Mark Bell's Power Project - Young Men Are Struggling, the RED Pill is NOT the Answer - Chris Williamson || MBPP EP. 873

Episode Date: January 24, 2023

In this Podcast Episode, Chris Williamson, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about where the Red Pill community are wrong, and where they make valid points. This as well as how Chris navigated going from big time Club Promoter to having a very successful podcast.  Follow Chris on IG: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx/ Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisWillx  New Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://hostagetape.com/powerproject Free shipping and free bedside tin! ➢https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!! ➢Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject to save 15% off Vivo Barefoot shoes! ➢https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off site wide including Within You supplements! ➢https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order! ➢https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori! ➢https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep! ➢https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en  Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

Where does this idea of the modern wisdom podcast come from for you? And what's the word wisdom mean? So I was wanting to start a podcast. I wanted an excuse to be able to speak to people that I thought were interesting. And I just needed a name. It was going to be called Mind Over Matter or Crushing a Tuesday. Crushing a Tuesday is a quote from Tim Ferriss, which I actually quite like, the idea that it's like the most normal average day of the week. mind over matter or crushing a Tuesday. Crushing a Tuesday is a quote from Tim Ferriss,

which I actually quite like, the idea that it's like the most normal average day of the week and you're still supposed to crush on that. Not hump day or anything like that. No. And it just happened to be that one, it's the only time in all of my years and years and years of trying to build businesses

that I woke up in the middle of the night with a flash of inspiration. I woke up at 3 a.m. and I was like, modern wisdom, that's it. Checked, hadn't been registered and just went to town with it straight away when it comes to wisdom i think being able to accurately predict the impact that your actions will have in the real world like just being able to make good predictions about what's going to happen being able to understand yourself and the world around you um it's a combination of timeless insights it's a

combination of um adapting where we're at now with your nature with what's preset with agency and sovereignty and stuff like that it's it's a blend of everything and for me i just wanted i felt a a tension between the modern world and uh what was passed down sort of traditional insights and i wanted to try and work out a way to blend those two things together. Are you in search of something in particular, you think, in talking to these different influential people? It's changed over time. So for me, when I very first started doing the show,

I was still coming out the back of a long career of being a club promoter. And that meant that because I hadn't been sleeping particularly well you know 4 a.m finishes two or three nights a week I always thought throughout all of my 20s I thought I had depression I was just adamant that this low mood once every two to three months I would be kind of bedridden with existential dread for you know two or three days. And then I'd get back out of it. And I just thought that that was me. I thought that was my demeanor. I have like a little bit of a history of depression further up in my family. It's pretty heritable. And then I realized when the pandemic happened, that was the first time in my entire

adult life that I had a stable sleep and wake pattern ever from the age of 18 i'd never gone to bed at the same time every single night for longer than like six days right because i was a club promoter and yeah i was very good what i did with the company that i ran was very successful but you've got to pay the price and the price is being awake until two three four in the morning two three four nights a week and the byproduct of that was suboptimal sleep suboptimal mood and then because of when you work really really hard at this i was having what i didn't realize at the time but turned out to just be like burnout i was getting burned out and and having a miniature little breakdown uh and i would feel guilty the really strange thing about it was

that i would feel guilty about feeling sad and not being able to get out of bed because ostensibly there wasn't anything wrong. There wasn't a – I remember I went to my GP in the NHS and I said, I think I might be depressed. I was maybe 24. It took a good bit of courage for me to go and say that to some woman, doctor, lady. The male denial of mental health problems is pretty fucking strong and uh yeah i i went and i spoke to this lady and she said uh what's going on in

your life i said no like i run a successful business i'm just finishing my second degree i don't have any money worries i don't have any relationship worries and she says well what about this what about this what like is there a problem with your family, with your finances, with your blah, blah, blah? And I was like, no. And she said, oh, I don't really know. There's not really much that we can do. There's a one-page printout

about how mental health works, like toddle on. And the long story short is that I was struggling with working out who I was toward the end of my 20s, having achieved a life of renown and whatever, like status and success in a way that modern society might tell a young man that he's supposed to achieve it, you know, with accolades and like transactional relationships with people and women and stuff like that. But I didn't find it fulfilling and I couldn't work out why. And at the beginning of the podcast, that was one of the reasons why a lot of the conversations if people go back

and listen to any of the early episodes a lot of them are around mental health a lot of them are around like just really trying to understand me why am I struggling to connect in this way why am I struggling to feel so good about myself and that's grown over time now, you know, the last 18 months or so, especially since I moved to Austin, dude, I feel it's a different person. Like my demeanor is different. The texture of my mind is different. And this isn't just from changing my sleep. It's a thousand hours plus of meditation. It's reading, it's training, it's more sunlight, it's better friends, it's more friends. It's better friends it's more friends it's a job that i existentially care about all the way down but you know to anybody that feels like they've

got lock-in with the way that their nature exists like i couldn't be more different the the inner texture of the way that i feel couldn't be more different than it was only seven years ago and from the outside seven years ago coming off the first season of Love Island with the director of one of the biggest events companies in the UK, it would have looked like, well, what have you got to complain about? And there was so much headroom for me to improve. My wife's got a lot of questions about Love Island, but before we get on with that, you also practiced a thousand days of removing alcohol. I'm a fan of like a cascade of disciplines, like things cascade downward from something. In this case, maybe you were cascading in like a negative fashion, staying up late, not getting enough sleep, drinking alcohol.

up late, not getting enough sleep, drinking alcohol. What do you think was the overarching thing that was causing like X, Y, and Z and then making you believe that you may have been depressed? So it wasn't the alcohol. That wasn't really a problem for me. I never had any dependence on it. Um, I think it was a combination. The bad sleep was such a fundamental contributor to it, and I didn't realize. The World Health Organization considers any type of shift work as a health risk now. So if you're a nurse, if you are a gas station worker, if you're a firefighter that works shifts,

or a police officer, or anybody, that's a health risk. And I just saw it as life. So that was a big part of it. The sobriety I actually did as I was coming out the back of being the sort of big name on campus club promoter guy. And I wanted to make all of these changes. And the problem was I didn't have enough time or energy or consistency to be able to focus on making real change.

