#900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill

30:25This is why it's so difficult to let go of grunt work and To let go of being permanently busy. Even when your precise goal was to get here to the point where you don't need to do grunt work And you don't need to be permanently busy. I guess And finally, as well, there's a question of why is it so hard to take pleasure in our successes? And a big part of that is largely because you're constantly peering over the shoulder of the present moment to see what's coming next. You're always just sort of looking past what is in front of you or what's happening right now. So even during the act of attaining a goal, you're already looking past it a little bit, getting ready to move the goalposts that you just this second kick the ball into further away down the field.

31:15We are all chasing a sense of completion, but we never actually allow ourselves to save at any tastes of completion that we get along the way. We assume that one day we're going to arrive and that day never comes because we never give ourselves a break. And then we realized that The path we were speedrunning through was actually the one to our grave. And how many people... I mean, what's that? The five most common regrets, deathbed regrets. One of them, I wish that I hadn't worked so much. I mean, if you're going to outsource it to people that are on the deathbed, they've got no reason to lie.

31:58I wish that I kept in touch with my friends. I wish I'd allowed myself to be happy. I wish I'd lived my own life and not the one that others expected of me. I wish it kept it. I mean, look, this inside around, what is your productivity for? What are you working this hard for? What is it that you're trying to achieve? Are you here to crank widgets and to keep your slack at zero and to send emails? Are you here to move your life meaningfully toward the thing that you want? The problem is slack and calls and emails are much easier and more obvious for you to judge than did I get myself toward a life that I want.

32:43That's really amorphous and tough, but I buried myself in work all. I only slapped four hours last night. We used the proxy thing that in the beginning of our journey when we were doing grunt work was supposed to be predictive of where we were going to end up, we use that mindset for the rest of time. And look, if you're starting out on a career journey or you're at the bottom of a ladder of something new, this might sting a bit because you're hearing about a transition that you, as of yet, don't have to make and aren't going to get to make for quite a while. But you need to keep it in the back of your mind because if you don't like the grunt work in the beginning, the only thing worse than that is doing it when you no longer need to do it when you've managed to get somewhere closer up the top of the ladder.

33:33And refusing to let go of it is going to cap your progress and your happiness and it's going to trap you in thought patterns that you really don't want. And it's a difficult transition. The existential loneliness that you have to deal with where I take. But I was, everybody needs me. Everybody wanted me. I was so busy all of the time. It's like, yeah, dude, you need to ask yourself sort of deeper questions now. And you need to genuinely consider whether a 30 minute walk is the best thing that you can do for your business or your relationship or your family or whatever it might be. And that's just, I don't know, why is that less sexy than sitting down and grinding out whatever needs to be the house cleaning, the emails, the hard core work out, whatever it might be.

34:23it's like you need to learn to chill out a little bit more. And that'll actually in some weird round about way move you closer to your goals to this interesting. All right, next one. So this is from Justin Lemilla, who does a ton of really interesting sex research. Gay men, see bisexual men as secretly gay and lesbians, see bisexual women as secretly straight. across two studies involving a total of 288 gay and lesbian participants, research is examined attitudes towards stereotypes of bisexuals and some of the findings were that both gay men and lesbians hold more negative views of bisexual persons of the same sex than they did of the other sex.

35:06It's kind of interesting. I wonder whether that is some sort of a sense that this person could be competing in a market that the individual wouldn't be threatened by, but they've chosen to step into their market and maybe they'll take their partner away. That might be an idea. Compared to lesbians, gay men were more likely to see bisexual men as having an unstable sexual orientation. And likewise, compared to gay men, lesbians were more likely to see bisexual women as having an unstable sexual orientation. Gain, maybe this is just a little bit of fear. They're keeping their eye on them. I don't know what direction you're going in.

