Cameron Hanes - Keep Hammering Collective - KHC 003 - Chris Williamson

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

Chris Williamson, host of the widely popular Modern Wisdom podcast, has conducted fascinating interviews with iconic figures like David Goggins, Jordan Peterson and Andrew Huberman, to name a few. Chris has also appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. In this episode of The Keep Hammering Collective, Chris delivers incredible insight in a unique way while diving into human development, philosophy, the importance of pain and suffering, critical thinking, and ultimately, what does it mean to be an intellectual?    Follow along: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cameronrhanes Twitter: https://twitter.com/cameronhanes Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/camhanes/ Website: https://www.cameronhanes.com   Connect with Chris Williamson: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChrisWillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisWillx Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0XrOqvxlqQI6bmdYHuIVnr   Special thanks to our sponsors. MTN OPS Supplements: https://mtnops.com/ First Light: https://www.firstlight.farm/ Leupold: https://www.leupold.com/ Black Rifle: https://www.blackriflecoffee.com/ Hoyt: https://hoyt.com/ Bass Pro / Cabellas: https://www.basspro.com   Timestamps: 0:00:00 Introduction and Chris’ background 0:00:43 Inspiration behind “Modern Wisdom” 0:02:46 High performance coming from a place of insufficiency  0:08:00 A negative mind will shape your reality 0:09:03 Childhood shaping adulthood 0:16:00 Thoughts are not actions 0:20:43 Chris’ progression of learning 0:23:49 Success begets success, while failure begets more failure 0:26:54 Letters to Myself, Marcus Aurelius 0:28:26 Life is what you deem it 0:31:00 Chosen vs. Unchosen suffering 0:32:44 Performance without purpose 0:37:11 Is balance necessary? 0:40:00 Success is a onesies, not an outfit 0:42:20 Chris’ future goals 0:45:55 Discipline before success 0:47:30 Influential voices for the Left 0:52:07 Centrist ideologies 0:56:58 The alignment problem 1:01:16 Why move to America? 1:03:00 The American Dream still exists 1:07:28 Joe Rogan inspiration 1:09:30 Intellectual Dark Web 1:17:50 Andrew Huberman 1:21:15 Who inspires you? 1:24:20 Childhood passion coming full circle 1:32:43 Wild at Heart and the lion in the cage 1:38:35 Men with a purpose 1:42:50 Young men in today’s world 1:54:39 Positive relationship dynamic 1:58:49 What makes a good parent? 2:01:35 Chris’ 1000 days of no alcohol 2:08:10 Advantages of not being dependent on anything 2:13:30 Closing statements   2:15:33 Sponsorships

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that we've partnered together and we can help open up those outdoor and hunting opportunities to listeners of this podcast. Every step I take, I move my truth. Every time they time move it's so reckless. That is a part of my mind I've been blessed with giving my blood so I am relaxed. Here we are, the Keep Hammering Collective with Chris Williamson today. How are you doing? I'm good, man. How are you? Oh, I'm doing great. This is, uh, I've been waiting for this. I've been following you for a while.

I love your content. I love what you put out. And watching you makes me wonder, the Modern Wisdom Podcast is, you made a huge name for yourself. How'd that come about? And what is wisdom to you? So I was a club promoter for a very long time. I got to university and wanted to have an excuse to party for free and became pretty good at it. So me and a business partner, the first guy ever sat next to in my first seminar at university,

still 15 years later, we're working together. We hadn't got rid of each other. And we just wanted to build a business. I love business building. Did that for a long time. Got toward the end of my 20s. I'd done some reality TV. I was on some dating shows.

And then it got to sort of 27, 28, and I'd done this big reality TV dating show, which was kind of like the pinnacle of the Party Boy World Championship. And I thought, is this really all that I've got to offer the world? You know, me and a tiny pair of swim shorts prancing about on TV. Not that that's not nothing, but it just felt like there was something else missing. And even though I loved the work that I'd done, it felt like being a crab that kind of was outgrowing his shell somehow. And it was like constraining. And I was feeling just ambiently sort of uncomfortable about stuff.

And that was a good time. It's whatever, 2015, 16. So you had your Jordan Peterson's, your Sam Harris's. you Rogans talking about taking ownership, talking about telling the truth and finding a purpose. So I really enjoyed consuming that stuff. I got invited on some podcasts just because I'd done some TV bits and I really enjoyed the process and I thought,

well, if I do my own, I can do this as much as I want. And then I just started my show. It's almost five years ago exactly now. And yeah, we're now 600 episodes in five years later. That's a lot of work. That is so much work. You know, you're telling that story. Do you think, I know he had a sort of childhood a little bit,

talked about bullying and being lonely. Do you think that that reality show was kind of a book into that? Like, you didn't get much attention as a kid, and now you're getting all this attention. Do you think that was part of that journey, and that's why you were drawn to that? That's a really good point. So most of the high performers that I know about

are coming from a place of insufficiency. You know, they're trying to prove. something to that parent, that teacher, that bully, that group of friends or whatever from their childhood, that they actually are worthy of love or praise or acceptance or admiration. And I think that you could track certainly through my 20s the fact that I think my fundamental like framing of who I was was people might not like me or want to be around me because of the world that I'd come up from being really unpopular and bullied in school.

but if they need me, that's like close enough. Right. That's a close proxy. I see. So if I'm the guy in the front door of the club with all of the VIP bands, yeah, the power. People need me. Yeah.

Now, obviously, this is fundamentally flawed. Like, you don't need to offer people things in return for them liking you or wanting you to be in their life. That's not the way that it works. But for me, I was so convinced that I was flawed and chronically meant to be alone that I needed to be able to offer the world something in order. to be accepted in that way. Right.

And yeah, I think that you can see going on the reality TV stuff is just scaling that up. Like just give me more, give me more. Right. More leverage, more scale, more exposure. And yeah, I think that wouldn't be too wrong to say. But it still creeps up in other areas of life. You know, even with all of the self-work and all of the bits and pieces I've been exposed to over the last six or seven years, I still see it creeping back up.

It's very important that I need to keep in check my. fears of insufficiency or lack of confidence or lack of self-belief. How does it crop up? Sometimes I feel like success is a fluke and imposter syndrome of nobody knows that I'm not supposed to be here. I think you've mentioned this as well, the fact that it almost feels like one day someone's going to come out of the woodwork and go, oh, this actually isn't your life. Yeah.

You actually don't deserve this. Yeah, you're the lonely kid by yourself. You're not supposed to be here. Oh, shit, we made a mistake. It's not supposed to be you. It's supposed to actually be that guy over there. And you go, I knew it all along. Right.

This is one of the strange things about the routines that you learn when you're a kid. Because they just seep into all of the sinews of life. And they're so hard to pull out. You know, you can change your approach with relationships at 30 and then 34 and then 38. And you've, you know, you've got perspective. you can at least see them in a different way. There's tons and tons of stuff from childhood that I simply can't remember and yet I'm able to call on this like worldview of acceptance or lack of.

And it's very difficult to deprogram in that way. I've spent a lot of time trying to deprogram stuff. So, you know, for anybody that has suffered with bullying as a kid, that felt lonely, that felt isolated, that feels like they need to prove something to the world, like I feel for you because that's me. And the only way, two ways, I suppose, that I've found that have been pretty successful at helping me.

One has been having an undeniable stack of proof that I am who I say I am. So Rogan calls it building a mountain with layers of paint. Right. It's just one iteration after the next. Right. Better. Better. Better. Better. Better. Each single time that you do something. You can get yourself to a stage where you've disproven your imposter syndrome so many times

in the real world that it just has to, it's crushed under this ridiculous weight of evidence. Yeah. Right. Yeah. There's no way that you could continue to exist. And the other side is to find, find people that just want you for you. You know, this is friends, this is family, this is partners. Right. And if you've got someone who there's no contingency for why they want to be around you. Yeah. That's hard though because they know you as you now. And you now is like, you know, looks like a model fit, popular, has power. because you have a platform. So, yeah, I mean, I understand that, you know, you have changed, but I think you're still the worry is like, I'm still that kid. Do they only want me because of now my position? Right.

And this is one of the problems of success. I think this is why you have, you know, actors that you find out about their entire entourage was pushing them, Avichie, this famous DJ who didn't want to continue playing and all of the friends that were around him, his assistants and his managers and stuff. they it looked like they were pushing him to continue to play because they were invested in that not only were they monetarily invested but that was their status that was their lifestyle that was what they wanted to do and they were prepared to push this guy to this stage where he had to take his own life so you can definitely when you start to gain accolade or success the motivation of the

people that are around you can be called into question yeah and if you've got that framing already that maybe the world doesn't want me for me, you can, what was this, this quote that I heard? A negative mind will find any way to make the world fit his priors. Right. So if you go into a situation, adamant that this is,

that you are unlovable, unwanted, broken, flawed, insufficient, you will manage to warp reality to be able to fit what you already believe. Right. Yeah, that's interesting. You know, I found myself, one thing that I enjoy about your podcast and your style is, of course, the Gagons podcast came out recently last Monday. And I was probably, I don't know, maybe one of the first ones to listen to it.

I was so pumped. It was like, I got to go on a run so I can listen to this. Because when I'm running, there's no distractions and I can just absorb every word. But I found myself distracted too because as Gaggins was talking about his experience and you were, you know, probing and it, had me reflecting back on my journey too, which I think is the beauty of podcast. And there's a beauty of discussion and storytelling, which is what makes this platform so powerful. But it had me thinking of childhood pain, basically. And, you know, I'm 55 years old.

It's just like, get over it, right? But I still think that, man, that you still, I don't know if it ever goes away, but it had me wondering, too, do you remember? as a child, the most painful thing you had to go through as a young man. And I'm trying to validate myself wondering, maybe it's just me. Or do people remember? So for me, there's no individual situation that occurred. It was like a, what's that Japanese water torture type thing?

You know, it was just a consistent, ambient, drip, forehead thing. Sense of. Yeah. And I think, I don't know, I would be interested to look at the psychology behind what happens if someone has a single very traumatic event versus a more protracted, drawn out, suffering. And, you know, I wasn't abused. My parents were great.

You know, we didn't come from a rich place, but there wasn't anything that I was struggling for. Like, weren't poor. I wasn't starving. But I was alone. I was an only child and I didn't have very many friends and I was bullied in school and you can create an awful lot of suffering yourself off the back of that. And I also think, you know, talking about I'm 55, like time to get over it, like fuck that. The priors that you have become the laws of physics that your world exists within.

And if you have a particular type of worldview that you've held for a very long time, that doesn't make. it easier to get rid of. That makes it harder to get rid of. You know, the fact that you can carry a burden with you for 55 years doesn't mean like, oh, well, now it's time to drop it. Right. It's fused into my fucking flesh. Right. Right. It's part of me. No. Yeah. I understand. What came to my mind was, and it wasn't, you know, I had whatever sort of childhood. It's fine. But what the hardest thing for me was I remember I left living with my mind. mom because I didn't like my stepdad, moved in with my dad in town here, you know, from the small town out where we drove yesterday. And then I felt lonely, which is why your story kind of

resonates with me because we moved to Portland. I was on my own. My brother wasn't there. So the thing that I remember being the hardest as my childhood was telling my dad that I wanted to move back with my mom because it was like this divorce thing. It was kind of a pulling back and forth, you know, my mom, of course, wanted me there. My dad wanted to win this little battle, have me with him, and I wanted to be with him because he was my real dad. But then I was just so lonely. And so to telling him, I want to move back with my mom was, you know, kids say crazy things to their parents. They say, yeah, I don't love you. And, you know, it's just kids being stupid and trying to hurt people. But that, I knew that hurt him deeply.

And, man, so as an eighth grade, so probably, I don't know, 13 or 14, telling my dad, you know, I want to move away, man, that was rough because it hurt him. Well, the reason that it hurts you is because you care about people. We were talking about this yesterday, you know. Fundamentally, one of the reasons that we get hurt when we watch other people suffering is that we see the good in people. We don't want to see other people suffer. And for you to be on your own and want to be back with your brother because your brother would be social support, he would be like literal physical support if you're in school.

And you know, you would have your boy back. Yeah. But one of the side effect or byproduct of you no longer being alone was your dad now being alone. Yeah. And you have to say, I mean, this is the person that stays in a relationship because they think that the other. the partner is not going to be able to deal with it by themselves.

This is the daughter or son that never leaves the hometown because the grandma and grandpa are going to be, they're not going to have anyone to look after them. You know, like these sorts of tradeoffs that people have are, they're serious. Like they're not the things that should be snarked at. They're not just simple situations. Right.

They're incredibly difficult because there are, it's like apples and oranges. Like how many lonely nights without your brother is worth your dad not feeling insufficient. Like, how the fuck am I supposed to weigh these two things? Can't win that one. Yeah. Can't make it work. Yeah. The math doesn't work. Yeah. And even in retrospect, you know, you can spend

40 years going back over this conversation with yourself. Yeah. And still not working out. Was that the right decision? Yeah. Yeah. Did I do the right thing? Yeah. That's why I say. It's, it's hard looking back because it's, on one hand, I'm like, you know, whatever. Why am I still thinking about this? But, uh...