Now, everybody knows how hard it is to stick to a diet or a new meditation habit or a new year's resolution. And then you add a hangover on top of that. It's basically impossible. Like it's an insurmountable task. So what I was doing was I was doing all this good work for maybe 13 days. And then on day 14, there would be a good party on. So I'd go out and I'd party and then I'd come back and I'd be hungover.

And that was just, you know, two steps forward, two steps back is for a lot of people, especially in the UK where there is a big drinking culture, you know, that's 30s, 40s, 50s, and that's still the way that they live. And they're like, why am I not making any progress? every fortnight and you have done for decades now so by cutting it out i did six months sober then came back to drinking for a little bit didn't really enjoy it did another six months came back to drinking for like a month and a half didn't really enjoy it said right fuck i'm just gonna do a thousand days and see what happens and it was that was the catalyst to a lot of my personal development not that alcohol was getting in the way but that by removing it it opened up one day out of every 14 and it gave me all of the consistency to actually compound so it was it's a huge competitive advantage for any young guy who is in their 20s that is wondering why they're not making the progress that they

should they're a conscientious motivated individual but they still like to send it every couple of weeks take that out for six months and your life will change drastically yeah you drink it all now uh very rarely like maybe once a month um i don't mind if i fly back home to the uk and the air hostess comes out with a glass of champagne or whatever you like champagne mr williamson i would like a champagne actually thank you um that's cool um but i haven't i think once in all of 2022, I like had a proper send. Me and Zach went to a DJ set that one of my friends from the UK was playing over in Austin. And that was it. So that was like one time that we went properly hard. So I had one hangover in all of 2022.

And I'm such a lightweight as well now. So it reset my tolerance too, for alcohol, which was great. It's also made me, and this is something that I need to speak to maybe a dietician about, very intolerant of alcohol digestively. As soon as I get onto spirits for more than like two or three drinks, I get such bad discomfort. And spirits are specifically what type of alcohol? Gin. Gin. Gin for me.

Okay. I'm curious about this, man, because when it comes to your progression, right? Your 20s, you were a club promoter. You were probably having a lot of sex. You were successful monetarily. You were living the kind of life that a lot of young men would look at and be like, that's what I want to be able to do. I want reverence from women. I want reverence from other men.

I want to be known. And I want the freedom to be able to have casual relationships that I want. But for some reason, you didn't find that to be fulfilling. Now, why did you make that switch? Or why do you think you have gone on to, because like right now you are in a relationship with a single person and a lot of people that are young, young men would look at that and be like, why would you do that? You're in your mid thirties, you're successful. Why would you settle down with a single person? Why would you waste your time with that? I've been to the top of that mountain and the view from up there isn't all that good.

It's not that worthwhile. And I don't know, maybe for some some tell me about i've been married a really long time walk me through this mountain of pussy for a little while give us a detail of like what life was like like how like well even that i was in relationships for most of my 20s right so i was in and out but i wasn't i wasn't a particularly good boyfriend to those girls, which also makes me feel pretty guilty. I like taking pride in being good at the things that I do. For me, the way that my constitution works, I take so much more pride in being virtuous than I ever did from running through girls. So for me, it makes me feel much more fulfilled to be a good boyfriend

that I can genuinely say that i'm proud of than to like add another notch to the bedpost that it's just it really is mostly meaningless and for the people who have maybe been in a committed relationship for you know 10 or 20 or 30 years or something and look at this free and easy world of Tinder and hookups and stuff. First off, the actual act of going through with one night stands, like the anticipation of it might be quite interesting. But there's a lot of like, okay, so now we've finished having sex. And what am I going?

Are you staying? I really don't want you to stay. Or if you're at somebody else's house, you're like, right, okay. So there's this sort of strange lonely looking as i recalled uber ride home yeah exactly through the net curtains as the sun rises on a gray november morning or whatever it's just not it's not that it's not the fucking like dan bilzerian hookers and cocaine night that you think it's going to be even if it is the reality of that isn't as good so So yeah, I just, I don't know. It was all part of growing up. I called it a manopause that I got to the end of my 20s

and realized that my training wasn't the way that I wanted it to be. I was getting out of breath going up a set of like stairs because I was just being a bro. So I switched to training CrossFit and doing Muay Thai and boxing and stuff. And I tried to take genuine care of my health.

I changed the things that I cared about that people valued me for. I tried to take genuine care of my health. I changed the things that I cared about, that people valued me for. I tried to be a better friend. I tried to be a better boyfriend. All of those things. And I prefer the person that I am now. It's not for everybody. Like I don't think that Andrew Tate

is going to like come out of Romanian jail and decide to like recount his approach to running through tons of chicks. Like that seems to be something that genuinely gives him joy. And who am I to say that it doesn't, but for me it didn't. And yeah, that was a change that I'm glad I made. So along with that, when it comes to kind of what you did, it's put forward as like, this is something that many men will be able to do. And like when listening to, I guess, Red Pill content from guys like Fresh and Fit and other people that talk about this, like Rolo, they put it for like, you know, as you develop or whatever, you're going to be able to do this. And it doesn't seem like most men are going to be able to live that type of lifestyle.

