I don't want to remain alone. But, in two or three meetings, they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real. My darling wife, I do adore you. I love my wife. My wife is dead.

2:14:54Tough.

2:15:12To play the reverse out. It's like, would I want Layla to write that letter? And I don't think I would.

2:15:25unless she was happy writing that letter. But if the removal of me as a contingency of reinforcement for her meant that she couldn't find that in somebody else, would sadden me. And so I've already, so like with Laylife, I've told her, I tell her a lot. um i was like i'm going to die before you statistically there's i'm for sure gonna die before you she's a little younger she's younger and i'm female like and she exercised like she's for sure gonna live longer and i was like i want you to spend as little time as similarly possible from the time that i die to finding somebody else um you do me no service by making yourself miserable and you do not discredit or dishonor me by finding somebody else to spend your life with So, yeah, I only think about that from reverse.

2:16:22There's a, the joy of melancholy is an interesting kind of emotion that's complex. You know, this strange. Like wallowing? Satisfaction and wistfulness. And yeah, wallowing's maybe a little more loaded. um but melancholy i you know there can be odd joy and sadness and and a kind of beauty that you get to experience after something is gone that you can't experience during it i've not had anybody in my life die only child with a mother and a father that's still alive like i've got there's no one must be nice yeah yeah fuck um but there's not been many things that I've lost and this is me fucking Monday morning quarterbacking I don't know but maybe

2:17:23what's a mood setter modern women see Layla and think I'll wait to establish myself in my career before I date or get married or have kids but they forget we got married when she was 23 and we built this together love is one of the rare times you don't do life in order but rather all at once

2:17:54if you find someone that makes your world go round and makes the world make sense to you where you both look at the same thing and say oh you saw that too like i feel like i was the only one i think that for high achieving individuals finding someone who sees the world the same way is incredibly rare and when you find that person you should stop what you're doing and then you should get them to stay with you and it's been you know one of the best decisions of my entire life marrying Layla and there's there's this especially unfortunately for women right now there's this huge you know put it off delay there's no rush but it doesn't actually take into consideration two things one is that biology hasn't advanced with culture and society you can't have kids past you know 35 i mean you can but you're a geriatric you know it's a geriatric pregnancy past 35 ruthless time yeah i'm just being real right yeah um and so i mean i i this is like super prevalent and i know there's a much more common theme on the show and i don't touch it very much but it's it just i just say it more like because it i think it sucks um it's fair.

2:19:09It's not fair. It's objectively, it's not fair. Guys can wait their whole lives. They can do everything. And you have to, if you go to college, graduate college at 21 or 22. And if you want to have four kids, assuming that you have perfect pregnancies and you have exactly one year, you know, 18 months between each one, okay, that's six years by the time you're done. And so if we rule out that geriatric pregnancies are last, then it means that we have to basically have, or we, you have to have your first kid at 29. Well, okay, maybe it'll take, let's just tack one year on of marriage to have the kid and be married.

2:19:47Okay. 28, you're married. All right. Do you want to marry somebody within six months of meeting them? Let's give it two years to give our logical brain in. Okay. So 26, 26, you graduate at 22, you have 48 months. And I think that again this is if you have if you don't want kids then all of this is null if you do then you have a very small window um to piece that together now of course there's surrogates and maybe in the future you know like i i'll say in general betting on i'll smoke i'll smoke cigarettes now because by the time i'm old they'll have a cure for it um i don't know i just i don't make those bets and so It's easier to work with reality the way it is, not the way you hope it's going to end up landing.

2:20:34Yeah. To knowingly incur basically a guaranteed price for the potential of maybe a non-existent solution is probably not the best decision-making process. And to be clear, I say this, Leila and I, you know, we don't have kids. She's not 35. but I think that we have these unrealistic expectations that someone is going to make our lives that they're going to complete us in some way when I think that for me the best thing that a partner can do is help you be the best version of yourself I love what you said about really appreciating small victories so forth to go back to the nobility and I kind of relate to that in an early Buddhist frame of these are the truths for noble beings, not noble by birth, but noble by effort.

2:21:23There's a nobility in letting yourself feel deeply or be revealed deeply. Like to go back to that maybe conversation at dinner that went bad to say, you know, at the end of the day, I was there in good faith. Maybe I was unskillful. I said this or that. There's lessons to learn for the future. I was there in good faith. I was there with my whole heart deep down. And I was brave enough to be earnest and sincere enough to kind of lay it out. Like, yeah, take pride in that, healthy pride. You know, appreciate yourself for that. The heroism, the nobility in that and the uncommonness of that. To me, that's where real bravery is.

2:22:08That's really cool. Yeah, I love that. uh i get the sense as well that this is one of the reasons why allowing yourself to be puppeted by your own fear to not show up there's an equivalent in the world of content creation which is audience capture so uh continuing to throw red meat that is predictably going to be liked by the audience but doesn't necessarily resonate with you as a person it's actually you know the word grifter have you familiar with that right okay um so i asked it's a word that gets thrown around on the internet a lot and for all manner of different individuals and i genuinely was interested i said hey for the people that use the word grifter what is the best working definition of what that word means for you because it's just it's just kind of a slight it's a slur it's a calling yeah it's just a very odd nebulous term that that people tend to use for someone that you think might not be fully authentic.