35:45A gay man tended to see bisexual men as being secretly gay, whereas lesbians tended to see bisexual women as secretly straight. Basically, in other words, both groups perceived by sexuals, regardless of their sex, as being more attracted to men than to women. I mean, that's fucking fascinating. Gay men tended to see bisexual men as being secretly gay, lesbians tended to see bisexual women as secretly straight. I don't know, man. There is, I mean, I saw this in Club promo. We used to refer to it. There was a few girls that swung both ways. And if they were in a relationship with a girl, we would mention that they were on a liquid diet.

36:26And then when they got back with a boyfriend, we'd say, oh, she's back on solids now. She's back on a solid diet after she was on a liquid diet for a while, but she's back on solids. So there is something in there. I don't know what it is. Maybe I think on average, women's sexualities are a little bit more fluid. So there's just this sense that sort of women will experiment a little bit, but they're still straight. Whereas the guy that's experimenting, it's because of some, you know, internalized fear of homophobia or not being accepted by society at large. So his way to get around it is by, you know, dabbling, just putting a toe in, or maybe more.

37:06Yeah. Another insight was that Lesbian's greater negativity toward bisexual women. relative to gay men was statistically explained by lesbian to great attendency to view bisexual women as being primarily attracted to men by contrast gay men's perception of bisexual men as secretly gay didn't account for why they held more negative attitudes towards by men than lesbian stood. Don't really know what's going on there. I guess maybe some differences in intracextual competition somehow. Yeah, basically it really He shows that there is a bisexual prejudice that exists in the gay community and there's some interesting gender dynamics that are at play.

37:50So for all that pride focuses on the L and the G, it's really the B. The B is the one which is the most persecuted, even internally inside of the LGBT. B is what I mean, what's the tea fucking doing in there? The tea has nothing in common with the L, the G and the B other than they get to enjoy pride together. But yeah, poor bees, another insight associated with this. There's something called the birth order effect, which is kind of getting replication crisis a bit at the moment kind of interesting. Birth order effect suggested that for every older brother, for every male that a woman gives birth to, it increases the chance of subsequent males being gay.

38:44So men with more older brothers were more likely to be gay, basically, when birthed from the same mother. Interestingly, some evidence showed that miscarriages also counted toward this. And it was, there was some suggestions about sort of immune system, some kind of immune system, mediation going on here to how the the womb interacted with the fetus and seeing it as like alien, alien, just a non -native part of the body. And then Obviously, you'd think, well, why would that be the case for men, but not for women? And this guy, Yakub Fort and some colleagues looked at the fraternal birth order effect, and they had a Croatian Slovakian data, and they found that the fraternal birth order effect exists for lesbians too.

39:39Women with more older brothers were also more likely to be lesbian. So I don't know what it is, I guess. It depends if you want a gay son or a gay daughter, what you better hope for is a couple of boys first and then you're off to the races. You know, you've got like lesbian, younger sisters and gay younger brothers running around all over the place. Maybe that's the way it works. But then I think it got replication crisis, like the whole thing. So now I don't know. And maybe I've just fed you, I've not fed you false information. I've just fed you information that might need updating. So come back to that, suppose.

40:19A quick aside, grooming isn't just about looking good. It's about feeling good, and the right tools make all the difference. That's where man escapes beard and balls bundle comes in. It comes with their beard, hedger, lawnmower, 5 .0, ultra, and all the essentials that you need to keep looking sharp from head to toe. The beard hedger is your precision trimmer featuring 20 adjustable lengths so you can dial in the perfect style, whether it's light stubble or a full, but rannled stash, like I'm rocking here. and for downstairs the lawnmower 5 .0 Ultra has a cutting edge ceramic blade, reduced grooming accidents, 75 minute battery, waterproof technology and an LED light, so you could use it as a flashlight if you needed to scare off an intruder, perhaps.