So it seems like they're being fed a dream that they're trying to continue. They're going to try to continue to seek out, but they won't be able to live that type of lifestyle. So it seems like they're being fed a dream that they're going to try to continue to seek out, but they won't be able to live out. What do you think about that whole idea that they're trying to put forward? I think that one of the issues you have, if a small number of high-achieving men capture almost all of the attention of women, but treat those women in a poor way, which use abuse leave behind perhaps that leaves a trail of broken hearts

behind them that other men then have to try and fix and pick up one of the problems that you have with the current state of men's advice when it comes to dating is that a few small number of men benefit from the advice because it teaches them about the fundamentals of dating dynamics which isn't nothing but it also encourages them to run through a ton of chicks which means that some men benefit at the expense of most men that isn't a net positive for me you leaving this trail of broken hearts in your wake doesn't scream virtue or integrity like for all that you can look at sex at dawn by christopher ryan and say that you know humans aren't meant to be men like high value men aren't meant to be with just one woman it's like dude 95 of relationships throughout all of human history have been monogamish right it's like serial monogamy so it might not have

been one person for life but it was one person at one time we didn't have enough resources that we could accrue up until 10 000 years ago to actually be able to support any more than you you were desperate for food desperate for resources trying to hold on to survival every single winter when there was a cold snow dude there was an ice age like what 13 000 years ago now what do you think and during an ice age that you guys were just slaying bear puss like fucking feeding them snow and shit like no obviously not so i think that yes it is a pipe dream for a lot of men to run through women tons and tons and tons of them and like as a guy who's been in the trenches of that world the reality tv the dating shows all of that sort of stuff. I know guys that are still doing it right now and love their life. Great for them. But for men that are like, fuck, why is it that I continue

having transactional relationships with women and I don't feel this like, I don't know, Genghis Khan level of conqueror satisfaction? Well, maybe that's not for you. Maybe that's not the case. And there's a quote from Naval Ravikant where he says, it is far easier to achieve our material desires than to renounce them. What he means by that is that you have to tick the box of a lot of things before you can transcend it. Like it's transcend and include, right? You have to do the thing to know that you no longer need to. Like if your most recent car is a beat up Honda Civic, it's easy for you to drive that if your last car was a Ferrari. Because you're like,

I know what it's like to do a Ferrari. Or one of my friends was a pickup artist for ages and I asked him why and he said it's because when I'm with my future wife, I never want to have to look at a Brazilian chick

and wonder what it's like to fuck a Brazilian chick. I just want to have all of the different boxes ticked. Because once you've done that, you can transcend it and include it. So maybe every guy needs to go through a fuck boy phase or a large cohort of men need to go through it but um this was uh uh andrew schultz's contention when he brought fashion fresh and fit on the show he was like i think that you guys are going to grow out

of this um and schultz is a guy who is very happily married now trying for kids all the rest of it that guy could run through as many women as he wants but he that's not what's right for him and to point at him and say ah yeah but it's because of his blue pill beat a cook mentality he's getting older and going lower in testosterone you know that's why

it's all of the seed oils that he's having okay bro like maybe or maybe it's different men have different priorities and different men can take satisfaction from different places that project family how's it going now we like to look good in the gym and out of the gym uh that's why you always see mark and i and andrew is stepping up on the short short game wearing shorts from viore and clothes from viore and honestly the number one compliment that i've seen that i've gotten and even Mark's gotten is, damn, your butt looks good.

And that's because, well, the clothes we wear make our booties look delicious. Andrew, how can they get it? Yeah, you guys both have pretty big wagons. You guys can head over to Viore.com slash Power Project. That's V-U-O-R-I dot com slash power project to receive 20 off the most amazing apparel that looks so good inside and outside it's gonna make your ass look fat and your ass will look fat links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes uh god damn it that's a good one make your ass look fat do you think you had a misinterpretation of how you needed to live your

life like just because you're a club promoter doesn't mean that you need to fuck chicks stay up late and party but was that what that meant for you for clarity i wasn't fucking like everybody in england right like i was with i like i, I was in a lot of relationships throughout my 20s. But you absorb the values of the environment that you're in, right? And the people that you're around. And this is why, whatever, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

I'm not sure quite how true that is, but it's certainly, you just, you get nudged. Your preferences get nudged by the people that you spend time with and my background especially as a child I was an only child dad was an engineer who left school with no qualifications and is a very very successful businessman now but he wasn't taking the same sort of route that I was you know the, the world that he grew up in, in the 1960s and 1970s, there isn't a ton of life wisdom that can be passed down that's still applicable now. And this is a challenge, man. Like, I'm going to be very interested to see what it's like when

we become parents from our generation with all of the exposure to personal development, with less of a sharp right turn of the introduction of the internet, of phones and social media, because hopefully our generation of parents should be able to communicate with our children in a much more aligned manner than the one that came before. I'm teaching you to use your iPad.

What rules are you going to teach me about how to behave on the internet? You know what I mean? So what that meant was when I grew up when i started to get some success within a particular industry i looked to the other people that were successful in that industry as role models for how i should live my life and it was the first time because i was chronically unpopular as a kid i hadn't really i didn't have a lot of friends only child so it's pretty lonely i just gravitated toward the first thing that gave me a sense of belonging and success and what that meant was i was very um malleable um by that and this wasn't like some

vindictive thing the guys that i worked with and the role models that i did have are fucking fantastic they're incredibly shrewd, high business acumen guys for whom I have the utmost respect. They taught me how to market a show, which I still use on my podcast now, right? All of the things that I do with my podcast that have caused Moz and Wisdom to be even slightly successful, all of that was learned from them.

However, they learned from the guys that came before them. The guys that came before them said, you have a big fat line of cocaine before you start work you stay up until four in the morning but they also inculcated real fucking hard work like you do the work you stand on the front door you freeze your tits off stood next to the manager in the middle of november in the northeast of the uk in freezing weather and you stand there and you you put up with it because that's what you do so swings and roundabouts um but yeah i i inculcated some like habits of life because I didn't know any different.

You know, a lot of people come from small town. The town that I was from had like 800,000 people in it. A city, technically Newcastle. But it's hardly the cosmopolitan center of the world. I wasn't getting exposed to tons of new cultures and different ideas and different insights. Were you always into like philosophy and stuff or did you just one day just turn around and decide that you were kind of tired of the life that you were living even though you were successful?