It's because you're a good man. That's why. It's because you care about other people and you don't want other people to hurt. You know, I don't, so here's a thing too. I actually don't think I'm good because I know my, I know how my brain works. It's like, it reminds me another thing. Somebody was the other day was talking shit about Goggins. And I was, you know, I have a hard time with that because I feel like, and maybe this is why I'm questioning myself because I feel like some people I mean I've met people regular people who think they are amazing at whatever they do they're the best you know and I look at what they're doing and what they're producing and I'm like you're not the best dude and I saw this guy talking shit about

gags and I'm like what are you this guy influences millions of people do you really think you're looking down on him and you can you have what have you done where you have that where you should be judging somebody like Goggins, right, who has two New York Times bestsellers, multiple world records, a Navy SEAL served his country for 17 years, and what have you done? But this guy is, I think some people get, they over, I guess, overestimate what they're doing, what they're contributing, or are they delusional? So I'm like, you say I'm a good guy. I'm like, I look at myself in the mirror and I know the thoughts I have about, you know,

I'm like, this guy, screw this guy. I know who I really am, so it's hard. And I wonder, can people buy their own BS or are they delusional? What do you think? How do you perceive that? You can manage to convince yourself of pretty much anything. Okay. This is the same as the priors thing, right?

Like, if you have come into a situation, believing that your self-worth is almost always determined by your monetary wealth, let's say. So your parents, perhaps, were keeping up with the Joneses, whether you were younger or perhaps they showed love through presents, Christmas was a huge deal and birthdays were a big deal and it was always about new shoes and new cars and blah, blah, and holidays and stuff, you are going to go into the world with a presumption that that is where your self-worth is derived from. That's no more or less real than anybody else's priors.

It's less effective. And this particular person, if their fundamental source of value is comparison between them and somebody else. Absolutely. To them, that's the physics of their life. Now, they're not the sort of person I want to be around. Yeah. They're not the sort of person that I spend my time with.

But I would be hesitant as you seeing the mean or nasty thoughts or the retributive fantasies that you have about calling this person out or meeting them in an alley or doing whatever, you know? Like, we don't have control over our thoughts in that sort of a way. It doesn't make you a bad person to have bad thoughts. Like, this is what was so interesting about, do you remember Minority Report? Yes. With Tom Cruise.

Yeah. So I always think about that film because it showed what would happen if people's intentions were able to be used to project forward their actions. No, it was actually more complex than that. It was actually able to work out what was going on. But you could imagine a world in which cancellation came, not from the things you said, but from the things you thought. Right, yeah.

That's what I'm afraid of. But that would be terrifying. Some of the things, like, and this is the concern that people have about parents calling or children calling their parents out for the stuff that's said in the home. My dad said this sexist or racist joke in the house. Because what is happening is you are ever more constraining the space within which people can openly think or play with ideas. Right.

And there is a question like, are there some eyes? that are so toxic and brutal that they shouldn't ever even be said out loud, even in the comfort of your own home. For the most part, people would say, no, like there has to be a boundary. Right. But you could push that one step further and say, are there some thoughts that are so toxic that you shouldn't even be allowed to have them inside the comfort of your own head? Yeah. And I would be very hesitant around, you know, taking a sense of self-worth or accusing yourself

of being, I don't know, any kind of person for not, for thinking things that are just a natural response to someone that's being a dick. Yeah. Like this guy is being, he's being a penis and rightly so. But it's about your actions, right? And let's flip it on its head. So imagine that someone said to you, Cam, I really love what you do with regards to your training.

I just wanted to let you know, like, I'm one of the most motivated people on the planet. And you go, wow, like, how does that manifest? You go, well, dude, I think about training all the time. Right. You would say, well, you're not training. How much do you go out and do so? Oh, well, no, I don't actually go out and do any training. at all, but I think about it a lot.

Right. If I flip that round to you and I say, you think bad thoughts and do good things, that doesn't make you a bad person. Right. I see. The actions. Correct. The actions speak louder than the thoughts, for sure.

Correct. Yes. And there was another thing that I learned from Jocco. He had this conversation with Sam Harris like five years ago. I was listening to it in preparation for the conversation I had with him a few months ago. The episodes that we're talking about, we'll put them in the show notes below, the Goggins and stuff if people want to go and check those out. because they were both great.

And Sam was saying that courage or bravery is an emotion that you can't fake. He said that doing the courageous or brave thing in spite of not wanting to do it is bravery. Right. There's no such thing as fake bravery. If you do the thing and didn't want to do it, that's bravery. And if you don't do the thing despite wanting to do it, that's cowardice. Right. But motivation works the same way.

If you do the thing and you didn't want to, that is motivation. It doesn't matter whether you felt motivated or not. The outcome is what matters. Yeah, the efforts are. And the same thing is right in reverse when it comes to being a good person. Like if you do good things with bad thoughts, that's being even more good in my eyes. Thank you. I overcame more because I wasn't starting a zero.

I was starting a lesson zero. It started at such a dick. Yeah, exactly. Okay, good. I feel better. Well, that's a good segue to this wisdom thing. Where have you, were you a boy genius? Did you, were you a voracious reader? What, how did, where did this perspective and wisdom come from? I mean, your podcast is modern wisdom. And I have to say, when I listen to you, I do, I feel smarter. I'm not smarter. I feel smarter. So where did the, where does the wisdom piece come from? Oh, man. I'm just repurposing what other people have said. Like, you know, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Well, no, you have that perspective. The perspective you just had on the thoughts, that seems. But that's taken from Sam, right? Like that's Sam's idea that I've repurposed and I've run with it for a couple more.

I've just developed that across. Well, it could be courage, but then it could be motivation, but then it could be being a good person. So it's a perfect example. Like, I can't remember who it was that said, there are no new thoughts under the sun. And the point there is that a lot of the big problems and big questions that humans ask themselves have been asked already.

Right. And they percolate through. whether that be directly through a quote in a book or indirectly through culture or the way that your parents looked at each other or whatever. You can take these things. They already exist out there. So I don't know. I spent almost all of my 20s dude being a professional party boy. Like the most fun, outgoing, degenerate lifestyle that you can think of. 30 trips back and forth to Abitha, a thousand club nights stood on the front door, met a million people going in and out of nightclubs. Like this wasn't the environment in which that you were supposed to cultivate, I don't know, like a wisdom approach to life. I wasn't asking people about answers to the Fermi paradox around why there's no aliens out there on the front door. It was like, hi, mate, by mate, here's your VIP bandmate.

That was my life. Right. So I don't know. I think the opportunity to learn has always excited me. And the introspection or the curiosity, it's really curiosity, I think. this sort of short answer is just I'm so fucking interested about everything. Right. And other people are as well.

And it's just a quirk of whatever version of the simulation that we live in that I can call that a job, that I can commercialize that, weaponize that, utilize that. Right. And I can then deploy it. And then other people get to learn from the shit that I learned. I was thinking about this last night, because you have a truck, which is very, very nice, but very, very analog. Like there's no self-driving, there's no nothing else. It's like you put your foot on the floor. It makes a big loud noise and it goes fast in the straight line.

That's right. But I was thinking about Tesla's automatic driving, self-driving car system. And I learned about this thing from a data scientist that the reason that Tesla is so much further ahead than all of the other competitors is because it's accumulating more and more road miles to train its own system on. So because they've got this broad distribution. More data. Precisely. And that means that more data.

makes the system better, which then iterates an even better experience, which makes them sell more cars, which means that they get more data, which means that all the way up. And that means that they leave any competition in the dust very, very quickly. And I realized that there is a, it's called a power law, right? So the Matthew Principles says, it's a quote from the Bible, to those who have everything more will be given, to those who have nothing more will be taken. Right. And it explains why success begets more success and failure begets more failure.

Yeah. People hate to hear that, don't they? Yeah, because it identifies that it isn't some ruthless capitalist malign force that's keeping them from success and giving it to other people. It's a natural byproduct of the way that increasing success begets more success. Was a Bible referencing faith? was a Bible talking about more faith because more faith? I think that it was more to do with, at least my interpretation of it, is it's more to do with poverty and success in kind of the social realm.

However, I would imagine, it's the same with everything, dude, confidence. You know, the people who are on an absolute tear, whether this be in the NBA or in podcasting or in art or in music or in whatever, that are just, everything they touch is magic. And it just gets better and better and better. And then you see the people that are on the other side of that hill. And everything that they do just gets worse. And that reinforces their fears about it being the baseball pitcher that's got the yips.

Yeah. Right? It just can't hit anything at all. And what I realized was that the show and my exposure to all of these people, you know, Jordan Peterson, Jocker Willinger, Andrew Huberman, and David Goggins, like all of these different people, has given me the same kind of competitive advantage that Tesla has. Because for each podcast that I do, that's another layer of paint.

Right. As Rogan would call it. Yeah, more data for you to precisely. Know what works, what resonates. More interlinking stories. And that means that when you have a conversation with someone, dude, I've had a conversation with a guy who's trying to re-engineer human DNA to be able to survive space flight because our DNA is very, very fragile,

and space doesn't have the protection of the from radiation that we have here on Earth. So one of the problems that we're going to have, even if you could create the life support systems, you could create a propulsion system that would get us to Alpha Santori or whatever sufficiently quickly, DNA is going to suffer. It's going to be really, really difficult. So, and I'm like, okay, well, who have I spoken to that's got something similar to do with this? And there is something.

And that's where you can start to see, people that look unbelievably competent, the Goggins of the world, someone that has this inhuman level of capacity, and yet layers of paint every single day for years and years and decades, you can see how that happens. Yeah, I mean, I guess your wisdom journey, I'm still thinking about that too, because I was, you're at the nightclub and I'm thinking it's definitely a different path, path than Marcus really is, you know, to gain that wisdom. But and what I was thinking about that is you said, you're kind of repurposing as been discussed before. Just as Ryan Holiday has proven, Marcus's

wisdom is still relevant today. I mean, you read, uh, what is, what is his? Meditations. And it's it's like it can apply today. How? How does that work? But I guess it goes back to your point that nothing's really changed. Correct. Is that right? The fundamental problems that everybody faces are the same they've always been. The original name for meditations was letters to himself. Right. That's what he wrote it as. It was never meant to be published. So you can imagine this, you know, philosopher God King who is trying to be virtuous in a time of massive corruption. He deals with the Antonine plague. You know, this basically a pandemic, which affects half of the Roman Empire or something. And he gets struck down and his only surviving son or his eldest surviving

son is this like party boy idiot who really shouldn't ascend the throne but he because Aurelius was given such a leg up by his mentor he kind of has faith that you can craft a very rough rock into a beautiful gemstone and unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case when his son does come into power but yeah nothing is that particularly new but another thing that I really love one of my favorite things from Marcus Aurelius is the whole year. universe is change and life itself is but what we deem it. Life itself is but what we deem it, the eight most profound words in all the philosophy. What he means is that things are going to happen, you are going to have experiences in life. Almost all of the important impacts of how those experiences

change you are going to be the story that you tell yourself about what that experience means. How you interpret it. So you could imagine that you are, yesterday, me and you had to carry a 72-pound rock up a 1.5-mile hill that's got a thousand feet of ascension. The way that I felt after doing that first leg up a very steep incline was painful but satisfying. I knew why I felt that way, right? The story that I told myself about why my heart rate was at 140, 150, and my shoulders were burning and I was sweating and all of this stuff was because of what I'd done. If I felt that spontaneously sat in a car in traffic, I would call an ambulance.

I think what the fuck is happening to me. I'm definitely having a panic attack or a heart attack or something. So the story that you tell yourself in some regard very much is what's happening. Right. You know, the framing that you place around the present moment largely determines your experience of it. And this is where having faith in yourself, having confidence in yourself, you know, an undeniable stack of proof that you can deal with whatever is put in front of you is super important. I'd like to mention a long time partner. of mine, Mountain Op supplements. I take their products every day and they keep me performing

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I just hope that you have the same level of confidence in your equipment as I have in mine. Because I know if I get one opportunity with my Hoyt, it's going to pay. off. You know, I learned people, they watch things like this and you don't, you don't really know the person. Yeah, you can listen to hours. You can try to interpret what they're saying, infer what they actually mean, who they are, but you don't really know. But how I find out what type of person somebody is is you put a fucking rock on their back, right? And so what I, what I saw yesterday, people who don't know you can make all sorts of assumptions. But what I saw yesterday was, and why I like doing it is because when someone suffers, there's never

a more honest time. You can't, when you're suffering, you can't fake it. It's one reason why suffering, the mob has used torture to, they're going to pull out fingernails. They're going to find out the truth about a person. The military puts their, they make their men suffer because they want to find out who's weak and who's the best because you cannot lie when you're suffering. What I saw yesterday is you were suffering. It hurt. But I liked, I saw a clip, the guys filmed of you. I was watching it last night.

You're going up the hill and you were talking about suffering for no reason, I think, is how you termed it is a challenge. You know, it's not like you're doing a race. It's not like anybody's watching, so to speak. But do you think that suffering is the ultimate truth teller, truth serum? It definitely opens people up. So this is two things again from. Goggins, which people need to go and check this episode out because it was so much fun.