2:23:08I mean, come on, let's get a bit more specific. And somebody said, and I actually really appreciated this, and this is currently my working definition, somebody promoting a product or staking a claim that they wouldn't use or don't believe themselves. So it's, here is what I'm doing out front. This is what I believe in private and behind. And I was like, huh, that's okay. I can work with that. That's like a functional definition, I think, for what people think they mean when they say that word. And my point is with the audience capture thing, it's you not being you. It's you trying to be manipulative in a way.

2:23:45It's this sort of meta you. It's playing persona, not person. It's projecting, etc. etc. And that conversation at the restaurant that was ungainly or didn't go the way that you wanted, the difference between you showing up with vulnerable sincerity, or just straight up sincerity, like this is me and this is the position that I hold. And I said it, all right, could I have said it with a little bit more deftness? Yeah, probably. And you know, I could have delivered it. But I tried, like I gave it a crack. And that was actually what I meant i said what i meant and that you know i can take some lessons from it the difference between that and the lessons that you can take from that situation and a situation where you didn't say what you meant and you were still rejected is the kind of the last bastion of well i tried and you know like i guess you know you can kind of laugh it off there's there is a there is an ability to do humor in that but where is the humor that you find that i compromised myself to try and be somebody else and that was rejected there's there's a an additional level of difficulty in getting past it and i think it's just a nice justification for yeah showing up sincerely showing up earnestly um you know sort of playful seriousness i think is huh why i have this additional level of protection for all of the fear that you are going to have by being seen and by this being me and by a rejection of that not being a rejection of a projection but a rejection of a person and that person happens to be myself what you do gain in that is well i at least i was myself at least this weird character i tried to play this role that i tried to perform wasn't rejected?

2:25:39Because to be honest, that's kind of more pitiful than the other way around. That's so true. I'm thinking the ways in which playfulness is a great aid to aspiration without attachment. And if we're incredibly, not just earnest, but if we're self-righteous or pompous about our pursuit of even a wholesome goal, that's not so good. But to be playful about it, I think about I made a play, using the word. For a woman in my late 20s, I was part of this whole personal growth context, kind of half a cult. I won't name it now. And so everybody was really deep in each other's business, kind of all knowing each other.

2:26:32And there was a woman in a relationship with like the head dude. So I was like a layer or two down from Alpha and she was with Alpha Boy. And I fully played, went for it. It was public. It was known. I wrote these nice little notes. I told him what I was doing. And I went full out. And I didn't know if I would get it. I didn't. And she was relatively kind and it was okay. But at the end of the day, I felt good about myself that I, little Ricky, kind of the dork, had still stuck my neck out and made a play for a particular woman. And I feel great. I went for it. If I hadn't gone for it, I'd be thinking, you wussy.

2:27:17You should have gone for it. Why not? Take the risk. But what enabled it is there was a playfulness about it. It was like an improbable goal, and I could be playful about it, which helped me be less attached to the outcome. My friend Charlie did a wonderful video breakdown of Jordan Peterson's most recent debate against 20 atheists. It was on the Jubilee YouTube channel. So it's a series called Surrounded, and it's doing huge numbers. It's really cool. Kind of like speed dating for debate, I guess, is kind of the way that I would put it. What a format. Yeah, it's really fun. We used to call them a fishbowl.

2:27:59You're in the fishbowl, and you've got 10 or 20 people around you. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And each person comes in individually, and you do a bit, and then they move on, and so on and so forth. and um he does this comparison between jordan when he did that kathy newman interview in 2019 so what you're saying is that really famous one in front of the purple background and and this most recent one and charlie is very interested in charisma and he's talking about likability being he's big into playfulness and he's very deep into self-work and and mindfulness too so i think that sort of percolates through and he has this he just compares them side by side.

2:28:39And I'd never even thought of this because the way that people change, especially over a long period, it's been six years, maybe seven years since that first debate came out. And then there's this new one. And if someone changes slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, you kind of, you don't really notice, right? It's like, when did you get fat? It's like, I don't know, one day, one day at a time. And he just makes a really lovely distinction between Jordan and that first one, where Kathy's sort of pointing her finger at him and saying, so what you're saying is this thing. And he goes, no, I'm not saying that at all.

2:29:07I think that's silly. I think that's really, I think that's, I do. I think that's really silly. And you just have this, it's keeping him regulated. It feels more casual. It's much easier to get on side. It's much more likable approach. Now he's standing his ground, but he's standing his ground in a sort of, you know, really fluid sort of Bruce Lee kind of way. You've sort of touched on them a few times, but just do a rundown for me of the most common places that people are getting exposed to the highest levels of microplastics. Yeah. So the most, I would say, common places, one is drinking out of bottled water, like bottled plastic bottles, right?

2:29:48Like a lot of people drink out of plastic bottles. That would be a big source. Tap water, that's unfiltered. So tap water, again, also has microplastics. unfortunately our oceans are contaminated so microplastics are also found in a lot of fish and particularly they accumulate in the digestive tract of fish so if you're eating shellfish or clams or oysters or anything where you're eating the whole digestive tract or a sardine whole whole sardine then you're going to be getting microplastics heat is a big big one I would say that is one of the main culprits when you're combining that with plastic.