Have you always been like open-minded to philosophy and to some of the concepts that you started to adopt over the last several years? Certainly curious, like super, super curious. But that, even that was, I hid that away because I was quite ashamed of the fact that I started to adopt over the last several years? Certainly curious, like super, super curious. But even that was, I hid that away because I was quite ashamed of the fact that I wanted to know things because if you're not a super likable kid, you don't get positive reinforcement for really anything that you do.

Like if you start to ask questions about stuff, it's just that annoying kid asking questions as opposed to now when I ask questions to people, it's like, wow, that's really cool. I've never been asked that before. The only difference really is your likability, which is kind of like a brutal side effect. And this actually does play into some of the Red Pill stuff

that the only difference between a creep and a man that you want to flirt with is how attractive he is. That's a brutal reality of this thing. And the same thing happens for kids too. So I was curious um but i did this reality tv show called glove island uh when i was 27 it was the biggest thing that was going to come to the uk for a long time i was the first person through the doors of season one right so i was the first guy into this brand new multi-million pound production every single night on itv2

for six weeks and i was in there for maybe four weeks something like that and uh filmed 24 hours a day with nowhere to escape to and there was no phone no books no internet no friends no family no nothing no contact with the outside world and i was around a bunch of people who were genuine extroverted party boys and party girls and that was who i thought i was and i had a fatal dose of contrast when i was there because that wasn't who i was and i couldn't escape the fact i was like oh shit i was able to do like high intensity interval training of being like a party boy i'm like all right mate bye mate how are you here's your vip band mate catch you inside like i could

do that i could do 30 second sprints of that 100 times a night three nights a week yeah but when you threw me in there with those people trying to do it 24 hours a day i was like oh there's a problem there's a problem so it's not like that was oh and then the fucking heavens opened and there's an epiphany but it was a gateway drug that made me realize oh this isn't all that it's cracked out to be and i'm not supposed to be here it made me think i'm not supposed to be here and then i came out of the show after this like surprise exit and it was a like an emotionally uh serious um situation because it is pretty fucking intense to be in there living with these people 24 hours a day i came out got deposited for the first

time in a month that i haven't had a chaperone or cameras on me at all times and i walk outside of this villa hotel thing that they've just put us in before they fly us home tomorrow and mallorca which is one of the balearic islands it's one of the best night viewing spots in all of europe and i walked out and looked up at the sky and the entire Milky Way was out. And I was like, holy fuck. It just looks like someone's taken magic glowing dust and just thrown it across the entire horizon. And it was so just insanely transcendent.

I couldn't believe it. And I was like, okay, there's something fucking going on here. Like this is, whether it's a sign, whether it's a whatever, like just you need to listen to something that you're learning at the moment. And came back and that was a great time, 2000 whatever, 16, 17. Your Jordan Peterson's, your Sam Harris's,

Rogan's really taking off, Alain de Botton from the School of Life, even people like Ben Shapiro talking about his history with bullying and stuff. It was a perfect time to learn about shit. I was like, right, okay, there's a problem. Problem requires solution. Solution is learn about myself and the world around me. And from there, I just exposed myself to like crushing volumes of introspective content. The internet changed a lot of things for you?

Massively. Jordan Peterson in particular, and I know you got a chance to interview him, and I heard how appreciative you were of him, and then mentioning that you're not quite sure of if he understands his impact on you and then how many people you've been able to impact through that process. Correct, yeah. I mean, that's the terrifying thing about any of these guys, which is the ripples continue to go out, right? You know, for every good person that you impact, how many good people people do they impact you don't know how many people's lives you make better through the people whose lives you make better and uh yeah peterson was a huge hugely influential figure for me he was the first person that taught me to tell the truth and that's like how did how so well just that i'd never really seen it as a virtue like to tell to actually try and seek the truth and not just a surface level truth of an acceptable uh um not falsehood but like the first thing that comes to mind like genuinely what do you believe like actually what do you believe what you care about uh and i realized after a long time of uh self-reflection that i couldn't really work

out what i believed i'd spent so long being this big dick, big name on campus, club promoter guy, that I didn't actually know what I believed. But what's my opinion on this thing? What I was doing was I was trying to give the answer that I thought Nsema wanted me to give. So you would ask a question and I would think, what answer will I give that to Nsema will endear me to him in the greatest way possible? So I was like playing a role, this reverse engineering of a persona. And after a while, the persona subsumes the person and there's no person left, right? The persona stares out through your eyes and you go, okay, so you just have to dig and dig and dig and dig and dig and get away

with all of that. And after a little while, after a good while, I started to get to like, okay, there's something a bit more solid. Like I've dug to the point where this is something that feels firm. Okay, let me ask you, how many years did you feel that you had to be that person? Because I'm just imagining if I had to do that or if I felt like I was having to give an answer

that someone liked continuously with all my interactions, that's scary. T's tiring do you were you living that way as a club promoter with all your relationships do you feel that you were able to be genuinely you with anybody in your life at that time yeah yeah some people um but there was you know big chunks of time where i didn't really have anyone that i could open up to about like anything like my space documentaries that i would love to watch or the new game of thrones episode I didn't really have anyone that I could open up to about anything. Like my space documentaries that I would love to watch or the new Game of Thrones episode or whatever.

Like this isn't what you talk about on the front door of a nightclub. Nope. Right? For the most part. And maybe this was also a byproduct of a lack of confidence because perhaps people would have been responsive to it. I'm sure that they would have been if I'd said, dude, I've got to tell you about this fucking space documentary.

Have you heard about the Buwete's Void? It's a 24 million light year across expanse that's got nothing in and it's in the middle of the universe and no one knows why it's there. Like, I'm sure that some 45-year-old doorman, father of two, that stands next to me and punches people in the face for a living

would have actually been like, fucking hell, that's all right. Like, that would have been perfectly acceptable. But again, like I just, I didn't have a combination of either the confidence or the desire or whatever it was pretty tiring and this is why

from the outside people that look like they've got it all together can seem like life's great but you can be alone in a crowd and hollow in victory because if you're playing a persona you never actually feel love for any of the things that you do you You only feel praise. The reason is there is always going to be a buffer between who you are and what you do because what you do is not who you are. Does that make sense? Like if you were truly being yourself, then the things that happened in life would just be a natural manifestation, a byproduct of you being you.