Two concepts from his new book. One is performance without purpose. And the other is chosen and unchosen suffering. So unshosen suffering is going to happen in life. Your parents are going to pass away. Loved ones are going to die. Your relationships are going to break down. Your body is going to fail you.

You're going to become ill or sick or destitute. Things are going to happen that you have no control over. And the only way that you can prepare yourself for unshomes, chosen suffering is with chosen suffering. Right. You can elect to put yourself into a position to become a stronger alloy of whatever the metal is that you're made of. And by purposefully choosing difficult things, you will arm yourself against that situation. It's still going to suck.

But think about how much more fragile you would be if you hadn't overcome all of this stuff. We spoke about this yesterday. Every single person that I know that is incredibly successful in a balanced way and has a good perspective on it, elects to do very hard things regularly. It humbles them. It reminds them that they're just mortal. And it also means that if the entire mainstream media apparatus tries to come down on top of you, let's say, just as a hypothetical, let's say that that occurs that you can deal with it

because you know that you've dealt with a thousand disgusting kettlebell workouts followed by a cold tub or whatever. And then the performance without a purpose thing is from David's new book as well. And I found that very interesting because a lot of the time people need an excuse to perform. They need a race to be working toward a goal, a holiday, a photo shoot, a wedding. Right. And that is what drives them forward. And, you know, that's not nothing.

That's an incredibly powerful, potent motivator. Yeah. It's worked for a lot of people. If you can manage to perform without that, that's real power. Because it means that not only are you going to choose. you're suffering, but you're going to continue to hit close to your maximum performance with no finish line, no crowd celebrating your completion, no glory, no nothing. And that's why, you know, you carrying this fucking pointless rock up a hill with marker pen on it. Yeah. Is with no one there.

That's why that's impressive. That's why that, and that's something that for me, I, as I've got more mature into my training age. I find it, like, I like training with my boys more. I was prepared to push myself harder on my own in the past. And now I like to train with my boys and like throw down and get some metal music on all the rest of it. And that's fun, but it has made me more fragile when it comes to training on my own. I can't push myself as hard.

So that's something, having seen you, having spent time with Goggins, that's something that I'm going to try and reintroduce, like that ability to be self-powered as well as use the motivation of others. Yeah, and Goggins, it seems like he's mastered that because he doesn't post often. So he's doing it every day. You know it his routine. You guys talked about that in detail, and people think that follow him know his routine, but he's a master of suffering on his own.

And I think that's what's given him great power and influence. And it's, you're right, it's not easy. But yeah, I was thinking, too, about Marcus's writings to himself or meditations to himself or whatever that was. And it's like, so my version of that is I wrote poser on that rock. So that's only one word. And I just like thinking about, yeah, people call me a poser. And I'm like, that's all I need.

So that's my version of Marcus's deep thoughts. So Goggins has got a very similar motivation desire that you do. I think I asked him toward the end of the episode, I start saying someone is struggling to do hard things. and he was like, what are the excuses for it? And I said, well, it's cold outside. The couch is warm. He said, keep going.

And he's saying, keep going. And I was like, what? And he says, I need you to keep going. And I was like, this is like a sex thing, David. And I was like, you're hung over. You've had a hard day at work. And he's like, yep, yep, yep. And he's like, that shit there makes me happy.

Yeah. Because I know that everybody else is facing that and that everybody else is going to fold with that. Right. And I reflected on that segment a good bit. And I've also reflected on your like poser thing as well. And not bitterness or resentment, but the desire to prove other people wrong is a fucking potent fuel. Yeah.

But it is toxic. I do think that as much as proving other people wrong is great and useful and can get you a good amount of the way there. I do wonder how much peace you find with that. And I ask Goggins that as well. Yeah. I said, have you found peace? And he says when you go to war with yourself. find an awful lot of peace.

Right. So maybe the only way out is through with stuff like this. But I think we've spoken about a good amount in the car yesterday that I want for the people that do this sort of thing that are going to war with themselves, I do want them to go to bed on a nighttime, having made a sacrifice, having tried to inspire other people,

but I want them to be at peace. You know, I don't care about whether they're happy or not, but I do want them to be peaceful. Right. And it does make me think, like, if I could gift just a little bit more insight around like how much you impact people, the Davids of the world, et cetera, et cetera, just to like, oh, fuck, like if the guys could have a tiny bit more peace. But if you had a little bit more peace, how much less motivation

and discipline would you have? That's what I was thinking of right then, because I also hear, what I hear when people say peace like that is I also see a lot of people say the key is balance. And when I think about that, I'm like, if you're balanced, you're probably not doing shit to stand out. You're going to be very, a lot of people are balanced, you know, they go run a mile, they have a cookie. Yeah. Very balanced, you rewarded your effort. The best, the people I know who are the best of what they do are not balanced. And I don't know about how peace relates to that.

I don't, I feel at peace in the mountains. At home, I never feel, I feel like I don't, I have a hard time sleeping because I'm like, I should be putting miles, doing work. I'm wasting time sleeping. Would you rather life be a way where you were able to sleep for longer, where you were able to take time off the mountain? I don't know. I mean, this is all I really know. I know, you know, sacrificing more makes me, you know, it feels like when you're exhausted, like last night, I'm like, we had a good day. good training day, good brotherhood, love the fellowship.

I felt pretty good last night. I was distracted with thinking about this discussion today, you know, because I was kind of intimidated because this is kind of an aside, but all the preparation you do to prepare, you know, to be at your best podcast wise. And I'm like, oh, my God, I fucking suck. I don't do anything. It's like everything he does, I do the opposite. And so I was a little intimidated, but I was at peace with the effort yesterday. So that's, but that's not balanced. I mean, because it's not.

And this is where I think it's very interesting looking at the sort of inspiration that guys like you and David give to normal people, right? You are in the top 0.1 percentile of people that do hard things, unshosen suffering on a daily basis. And that inspires a lot of other people. But you hear this a lot. Like, I'm glad for the inspiration, but I wouldn't want to. to live that life.

Mm-hmm. And maybe you could almost see it as kind of like how a scout for an army is going out that on their own, you know, they're suffering with wilderness and loneliness and foraging for food and all the rest of it. For the good of the troops. What they bring back is the information that makes the rest of the army better. And that's a fucking noble purpose. That's an incredibly noble purpose.

I haven't thought about that before. Yeah. I mean, I do see because I think, did you ask Goggins or maybe he's talked about being at, I don't know, the suffering? It's like, how can you be at peace suffering? But yeah, I mean. When you go to war with yourself, you find a lot of peace, you said. But here's another thing as well. We spoke about this before we started that you can't take part of someone's life, right?

Someone can't look at you or Goggins and say, do you know what it is? I really like his approach to training, but I don't know when you sleep four hours a night or permanently feel like I should be out there getting in miles. I want Cam's motivation for training, but I don't have to deal with like the permanent ambient discontent around not working harder. You don't get this is an outfit.

This is a onesie, right? You have to take every single bit. You have to take the bad childhood. You have to take the loan. us at the age of 13, you have to take the regret for four decades about the decision to leave your father. Every single bit of you has contributed to make the person that you are. Right. And this is where it's like alchemy, like taking something which is toxic or bad or useless and turning it into something which is positive. That is where the magic lies, I think. And it's the same for me as well,

you know, going from how could I take a childhood where, I was alone and flawed, felt like I was flawed, felt like there was something wrong with me and that I needed to find a way to fix that. I needed to find out why. I would obsess over stuff like why people in school tied their ties a certain way or the type of shoes that they had or the type of haircut they had. Now be adamant that that was the reason that they had a good group friends and I didn't. And it was because of the fact that they were able to socially connect and I didn't. I didn't have the same social skills that they did.

Right. But you roll the clock forward 20 years and that level of attention and introspection has meant that I can have insights that I really value. Right. And then I can talk about them and maybe they help some other people too. So on the bright side of a lot of the things that you're ashamed about yourself for are some of the things that you're most proud of yourself for. as well. You know, it's a double-edged sword. And on one side is the suffering that you've been through

a lot of it unchosen. And on the other side are the things that people praise you for the most. Right. Yeah. It's a rocky journey, isn't it? One thing, my whole point with this podcast is talking to outliers. And that's, I look, I see you as an outlier of, you know, wisdom, of leadership, of perspective. What's your, so you've made this impact. And I see, I see your trajectory. And I see it, I think it's going to skyrocket because you're like, you remind me of Jordan Peterson, but also like a David Beckham type like, you know. Broie Peterson.

I don't know, but what's your goal? Which, I mean, what's your goal? Where are you taking this? I'm really not very good at having long-term plans. And I came from the productivity space. When I first started the podcast, it was big into the world of productivity. And that was something that,

I always felt a little bit like a fraud for because in productivity you're supposed to have your 10 year goal with your one year stretch, with your 90 day sprint, with your daily actions, and this is how you build it up. And I was good at doing the daily stuff, but I just never had a long-term plan. And it's the same with this.

Like, I just don't know where it's going to go. I still feel like the podcast is hopelessly undersubscribed compared with where it could be. Yeah. So that excites me, the fact that we've got more headroom for growth. But I would like to start to really try and pay it forward to people because for a long time, you're slip streaming, everybody else is clout and you're kind of repurposing ideas from other people. And it gets to a stage after a while that you can be a springboard for ideas that you think is super important.

And reminding guys, but girls as well, like that there is so much agency that they can have. They can change themselves so much. If that was the impact that I had where it just gives people a greater sense of control over their own lives, dude, I consider that a win. I mean, it looks like I'm going to start maybe trying to write a book or two

over the next couple of years. Some live shows, I'm getting a lot of offers to do sort of live talks and that really excites me as well. Maybe some products of some kind. I think there's some gaps. Having spent a lot of time working with partners and stuff for the show,

there's certain things, products out there that I wish were out there. and I want to make them, which is cool. It's not really about, it's all just a byproduct for me of learning. So if I can satisfy my curiosity every single day, everything else is going to be fine. I see. So, yeah, I was just thinking about on your journey.

It seems like I see you reaching a lot of men. What's the breakdown on men to women? On audio, it's about 65, 35. On YouTube, it's like 90, 10 or 85, 15. YouTube skews massively male in any case. Right. Why is that? Well, you know, my daughter watches a lot of book review shows.

Those are all girls. But why do you think that YouTube is skewed for men? I don't know. I think it's skewed for men for the type of content that we're putting out. Okay. I mean, call her daddy or whatever girls watch or listen to. It's not like girls don't use YouTube. But when it comes to the personal development stuff,

I don't know. I don't know. The algorithm is a hell of a beast. It just starts to deliver stuff. But, you know, I mean, if you're a guy that's watching endurance racing or slap fighting or whatever, the likelihood that you also get served David Goggins on a podcast is probably pretty high. Pretty high, yeah. Yeah. So that brings me to another point. All the people that I follow, and maybe it is the algorithm controlling my entire life, but these people who are influential right now, and we'll just say Goggins, Jocko, Rogan, is there a common theme? You can throw you in there too as this Ascension up. Everybody is fit and disciplined. Is there people who are not fit and not disciplined? who are influential. Well, think about it this way.

Do you think that the most successful people in the world became successful and then got disciplined? Or do you think that they became disciplined and then got successful? Yeah, obviously the latter, yeah. Correct. Yeah. You know, it's an outcome.

Now, you, that's not for me to say that there aren't undisciplined people that have managed to get super, super successful. Like, we all know that there's flukes out there. Yeah. And I come from that world, right? Like, I came from this reality TV, obligation-free status,

plucked out of obscurity and six weeks later, two million followers and a million pound fast fashion deal, that's the world that I came from, right?

And that is the most transactional, low investment way that somebody can become super famous and successful for nothing. Right. However,

I don't think that's scalable. And the only way that happens is you beat the odds. It's like a lottery. You ever see the hunger games? Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Like it's being plucked out of obscurity and hoping that you're going to be given this opportunity. Right. That's not how most people are going to win. Most people are going to win through discipline. Okay. Correct.

And so, and again, is it the algorithm or is it just the people I'm seeing? But we spoke about this a little yesterday. Those seem like Joe would say he's a centrist, but more right-leaning, hard work-type mindset. I don't know about political. Some of those guys don't talk politics. But who is influential on the left for the, let's say, We talked about we reached mostly men.

I mean, you said 9010 on YouTube, 6535, but that's still mostly men. I'm 9010. Who is having influence on the left for these young, the men that we're talking about? And people characterize young men as many times the power of the company because, or power of the country, excuse me. Because they're the ones building the roads, putting in the infrastructure, building the infrastructure, water and power, going to war. that's young men. That feels like the power of a country. So who on the left is reaching those type of people? I would say a guy called Hassan Abbey, who is a Twitch streamer. He is the, I think, our nephew of one of the founders of the young Turks, Chianga, there's another guy called Destiny,

also another Twitch streamer, like very much from the left. But Destiny especially is a very, very well-meaning guy. He is super open to having conversations. I'm doing a panel with him in Austin in a couple of months time. He regularly goes on shows where he disagrees with people. He, this guy is, he plays StarCraft, which is like a strategy role-playing game, right? Twitch streaming is games, right? It is usually, although there is increasingly people like Hassan who just talk. There's a category called just talking or just chatting, I think it is. Okay. I don't know anything about this. So here's the wild thing. So Destiny does just chatting, right?