2:30:30So a lot of your to-go coffees that you're drinking from Starbucks, anything like that is going that is a huge one because you're you know, there's been studies looking at BPA leaching into liquid when it's when heat like boiling water is applied. It increases the leaching by 55 times, which is huge. It also increases microplastic, you know, breakdown, right? Because you're breaking down the plastic itself. So when you're getting more, you're making the plastic smaller, which allows it to be permeating through the gut more effectively. Exactly. Exactly. I can't tell you how many, like, to-go coffees I've had in my life.

2:31:08And, you know, another big source now, this is like new coming out. I mean, there's been a couple of studies that have come out on this is tea bags because you're adding hot water to tea and the tea bags themselves are made of either polypropylene, they're made of nylon or they're made of, interestingly, cellulose, which you would think wouldn't have microplastics. but I think there must be a mixture of stuff in there. And this new study came out, you know, really just a couple of months ago, showing that you can get anywhere between millions to billions of microplastic particles per milliliter.

2:31:47I mean, per milliliter. How much is that compared with the normal sort of... That's a large dose? It's a lot. It's a lot. What I'm getting at is, you know, I think what's happening is the heat is breaking the plastic down. These teabags are made of plastic. And so, you know, consuming these teabags, again, when you're getting to goatee, it's like now I'm like all I can think about is like I'm consuming a plastic tea. But you have to remember there's a lot of studies, at least with green tea, showing that green tea has huge benefits for cognition. it delays dementia it might even offset the microplastics you've had to consume yeah yeah so i mean clearly people are drinking tea out of probably tea bags so it's not like at least with green tea it seems like there's some there's some benefits right but um so so those are some of the major sources um and then there's also it's in our salt um and then air right so like that that's another one if you're living in a polluted place if you're again you know internally venting your dryer dryer ventilation in your house that's another major source.

2:32:55And then another one would be also to consider would be black plastic. So I know you're like, what? This is kind of some new data coming out. Black plastic is often made from recycled electronics. You mean bits of plastic that are black? I mean, black utensils, like your black spatula or black plastic, you know, forks and knives or your black plastic lid on a coffee to-go coffee cup, black sushi, the bottom of a sushi container, bottom of like a rotisserie chicken. If you've ever bought a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store, that black, right? Black plastic. It's often made from recycled electronics.

2:33:37And recycled electronics often have chemicals in them that are added to prevent fires from starting. Like they don't want electronics starting fires. So they add these brominated flame retardants, which are carcinogenic. They are not supposed to be in food. They're not supposed to, you don't suck on your electronic. They're not supposed to go in your mouth, right? So these black plastics have very high levels of carcinogens that are normally not even found in regular plastics that were, you know, in things that were consuming. And there was a study out of the University of Plymouth that found black utensils, black toys for babies, you know, they're putting in their mouth.

2:34:17they contain between 30 to 40 times the safe limit of these brominated flame retardants and other carcinogens and endocrine disruptors in them than safe. So that's another sort of, and think about it, if you're buying like a rotisserie chicken or like you get it to go pho or whatever soup and it's in like a black container, you got the heat. That's the added factor on top of that, right? So that's another major source. What about dermal stuff? Yes. So again, we mentioned the phthalates, right? Which are in personal hygiene products. And that's something I do want to mention because you might think, oh, I'm looking at the ingredient list and there's no phthalate on there.

2:35:02But there's two different chemicals that are very, very sneaky because they mean there's phthalates. And they're in a lot of personal hygiene products. One is fragrance. If the word fragrance is in the ingredients list, that means there's phthalates. And parfum. Not perfume, but parfum. That is another chemical that means there's phthalates. So you really want to look for phthalate-free personal hygiene products. Again, very important, especially for people that are considering conceiving because those are the chemicals that are associated with disrupting sexual development in boys. And then the other one is receipts.

2:35:42And this is a really big one because maybe not for you and I, right? Receipts are, they're a thermal paper. And so essentially they're coated with BPA because there's a thermal reaction that happens when heat is applied to the BPA. it prints it prints text on the receipt without actual ink so that's how it works and if you ever see like a white coating on the receipt like that that's bpa so the bpa in like plastics at least it's kind of contained in a plastic matrix like this is just it's purposefully liberated yes exactly it's like free for all on the receipt and um so there's studies looking at people that handle a lot of receipts like when i was in the airport stuff and stuff yeah i was in the airport on coming coming here and you know i the the guy that was like handling the receipt he's like do you want the receipt i'm like no and i saw him take it out and put it in the trash and like i thought about there's this huge line of people you're doing that 500 times a day exactly and i looked at the guy and i was like i was like hey dude you know i just want to tell you that these receipts are lined with endocrine disruptors that disrupt hormones and he goes i mean wish somebody had recorded this oh my god this lady who's going through the airport i met this lady earlier on today and she started ranting and raving about the receipts said it's sort of covered in this magic dust that's killing me or something like i couldn't i couldn't help myself i felt like it like i couldn't not say something right and he looks at me he goes you mean like testosterone i was like yes testosterone it's been show it's been correlated with a decrease and testosterone.

2:37:19I was like, you need to wear nitrile gloves. So bottom line is BPA, it's lined on the receipts. Nitrile gloves can stop people from absorbing it. So people that are like, you know, basically any kind of cashier, anyone that's handling a receipt multiple times a day, highly recommend they wear nitrile gloves. Latex doesn't do that. Also, if you wear cream or hand sanitizer. It's been shown to increase the dermal absorption of BPA by a hundredfold. Fuck off.