Whereas if you're playing a role, when someone says, well done, they're not actually applauding you. They're applauding the role that you play. And that's a very dangerous position to be in because it meant that I never fully feel existentially connected with a lot of the things that I did, even the things that were worthy of praise. So I was like, oh, well, that wasn't me. That was like club promoter Chris, or that was the version of things that I did even the things that were worthy of praise because I was like oh well that wasn't me that was like club promoter Chris or that was the version of me that I was playing uh and I think a chunk of that is not being prepared to be vulnerable because I was scared that I wasn't worthy or people wouldn't like me I managed to find a glimmer of acceptance or success being this role and then if i stop being that role then maybe

people wouldn't like what they saw maybe the the real version of me isn't worthy of love or acceptance or friends or any of this stuff and maybe it would all go away a lot of the things that get us super close to the truth i think are in our galaxy in space. Have you found that to be true for yourself? Just in listening to Joe Rogan and hearing people on there that study quantum mechanics and Neil deGrasse Tyson and David Deutsch is somebody that I follow. The kind of science and math

of getting us as close to the facts as possible with the distance of these things and the miraculousness of space and gravity and just all these different things, I've found that for some reason a lot of those people – you mentioned the other guy too. I forget what his name was. He has the app, the meditation. Sam Harris. Sam Harris. There you go. A lot of these people, they have really interesting views on life.

Have you ever made a connection between like views on life and your attraction to, I don't know, the galaxy, stars, things like that? I would definitely say that looking up at the night sky makes you feel insignificant,

which is something that everybody needs. Like a nice ego check of remembering that the universe is absolutely indifferent to you and your preferences it is as cold and unforgiving as it can be but that's also liberating the fact that you can look up at something and go wow it doesn't care about me is the same as going wow I can do whatever I want

I can cause and effect my way through this world in however it is that I care to be. There is an interesting question. Is it terrifying or beautiful that the universe doesn't give a shit about you? And it's kind of both. But it makes you feel small and I think that keeping your ego small is a good idea.

So yeah, I enjoy learning about space and any opportunity to expose myself to stuff like that really helps. You mentioned that you were kind of like lonely as a kid. And I actually saw you mentioned in a video with Goggins how your childhood bully reached out to you. But I'm curious kind of when you were a kid or teenager, how soon when you found like club promoting in that community, did you just fall into that because you didn't have much of, I guess, a community when you were younger? I don't know if you did or not. But one thing I'm wondering here is your loneliness as a kid, how was that as childhood? And then I guess one morning, how's your loneliness as a kid? How did that affect you in your 20s in terms of being accepted with people in your 20s?

Yeah. So the Goggins thing is interesting. So I put this clip out. We can put it in the show notes or whatever if people want to go and watch it. I did this episode with David Goggins, which is one of two, and I really, really enjoyed it. And I figured that he is very open about his failings. And it made me feel brave about opening up about mine. And I haven't really spoken about childhood bullying uh i've reflected on that because it went fucking

super viral did like 150 000 plays in the first 12 hours on youtube so it just took off and it was about a childhood bully that had reached out to me and while i'm like in between sips trying to hold it together uh goggins asks why don't you talk about it and i kind of flubbed this answer to do with i haven't got around to it yet maybe it detracts from me and blah blah blah but i could have given him like just a two-word answer which was i'm ashamed because i was ashamed of being bullied because it made me feel weak and it made me feel vulnerable and i didn't want to feel like that anymore and that by not talking about it maybe people in my life now or in the podcasting world that see me as whatever they see me as wouldn't have a lesser opinion of me because i still held on to this

broken alone like mistreated at least at school mom and dad were fucking phenomenal yeah um bullied kid and I should have said it to him and I regret not saying it to him I regret not just going like taking an extra breath and going it's because I'm ashamed but um yeah throughout school just I think for anybody that doesn't have a ton of socialization, they struggle to connect with the kids around them. And, you know, kids are fucking super quick to pick up on the person that stands out as a little bit different. I don't have the accent of the place that I'm from.

I went to a state primary, state secondary, state sixth form college in a city that was famous only for having the highest teen pregnancy rating in the UK. So it was as working class as working class gets, right? In the northeast of the UK, 60 miles from the Scottish border. So very, very small town, very, very working class. And I stood out.

I didn't sound the same. I didn't act the same. I was playing cricket, which is a sport which nobody else really played, even though I was playing it at a high level. That didn't really garner any respect. So yeah, I think me perceiving myself as a broken flawed individual was there's something like fundamentally wrong you're like look i'm really

good at cricket they're like we don't fucking care put that bat away the only place that they care less is in america about my skills at cricket um get up so and then when it got to i get to sort of college and i start to at least get a little bit of i don't know tiny bit of social competence but still not really much uh and then i get to uni and you have the opportunity to reinvent yourself right you're in a new city everyone used to do this you remember when you used to come back from the six-week holiday in summer and you're like oh i'm gonna be like the cool kid this year i'm gonna be the this kid this year everyone thought that at least i did uh and university was a really big opportunity to do this very quickly i managed to place myself uh in a role that where people needed me which was

as a club promoter and what that meant longer term was that even if people didn't like me they needed me i didn't realize that a bunch of the people that probably did like me like you know i'd finally managed to work out how to converse with people and be a good friend and and understand sort of social dynamics in a nice way um but the reason that i think it caused me to, uh, want to appease people so much was that belief fundamentally that I was flawed as an individual, that I was unlikable, insufficient, uh, and that the solution to that was just do whatever you need to do in order to get people to like you.