He'll talk or debate people. And while he's doing it, he'll be playing this strategy game. So he'll run rings around some of the best debaters in the world whilst taking over a new planet in fucking Starcraft or some shit. It's wild to see. So both of those guys are like relatively okay meaning examples, I think. But you do have a problem, especially if you're talking about men, that the left has mostly abandoned that conversation with,

It is so unpopular to talk about men's issues and to raise men up and to pedestalize them, masculinity and traditional values in any sort of a way that any left-leaning person who wants to try and gain traction online with certain areas of the left is going to struggle to do that because as soon as you, like, where is the firm place that you're going to stand in order to talk about something good from the left for men? You know, as soon as you begin to discuss anything, here's the way it works, what men want in terms of a role that can make them feel proud of themselves and what is popular to talk about in many left-leaning circles, don't align. Right. You have the choice between virtue signaling the effective talking points to the left, or you have things that are aspirational for men to follow. and those don't cross over. Right. And that means that the left largely has abandoned the conversation with men.

Seems like a flaw in the matrix. It's fucking something, dude. And here's the problem. Like for anybody that is under like, you know, fucking half of the country is from the left. Anybody that is a well-meaning leftist, if that was me, I would be very, very unhappy at the conversation that the left is having with men

because the vacuum is, allowing whoever you hate the most from the right to take over this conversation. If you have a problem with Jocker Willink or David Goggins or Cameron Haynes or Andrew Tate or Justin Wallet, like pick whoever your heinous example of patriarchal superstructure is, where's the alternative that you're offering? Right. Yeah, that's a premise to the question because I don't see it. But like I said, maybe I don't know.

I mean, I don't know Twitch. Yeah. But I don't see any, I see a lot of, I don't know, I just don't see any males on that side that I would listen to in like, you know, I felt like pretty open minded. If somebody's making sense, I'm like, okay, I can, I can see where they're coming from. I don't see it. I mean, I don't see it on the left. I don't think that, well, I don't know. Maybe I'm missing it, but I spend a good bit of time being exposed to this sort of stuff.

Mm-hmm. And, yeah, I mean, is it impossible to. like eating meat and shooting guns whilst believing that immigration is okay and that being pro-choice is okay. Right. He was, he was an interesting thing. So Sam Harris as a guy that kind of keeps on getting in hot water a little bit at the moment through a variety of different means. But I always appreciated, and I still do, that Sam is prepared to hold a bunch of views which don't align with any one party, right? So, for instance, he was anti-Trump, but anti-woke.

Okay. He was pro-vax, but anti-lockdown. He was pro-free speech, but he's also, I think, pro-life, pro-choice, sorry. This means that you have all of these crossing over streams that no one is going to be happy. Like, you're going to piss off both sides with your centrist opinion, which falls both ways on different topics. You can be weaponized from both sides. Dude, the best way to guarantee disagreement is to not be in an extreme. If you're out on the extreme, you guarantee agreement from at least one side.

But if you're in the middle, you guarantee disagreement from both. And the problem that you come up against is that he kind of becomes an unreliable ally, right? If I know that you are the cookie cutter, leftist, every single view, I know one of your views. And from that, I can accurately predict everything else that you believe. I don't need to assess you. I know that you're a trustworthy ally because I know that you hold every single belief and you're easy to predict.

But if you're someone that falls left and right on a variety of different topics, well, fuck knows what you're going to... What about when the next social issue arises? Maybe you're not going to be with us. Here's another thing that I realized that an absurd ideological belief is a show of fealty to your own side

and it's a threat display to the other. So let's say that in order to be on the left, you needed to believe that the earth was flat. Right. Let's just say. Okay. What you're saying is I put the value of this ideology so high that I am prepared to push reality and my own senses to the side in service of this.

So it's like a show of loyalty, right? I'm pushing my own rationality out of the way in order to be loyal to this group and this movement. So it is a show of fealty. It's like a branding exercise almost. And it's the same on both left and right. And what that means is that you can judge the commitment of certain people to a movement by the ridiculousness of the belief that they're prepared to swallow. Right.

And if they're not prepared to swallow it, then maybe you're not actually that trustworthy of an ally. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like it wouldn't Trump people be, could they be categorized as that? because they would say they will take Trump and all his flaws to support that side, right? I mean, because he says some crazy stuff. I mean, yeah, you can say, well, he produced and he did a great job leading the country and all this. He said some crazy stuff, but because you're aligned here,

you're going to just absorb all that and just deal with it. Correct. Yeah, you would be prepared to give Trump or Biden a degree of freedom that you wouldn't show to the other side. Right. You know, like you have to treat, if you want to be a rational being, you have to treat each situation with as much rationalities you can find. Right. And you go, okay, well, if I'm going to let, let's say, how many Trump gaffs and like sexist outbursts is worth a Biden alksymic slip up?

Yeah, or shitting his pants. Yeah. Like, how are you supposed to do that? I know. It doesn't work. happily point out the other side's flaws and forgive your own. This is just the nature of biases, right? That's absolutely fine for you to say that I've got my priors.

But then you can't step into the situation and say, coming from a place of reasonable rationality, I have morally reasoned that this is the way that it's like, no, no, it's not. It's not. You are a biased individual, as is everybody, but don't claim that you're not. Do you think it's getting worse in that regard, or has it always been like this? No, it's the political polarization. The data seems to suggest that it's,

getting worse and the a bunch of different reasons for it one that I found which is really really interesting everyone talks about echo chambers online right so you start to engage with the particular type of content and then the algorithm feeds you more and more of that content I had a guy called uh he wrote human compatible dr. Stuart russell he literally wrote the book the textbook which is used in nearly 80 languages worldwide to teach people about how AI works okay he wrote this book about the alignment problem which is how do you get computer systems to effectively align with what you actually want them to do? So there's a thought experiment called the paperclip maximizer. Have you heard of this?

No, I don't. I don't. Of course I haven't. I carry a rock. That's all I do. Well, you might have learned about paper clips while you were carrying the rock. I don't know. You can imagine that a paperclip company manages to create a super intelligent artificial general intelligence, right? Let's just go with me. Okay. And Nick Bostrom, the Future of Humanities Institute in Oxford gives this example where he says the programmer gave it one function and he said make as many paper clips as possible in presumably it seems like a pretty good idea for a paperclip company to give to its new

super intelligent aGI now the problem is that the aGI realizes well first off if i'm switched off i can't make as many paper clips as possible so immediately it neutralizes all of the people that work in the factory says if they stop me from making as many paper clips I won't make as many paper clips right so everybody's tranquilized then it realizes that all of the atoms that make up the planet earth could be used to become paper clips so it just turns the entire earth into paper clips and then it realizes that all of the matter in the entire universe should be paper clips now the function of make us as many paper clips as possible wasn't quite aligned with what we wanted right so here in you can see this incompatibility problem it's called the alignment problem okay and

One of the issues that Stewart brings up in human compatible is with the algorithms that optimize social media content. It's two ways that you can increase the amount of click-through that you get on a social media platform. One is to make the content that you serve to people ever more accurate based on their preferences. Right? So that's where the echo chamber thing comes from. Now, the other way to do it is to reprogram the preferences of the user to make them more predictable. Explain that. So you could imagine that if I am able to shift your preferences ever so slightly over time,

I can know what you are going to want more easily. Right. If you are someone that falls left of center on one view and right of center on another, that's actually quite hard to predict in the same way that we said before. You like this unreliable ally. Whereas if I can push you all the way out to this cookie cutter version of left or right or, you know, libertarian or authoritarian or whatever. It's very easy for me to predict what you're going to want.

So there is a two-way street going on with algorithms. One is it is trying to predict what you want, but the other is it's trying to repurpose and reprogram your preferences to make you easier to predict. Right. And I think that that really explains a good part of what's going on. The social media algorithms have an incentive to push people out to the edges because they're easy to predict one that they're there.

Once you're in there, social reinforcement mechanisms encourage you to behave in a way that is going to be applauded by your side. That usually means the most extreme low resolution take. Like nobody really gets rewarded for nuance on the internet. And then once you are there, you use the other side as a tribal sort of threat display thing. Like, we are not them. We will bind ourselves together over the mutate hatred of that outgroup. And yeah, that pushes people to either side.

It means that it's even more difficult to speak across the aisle. Finally, any show of nuance or subtlety in your viewpoint, it's seen as a weakness. It's seen as a chink in your armor. From the other side, they say, oh, so maybe you're not quite as committed as we thought you were. It's a whole premise behind clickbait on articles, right? I mean, it's extreme. That's just a one sentence or a few word example of extremism.

for whatever the point is, left right or whatever. It's just like, here's what you want. Here's what's important. I mean, take it. And yeah, that, that, so I was thinking about that as you were talking. And this is kind of interesting. Is America the capital of podcasting? I mean, is, you know, there's talking about America is people consider us being elitist sometimes, you know, pro,

what our country, whatever, I guess. I thought everybody was like that. Every country was like that. But maybe I need to ask you, why did you move here? Why did you move to Austin to podcasts? Can people podcast in other countries? Or what is it? Why is it, do I only see American podcasts?

Or is there some African podcast? I don't know about this. It's killing it. Probably. I think the UK and the U.S. and Canada and Australia are leading the way with regards to this just because they've got the best access to language, especially when it comes to podcasting, right? Access to language.

Well, they speak English as their first language. Okay. You know, it's going to be very difficult for someone who is French, right, to be as effective on a podcast that can access all of the people that speak English. I guess I don't know. What is the percentage of breakdown of language? How many of the world? I think Chinese is the most used language.

It'll be English and Chinese. be first and second. Okay. And then probably something around Indian, subcontinentally type stuff. Yeah. But the reason I moved out here is I really like the community aspect that Austin has. Everyone's a cultural refugee from somewhere else.

They were super open to me. But more than that, for all that America is a, you know, disgusting cis hetero patriarchal superstructure that's capitalistically keeping everybody down, you guys have an amazing positive attitude to life. And the blue sky vision that the American dream now is like the after effect of that perhaps, you know, like from the 80s and 90s where it's like really, really fucking potent.

Yeah. Still exists. You know, I face some challenge with regards to work. And all of my friends that live in Austin will just tell me, dude, you got this. Like here's 15 reasons why this is going to be absolutely fine. And here's five solutions for you. That's not to say that there aren't people like that in the UK. But I met, like I say, about a million people, right, over a year, a decade and a half.

And I managed to, from them, distill down a very, very small group of friends. It took a lot of work. I really wish that I could gift people in the UK the level of positivity and the, like, inclination that you guys have over here. That blue sky vision, very pro-social, very outgoing. prepared to deal with things. Why is it? Why do you think it's different? There's a number of reasons.

I mean, where does culture come from is like just a generally an interesting question. The UK is water locked on all sides and it's quite small. The population density is super high. So there is a higher level of competition and sort of zero sumness. Like you see somebody else's success as as detracting from yours because there's just less to go around. I see. That pioneer spirit doesn't exist. You know, our countries exist.

It does do this trees. in our country that are older than your country. Right. And it just means that there's less new stuff, new ground to break. The weather makes a huge impact. I think it's really cold and really miserable most of the year. And it genuinely impacts people's demeanor. There's a whole host of reasons, but I wish that it wasn't that way.

Right. And it's one of the things that I really appreciate about being out here. That, you know, I'll get checked in on by Huberman or whoever, like about what's been going on or just like a well-meaning message about something, which was rarer to find in the UK. There is still even the best most growth-minded people in the world. You know, Stephen Bartlett, this guy that's got a big show, we're buddies and True Jordy, also another guy with a big show. Like, even us, I find we communicate, despite the fact that we're like, you know, the British

wing of podcasting or whatever, even we communicate less than some of the guys that I deal with in the US, just because you're more forthcoming. Some would say, some would say, uh, like, um, overly excitable, but like, I like it. I really, really like it. I've, the excitability of America is like something that I very much appreciate. And this big stiff idiot of a housemate, Zach. And he's like this six foot four, two hundred and 40 pound weightlifter. Yeah.

And he's just like a huge fucking Alsatian all the time. And he's really, really good for me. He's a very good influence. What's an Alsatian? A dog. Oh, okay. You're like a fucking big, fluffy, excitable dog. I got you.

Yeah, I guess I didn't know that breed. Yeah, I was wondering about that, just thinking about, it seems like all the podcasts I know of are America-based, of course, would make sense. But I just didn't know how it worked. But that, that is interesting. And you're at the end of the Oregon Trail. Speaking of Pioneer Spirit, here we are, right? Oregon. What's the Oregon Trail?

That's how they came over. And they explored the new, Lewis and Clark, you've heard of Lewis and Clark. Anyway, those are the people that explorers that came over here on the Oregon Trail and discovered this land. Dude, I was driving through New Orleans, driving to New Orleans three or four years ago. And I couldn't believe, I mean, you look at the fucking landscape that you guys had to get through. Yeah, navigate. Yeah, like going through the bayou. Okay, so it's like a forest, but it's underwater.

and you've got to get, you've just got to keep going and hope that you find something that's not totally useless at the end of it. Like what if this just turns into the sea? Right. What if there's nothing on the other side of this? Yeah. And that's everywhere. Mm-hmm. And you go through, pick any other extreme landscape.