40:59Right now you can get 20 % off and free shipping on the Beard and Balls bundle by going to the link in the description below or heading to manskaped .com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom 20, a checkout. That's manskaped .com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom 20, a checkout. Next I said, so I told this story a couple of times about a retreat I went to in California, but then I saw a Kurt Vonnegut quote that sort of perfectly summarized it, zipped it down, and it's easier to remember. So Kurt says, we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

41:36We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. So I'd go into this retreat in California and I met a business owner who had a big YouTube channel that used to watch a lot a long time ago and then I asked him why he'd stop making videos and he said, I started feeling like I had to live up to in private the things which I was saying in public. And I think about this quite a lot. I've come to sort of realize there's two sides to fake it until you make it and one is positing an ideal or a better a version of yourself, which you're motivated to live up to due to the need for social consistency.

42:13But that stake in the ground acts as much like it's Heather as it does a finish line. If you commit yourself to some world view or life philosophy, what happens if you stop agreeing with it? Sure, you might want everyone, you might want to change. But everybody around you has grown accustomed to the previous version of you. And whether your lifestyle changes, like your dietary approach, or your training methodology, or worldview changes, like a religious belief, or political affiliation, or personality changes, like commitments to growth, or going sober, or changing friend groups. Social consistency bias is a double edged sword.

42:53A while ago, some of the leading influences of the ex -paleo diet movement, then the carnivore movement started to add fruit food, into their food, and the aptly called meat and fruit diet caused uproar, not because of evidence that the diet is based on, but because its new proponents had ardently stated a different belief in the past, and a change caused the people around them to feel uncomfortable. This is the danger. The social incentives align for you to not change in public, even if you grow out of your beliefs in private. stupid people see someone changing their mind as an indication of un -sophistication because they don't understand that updating your worldview when you grow is a sign of intelligence, not fickleness, and that an unwavering commitment to a narrow worldview is not cleverness but a substitute for it, which, unfortunately means that after changing your mind in public, it often results in you being attacked by a large number of mostly stupid people.

43:59And the more public you are about it, the harder it is to reverse. Perfect example of this. Alex Okona, goes vegan, is convinced about the ethics, the philosophical underpinnings of veganism, does not want to contribute to animal suffering, but as a byproduct of that, his health suffers, and he is struggling to keep his health to where it needs to be whilst eating a balanced plant -based diet. It's not something he says that he doesn't think you can do, but something that given his level of conscientiousness and preparedness, it was something he was struggling to do. So his demeanor was incompatible with the challenges that his new diet informed by his new philosophy had given to him, so he went back to eating meat.

44:47He had to announce in public something which he had changed in private, and he got fucking castigated on the internet for ages. I mean, he's now out the other side. I don't think anyone really brings it up anymore, but that was uncomfortable to watch, especially when he thinks this guy's doing it for his health, and he said it. He told you, he made this change, and he told you about it. He We didn't continue to get those sweet vegan dollars if they ever existed.

45:19You never did that. You told you as soon as you changed and people slide a problem with it. So be careful of the things that you say in private, not being able to be compatible with the expectations people have of you in public. And yeah, that stake in the ground versus finish line, am I positive and ideal? Or am I attaching myself worth to an expectation that I'm then going to have to rip off me? I'm going to have to sort of peel this fucking skin off me that everybody else expects. It's difficult. Personal growth is hard enough as it is without all of the expected. It's why, you know, to be honest, what are we?

45:5545 minutes in. I can talk about this now. The reason why I don't talk about, like, deeply talk about my relationships on the show, you know, even though I talk about relationships and dating and a lot of the dynamics. Evidently something I'm interested in. I'm obviously on the path toward trying to build a family and do all the rest of the stuff. But I think it's fucking so hard to have a relationship full stop having a relationship with even a couple of thousand people observing it. You remember what it was like when you used to get that then Chris Williamson is in a relationship notifications on Facebook or whatever you would see it from your friends and people would be able to like it and comment on it and so and then it would tag the other person but then it would also show Chris Williamson is single fuck like you've only got what I think thousand friends are something on Facebook that was a huge deal I mean I don't know maybe I'm speaking depends how young you are you might not have ever seen that on Facebook that was fucking revolutionary by the way bring back Facebook dating shit.