2:37:54Some people are like, I don't want to get my hands on the thing. I don't want to get COVID or whatever. Right? A hundred X. A hundred X absorption. Think about how many times these, I've seen them do it, you know, and then they touch the receipt. So I think this is like something that is not really talked about. And here I am worried about my like one-time exposure. So, you know, for people out there, it's like, yeah, you can opt for no receipt. Two-decade career of working in Target or something like that. So the first time that I ever learned about receipts, you won't know who this is, but Owen Schroyer, who is Alex Jones's sort of second in command.

2:38:28I went for dinner with him when I first moved to Austin like forever ago. It was him and a bunch of other people. There was a couple of girls at the table with us as well, just downtown in Austin. And the receipt came out. I was like, I'm sort of new here. I'll get the meal. It'd be like nice. It'd be a nice thing for me to do. So I did it. And as I'm going to get the receipt out, one of the girls that sat around the table like hits my hand away. I'm like, what? She's like, what are you doing? As if I was about to walk out into open traffic. I'm like, I was going to take the receipt and I was going to put the tip on.

2:38:57She was like, are you crazy? You're going to touch that? I'm like, so it kind of does show that the fringe insight from three years ago, some of that stuff ends up being a bullseye and sort of percolates around. Now, I'm not saying that all of it is, but some of the stuff ends up being legit. Right. It is. It's definitely legit. And it is a concern, particularly for people that are handling them daily, multiple times a day. And I don't know that I've really, I've seen a couple people wearing gloves at cash registers. They've got special ones that are like finger things. Have you seen those? Right.

2:39:29I've seen those. An individual. So maybe just the sort of your first two fingers and your thumb are something rather than having to wear sweaty gloves all day. And I imagine that's, I mean, significant. Well, it gets through latex as well. It gets through latex. There is no way of getting it perfect. There is no complete, no finish line, no done. There is simply what's the next experiment? There is only play. Yeah. Yeah, so the way I think about that one is, so when is an oak tree perfect? When it's an acorn, when it's like a sapling, when it's like 100 years old, when it's 200 years old, like when is it perfect?

2:40:06But yet somehow or another, we have to be perfect. But it's not, it's just iteration. It's just evolution. Evolution doesn't end. The only thing that ends is an idea in our head and our egos. Egos can't exist. If you actually really understand that there is no end, the ego has to evaporate. Say more on that. Right, so oftentimes the people who are searching for enlightenment, They think once they get the enlightenment, then it'll be done. Right. That's just the ego talking. That's just, that's just, oh, there is going to be this end point where then I'm going to be happy. Like that, that, that is an ego thought process so that they can, so you can whip yourself and beat yourself up to get to that place.

2:40:51And it is just a way to convince yourself that what you want can't be found right now. so if i said to you right now without going into the past without going into the future you can't find any evidence from the past or any evidence in the future to find a problem with you

2:41:11yeah that's funny yeah there's none you can't find it so so you need an end because the other the other choice is to be in this moment which is where the ego doesn't get to exist. I wrote this quote from Van Gogh this week in my newsletter that said, if I'm worth anything later, I'm worth something now, for wheat is wheat, even if people think it is grass in the beginning. Oh, I like that. That's so fucking good. The same thing you're talking about, right? It is. The acorn. Okay, I'm going to... Wheat is wheat, even if people think it is grass in the beginning. I'm going to geek out. Let me geek out for just a second.

2:41:49So today I got a text from somebody who is a Zen teacher that I know, and he was worried about AI. And, and so found out that I'm working. You're the guy to ask. Yeah, apparently I am. Are they coming for my Zen teaching? Say again? Are they coming for my Zen teaching? Tell me, Joe.

2:42:10yeah and uh and my response was um just like everything this river is going to find the lowest ground so where it's going to end up is already determined and it's the same thought process that you just said there like even the action that i take and that all the people will take towards influencing ai like all that is set and from that same kind of point of view so our job is the same it's like show up with love do what you're called to do you know draw the boundaries say the truth that you can see and but the whole idea of like i have to manage my entire world to get to the place is just it's just a huge amount of stress it's all self-talk yeah not real again to sort of fly the flag for the insecure overachievers out there the uh the the desire for control.

2:43:05You know, if I can prepare sufficiently well, if I can know every different permutation of every different outcome, then I reduce down the play within the system. So it's so precise so that what I think is going to happen and what is going to happen end up being so tightly correlated that there's no variance at all. Ah, okay, there we go. There's a bit of certainty. Isn't that nice? Isn't that death? yeah i want that i want i want this wholly under control and absolutely predictable existence yeah i mean yeah exactly i think about this in a slightly different way but the there is no life without tension a cell doesn't exist without tension your lungs don't exist without tension a salad cell no cell a salad doesn't exist

2:44:02dude i had this vision i had this vision in my mind i was like why is it has he got like bits of fucking lettuce leaf hanging across a string i had the like a tightrope walk but it's just individual leaves of lettuce hanging over a salad bowl holy fuck wow yeah okay getting back to it a A cell doesn't exist without tension. Yeah, so life doesn't exist without tension. So the idea that you're going to be at peace when there's no tension, the idea that you're going to be at peace when you've narrowed everything down so that you don't have to actually feel that tension, is death. So you don't find peace by having no tension.