It's just trees that are three feet apart for the next 200 square miles. Yeah. And you've just got to get through them and then try and make a road and then try and make a town and then try and get people to go there. Yeah. It's fucking insane. Not for the faint of heart. No. No.

I was also thinking about this too when I was thinking about your journey. How much would you attribute Joe Rogan to you starting your podcast? Did you listen to him before you had a podcast? Massively, yeah. Okay. Yeah, he was very influential for me.

I think, you know, anybody that's in this sort of a space that hasn't been influenced by Joe as an outlier, the guy has pioneered an awful lot of the way that podcasting has done is an incredibly benevolent person to have at the top. And it's not usually that way. The person that accumulates all of the power and all of the influence is not usually prepared

to give it away very quickly. To step to one side and then allow other people to shine like three or four times a week and not make it about them. Right. And we're very, very fortunate that that's the case right now. And there is a part of me that I don't know is, I wonder who comes next.

I wonder who takes that mantle next because, you know, if we beat the odds two for two, that the next person is equally benevolent and good-willed and good-natured and all the rest of it. Yeah. Fucking hell.

Like, that would be a surprise. So maybe we do end up with like some absolute tyrant dick that now takes over the podcasting crown in however many decades, Rogan stops doing it. Right. But no, he's hugely influential, man. I used to listen to him. I told you yesterday about this drive

that I used to do from Manchester to Newcastle, which was heading home after the bar. Correct. Yeah. So, you know, I'd do, I'd accumulate, you know, 30,000, 40,000 miles a year of driving, almost all on my own. And I would be listening to whoever it was, you know, episodes 6, 700 was probably when I started listening to Joe. Yeah, man, I've spent, you know, thousands of hours listening to that guy. Yeah. And then you sit down with him and it's just the same experience that you've had before. It is one of the easy things, I suppose, about how. having listened to someone so much that you sit down and you have a conversation. You go, I kind of know where this is going.

I've got an insight here. Yeah. Is, okay, so there's a category of people and I would put you in there. What is an intellectual? You know, people say, they'll say Jordan Peterson or Brett Weinstein or Sam Harris. They're intellectuals. What is that? People that think deeply about stuff, I suppose.

There's no reason that I wouldn't put Rogan in that category as well. The only difference is that he does a lot. People look at intellectual as a think and not a doer. But Joe thinks a lot. He also just does a lot. And the same would go for Goggins. You know, he mentioned it on the podcast. He didn't put it in the book.

I wonder whether if he does a third book, whether we'll talk about this. He's got this like sweet, I think he calls it a garage of garage. Whilst he's earlier, I got that. I caught it. You like it. You said it. You're obsessed with whilst. I've never heard it.

It's awesome. You were screaming it. We tried to go for dinner yesterday and you were screaming at the top of your lungs. I don't know about screaming. Yeah. That was what was happened. The survey came over and said, sir, I need you to stop shouting that word. I think that it's people that think deeply about problems is how I would look at it.

It's the most like broad definition that I could think of. But I really like the idea of this do. philosopher situation. You know, somebody that doesn't just think about stuff, but then goes out and acts it. And you go back to the ancient Greeks that they didn't think you were supposed to just consider. You were supposed to act.

You know, you were supposed to wrestle. You were supposed to feel the extremes that your body could go to as well. And doing hard things mentally is good, but doing hard things physically benefits that. They complement each other maybe? Absolutely. Yeah.

Okay. You know, there was an art. I can't remember what was it was in New York Times. I'm not sure, but it was called the intellectual dark web. Do you remember that article? Yeah, yeah. And who they put in there? That's where I was like, what is an intellectual really?

You know, and what's this dark web? It's like, what did you think about that piece? Yeah, I think it's interesting now because it's kind of like a loose, that was a loose conglomeration of certain individuals that had a good, amount of clout within the thinking talking space and now the band has broken up and none of them are friends really there's a couple of them that are still friends but basically none of them are it was uh brett weinstein uh eric weinstein sam harris ben shapiro jordan peterson rogan was in there douglas murray was in there maybe barry weiss uh i think dabe reuben was in there

and now like half of the people don't speak to half of the people yeah and a bunch of the people don't speak to any of the people. So when that came together, it was a cultural moment that was needed because you had to have a show there is a way that certain individuals who do not necessarily disagree, do not necessarily agree with regards to their politics

can have a well-meaning conversation, right? And this was the height of woke, you know, it was kind of just before BLM and everything kicked off. And you needed to be able to show Ben, who is as conservative as they come and Brett who was from the left and Jordan who was a little bit more centrist and Dave Rubin who used to be on the left and you know blah blah blah you had all of these different

people within Sam Harris who's you know sort of swings both ways they were all able to have a conversation and the point of that was to try and turn down the volume of the conversation this you know partisan echo chamber right versus left thing that was going on and for whatever reason that experiment didn't end up going particularly well in the long term. It was effective in the short term. But the fact that it still sticks about is really interesting to me. And I'm not really too sure why. Like, you know, that was one article.

Nobody, as far as I'm aware, unironically self-referred to themselves as like this Avengers fucking group of intellectuals. And then it kind of, you know, pitted out within the space of 18 months or something. And it was never really used that much during the 18 months in any case. And yet it's still spoken about to this day. So there was something culturally important about that. Whether you agree with the people or not, whether you liked it or not, whether you thought it was cringe or not.

You can't deny that it stuck about as a term. And I do think that there's something interesting about that. I'm not really too sure why it's the case. But it was needed to just turn down the volume of the conversation. Why do you think that they were to now they're not as tight as they were? Some of the people you mentioned. It's beyond not as tight as they were, man. I mean, Sam, in a couple of most recent episodes,

he did one with Josh Sepps, and he's had a couple of others where he just outright calls out Dave Rubin for being like a dense idiot. He says that Brett Weinstein, he can't speak to him anymore. He's like, this person's lost his mind and that person's. And Sam's kind of a burn it all down, socially kind of guy because he's got his own thing going on. And he's like an individual with regards to that.

I think one of the problems that you had there was, ostensibly what was supposed to happen with the IDW was people were, from differing points of view, were prepared to have conversations where they all disagreed. And that happened, but it only happened up to a point. And then a combination of Trump and COVID pushed the limits of how much these people could disagree. And still be on the same page.

Yes, precisely. And the problem that you had was, whenever you set yourself up as being as having a particular standard. So for instance, with David Goggins or yourself, right, you guys have positioned yourselves

as the do hard things people, right? And then if somebody finds out that the do hard things people continue to shy away from doing hard things, they'll go, ah, I got you,

I got you, you prick. That's your hypocrisy, yes. And one of the issues you had with the IDW especially was that it was the, we talk about things

that nobody else can talk about in a well-meaning way people. So as soon as soon as, as soon as there started to be cracks and splinters in that, that was the hypocrisy that got pointed out. I see. Even if, you know, they might have maybe come together had they have not had so much scrutiny on them, I kind of get the impression that it was doomed from the start. But he was one other thing that I realized that was really interesting.

This is from the happiness hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt. And he talks about why people love scandal so much. And this is certainly something that I see online as well. hypocrisy is like catnip to the internet. Right. And the reason that I think that that's the case is that if you call out somebody else's hypocrisy or their lack of ability to keep to their promises, what you do, the subtext of what you're saying is,

I would never. I would me, I would never, I would never behave like that. I stick to my word. My virtue is impeccable. I am the most honest and trustworthy person. So what happens is this sort of performative outrage allows your morality to stand on the shoulders of somebody else. You get to feel moral whilst having done nothing moral to earn it. Right.

And this is why I think the internet is so prepared to call out hypocrisy. It's like purpose built for the internet because all that you need is two clips. Yeah. First clip, someone making a preposition. Second clip, somebody breaking it. Right. And you go, look at this. Look at this.

And the subtext of that is, I am not that. All of my views are perfectly aligned. You don't need to worry about me. But let's have a look at that person over that. Yeah. And then if you get a reputation of being the sort of person that calls out people that do that, people then want to call you out on your inconsistencies. Yeah.

Which is why starting fights on the internet is, like doing outright call out is a relatively dangerous thing to do. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's going to come back around. It's open season. Yeah. As soon as you decide to do that, it's open season. You need to be incredibly strategic.

Huberman actually had this really fucking interesting take. I put it in my newsletter this week. And if anyone wants to check that out, by the way, there's a reading list of 100 books that I absolutely love. And you can get that at chriswillex.com slash books. But I put this quote in from Huberman. He's a really interesting guy because he kind of purposefully avoids... Drama.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He doesn't really even engage in talking about why he avoids drama, but he... He's always positive. I mean, if he's talking about anybody, there's always a positive spin to it. It's sickening, isn't it? Yeah. Advice I got early in my career, don't overengage in any controversy unless you are willing to stake your entire reputation on it.

Rather, keep focused on discovering new things and creating or else you become known for the controversy and nothing else there is no going back. Right. Do you want to be known for the things that you do? Or do you want to be known for the takes you have? Right, exactly. I want to be known for the things that I do. I think the people who choose for the takes is they're not doing.

anything noteworthy, right? Wouldn't that be the argument? Well, it's very easy to do that. Now, there are people who have great takes and also do things. Yeah. Like, that would be, and it's impossible to be in the fucking podcasting world and be like, oh, I don't want to be known for my takes. It's like, dude, you are your takes.

Yeah. But on the flip side, if someone is able to both do and think at the same time, that's, that's good. Yeah. Huberman is, man, he's a unicorn to us. I was explaining this yesterday is like, normally people as smart as him, they're nerd out. I can't understand what two nerds

talking to each other are saying. But he talks at my level, it seems like about smart things. And I'm like, oh, okay, that makes sense to me somehow. I don't know how, but it's because how he's delivering it.

It's a, that's a skill that, man, not everybody has, especially, you know, what is he, a neuroscientist?

Yeah, I think that's his qualification from Stanford. Yeah. And so he came here and lifted weights like a dumb ass like me. And that was kind of cool. How can someone,

somebody be both. Yeah. It's pretty amazing. Yeah. You learn about ophthalmology or whatever it is that his specialities in and they come in here and crush you on the deadlift. I know. But that's,

you know, this is what attracts people. And this is why as well, I think that shows like Joe's and hopefully mine and yours are interesting and attractive because most people aren't just interested in one thing. Most people aren't just a neuroscientist. They aren't just a weightlifter. They aren't just a film nerd.

Yeah. You know, they're idiosyncratic. They've got tons of different. interests and things that they want to maybe they've got like a secret ultimate frisbee like obsession or something they just love watching motocross accidents or whatever in youtube like one of my friends says if you want to find out who somebody truly is look at their youtube watch history between the hours of 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. at night like that's that's a window into the soul that you're never going to get um people are interested in lots of things which means that when you see someone

which is multifaceted as well, like a huberman. You go, oh, yeah. Like, he's like me. He's not just one thing. He's competent in multiple things. He's got lots of different interests. And that's why I think shows that facilitate those sorts of conversations are effective as well. To me, it's inspiring because, you know, you can say somebody's good at this one thing.

It's just like, well, that's all they do. But when they are multifaceted and they're varied and they offer different skills and can communicate effectively, then you're like, Like that, to me, that's inspiring. It's like, I want to be like that. I want to be the dumb ass that carries rocks. But I also want to be able to write and impact people. And to me, that's why he's inspiring.

Who inspires you to, you know, obviously Rogan, but to step up your game? I mean, where do you think you're impacted most by who? Joe was definitely a big impact on me. Dude, I take stuff from everybody. I mean, Sam, for all that he is like very, very unpopular at the moment with a lot of corners of the internet, because he's had like a three or two or three like big fucking foot in mouth moments, at least that's what he's being accused. I think he stands behind what he's said.

Right. His ability to speak is as elite as it gets. The clarity that he speaks with, the precision that he speaks with is world class. And I'm yet to find really anybody him, Peterson, They're so fucking precise, man. Yeah. And that's something that I very much admire. I know we've been speaking about some of the, like,

training that I've done to try and improve my. I put you in there too, because every time I see you, every clip I see of you, I'm just like, God dang, this guy's polished. I mean, so whatever you're doing. But so is Andrew Tate, man. Andrew Tate's ability to communicate, regardless of what you think about the things that he says, the way that he says it is fucking elite.

Yeah. That guy's verbal agility is phenomenal. It is. And that's one of the, you know, let's say that you're somebody that doesn't agree with his takes, right? Even a little bit or a lot. What Tate has identified is your ability to speak in a fluent and seductive manner can carry you a hell of a long way. Right. And especially in a world where everybody feels quite uncertain, if you speak in absolutes, that creates a little bit of order from chaos.

because for me, I'm sure for you as well, the world's changing very quickly. We don't know whether the rules from yesterday apply to today. Technology's changed to everything. Society's changed to everything. Laws and norms and everything's up in the air. So when somebody comes along and says, this is the way it is. I can give you a black and white explanation of why, of how, of what. I can tell you everything.