46:57But that was hard. Just doing that was hard. So how hard is it when you're posting photos of you both? And you know, that's the reason why I've kept that area of my private life private because again, you've got this like expectation to stake in the ground. Additional scrutiny. You know, do you stay in relationships for longer than you should because you're scared about what people are going to think? Do you leave relationships more quickly than you should because you're scared about what people are going to think. You're never existing for yourself. You're always existing for this version of what people who don't necessarily have your best interests at heart think about how you should behave.

47:40And, uh, yeah, a digital hijab. As Mary Harrington calls it, I've got my digital hijab on. Next one, this is Mark Manson insight, which I fucking adore. So So he says, neediness occurs when you place a higher priority on what others think of you than what you think of yourself. Anytime that you alter your words or behavior to fit someone else's needs rather than your own, that's needy. Anytime you lie about your interests or your hobbies or your background, that's needy. Anytime that you pursue a goal to impress others rather than fulfill yourself, that's needy. where as most people focus on what behavior is attractive or unattractive, what determines neediness and therefore attractiveness is the why behind your behavior.

48:29You can say the coolest thing or do what everyone else does, but if you do it for the wrong reason, it will come off as needy and desperate and turn people off. Turning people off is definitely not optimal. I like turning people on as much as the next guy. But I think there's an even bigger price to be paid here, which is your own self -worth. So imagine for a second a world in which you are unanimously adored by millions, but you hate yourself. Are you happy? Is it worth it? Now imagine a world where you're disliked by everybody, but you love yourself. self. I propose that self love you would be happier.

49:15Because ultimately in some tawished roundabout way, the reason we want validation from others is to give us a good enough reason to validate our self. And if you compromise yourself in order to gain favor with other people, you'll know. Even if you think you're not keeping score, your subconscious is, and given that you're the sort of person who listens to this show, you probably keep score a lot more accurately than is typical. How can you expect to have faith in yourself if you can't even keep your own word? So the problem is, we sacrifice the thing that we want, which is self -worth, for the thing which is supposed to get it, which is validation.

50:00Sacrifice self -worth to get validation in the hopes that if we have sufficient validation, we will finally be able to have some self -worth, sacrificing the thing that you want for the thing that's supposed to get it. And this neediness insight that, you know, it's not too dissimilar to that point from before, from some ovens where you think, fuck, we have these expectations, public expectations, familial expectations. People don't like change. There's also another reason that people don't like change, I think, is because we want to be able to predict, project out where somebody is going to be in future.

50:38And the more easy they are to predict, as in the more reliably they fall into our model of them, the less we need to sort of worry about what's going to happen. You know, I don't worry about Chris. He's a good guy. He'll, he'll, he'll be on board with the next, whatever Trump policy or he'll be on board with the next Kamala policy or he'll be on board with the next whatever because he was with the last ones. But if you start to deviate a little bit, whether it's political ideology, philosophy, life direction, career, temperament in its extreme, this is sort of bipolar, right? It's, oh my god, I'm so scared of whether or not this person's going to be high or low or whatever it might be.

51:16But in smaller ways, the same discomfort comes through. It's like, I don't know if they're still going to sort of be here in a year's time. What if they outgrow me? What if they outgrow a friendship? What if they start to disagree with something that's really sacred to me. So in that way, people who don't necessarily go along with the crowd are seen as a threat in many ways. So yeah, I think just something to consider. All right, some more dating stuff. This is insight from Chris Bumstead, awesome episode with him last year. And I was asking him about how to choose a good partner, how to know when you've sort of found the one.

51:55and Chris said, find someone who you just feel safe being a burden to. You're not going to intentionally be a burden, but sometimes you suck, you know, sometimes you're a burden. And even if you don't feel safe being like that around your partner, if you have to withhold things from them and put on that show, you're never going to feel safe around them and you're not going to want to be there for them as much when they're being a burden as well. You just become these two people dividing and conquering all of your problems rather than taking on the world together. I think I always felt like I wanted to be great at everything I did and great at what I pursued.