2:44:41You find peace by enjoying the tension, welcoming the tension, looking forward to the tension. Is safety got anything to do with it here? is there a degree of unsafety there is no safety safety is an illusion what the is safe like we're sitting in like we're in austin texas in a cool thing like yeah it's pretty safe but hurricane earthquake fire they're like safety is just something that we like to pretend exists

2:45:13yeah and and also like a form of death

2:45:19if it feels scary to say it's important if it feels scary to say not saying it will hurt your connection if it feels scary to say not saying it prioritizes their imagined reaction over your truth yeah why why why um so i'm not scared to say things that aren't important to me and vulnerable to me so i i could qualify that and say that quote i could qualify that quote and say with an open heart to say it with an open heart but and i think that would probably be more accurate but if i'm if i'm scared to say it it means that there's something important and it's something vulnerable if i am if i say the important thing to you and i'm vulnerable with your connection deepens always the case if i am not willing to say that it means i'm scared of a reaction that you're going to have for me which means i'm prioritizing you more than i'm prioritizing my own needs yes yes i'm actually prioritizing my fear over our connection as well and over yourself and yeah and over myself that's right so it's and so this is how i run my business it's how we run our marriage is how everything it's like and this prevents resentment like it's amazing if if i find something that doesn't feel right i will speak to it i might not speak to it right now it might take a day because i'm not going to be heartless and like and not pay attention to the person or have compassion or empathy for where they're at but i'm going to say the thing that's scary to say or the thing that's bothering me and and and my expectation with the 18 or so people in our organization is that they do the same thing like that's a we tell them that's that's the job you got to say the hard thing we actually start our meetings with what's the scary thing you're not saying because that's what keeps relationships clean that's what keeps the problems at bay that's like stepping into it instead of trying to avoid it it's i was trying to think about the difference between uh selfish and selfless and this is a third one that's not that's not either of them.

2:47:29So you're not being selfish because you're actually hurting yourself in it. You're not being selfless because you're killing the connection. And like, what the fuck is this? And you're not trusting them. Yeah. It's like, what is it? It's not, you know, it's one of those interesting situations where it's neither selfish nor selfless. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's really cool. Yeah. There's no, uh, it's just, well, it's actually, it's kind of, it's destructive to the self and it's destructive to the other as well. I guess that's one way to put it. yeah right it's like it's bad on all fronts yeah i remember having this moment where so i we did this in our company and i was just like we we do this we're gonna if something's upsetting anybody we talk about it that's how we're doing and one day i came into and i was the the woman who i at the time worked with most closely um and she her name's sarah she's amazing anybody who's worked in our or done anything in our organization knows sarah she's amazing and i walked in i was like frustrated i was like oh and she goes oh i'm so excited that you're frustrated i was like what she goes every time you're frustrated it means that you're seeing something that we're not seeing and we're going to make a big improvement so what is it totally like changed the whole like my the way i hold my own frustration it changed that and then it also changed like how i like looked at the whole business because i was oh wow this is really important it's like alchemy yeah doing that exactly why do you think it is that people are drawn to relationships that are very tough that from the outside look turbulent difficult challenging uh the classic i can fix him meme what have you come to believe about that yeah uh could go in reverse there so you're not going to fix anybody i have to tell folks out there uh it's a common belief people almost seem to have it as sport or hobby, right?

2:49:24Like I'm going to fix, go fix people. It almost just never, such low odds that that ever ends up, ends up working out. Why? Because people are, people are stable, you know? There's these really beautiful studies of personality where they track people for 40 or 50 years from the time they're in their teenage years to the time that they're retired. And if you were neurotic when you were, highly neurotic when you were a teenager, you're like the grumpy person at the retirement home. It's just like a stable kind of thing. Also, if you were the sweetheart, really nice, always helping people out kind of person in high school, you're doing the same thing.

2:50:06Do you reckon that's the same for social sexuality? If you were the girl that was sleeping around a load in high school, you're still the girl that's sleeping around a load in the retirement home? Well, that is a concern actually with older adults right now. So there's this STD concerns. One of the places it's most acute in public health is among older adults. Phenomenal. Yeah. Phenomenal. Which is amazing. So, yeah, people don't change because traits are, you know, traits are stable. And folks might see these articles every now and then that you can change your personality. And that is true to an extent.

2:50:41but the number of people who will change their personality, like the rough way to put that is about 20 to 25 % of people, like for example, who are neurotic, will turn themselves into not neurotic people anymore. The remaining 75 to 80 % will show stability over time. And the reason I like to put things that way is if you're in a position of choosing a partner, you know, this is a bet, really, right? And you're saying, okay, so I have this person who's high in neuroticism. Do I think that's going to change? 80, 75 % chance. Yeah. I mean, exactly the same way for the rest of my life. 25 % chance they change.

2:51:24That's not a bet I would probably want to make, you know? Yeah. It's interesting when you think about sort of what people are doing when they first find a partner, they're kind of, I get the sense. And you may tell me that, uh, my belief in personal growth and malleability is misguided and must be subdued. But you're trying to find somebody that is as close to the bullseye of what it is that you're looking for whilst making the decision rationally before you get into passionate love using evidence-based insights from somebody as educated as yourself, trying to find somebody that's close to the bullseye, but also has, I would guess, as strong of a capacity to grow, to work on themselves, to be able to update their beliefs, the way that they operate as possible.