You go, fuck, thank God, thank God. I'm not this certain about anything in my life. Therefore, in order for me to have the level of certainty that he does, I would have to know everything inside out. You know, you observe your own hesitancy from a front row seat every single day. And then you see this person come out and say, I've got the answer. And you go, fuck, he's got the answer. Like, he has to be right.

Yeah. Yes. And that's why I think that he's particularly being effective. But dude, I'm a real, admire Tim Dillon, Jesus Christ. Yeah. That guy's ability to tell stories. Incredible.

Chris DeLier as well. You know, he's someone that's, again, is going through the ringer a little bit at the moment too. But that guy does solo podcasts with nobody else in the room and maintains a level of energy for 60 minutes or 90 minutes. And you're like, holy fuck. It's incredible. Yeah, it's phenomenal.

And these guys are performers, but they're all different, you know? Like, you know. Can that be learned? I mean, do you think? It certainly has been for me. Certainly has been. The difference between when I started my show and now is worlds apart.

And it's layers of paint. You know, it's 600, it's probably a thousand hours over the last five years of trying to have conversations about hard things. As a kid, you couldn't communicate very well. So I was always like gobby, we would call it in the UK, like talkative. But I didn't have anyone really to talk to. You know, I was playing. playing in my room on my own listening to audio books.

Yeah. There's this really cool story about a famous color picker. So she was used by interior design companies, elite interior design companies and fashion houses to create color wheels, right? So these beautiful color palettes of different shades that complement each other. And there was this interview with her, and she was asked, how have you managed to develop this incredibly unique skill to become the most sought-after person in the world at the...

She said, well, I've got no formal training. I've got no formal training. However, my parents, when I was about 11 or 12 years old, got me the biggest Crayola crayon set that was available, and I used every single one of them down to the end. And I think a lot of the passions that we have when we're a kid come back around to be the things that we want to do were an adult. And for me, a lot of it was audiobooks,

so being a room on my own listening to them. And you roll the clock forward by 20 years, and what's the 20-23? equivalent of an audio book. Yeah, podcast. Yeah. So yeah, I think it can absolutely be learned when I see the difference in myself from just the time and detention of doing stuff, focused work on trying to be precise with your speech. And it's made everything better. It's made my social anxiety less. It's meant that I'm able to be more me. You know, your ability to communicate. in a large degree determines other people's experience of you.

You know, you can be whatever you feel you are. There's an essence, right? There's like this sort of cloud that is you. Yeah. But that needs to get squeezed into language. Some sort of communication, unless you're going to do sign language or something, a fucking interpretive dance.

Like you need to communicate what is inside of you to everybody else that's around you. Language, yeah. And for the most part, language is going to constrain that. I think it's Wittgenstein that says, the limits of my language mean the limits of my life. I see.

And the broader your vocabulary, the more precise that you can put across what it is that's inside of your head, whether that be written or spoken or whatever, you are more yourself. If you can say that there is a restriction between what's in your mind and what comes out of your mouth, you're being less you. You're bringing an imprecise version of you. Do people who can't get that out their mouth, could they be a good writer, though? Perhaps, yeah. But even that, you know, you need, there has to be a way that you can.

can communicate it, whether it's from brain to hand, brain to fingertips, brain to mouth, you have to be able to communicate it. And if you can't, you're going to go through life living this limited version of you. It might be tormented, because if your mind is saying, telling you one thing, but you can't get it out in word or in language, in writing, yeah, that would be miserable. Did you write as a kid? Did you write? No, I did five years at uni. I did two degrees, both of which were useless. Yeah. And neither of which I can remember. But I didn't write for any other reason. Now I do and use that

thing I said earlier on. And I love it. It's maybe 90 minutes a week. It takes me to two hours a week. I absolutely love it. I love sitting down and writing and going through it's great. I haven't seen, is it your thoughts on different topics? Yeah, so I do maybe 500 word reflection on something that I've learned each week. This week was about the effectiveness of sexual gossip between women, like why they use it so much. So women gossip way more than men.

Right. Loads more than men. The interesting thing about sexual gossip is that it is a precision targeted weapon to reduce down the competition that other women see in their competitors. So amongst women, chastity is something that is valued by men, right? that on average you want to make that is less promiscuous than one that isn't because of male parental uncertainty you need to make sure that the kid that comes out if that woman is yours therefore if you have a woman who is sexually less open you would presume that there is a greater likelihood now the thing and that's subconscious correct none of this is none of this is front of brain um no one's reverse

engineering this apart from the evolutionary psychologists that have on my show who have like you know laid this all out right but the thing about sexual gossip the person that deploys the sexual gossip is by first off identifying, I'm really worried about Mary because she's spending all of this time with guys. I'm just really worried that she's going to get hurt. That is a very caring way. It's called venting.

It's a very caring way to put across, Mary's a whore, don't go near her. But the other thing it does is it displays your own chastity. The subtext of, she's going to get hurt. It's precisely. Yeah. Yeah. And it's very difficult to displace.

prove how you like look at all of the sex I'm not having like sex is inherently private so anyway like I did 500 words on that and then I'll have three lessons that I learned each week which I put on my Instagram which you might have seen before so that gets taken actually from the from the newsletter but just building up this variety of outlets to repurpose the shit that you learn is brilliant where where did you learn that about women I mean where'd that writings come from that was a conversation I heard with Dr. Tanya Reynolds, who is an evolutionary psychologist focused on intracultural competition from the University of New Mexico. I had her on a couple of weeks ago.

She was great. And I'll just, you know, each week I'll have a conversation. I'm like, fucking hell, that's great. Yeah. Just reflect on it. Precisely. And it's the Feynman technique of memorization is the best way to learn something is to teach somebody else it.

So my training partners that I have in Austin, like my housemate or whatever. I'll usually read for maybe like 15 minutes or 20 minutes on a morning. Yeah. Then whoever it is is going to get it. Whatever I've read that morning, I'm going to try and for five minutes while we're in the car on the way there before we put rock music on to get a samptop. Talk about it. I'm going to try and tell them. And it just means that it's such an unbelievably good way.

Even that, even trying to explain about the sexual gossip thing now, that's just refined it a little bit more than my mind. Yeah. You know how we were talking at the start about performance without purpose? learning without purpose is quite difficult. Why would I go through all of the discomfort of learning all of this stuff if I wasn't going to have an outlet to display it on? Right, okay.

You have sheer curiosity. Plus your incentive is you want to be able to share it to your listeners. Yeah, so having a platform in that regard can actually be one of the best vehicles for personal learning that you can have. Yeah, that's a good point. I used to learn in college and I would go through, I would just, I would have to write everything.

So I could read it. That'd be one thing. But if I wrote exactly what I read, writing it cemented it in my brain. Yeah. Oh, okay. Exactly the same as me. I would take whatever the thing was I was learning, the slides or the book, write it out in paper, and then I would learn it off by heart. So let's say I had eight pages and I would read through all of it and then close my eyes and trying to remember.

remember every single point. And then once I'd done that one, I'd move on to the next one. And then when I got into the exam and some question about an accounting principle came up, I'm like, right, okay, I know that's on the one, two, third page, top of the third page. Oh, and that was the one where the asterisk was like a little bit fucked. So I had to do it again. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And so for me, I didn't really learn anything. I just kind of memorized for a short period of time, get through the test, good to go. Correct. Now I have no idea what even anything was. Me and you both. I'm interested to hear your thoughts. on masculinity. And this book, Wild at Heart by John Eldridge, is a book Michael Chandler talked about.

And he had a great quote in there. It's on my podcast there. But we spoke about this yesterday. And I wanted to get your thoughts on masculinity and how men in society these days. But let me read this paragraph to you. Again, out of wild at heart, this is page 38 by John Eldridge. This wonderful, terrible creature should have been out roaming the savannah, ruling his pride, striking. fear into the heart of every wildebeest, bringing down zebras and gazelles whenever the urge seized him. Instead, he spent every hour of every day, of every night, of every year alone, in a cage smaller than your bedroom. His food served to him through a little metal door. Sometimes late at night, after the city had gone to sleep, I would hear his roar come down from the hills. It sounded not so much fierce, but rather mournful. During all of my visits, he never looked me in the eye.

I desperately wanted him to Wanted for his sake the chance to stare me down Would have loved it if he took a swipe at me But he just lay there weary with that deep weariness That comes from boredom Taking shallow breaths rolling now and then from side to side For years after living in a cage A lion no longer believes it is a lion

And a man no longer believes he is a man So it's creating this link between a lying in a zoo in a man living, a existence of boredom in a house. So what's your thoughts on masculinity? And why, is that why Tate's message of what being a man is, is resonating so much because so many people are like that lion in the zoo with no feeling no purpose or not knowing what the role is?

What do you think? I think that definitely contributes to it. Yeah, I think that, Finding a firm place for masculinity to stand is very difficult in 2023. One which is publicly applauded, which personally feels fulfilling, which aligns with some biological predispositions that you have, which isn't going to be accused as being toxic, which isn't actually perhaps dangerous to the people that are around you,

whether they be, you know, other citizens or women specifically. Like, it's a difficult needle to thread with all of these different things. And for someone like Tate to come in and say, I have the answer. It's traditional roles. It's masculine dominance. It's prestige. It's success monetarily with women sexually.

It's seductive because it's a kind of a low resolution view. But it's one that aligns with what a lot of men kind of feel inside of them. Now, there aren't many men that are traditionally masculine that have said, this isn't the way that men are supposed to be. What they've said is that this is an uncivilized way for men to be. This doesn't align with what society in a developed world is supposed to behave. This is like going back to a more ancestral view, a dog-eat-dog kind of world. Now, the problem that you have with masculinity at the moment is, as we've said,

there are very few proposals for what masculinity can be, which is agreed on by all sides. Like tell me, tell me one principle, which would be agreed on by both left and right. Let's say one that should be agreed on by both sides would be something like bravery or courage, right? Like the ability to protect, preserve, provide. Well, that seems like you could be pandering to women. Or women not able to protect themselves now? Why did they need protecting? Maybe it should be men that shouldn't be so predatory that women don't need to be protected in the first place.

What about provide? Well, you're telling me that women can't earn their own economic independence? Oh, you want women to stop going to university. You want women to stop being in the workplace. You want women to just be domestic prostitutes. Right. No. Like, there is a way for anybody on the internet to find a problem with any proposal of masculinity right now.

It's not the same necessarily with femininity. Right. And, you know, biologically and reproductively, women are more valuable than men, as it's called women are genetic. plays things. You have more geniuses and you have more retards with men. Like that's actually what happens. The average IQ is the same, but the distribution is much wider. So you have super geniuses and you have guys that lose. You have more men that are CEOs, but you have more men that kill themselves or go to prison. You have, you know, more male superstar athletes, but more men

that end up being shot. So men are the playthings in that regard. And that makes it difficult, man you know you have for all that you could point to men that are doing incredibly well in CEO positions and say look at how fantastic the life is that they're living and you go yeah but look at the fucking bottom end of the distribution yeah they're not having a great time I've heard that example too like you're looking at a very small percentage of successful men you know that say well some people say well all CEOs running multi-million dollar companies are all white men. And it's just like, so it's white men have all the advantage. But you're not looking at all the white men killing themselves or in prison. You know what I mean? So it's a, I get people do,

they make a lot of assumptions. I know one thing, Tate does mention too, and I've read this in the book, in this book too. And it's also, sometimes I think Tate gets a lot of his material from the Bible itself. And, and, um, yeah, Quran is true. Um, but they talk, Where men, they don't so much need love, they want respect. Like if they had to choose between love and respect from their mate, from their, from their wife or their, their girlfriend, they would choose respect. And men aren't really love is whatever. Just respect me when I come home. I'm willing to die for you.

If somebody broke in the house, I would die to protect you. Just respect me. And if men don't get respect, that's when they, that's when problems come up. Women need love. They want to be loved and adored and everything else. Men, different. Interested in your take on that. So I had a psychotherapist called Adam Lane Smith on my podcast,

and he has dealt with attachment issues and depression from both men and women for decades. He's been a clinical worker. And he said that male depression gets treated like female depression. Men are made to feel loved and accepted when all they want to do is feel capable and powerful. and he used this example of the Blitz in World War II. So the Germans are coming over and they're bombing London.

And before the war started, there were these psychiatric wards and they had patients in. These patients had been catatonic for you, totally comatose, unresponsive. And the nurses would come in, feed them, roll them over, to clean the bedpan, wash them, leave them again. These men, mostly men, had been completely unresponsive. Then the blitz starts. And bombs are being dropped.

And one of the problems that you had was that a lot of the men had already been taken off to war. They were already working in jobs. A lot of the women were also working nurses, all looking after kids down in bunkers and in the underground trying to protect them from the bombs. So there were fires and there were injuries all over London. And there were ambulances and fire engines. And there was no one to drive them. These men who had been catatonic for five years and a decade got up. Rose to the challenge.