I'm back to kind of when you were a kid. I know when, when I was a teenager, a lot of shit happened but one of the things was i got this thing called oshkod slaughter in my knees when i was 13 so i couldn't really run which means i couldn't play sports so my retreat was going to the gym going to school and when i didn't do either of those things i'll play mmorpgs right and my community what was your rpg of choice maple story i don't know if you've ever heard of MapleStory. No, I was RuneScape. I was old school RuneScape. I played a little bit

old school RuneScape, but the graphics were just fucking too bad. Yeah, they were terrible. So I played old school. You were super popular. I was popular in MapleStory. I had a level 200 Chief Bandit, man. That's what I'm talking about. I deleted that shit when I got to college because I knew that I couldn't live life normally if I kept playing. Never going to have sex. But, like, my community was in this fucking virtual video game world.

I had some friends, but I didn't socialize with them as much as I should have. I was extremely shy. And it was in my early 20s when I like, like I read how to influence friends and influence people. And then I became a person who I could talk to people comfortably. Right. I wasn't bullied, but I didn't have communities like that in person other than maybe sports teams I played on. And that was literally it.

So for you, what did that look like for you? Were you bullied often? Was that something you had to deal with on a consistent basis? And how did you kind of figure out a community to be with when you were younger since I guess you were lonely at that time so yeah it would have been isolation was a good chunk of it that just I didn't have anybody that I felt like had my back and that that's something pretty important especially if you've not got brothers or sisters yeah you know like you just need fucking you need your boys and I didn't have

anyone like that so I used to go there was a period for about six months I think when I was probably 13 or 14 where it was a combination of either being like whatever mocked in the school ground or just being on my own which I didn't enjoy or trying to play in games but kind of being shunned a little bit so I just used to go there's a history teacher Mrs Wilkinson that was really kind to me and she said if you want you can just come and um spend lunch times in my classroom and you can just like chill out you could use the computer or you could just do whatever and kids used to go past and go wow are you in detention why are you here like how come you're spending your lunch times in this history classroom and i didn't say but i was like it's because i'm more comfortable in here than i am

being outside and that was kind of what bullying looked like now I had the sports teams that I played on the cricket teams I played on was super formative as well but they weren't especially the men that were there because I played men's sports from the age of 13 like I was playing second team from the age of 13 I was playing first team from the age of 14 I was playing for Durham I was on England's books for a while went down to go and train at Loughborough, which is the big university, did like a couple of sort of trially things there. And it was my life. But the sort of guys that I was around, they weren't fantastic role models. I came up with this example that I told Goggins about, which is the reverse role model. So a lot of people struggle because they don't have people like the person that they want to be like around them. I had people like the

person that I didn't want to be like around them. I had people like the person that I didn't want to be like around me. But that's just as valuable and it's a really beautiful solution, a way to alchemize lead into gold because you can use all of the errors that these different people are making as way pointers of where not to go in your life.

Okay, so I don't want his relationship with food. I don't want his alcohol addiction. I don't want his way that he deals with finances. Him and his wife can't talk to each other. He doesn't care about his family. And I could just use that to weave my way through a bunch of problems that may have snuck up on me otherwise somehow. So that's the reverse role model, right? That a lot of success in life comes from simply not being in catastrophe rather than pursuing cleverness. So that was good, but still, like, didn't have a group of boys, didn't have anybody that I could look up to.

And I was so desperate to, like, find someone that was going to be the person that was going to, like, give me the fucking answers. And I think that that's where the podcast comes out of. It was like, right, I can finally have this endless list of people that I respect, that I know because I've done my research, I genuinely believe have got good insights, and I can ask them the big questions.

What does it mean to live a good life? How can you be happy? What should I value? Where does love and meaning come from? How do I find purpose? Yeah. How were you bullied? What did this guy do i do bits and pieces of so the guy that messaged me um

he i i don't i don't particularly remember him specifically although i recognize the name a little bit of physical stuff a lot of social stuff just being shunned being on the outside always being like uh picked on and teased and and stuff like that so a good chunk of it was isolation um like you know little fights and like people pushing you out of the way in the hallway which is fine all of that stuff would be easy to deal with if you had a group of boys you could go back with and go he's a fucking dick isn't he but without that it felt so personal. It felt like such a sniper curse that's just you. This is just for you. And there's no one to laugh it off.

So it's super fucking humorless as well. You know, if you like, the big bully guy in school comes through and like pushes you, but one of the guys goes, fuck dude, he did that to me yesterday. Like that guy's such a dick. You would giggle about it,

at least a little bit. You would be able to dispel some of that but without even that um and again like i i hesitate to go a woe is me because i'm sure that i could have done things differently as a kid but i did uh some psilocybin work a couple of years ago and i remember seeing a version of me at 12 or 13 years old uh out on the on the floor of the bedroom where I was. And I remember looking at him and saying, like, fucking hell, you've been through a lot. Like, if I saw that kid now, or if that kid came into this room and told me his story and his story was my story, I'd pick him up and go, dude, you're going to be fine. You're awesome.

Look at all of the things that you're good at. Look at all of the admirable traits that you've got. And it would just be a bottomless pit of sympathy for this kid and love and appreciation and acceptance. So that insight from a relatively high dose of magic mushrooms was good to realize, look, you didn't deserve to be treated that way. And transcending that's a big deal. But this kind of comes back to the shame thing that i'm like fuck you're 34 and you've got the businesses that you've run and all these different things that you've done like

are you still really harping on about fucking childhood bullying um but i hadn't been i'd been hiding it the reason i haven't spoken about it is because i was like i don't want to be that guy uh but i think it's important because i think a lot of people have been through shit in their in their childhood and they feel whatever like like ashamed or like it didn't matter it wasn't a big deal who used to say it wasn't a big deal you're fucking miserable through some of the most formative years of your life like how's that not a big deal yeah you think it's important to go back and kind of think about those things and and work them out and uh maybe form you were saying like you didn't have a lot of beliefs um you weren't or you weren't sure of what your beliefs were you think