2:52:10And it seems like those two variables, how close are you? Where's the starting point? And how capable are they of running and maneuvering towards something that is more healthy? Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. So you're kind of identifying this trait that sits outside of personality a little bit, right? Which is this interest and this persistence to grow as a person. and I think you're gosh that's if people want to put something in their top three that would be another great trait to put in their top three capacity for growth and that dogged commitment to it because it's one thing you and I probably both know people who have some bright idea every other month about oh I'm totally going to change myself in this way usually has the word radical in front of it you know I engage in radical self-disclosure or something yeah yeah yeah radical honesty radical painting yeah and i'm always like uh you know what i'm more interested in is i mean that's cool and that's part of it it's a necessary first step but but then how many people now have the dogged determination to actually make that happen because it's so hard right over the course of really years to turn that huge ship around and make it so that you have this better range in your personality.

2:53:36You've got to be dead-ass committed if you are going to actually do anything. I mean, yeah, you're right. I think the way to look at it is these forces' personality, whether it's infant upbringing, genetic predisposition, time, place, confluence, nature, nurture, whether it you know whatever it is whether it's personality whether it's attachment style whether it's values whether it's ideological belief whether it's all of that stuff um it is no matter which of those you're playing with it is a marathon to try and get that to be nudged and uh you know that's where you know the 20 sits right for the most part uh these are probably i imagine there's not many people that fluke themselves into lowering the neuroticism.

2:54:26It's probably, you know, the people that listen to podcasts like this one, you know, the insecure, overachieving personal growth maximizers who are really sort of trying to better themselves within the world. They're thinking very carefully. They're very reflective. You know, they're really trying to work on themselves, but that's a terrifying minority of most people. That's so true. So maybe for some of your listeners who maybe are really into fitness, for example, if you think about, I'm always annoyed like January 2nd in the gym when you can't get on anything, right? It's this overrun with - All the creatines taken.

2:55:09That's right. That's right. All these New Year's resolution people. I mean, the same exact mindset and outcomes could apply to something like personality. Like, okay, someone could have this really bright idea, like they want to get fit, or they want to change their neuroticism. But who's going to be there even in March? You know, who's going to be there much less in December? And, you know, as your listeners know, who are really committed to fitness, it's not even a year, right? It's the course of numerous years and being really disciplined and constantly evolving and learning about new things in nutrition and technique and other things that actually lead to a meaningful change in their body composition and their fitness and their health.

2:55:50Same thing with your mental health and your psychological health. It's that degree of commitment and obsessiveness, right, to make some sort of long-lasting change. I want to talk about something that's really important to me. So you're big into inequality, as am I. I grew up as working class as is possible. The only thing that was famous about the town that I grew up in in the UK is it had the highest teen pregnancy rating in the UK. And then it lost that. So it didn't even have that anymore. Fatherlessness. Boys who grow up apart from their biological father are about two times more likely to land in prison or jail by age 30.

2:56:24Fatherlessness is a better predictor of incarceration than race or growing up poor. Young men are more likely to end up in prison or jail in the US than they are to graduate from college if they are raised in any non-intact family setup. Regardless of family income, children in intact families are about half as likely to be diagnosed with depression.

2:56:48What do you make of that? I make it to be a serious crisis. And I make it, I believe in family. And I believe we have got to create the conditions for young people to be good dads and good moms and to raise healthy children. Thinking about some of the groups that you brought up today, one of the ones that's obvious in its absence is men. uh why have the left tended to not talk about men's issues do you think that's a good question and i think i mean we start with i i think the underlying issue is that for a very long time women were second-class citizens in this country and people were saying does it make sense that you have women who cannot become police officers, soldiers, carpenters, governors, presidents of the United States.

2:57:52And that's wrong. If we believe in equality, we want to give everybody an equal opportunity. So I think there was that focus on that. I think the issue you're raising is getting more discussion and it needs far more. Is that what we have seen right now, and I was on a plane coming from Washington back to Vermont, sitting next to a woman, and she's visiting her daughter at the University of Vermont. And we were chatting and she mentioned to me that something like over 60 % of the college of the kids in her daughter's class were women. Correct. Okay. Two women for every one man completing a US college degree, basically.

2:58:27All right. Not a good situation. That's a bigger gap than when Title IX came in 50 years ago. All right. In the other direction. This is a serious issue. And I think it is not incompatible to say that we believe in women's rights, the right of women to control their own body, that we don't want women to be second-class citizens, but say the same thing. Of course, we want our young men to be able to have all of the opportunities that they deserve as well. And there has not been the kind of focus on that that I think needs to be. Before we continue, if you haven't been feeling as sharp or energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start, which is why I partnered with Function because they run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers.

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2:59:45Just go to the link in the description below or head to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. Did you know Richard Reeves? He does the American Institute for Boys and Men policy. I have heard of it. Yeah, he wrote of Boys and Men. So this is just a passage from an article he wrote a little while ago. So I'm going to get you to react to this. Suicide rates among men under 30 have risen by 40 % since 2010 and are four times higher than among young women. Male suicides account for as many deaths as breast cancer. Men are less likely than women to go to college or to buy a home.