Put their shoes on when I'd starred and started driving fire engines and ambulances. These men that had been unresponsive for years and years and years. Because they had purpose. And that's what Adam said. Adam said that give a man a purpose and the ability to achieve it and he will crawl over broken glass with a smile. And I think that feeling capable and powerful and competent and respected and admired is something that will get a man so far. You give a man those things and he'll deal with suffering until the ends of the earth. We're designed to do that.

We're designed to suffer. We're designed to deal with that suffering. But it needs to be in service of something. Yeah. You know, the man that suffers and doesn't have competence, capability, purpose, respect, meaning, admiration, that's a man that's depressed. That's a man who is alone and struggling and may take his own life or may take his own life. or may become increasingly useless

to the potential partner in society around him or may become radicalized, you know, in one form or another. And a man who is able to do things well is useful to everybody around him. One of the problems that you have is because there is a very small but pretty vicious cohort of men who do bad things to other people and women, especially, in the same way as you said, you know, 90% of CEOs are white men, therefore all white men are having it great.

Yeah. You know, whatever it is, like 0.1% of men or 0.05% of men are something, commit sexual violence acts. Therefore, all men are predators. Right. If in order to make a society where a very small cohort of men is no longer going to misbehave, you have to make all men sedated and useless, what do you want? Like, what is it that you want? And this is a really interesting question.

So going into my evolutionary psychology obsession at the moment, there's a dynamic called Young Male Syndrome. And Young Male Syndrome describes a society in which there is a large cohort of, unmarried, childless men, usually young men. This happens sometimes if there has been selective breeding, if women or if parents for some reason have chosen to have more male than female sons. You're seeing this in Japan and China at the moment. Or it could be if there has recently been some sort of catastrophe,

which has affected women more than men. Perhaps it was a cold snap and women were able to fend off this sort of cold little bit less effectively. And throughout history, when you have this preponderance of men, also another one will be what's called a gerontocracy, which is where polygynous relationships and mating is reserved only for the older men. I see. And the younger men would tend to have to go through a bunch of trials and tribulations and

stuff. And it's until you get to 35 that you actually are allowed to mate. Well, it's the young men mate on the side in any case, but they resent the older men. Basically, you have a large number of men. young men. Now, when you get into a relationship as a man, your testosterone drops. When you have children, your testosterone drops again. What this means is it reduces risk-taking behavior amongst men. And this would make sense. If you now have to provide for first a wife and then kids, don't try and jump off that cliff and say if you don't die. Because if you leave

behind some kids that aren't going to be able to defend for themselves, that's not good for your genetic line. Right. So men's risk-taking behavior goes down when they get into a relationship and have kids, which means... Testosterone goes down. Yes. Yeah. Which means that if you don't have many married men or and or men with kids, you have a greater increase in risk-taking behavior and testosterone.

Men who are between the ages of whatever, like 17 and 28, let's say, just going around causing havoc, pushing over granny, graffeting walls, and sometimes creating populist uprisings. You know, this is the classic, like, gang mentality. situation. The problem that you have at the moment is we have the highest rates of sexlessness amongst young men, I think ever in history. The number of men reporting no sex in the last year has tripled from 8% to 28% from 2008 to 2018. Roll that clock forward the next four years through the pandemic. I honestly think if you see a man on the street between the ages of 18 and 30, you pointed at him, there would be a 50% chance that he hasn't had sex in the last year. That's not

good, right? And what's that, what's going to happen? What's the result of this? So most theories would suggest that you would have increasing societal instability. You'd have three things, individual happiness drops because no matter how much of a hardcore men going their own way, like Red Pillar you are, there is a good amount of evidence that suggests having a companion, having friends, having connections is correlated with every outcome you want. Happy. lifespan, health span, longevity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So people individually are going to be less happy. Societally, it should be less stable because of this young male syndrome that we've spoken

about. You have less reason to buy in. Yeah, if you don't, if your misses isn't going to keep tabs on whether or not you're fucking up the local gardens at night or whatever with your friends because you're just like played football or whatever it is that you decide to do. And then civilizationally, you've got birthright problems. The one that we're talking about is the societal stuff. So we know that we've got increasing rates of sexlessness amongst young men.

Yeah. But we haven't seen this huge preponderance of in-cell killings. You know, that's not to say we haven't had none. Like Elliot Rogers and blah, blah, blah, most of the killings that do happen are coming from disaffected young men. But given that we've got as yet unseen rates of sexlessness, where are all of the terrorist events? Yeah.

And my theory, which is the male sedation hypothesis, is that men are being sedated out of their status-seeking and reproductive behavior through porn and video games. I think that they are getting a titrated dose, just a little trickle. And medicated, didn't you? Yes, medication as well is also happening. I think I saw you put that up the other day. Correct, yes. So that's from the newsletter. 2,000 hours a year.

Men between the ages of 18 and 30 on average pay 2,000 hours a year a video game. and a good chunk of them, at least 50% of them, are doing it whilst on prescription meds or on weed. So young male syndrome, right, and this is a perfect example of what we were talking about earlier on. Let's say that there are two versions of the world, one in which the traditional young male syndrome of populist uprisings and dangerous men and stuff occurs,

and the other one in which you've got my sedation hypothesis going on. Given the choice between the two, I would rather have men not be causing havoc and burning down buildings, but only by a little bit. Like you have got an army of useless, sedated men who are not contributing to society. They're not working jobs. They're not innovating.

They're not driving GDP. And every year that they continue to do the things that they're doing, playing video games whilst on weed, they become less and less of an attractive mate for the sort of partner that we drag them out. of that in any case. So you have a choice here between men who are dangerous but competent or sedated but useless. Yeah. Tough choices. Fucking hard, man. Yeah. Yeah. Like, do you want, do you want the risk of uprisings whilst you, if you do need them to do something,

they're there to do it? They're available. Correct. And this is the, this is the problem. You know, this is Peterson's whole thing. Like you'd rather be a warrior in a garden than gardener in a war. that you need to be able to have competence and danger that you voluntarily control because a rabbit isn't by its nature good, it's simply weak. Right. Yeah. That's a good point. It also reminds me, I've read that, you know, years ago, college educated kids were

60, 40 men to women. And now it's 70, 30 is some of the stats. So women are being more educated. Men are whatever, I guess less of a byproduct of a higher education. And so, yeah, we flipped that script on that. And the intentions were good because, hey, have women been oppressed? Who knows? But there's a concerted effort to get more women educated, college educated.

And now it's reversed. And now, I mean, it feels like, I don't know. Is there an ebb and flow to everything or are we going too far with some of it? So when Title IX was introduced, which was to try and improve the number of female college graduates that you had, that was 50 years ago. And the percentage point gap was 13 percentage points, right, between men and women. The gap is now 15 percentage points in the other direction. Right. Nobody, nobody at all. And I spoke to Richard Reeves, who wrote a great book that everybody should check out called of boys and men.

He's looked at this. He's like a policy wonk from Washington, D.C., also a fellow countryman of mine. And nobody thought that in 50 years, this trend would blast through parity and swing back the other way. Nobody thought that this was going to happen at all. So, I mean, what do you do when you have ever-increasing numbers

of women that are going to college and university? Well, I'm just considering it with your example too. So you get the less capable men who, you know, that's an unrelated issue, it seems like. And now the women and less men going to college also. That's like men taking a big hit. Oh, dude, it's a ton of elves. It's elves everywhere for men at the moment. Structurally, the three main areas that Richard looked at was education, employment, and fatherhood.

In employment, the male. labour force participation has dropped by 0.1% per month, every month since 1950. Eighty-seven percent in 1950, down to 68% now, and by 2040, it's going to be 65%, which will be an all-time low. You have two men, three women for every two men completing a four-year U.S. college. No, in fact, it's, yes, it is, three to two, for every two men completing a four-year U.S. college degree. and, you know, is it right that we should give everybody as many opportunities as possible?

Yes, absolutely. Was it the case that women's access to education and employment had been restricted for a good amount of time? Yeah, it was. You know, they didn't have the same level of opportunities. But the problem that you have is this ever-increasing cohort of high-performing women are now competing for an ever-decreasing cohort of ultra-high-performing men.

You know, the stats on Tinder suggest that the bottom 80% of men compete for the bottom 20% of women and the top 80% of women compete for the top 20% of men. Right. So the top 20% of men, if you do get yourself into that cohort, quite rightly a commitment of us, because they've got just this wealth of options in front of them. So they use women because why not?

You know, men are not going to say no to many, many women. Right. These women become bitter and resentful. They retreat from dating into a boss bitch career lifestyle, which for some women is right, but I would argue on average for most women is not what they necessarily want long term. Right. This big cohort of men here down the bottom, they become lonely and resentful, and they just retreat into porn and video games.

Yeah. So it's not really, it's not really fantastic for anybody. And it's not even, I think, that fantastic for the, you know, the Andrew Tate, like, hustlers university crowd. War room. No, I don't think that it's great for them either because, like, do you really want in your 50s to still be slaying pus? Yeah. Like, is that really, and dude, this is my, like, this comes full circle for me. is someone that lived that lifestyle, the nightlife thing,

all of the values that I was told that society should, that I should care about, you know, the social renowned and all the girls knowing your name and all this sort of stuff. Mm-hmm. Maybe for some guys that are more differently inclined than I am, that is the pinnacle of what they want. But for me, it's not. Like, you know, I look forward to having a family.

I can't wait to have kids. I can't wait to be a dad. Yeah. Like I want to do that. that's part of my life path. And I don't want to have a family whilst, you know, sneaking out, even if it was with the allowance of my partner, to like go and what?

Fuck some like 25-year-old bird. Like that's not what I want to do. Some people grow out of that. And evidently some people don't. Or maybe some people kid themselves that they don't want to. But it's not good, man. It's really, really concerning. And I think that trying to find a firm place for men to stand is really, really important.

raising men up without dragging women back. Right. It's a very difficult situation to get ourselves into. Well, especially given the, you said, extremes on both sides, you know, nobody's working together on this. It's super adversarial. It's a feminist, crazy feminist, and then the toxic masculinity. Correct.

And so coming up with a solution is almost impossible with those two camps. I mean, how is it going to work? But so are you feeling pressure yourself to find, a mate to find somebody so i've got i'm i'm in a relationship and uh i very much enjoy the like calm piece that i found in that uh we're a very good match and yeah i i i do feel the to a degree i do feel the pressure of um all of these sort of competing values and pulls in different directions you know it is even for whatever you want to say about Tate's message,

it adds more options into the water for like, oh, well, maybe it should be the case that you should convert to Islam and try and have four wives. Like, that's not my path. But every time that a new narrative gets added, the path becomes a little bit less clear. Thankfully for me, I've always known that I wanted to be a dad. I've always known that I wanted to have a traditional family.

But even I can see from having observed it from the outside, I'm like, wow, this can become really, like, difficult for people. And I think it's going to take a lot of work to try and turn down the volume of the conversation between men and women to make this effective again. Yeah, and I think, you know, I remember being in your position and then being where I am now,

and it's the challenge I always had was your wife, mate, partner, whatever you want to call it, doesn't necessarily need me to go carry a way, you rock up the mountain every day. It just wants me home. Just, you know, just be home. You don't need to be this. So you have these goals of you want to make an impact.

You want to be this communicator. You want to be this messaging for, you know, what you're passionate about. Then that competes with time for your spouse. You know, so they just want you around. You have these goals. That's always, that's hard. You need to find somebody who aligns with your desire.

for life. You know, I think I see this very well with Kish and Goggins. Yeah. That she is just there to help him be the best version of him. And him being the best version of him allows him to show up for her in the best way as well. Right. You know, the tiny amount of time that I've got to see. Yeah. Those two together. That seems to be the dynamic of that relationship. And yeah, man, but it's difficult. Like as a, as a driven guy with high capacity and goals that you want to achieve in life, do you want to sacrifice that fulfillment existentially for fulfillment in terms of a relationship?