52:35And I never expected to be as good as I was. So it would just be such an interesting relief to be able to give myself to think, you are going to be great, you are going to have all these things that you want. But you're also going to realize that they're not as important as you think they are. You're going to come to the realization where your relationships and your values and everything you enjoy and experience aren't going to come down to spectacular moments on stage. They're going to be much simpler than that. They're just going to be these moments where you're being yourself and the people who love you for that are going to be everything.

53:11It's awesome. You know, this guy who has conquered the sport, has sort of defined an entire generation of bodybuilders. And then bowed out at 30, is able to say completed it, but even in the process of completing it six times in a row, the big wins weren't the big wins. The big wins were the little ones, and they were the shares and the opportunity for me to celebrate what I'd done with people who cared about me, who knew me, and it's great and magnificent and impressive and all the rest of it. But it wasn't what mattered. You know, a successful career in a terrible marriage can make your life miserable.

53:53An average career in an amazing marriage can make your life delightful. So you need to choose wisely. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Look, it's officially 2025 and that business idea that you've been thinking about for ages is collecting dust on the shelf. It is time to do the thing. Here's the good news. Shopify makes it unbelievably simple to create your brand, open for business, and actually get your first sale. They have thousands of customizable templates, so all you need to do is drag and drop no coding or design skills required. They help you manage everything like shipping, taxes, payments, all from one simple dashboard, and when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they're best in class.

54:32Their checkout is 36 % better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms, and with shop pay, you can boost conversions up to 50%. Basically, Shopify takes all the messiness of running a business off your plate so that you can focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling an awesome product. Right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify .com slash modern wisdom or lowercase that shopify .com slash modern wisdom to start selling today. I saw this thing on Reddit actually. 5 questions to ask yourself if you're unsure about your relationship.

55:10If someone told you you're a lot like your partner, would this be a compliment to you? Are you truly fulfilled or just less lonely? Are you able to unapologetically be yourself or do you feel the need to show up differently to please your partner? Are you in love with who your partner is right right now as a whole, are you only in love with their good side, the potential or the idea of them? And would you want your future or imagine child to date someone like your partner? Those are absolute hammer blows. I think almost everything in here, if someone told you a lot like your partner, would this be a compliment to you?

55:54Are you in love with just the idea or would you want your future child, imagine child to date someone like your partner. Those three are sort of taking you out of the situation and imagining that you're somebody else, you're something else. It's four different person. So that's creating a little bit of psychological distance. Are you truly fulfilled or just less lonely? Is, you know, a fantastic insight around the reason that we suck so much in relationships is that we're terrified of being alone. And that means that we stay in relationships or we accept relationships that we shouldn't do because familiar loneliness or familiar partnership is more enjoyable than unfamiliar loneliness.

56:35And that's not good. Are you able to unapologetically be yourself? Or do you feel the need to show up differently to please your partner? I think that a lot of that is around the level of openness, the level of comfort that you have. of how much do you need to self -edit? Now, the question around the person that's your best friend is the one that you have the least filter with and that you can sit in silence without having to fill it. So it's a person that you can talk the most with in an unencumbered way and the person that you can shut up the most with in an unencumbered way. And if that's not your partner, then you're struggling because your relationship should feel like home.

57:18It should feel like a house with a sturdy roof and strong foundations and shit gets thrown at it all the time and rain comes down and there's weather and there's heat and there's cold. But inside of that house is the one safe refuge that you have. You can lose your job, status, your financial position can fall away. your health can break down, your friends can leave you, but you have this one safe place, and it's in another person, it's in them. And if you can't be yourself with that person, the entire house does not exist. It's fake. So you need to make sure that you can be yourself with your partner, or else you have no safe refuge from the world, which is fucking terrifying.