3:00:15They're more likely to be lonely and more vulnerable to addiction. Young white men from lower income homes are worse off than their fathers on almost every economic and social indicator. There is a bigger gender gap on campuses today than in 1972 when the government passed Title IX to prevent sex-based discrimination in education. but today the disparities in college enrollment and performance are the other way around. There is no strong evidence that young men are turning against gender equality, but they have turned away from the left because the left has turned away from them. The problems of young men are not the confections of reactionaries.

3:00:43This is a story of elite neglect, not voter chauvinism. The Democrats have failed to address these issues. Under the Biden administration, the Centers for Disease Center Control and Prevention has refused to acknowledge the gender disparity in suicide rates. The White House Gender Policy Council has not tackled a single issue primarily facing boys and men. There have been initiatives to promote women in STEM and construction, but nothing about encouraging men into teaching on men's health. There is women's health research initiatives, but no office on men's health. The Democrats and progressive institutions have a massive blind spot when it comes to male issues.

3:01:15And this was exposed in the election. At worst, men are seen as not having problems, but as being the problem. That was Richard. He's his policy wonky DC fluffy. I agree with much, not all what he's saying. And I think, look, here is the issue. The world in the fight for women's equality, the world has changed. All right. 50, 60 years ago, men were the breadwinners in most households, right? Men were the bosses. Men made the most money. Men were the governors. Men were the presidents. Men were the senators. It was a man's world. That's changed. And the fact that we have fought and achieved more equality for women is a positive thing.

3:01:56I agree. All right. But you're suddenly seeing, and I think half of what he says is very true, you're suddenly seeing men fail, does anyone give a damn about me? You know, what's going on in my life? Good. We want women's equality. What about me? Have we paid enough attention to that? I think we have not, and I think we need to do a better job. I don't believe that everything that Reeves is saying is accurate. I understand. I was watching that, uh, uh, now infamous, uh, interview that you and AOC did on CNN last week. It was infamous Fox television picked up on it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's just gone everywhere.

3:02:33It's gone everywhere. Right. It was, it's what was infamous about it. Uh, the, well, this is what we're talking about. And then you kind of, uh, blew through when it was asked, is this going to be a challenge? That wasn't what I was interested in primarily. What I thought was real interesting was she said, the reason that Republicans have appealed to young men is a dangerous way. They are able to radicalize and target and exploit a generation of young boys in particular away from healthy masculinity and into an insecure masculinity that requires the domination of others who are poorer, browner, darker, or a different gender than them.

3:03:05Do you think Democrats have done a good job of giving men a positive vision about themselves? She's saying that this is an insecure masculinity as opposed to a healthy man. You know, I'm not a great expert on this. Yeah. I think this is a real issue. Yeah. And I think we've got to pay a lot more attention to it. 90 % of anxiety is anticipatory, not about events, but about control over them. And this link between uncertainty and anxiety being intrinsically related is so true. There's this wonderful idea called compensatory control. What is it called? Compensatory control. Compensatory control. Compensatory control.

3:03:42I'm going to speak in a language that you may not be familiar with, British. My husband went to high school in Britain. Okay, good. Did he retain? No, I just don't understand the big words. Compensatory control? Yeah, to compensate. Oh, compensate. Okay, gotcha. Compensatory control. Okay, gotcha. When people were told to imagine an uncertain medical diagnosis, they were more likely to see patterns in meaningless static on a TV. So basically, if you have a sense of threat coming from the outside, if you feel like control and uncertainty are very common in your life, you are more likely to construct narratives and personify and create archetype and myth and believe in conspiracy and attach meaning where it's not there.

3:04:27This is from Matthew Syed. It was in The Times forever ago. It was actually around COVID. And he basically made this point that this is before lab leak hypothesis stuff was supported or disproven or anything. It was just a notion at the time. And what he basically said was it is far easier to believe that the release of some global pandemic is the plan of a malign scientist than it is the chance mutation of a silly little microbe. because at least if it's a scientist, we understand there's motivation and there's desire, and it feels like it's within our realm. And I think for many people, what feels like control in life is actually just a reminder of how little control we have, right?

3:05:14Because we have the illusion of control. I can tell you what the weather is going to be in Tampa, Florida tomorrow within a pretty tight timeline. If a nuclear bomb went off in Russia tomorrow, Starbucks would open in Austin, Texas, right? Okay, so I have acute predictability, but I have long-term chaos. And trying to match these two, trying to work out, well, we've always not had control over the things that we haven't had control over, but never before have we had such an illusion that we might be able to have control over them. We've got this illusion of mastery Well, the modern world, I can message anybody on the planet immediately.

3:05:52I can consume the entire world's news 24 hours a day directly streamed into my face. So maybe I should have more control than I do. And it's blurred the lines. I think it's made distinguishing what we should let go of and what we should try and have agency over. those lines have become more blurred than ever before and i think that uncertainty about the future combined with the sense that i might be able to get some sort of a change enacted if i push i think that those two worlds blending together has made it very difficult for people i think that's where the anxiety might be coming from well one of the things that's interesting about anxiety having been somebody that has not has struggled with it for most of my life and not understood it and not understood what to do in those moments and probably made every single mistake personally to make it worse.