And the goal is obviously to find a partner that allows you to do both that takes pride and respect from the hard work that you put in. That's the dream. But for a lot of people, they struggle to find that kind of a partner. Yeah, that was, you mentioned respect. again like your spouse would have to respect your hunger and your drive and your passion for whatever and yeah I mean for me what I always wanted to do is yeah did I need to go run all these miles should I have just been home with the kids but there's also this other flip side of maybe I'm not

home but I'm also showing them what hard work can result in and be in the example and that's I've always I've struggled with that because I, you know, do I need to leave the house at night to go run in the rain? Yeah, I mean, is it subconsciously telling, showing my kids that it's going to take hard work if you're going to stand out? Setting an example is a pretty good way to, I mean, dude, your kids are beasts. Like, in the nicest way possible, they're fucking freaks. Like, they do things that nobody else would do. And that's because of the values that have. been inculcated from yourself. There's probably people though that would would say that they had the same goals I did

and then it didn't turn out. Their kids weren't. Their kids struggled. Their kids had abandonment issues. Their kids, their dad was never around. So what makes an effective like parenting style is so like who the fuck knows, man? Yeah, I don't know. You know, so there's a field of behavioral genetics, which is how your genes, what you

inherit from your parents biologically impacts your outcomes in life right so it's anxiety alcoholism depression happiness set point uh IQ fucking shoe size everything right and at least 50% of pretty much everything that you are isn't determined by your environment and it's not like it's just oh you take father plus mother and your a combination of the two there's all manner of weird versions of you sitting inside of sperm and eggs and it can come together and it can be oh well it's not you, it's actually your great, great, great grandpa who happened to have this weird quirk. And you go, you know, you as the get hard things lift rock, like keep hammering guy, could have some creative fucking grandfather who was an artist or a musician. And you're like, where the fuck did

this musician kid come from? Yeah. He has a friend, Dr. Stu McGillie's the number one back pain specialist on the planet. He's got two sons and a daughter. He is a very hard, big, mustached Canadian man who has spent his entire life doing science and hard things, built his own house, phenomenal human, very, very powerful guy. One daughter became a ship captain. You think, yeah, I see the alignment there. The other son became a doctor and like a building, something to do with architecture, I think, again, like I can see the line.

the third son went to theatre school and became this unbelievable I think he did dance like some sort of dance or maybe ballet or something like that he's a savage but it's very different and I go where the fuck did that come from so you just don't know the outcomes

that you're going to get and I mean parenting styles is something that part of the reason I can't wait to have kids is I can't wait to learn and go deep on parenting but I don't think that you get to choose that the best that you can really do with regards to kids is set a good example, be there for them, you know, instilling them the values that you think would be effective. There's not really much else that's left to do. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, I mean,

I think I struggled with my first son, maybe got a little better, was pretty easy by the time my daughter was born. But I'll be between there, I was 20-some years old to 30-some years old. You change as a person and, of course, as a dad. So, yeah, it's a, I don't know. It's very interesting to me. The last topic I wanted to touch on, and I know you've mentioned it before, but you had a thousand days of no alcohol. I was interested in what you learned from a thousand days of no alcohol. And was there such a benefit that it made you not want to ever drink again? Or what was that journey like? Yeah. So the UK is a big log-alout culture, especially if you're

if you're a young guy from a working class town like I was, you know, I went to a uni and I went to a, what's the class, there's a red brick uni, so like a high, high class uni or whatever. But even that, like, it's just a, it's a drinking culture. Yeah. You know, everybody gets smashed most nights per week. And that was my life. Not only was I doing that recreationally,

but that was also a good amount of time that I spent at work. You know, I was monetizing this alcohol culture in the UK and contributing to it as well and encouraging it. And then I got sort of 23, 24, training really started to become important to me. So I dialed back my partying and I'd maybe only party once every couple of weeks and I'd work a lot and then it got to 27, 28 and I'd had this sort of epiphany out the other side of the reality TV stuff and I thought, fuck, like I need more time. I need more consistency. I felt like I would make good progress and then I'd get the Friday

afternoon it which is this compulsion to like just be a degenerate and get on it with the boys, which is fun but I knew that I needed more time more money more energy and more consistency if I wanted to make the changes that I needed to like fundamental changes to the way that you see the world are really really hard to do and if I was resetting my progress every two weeks because I was spending a day hung over in bed or a day and a half hung over in bed or whatever I wasn't going to get anywhere and I was sick of this like groundhog day style two steps forward two steps back two steps forward two steps back. I was never able to hit a streak with meditation or reading or make any fundamental changes because I was just like shaking the etcher sketch every couple of weeks. So I thought,

right, well, what happens if I go sober for six months and I'll see if that impacts my performance? And I loved it. Like I found I had basically an extra, you know, day every two weeks free to myself because I wasn't getting drunk. I had better consistency. That started to compound over time. went back to drinking for a little while didn't really enjoy it didn't have the six months went back to drinking after that for like two or three months

didn't really enjoy it and then was that right fuck it I'm just going to do a thousand days and that was incredibly impactful for me because it gave me focused consistency I think

going sober is the most effective competitive advantage for most young people to do because it just gives you so much more mental clarity and ability to be consistent. What you're doing when you choose to drink is basically electing to have a self-induced illness for a day every two weeks.

Like if this was, if this came from outside of your own choice, you would fucking hate whoever this person was. You would feel like it was a, like torture. Like it was a, hang on. So you're telling me that whatever it is, like 7% of my life is going to be spent like this. this is agony but because it's you

and because it's a right of passage and because it's like a byproduct of a fun night the night before so yeah I did this thousand days sober and it was great coming out the other side of it my relationship with alcohol which was already very balanced right

I didn't have a problem with alcohol I wasn't dependent on it at all I just wanted more from my life but the strange thing about going sober is that it's a very odd pursuit to do if you don't have an addiction alcohol is the only drug where if you don't do it, people assume you have a problem.

Right. I've heard that. I've heard you say that and that does make sense. It's true. It's very odd. Actually, the other one, I did realize after I said that, that caffeine is probably the one. It's like, I don't drink caffeine.

You go, what? How? But with alcohol, you know, you'd speak to any, especially working class person in the UK and it's like you've claimed that you're Jesus or something. Yeah. Like, what? How do you? Surely not.

No, are you okay? Never? I'm absolutely fine. Yeah. Thank you. that's been changed a little bit. What's called the low and no movement, low alcohol,

no alcohol is really taking up steam. Heineken Zero Zero sponsors all of the Formula One. So, you know, it's obvious that they see a massive opening in the market for it. But then I did the thousand days and I was like, right, okay,

well, I'm going to go back to drinking. Dude, I'm such a lightweight now. Like my, my alcohol tolerance is through the floor. And the main thing that it's done is it's stopped that, desire to go out and party hard

because that was inculcated from work. And a lot of people will feel this that your right of passage, the stuff that you do is a young guy, going away on holiday, going to Vegas or doing whatever. Like, that's what you bonded with your friends over. Yeah.

And that's cool. But, you know, you used to play with power ranges when you were 11. Right. You don't play with them anymore. Right. Like the tools,

yeah, the tools in the, experiences that formed you when you were younger aren't necessarily the ones that will serve you when you're older. Yeah. And yeah, I also didn't like the idea that I used alcohol to give me social confidence. And one of the reasons for that was that I was in social situations that I didn't want to be in. But I was able to sedate myself out of realizing that I didn't want to be there by just getting drunk. Everyone knows this situation. Your misses, says that we've got to go to such and such his birthday party and you know that they're boring as fuck so you've got to go but you're like right

it's fine I'm just going to get drunk and if I get drunk then it'll be okay but you never end up asking yourself the question of why am I allowing myself to go to an event that I don't want to spend my time at yeah and you sedate yourself out of that problem right so I did that came back to drinking but it's very rare very inconsistent I would be maybe you know every month or so for me it's rarely like if I go on a plane like if I'm going on a long trip yeah the the air hostess comes over and says you like champagne so yeah yeah yeah I do want a champagne. That'd be, that's nice.

Gotcha. But it's very limited. And then I did 500 days without caffeine, which I haven't done a video on yet, but I'm going too soon. And that was very interesting because I realized on the other side of the fence to alcohol, most people are propping up their confidence with alcohol.

And most people are propping up their fatigue with caffeine. And Alex Holmosey, one of my friends, has got this great quote where he says, if you can't perform without it, it stopped conferring a benefit. Right. That makes sense. Like you're no longer being assisted by caffeine.

You need it in order to be able to perform. Yeah. And the problem that you have there is nobody ever stops to ask themselves, why am I tired at 11 a.m. Why do I need caffeine at 11 a.m.? I've been up for four hours. What the fuck is wrong with me? Shouldn't be tired. But because you can paper over the cracks with the caffeine, you never end up saying,

well, maybe my sleep routine's not so good. maybe I'm actually spending too much time on my phone. Oh, maybe I'm not actually eating while or whatever it is. And people don't even say I'm tired. People say, I need a coffee. Right. Hang on a second. So you've supplemented your level of fatigue for the caffeine concentration in your blood.

And it's just, it's another eye opener. I really like this whole sort of sovereignty agency thing is like a big deal for me. I think it's because I didn't feel like I had a lot of that when I was younger. And I don't like anything having control over me. any substance, any anything. And I wanted to, okay, club promoter, a thousand days sober, Roger that. Yeah.

Okay, guy that used to stay up until four in the morning, three nights a week because he had to work and is now trying to be productive and write and do podcasts and stuff like that. No caffeine, 500 days. Yeah. Away we go. Right.

And I learned an awful lot about sleep. I reset my caffeine tolerance. I didn't have headaches. I didn't have withdrawals, which was fortunate because I know a lot of people do, especially people that go hard on caffeine. Yeah. But I would highly, highly recommend that everybody do that.

Like both of them, the two substances that people, I think, are, they sneak under the surface without people realizing. Yeah. If you're taking opiates every night to go to sleep or if you're smoking weed, it's not hiding in the dark. Right. Like, it's front and center. You know what's going on.

Alcohol to be able to get past your group of friends that aren't actually your friends, they're just drinking buddies. Or to put up with the boring events that you take yourself to or to deal with your lack of social confidence, that sneaks under the table a little bit and then the same thing for caffeine. Yeah, I guess how I've, you know, some of it is just me wanting to justify to myself.

But alcohol, the things that I cared about, alcohol wasn't helping. You know, I wanted to be more fit. I wanted to be more disciplined. I wanted to be the best bow hunter, the best athlete. And alcohol was always a step backwards on all those things. So it's like, this is what I care. Caffeine hasn't, that I've noticed,

been a step backwards on anything. Yeah, I might, maybe I would be sharper if I got a little more sleep, but it hasn't been like the huge silver bullet that's just killing everything that I want to do. So alcohol definitely was. I mean, that thousand days sober was intriguing to me just because alcohol, I did have a problem and it was, I wouldn't be, I wouldn't be who I am if I would have kept drinking. That's how powerful it is. So I was interested in your journey there on that. But yeah, I mean, such a powerful drug. I mean, it's an acceptable one and people don't realize the poison that it is. I think with regards to your use of caffeine, man, like what you're doing if you were trying to do that without it would be very difficult. this is how people can become reliant on stuff

and it not seem like they are. You know, if you wanted to do the RX plus version of whatever you're already doing, it's like, okay, how much can I just start to dial that dose back just a little bit and see if I still perform? That being said, with alcohol, everybody kind of has it in the back of their mind that it's not really good for them.

Yeah. man, people get fucking upset when I start pointing out their use of caffeine. They get really, really upset. You fucking piece of shit. Who do you? This is because you've got no joy in your life because you don't have a coffee first thing in the morning and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, hey, whoa, hey, I'm just saying that I think your life could be a little better if you needed less caffeine in order to be able to perform the way that you do. And the problem that you have is because it's not, it's not socially unacceptable.

You can't go out of the office at midday and have two pints and come back in. Right. Right. But you can happily go out and get a quad shot vanilla fucking supercharged rocket fuel bullshit. Are you talking about me? Come on now. You got me one yesterday. You might have noticed I actually only drank about a quarter of it yesterday. I did. It would have taken my fucking face off. That's why I started vibrating. You're like, right, man. And we're just going to stay nice and steady with that front arm. Like, dude, this is my entire body at the moment. It's like at 1,000 hurts. Yeah.

However, I think that just assessing, like, how much do I rely on stuff? And this can be for anything, right? How much do I rely on social media in order to be able to distract me when I get bored? Why can't you sit with boredom? Right. How much do I need to use television to calm me down on a nighttime? Why are you not calm? How much do I need caffeine to be able to wake myself up?

How much do I need alcohol to calm myself down, blah, blah, blah. Like, all of these different things. Symptom of the cure, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I mean, I'm, I just wanted to cap this off by saying how thankful I am, Chris, that you came out here. I know Oregon is the middle of nowhere. And, you know, to share the lift, run, shoot experience my life with you is, is powerful for me. And before we go, one of my favorite things to do is expose people to the world of archery and hopefully bohunting at something. day and so I'd like to welcome you to the bow hunting brotherhood here's your bow man this is so fucking cool and you shot it great yesterday it was amazing dude I shot a a balloon at 50 yards I know with this first day ever shooting a bow within two hours three hours yeah it's Wayne the wizard for

you this is so beautiful and I have a ton of friends in Austin that are going to absolutely hate the fact that you've given this to me because I'm now going to be able to compete with them on whatever it is they do. I mean, this is just for a second, look at how much of a fucking weapon this is. It's a beautiful. It's so cool, man. Beautiful piece of equipment. I can see why you guys get obsessed by it. Yeah, definitely. It's phenomenal. And this is just, you know, what a beautiful way to cap off what's been an awesome few days. Yeah. Well, for me, building the Bowhunting Brotherhood is, that's my mission in life. It feels. like because bow hunting has changed my life. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for bow hunting.

I'd still be out in that little small town we went and visited yesterday. So it's had a life changing impact on me. And that's why it's, I feel like it's, you know, my mission to share that impact with others. And that's, I'm very thankful you came out and you, you were mastered it so quickly. I mean, shooting so well and just being at the bow rack and then capping that off with the training and the lifting. It's like, man, best day ever for me. Thank you. First Light Farms has been a great sponsor of the podcast because bottom line, not everybody gets their bowl every year. So some people's freezer isn't filled with elk meat. For people like that, they want an option of how can they eat elk meat that's great tasting and really as close to a while as you can get because if

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