it's it's a good idea to kind of walk your way through some of that and start to think, okay, well, maybe this is why I was picked on. Maybe this kid was hurting at home. Maybe he – like I had pretty good support at home. Maybe he didn't. And you start to think your way through that and you can maybe come up with some sort of logical information that says, well, the way I acted and the way I felt was totally fair. that says, well, the way I acted and the way I felt was totally fair. I certainly think that letting go of bitterness and resentment is a good solution. This is something I spent the weekend with Cam Haines

or a few days with Cam Haines before I came here, which is why both of my calves are on fire. And he has this rock that he made us carry up the side of a mountain this week, and it's a 72-pound. It's a rock. It's not purpose purpose-built it's not a rogue rock it wasn't built by sorenx or something it's a fucking rock that weighs 72 pounds and on one side of it he's just got the word poser written and it's because people on the internet call him a poser and he lifts it up on his shoulder and every time that he thinks about putting it down he turns his head and he lifts it up on his shoulder and every time that he thinks about putting it down

he turns his head and he sees the word poser written and he reminds himself that he's doing this to prove these people wrong now the interesting thing is fucking bitterness there we are yes

bitterness and resentment are a very very potent fuel but it's pretty fucking toxic as well now Cam and Goggins both have a very very large capacity to be able to not become not fill up their toxicity from that type of fuel they seem to be able to use it and and alchemize it in a good way it doesn't work so well for me i prefer peace like i really want to be at peace uh and that was the reason why when I got that message from that school bully, which is this huge, huge fucking essay after an article came out in the BBC

and I mentioned it very briefly about bullying in school and it prompted this guy who'd been thinking about doing it for ages to reach out. And he said, I'm having a daughter. She's about to go to school. I don't want her to behave the way that I did. It made me reflect on the way that I behaved at school and I don't want her to do that. And I just wanted to tell you that I'm sorry. I'm ashamed of the way that I treated you. I me reflect on the way that I behaved at school and I don't want her to do that. And I just wanted to tell you that I'm sorry.

I'm ashamed of the way that I treated you. I don't even know if you'll see this. I'm happy that you seem to be happy. I just had to get it off my chest. And the best thing that, I mean, first off, it was a beautiful message, but also I was like, I really, really want this guy to have a good life. I was like, fuck, like like maybe if it was one of the

absolute key kids that the names do still stick in my mind, uh, maybe I would have been, I would have struggled to let that go a little bit more, but I don't know with him, uh, the piece was a big, a big part of it. And I think that reflecting on it allows you to find a bit more equanimity. Yeah. Did the psilocybin thing that you mentioned a few years ago was that a purposeful thing that you had somebody with you or did you just somebody gave you some shrooms and you just ate them and you reflected let's crack on yeah um so i've used i've spent my time with recreational drugs uh psychedelics is something relatively new that i've introduced i don't use them particularly regularly at all actually i am interested in doing a more formalized sort of therapeutic approach to them.

But that was just, I'm interested in the texture of my own mind. I took some, it was actually not that high of a dose. It was maybe not even two grams. And I just had this little insight and it was only short, but it was pretty, it stuck with me. As an adult now, you were talking about,

yesterday we were talking you mentioned socialization is a big part of like what you spend time with and i was mentioning like i do have aspects of socialization with everything that i do but i am not as purposeful with it as i know i should be uh and one thing i know too is like there's a lot of there's a lot of men that struggle with making male friends as adults and as they get, they just either they tend to go in with their families, go in with the ladies that they're with, and they don't have other male friends around them. Luckily for me, I've had some since childhood. I've had some that I've known for a while, so I'll foster those a bit. But why do you choose and how do you intentionally grow those new relationships and how deep do you generally get with those friendships?

The most common answer to the question, how many friends do you have amongst US men and women is zero. That's the most common answer. That's not the average. The average is like, I know, between two and three. I think the question was, how many people could you call on in the event of an emotional emergency that's a friend not family and the most common answer was zero which is fucking terrifying right in a world which is more connected than ever before people have never felt

more alone loneliness it seems in terms of the evidence is as bad for you as smoking 10 cigarettes a day and it impacts health span, lifespan, longevity, individual happiness, societal stability, all of these things. It's not good. For me, since moving to Austin, I've been around a group of people that are on a similar sort of path and journey to me. They're creators, they're builders,

they're inquisitive, they're curious, they want to learn about themselves and the world around them. They know what I do. Having any platform of any kind that other people are interested in acts like a gravity field to suck other people in that resonate with what you're interested in it's kind of like the world's best business card and it's just permanently out there and other people that like the shit that you're into will find you and they will message

you and then you're like, Oh, I've just got this endless list of interesting, cool friends and people that I can go to go and see. So I'm very purposeful with that now. Um, another good reason for having a creative outlet, you know, not everybody's going to make a YouTube channel or have a podcast or do whatever, but I think if you do want to maximize your learning and your self-development, you need have some sort of outlet and the reason is that it gives you a purpose for going through all of the challenges that are associated with reading a difficult book or getting through and we spoke yesterday about some audio books that both of us have struggled to struggle to finish um you have a reason to do that because you know that on the other side of this it's actually going

to be published you know maybe it's a sub stack that you write once a week, or maybe it's a conversation that you have with a friend, a super casual podcast. Maybe it's a YouTube channel. Maybe you're doing what, maybe it's art. Maybe you, maybe you're into drawing and sketching or something like that, but it's fed into from all of these different insights that you learn. Um, maybe you're an aphorist. These are coming back. My, one of my, a couple of my friends, Vizzy Andre, uh, and, uh, recovering over thinker. of my a couple of my friends visi andre uh and uh recovering over thinker i'm subscribed to him yeah yeah yeah eternally eternally overcoming sisyphus yeah so um he's a he's a really really fucking good dude um like this an aphorist would be someone that does like tiny pithy little quotes right and comes up with it so on the goggins episode sidetrack you remember i said um

there is no uh greater feat that a man can try and achieve than to fail in attempting the great and impossible. That's a quote from him. That's him quoting Nietzsche. And he has this thing called kettlebell wisdom. Pull up recovering.overthinker on Instagram or just pull him up. You all should go check out this man's sub stack or just look at his stuff. Just follow him on Instagram. He's fucking legit so um yeah he does he did this thing called can we pipe uh audio through as well from

videos and stuff yeah we can is it on his instagram yeah so go down go down to probably just before december keep going keep going keep going keep going keep going down because he posts every single day keep going it's him with it's him with a kettlebell in front of a black background keep going it's one of the videos there. Stop, go back up. Up, up, up, up, up, up, up. Try the explanation, see what that is. Is that a video?