3:06:50And also being a mom who had kids who had anxiety and making every single mistake you could make. So I am personally responsible. You've got skin in the game. Not only skin in the game, dude, I have bruises and broken bones when it comes to this game because I have fucked it up because I didn't know. I didn't know. And if you're somebody that has really struggled with anxiety and you then have somebody around you that's anxious, it then makes you anxious. And I can see now in hindsight, all of the things that I did wrong. this is why i pay gladly for my children to go to therapy adult children because i'm like i fucked you up in so many ways and i didn't allow me to compensate yeah well i let me support you in identifying the things that don't work and let me support you in working with somebody who can help you change the settings in your mind and who can help you understand when life triggers you because it's going to but to that point on anxiety that i want to talk about I actually believe now that anxiety, if you can simplify what is happening in the moment, it will help you apply what every expert tells you you have to do.

3:08:11Because the world is so overwhelming right now. Whether you're talking about the world at large and AI coming or the headlines that are distressing or you're talking about the issues going on in your life. whether you are struggling to pay your bills or you're scared about the rising cost of living or maybe you have somebody in your life that's struggling and you don't know how to help them. And any one of these things can cause you in this present moment to start to feel anxious about what's going to happen. And so in that moment, God, I wish I knew this. I wish I knew this decades ago. I wish that decades ago, somebody could have explained to me that any time you feel that alarm going off, because that's what anxiety is, it's just an alarm system in your body that is designed to wake your ass up in this moment, either because there's something that you care about that you need to do.

3:09:14So it's coming online as an alarm to wake up your body and your brain to help you perform. That's one type of anxiety, like performance anxiety that a lot of people get. Or you have the kind of more nagging chronic anxiety, which is what I had, which is this nagging sense that something is about to happen. And you then have this moment where you separate from your own ability to handle it. Like, I love Dr. Russell Kennedy's work. I love Russell. Yes. He's brilliant. Yes. And the fact that he says that all anxiety is separation anxiety. I'm like, what the hell are you talking about? It's not separate.

3:09:59I'm a, you know, grown-ass woman. It's not separation anxiety. My son, you know, is not have separation anxiety. He's like, it's not separation from another person. It's separation from self. Because, you know, if you've got a situation, let's just take, for example, You know, something that I'm seeing, and you're probably seeing this too, from a global fan base, people around the world feeling incredibly anxious about AI, incredibly anxious about whether or not they're going to lose their job, incredibly anxious about the changes that it's going to have in the world. First of all, that's a normal thing to feel because it is completely out of your control if you get fired or not.

3:10:37It's completely out of your control if your job's redundant or not. It's completely out of your control how this is all gonna play out. And so in the moment where you feel this alarm going off, what happened in that moment is you started to go, what if this happens? What if that, oh my God. You separated from the one thing you can't control, which is your response to it. And so instead of going up here and going, what if this, what if that, what if the other thing, which only makes the alarm that you're feeling worse, because when you go up here, you now double down on doubting your ability to handle it.

3:11:12And so in that moment, if you could take a breath and drop back into your body and into the moment, go, wait a minute. Okay. So I don't know what's going to happen with AI. I don't know, you know, what's going to happen with the state of the world, but here's what I do know. I know that through my attitude my actions I can handle it I know that even though I don't know what's gonna happen or what if this or what if that I can also say what if it works out what if something bad happens and I surprise myself and I'm able to just figure it out as much as it may suck. When you start to drop back in and double down on the truth, and the truth is you can through your attitude and through the actions that you take, you can handle even terrible things that happen.

3:12:12It doesn't mean you deserve it. It doesn't mean that it's not going to be terrible, but doubling down on your capacity is what will quiet the alarm, and it is what will retrain you to know that in those moments, because those moments are coming, and they're there for all of us, in those moments when life really overwhelms you, there's nothing you can do about life, but there's so much you can do to support yourself through it. and you know what I can now see if you look at somebody like David Rossmarin, professor at Harvard Medical School, and he's also the one that has all the, I think they're called the anxiety centers.

3:12:55They're all over the U.S. He said the single thing that people do wrong with anxiety is the moment you have that separation, oh, God, what if this and I can't handle it? Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. And then you like send yourself into a state of complete panic. You freeze, and now you avoid the thing you're scared of. So most people right now, if you're worried about your job, I guarantee you, you know what they're doing? You're probably doing what Mel Robbins used to do. You're bitching to your friends. You're worrying about it. You're frozen about it. You're pissed off about it. But you know what you're not doing?

3:13:30You're not doing the one thing that you can do, which is fucking update your resume, learn new skills if you're scared about it, lean into it, ask yourself, do I even like what I do? Maybe now is the time to tighten the belt and cut back on all the spending I don't need so that I can create a longer runway and figure out what changes I want to make. Because you're not stuck in the job. You're not stuck where you are. At any moment, you can fucking change. But if you do what I used to do, which is separate from your power to change and separate from your ability to change your attitude or to learn from somebody like you or to get the support that you need, then you're going to trigger a bigger alarm and you're going to become the single biggest reason why you stay stuck.

3:14:17And it's in these moments, in these moments where life overwhelms you. That's the mistake I made for years. And then the mistake I made as a parent? Oh, Jesus. My kid would be overwhelmed. And, you know, as a mom, you're like, okay, no problem. You can do a sleep under, not a sleep over. Oh, no problem. You can sleep on the floor of our bedroom for six months since you're scared to be in your room. You know what I'm signaling as a parent? I'm signaling, I don't think you can handle it. And so you should be scared because I'm showing you that I don't think you can handle it.

3:14:58I 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.