58:13on the dating line, Hormosi dropped a fucking slammer the other day, which I want to talk to him about the next time I speak to him. If you find a girl who believes in your dreams more than you do, who makes you want to be a better man, who's willing to work alongside you to get there, and is grateful for whatever you have, just marry her. That's how you make marriage an easy yes. How you make marriage an easy yes is by having a girl who has those. Find a girl who believes in your dreams more than you do, who makes you want to be a better man who's willing to work alongside you to get there and is grateful for whatever you have.

58:47Just marry her. The rest of the stuff will sort itself out, man. I really do get that sense. Maybe I'm getting soft in my old age, I don't know. I guess there was one final element. I got asked a bunch of questions about the black pill and stuff and sort of in cells the last time on a Q &A at some point recently.

59:08And it's kind of an unfalseifiable philosophy in a lot of ways, because there's many kernels of truth in it, you know, realizations about what women want physically and a partner and the fact that some men just, no matter how many pushups they do, they're not going to get there. It's tough, you know, it's a hard biological limit. But there's a very specific cohort of men, frustrating men, guys who have got nothing going for them, no drive in their life, they're uncomfortable in their own skin, they're endlessly miserable, they keep complaining about women having two high standards. It's like, bruh, your standards for yourself are through the fucking floor, your friends don't want to hang out with you.

59:55You don't want to hang out with you. Why do you think a woman would want to hang out with you? And how is this their fault that they've got two high standards? You suck. You suck. Your friends don't want to hang with you. You don't want to hang with you. Why lay at the feet of women the fact that they have got two high standards? I am all for it. I will fucking die on the hill of fighting for more empathy for men. Right? And I have been thrown under the bus many times for doing so. I'm, again, able to walk this tightrope where I'm so so cupped that the manosphere considers me to be blue -pilled, but I'm also such a misogynist that guardian readers think that I'm andry -tate from wish.

1:00:43And I don't care anymore. Like, I don't care about being misjudged by people who don't understand what I'm trying to achieve. And there's a group of people out there. Maybe the large majority who are reasonable and who understand that it's not zero sum when it comes to empathy who realize that you can raise up men without dragging down women, that you can support women without forgetting about the challenges of men, that you can tell men that they need to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and actually do some work without forgetting that those men have got challenges that need structural support from society at large and we need initiatives and we need investment and that some women do have two high standards.

1:01:30Some women do have skewed perspectives of what they're worth. But you're not gonna get into a relationship with them in any case, what's your goal? We're screaming at these harpies on the internet. These like retarded women who go onto these dating shows and are like, I'm gonna get a guy who's got like six feet six and he's got like six figures and he's got a six inch day. Like, what are you really, really going to go and change them? Are you gonna you turn them and turn that Check into waifi. No, you're not. You're getting frustrated because you think that they are a representation of women at large.

1:02:02But that woman by design sucks. So you're not gonna hang out with her. So just don't pay attention to her and move toward the chicks that are perfectly normal that there are so many fucking awesome women out there who want to get into a relationship who just want a man who's got those traits that we talked about before. Yeah, I am that special category of men who don't have anything going for them, no drive, uncomfortable in their own skin, endlessly miserable, complaining all the time and late at the feet of women. Dude, point the fucking finger in the mirror. Like, I will give you as much social confidence, training, diet, hairstyle, advice, until a cows come home and I will continue to do it.

1:02:50But if you're not doing any work and you're saying that it's the fault of women, that you're not getting dates, talking that's only you guy. Anyway, what a fucking wonderful positive tone for me to finish this 900th episode on. But I love it. I mean, some of these doesn't stay, I really, I really adore and I hope that you do too. And I appreciate you all and I'm actually going to be in Mexico tomorrow. So wish me luck. I'm getting some Treatments and stuff for the health shit that I'm fighting with the moment mold and ebv and Lime and all of that shit. So I If I can pray for Chris if you would pray for this mustache as well Because it's probably not gonna be here the next time that you see me.

1:03:33But I appreciate you all roll an episode 1000 base