Explanation one down from there. But yeah, this guy is like a classically trained, I think he's, I don't know where he's from. No, not this. Sorry. Fucking, god damn it. You'll find it.

Yeah, anyway, so he he just uh i really like his insights around uh doing hard things and uh he had this quote from nietzsche that that was talking about how important it is to uh fucking try voluntary struggle i don't know dude you post so much i subscribed to his sub stack because as i was looking through his instagram i'm like what does he read i was just curious on like the books that he was reading or that that he's like gone through himself i can't find it anyway he uh he is a very legit guy and um i don't even know what we were talking about what we're talking about before we got distracted by we were talking about friends that That was it, yes. Having friends that you can talk to.

Purposefully focusing on building connections. You know, like guys like that will reach out. Like he's a very, very interesting guy that I can learn terms from. Having an outlet is going to mean that you've got a reason to learn more. Do you think that, I mean, now you did mention people are more connected. People can connect to you.

People can message, et cetera. Do you think that there's an aspect of virtual friendships being as deep as potentially in-person friendships or people that are close to you no i think it's very hard to compensate for being away from someone and not having them in person like any amount of virtual contact is never going to supplement for meeting someone in the real world. Now, the way that you know this is, think about all of the fucking endless list of people that you know from the internet that you've never met in real life. If you spend 30 minutes with that person for a coffee, they immediately get moved outside of the bucket of virtual friends and into the bucket of real friends. So Michael Malice is a good example, anarchist, cultural commentator, professional troll.

He and me were very good friends for two years until I moved to Austin. And we talked pretty regularly, probably weekly on the phone, catching up through the pandemic, you know, like a lot of people did. And even though we were super tight, it wasn't until I got to meet him in Austin that he actually got to move outside. And then as soon as you do meet somebody, and this is why, you know, if somebody is coming through town in the city that you live in

and reaches out and says, hey man, I see that you do this thing. I see that you train CrossFit. I remember that video you put up about powerlifting however long ago. Are you free for a coffee? Like just fucking say yes. Say yes.

You have to presume that you have fewer friends than you need. And just, you don't know where that person's going to end up. You don't know, not in a transactional, I'm going to use you and abuse you kind of way, but in a, this person's fucking cool and they could add something to my life kind of way.

Why do you think those friendships are so important? Like, what do you think some of the main, other than like, obviously the obvious of loneliness, what else do you think might be at play there? Oh, dude. I mean, it's, especially as a man, of loneliness. What else do you think might be at play there? Oh, dude. I mean, especially as a man, I think that it's very, very important that you have a broad group of people

that you can speak to about things. If you're someone that is personally developed, mentally minded, you need to be able to play with ideas with a bunch of different people. And if it's only a small cohort of people, they're only going to give you the same ideas back. I live with Zach Talander, right?

And for all that he is a fantastically creative human, we both need different groups, even different groups that we both go out in together because we go, fuck, like I never even thought about that. I never even heard of that guy recovering over, I never, whatever, whatever, whatever. You need new stimulus all the time. And it's so crucial.

I learned about the difference between male and female friendships. So male friendships, it seems, were designed to be easily bound together, especially over shared suffering or shared attempts at things, and also to be easy to let go of. You could imagine why this would be adaptive

because ancestrally, it's like me, you, and Seema, Mark, we grab spear, we get mammoth. Like we fucking run out, we chase it down. Maybe and Seema unfortunately gets gored because he's the black man, so he has to die first in this particular movie. And that means... This is a horror movie

I think it's an early 2000s horror movie it's any movie from the 2000s and he goes what the and then he dies

exactly god damn it anyway he gets gored me and you can't mourn him we need to get back we need to still look after the tribe right the difference with women is that they have a much smaller pool of friends

alloparenting which is something that's very rare in the animal kingdom is non-kin who look after raising the children so it would be grandmothers it would be aunties but it would also be close friends right so you would sort of pool the resources of caring what this means is you really need to fucking trust the woman that you're next to and you also don't need loads of them they're probably not going to get killed hopefully they're not going to get killed by anything however it seems like men are used to having a pretty broad group of friends and they're a little bit more come and go they're a little bit more sort of fluid in that regard which means that you need to replicate that in the modern world like yeah maybe you know you can just keep

on taking over like check in with your bros every couple of months here's a really cool life hack that i i started using maybe three or four years ago a lot of the time you'll be on a train or you'll watch some piece of content or whatever and it'll remind you of one of your friends guy or girl and you'll think fucking hell do of your friends guy or girl and you'll think fucking hell do you remember when i did that that thing we went away on holiday together or we did something else just text them immediately hey man thinking of you hope that you're well that's it like that's all that needs to be if you've got more to say then say more that i found is such a lovely like way to just keep friendships moving and warm uh and it's a when i receive those

messages as well from friends because they started using the same life hack it brightens my day fuck yeah cool and see me thinking about me i wonder what he's i wonder i wonder what he's up to i wonder where he is and that's a that's a really really good way to do stuff um there's another thing that i i use called the appreciation offer. And that is to somebody that has really contributed to my life in a good way. Every so often to different people, I think, right, I really need to, I need to offer more of myself out there. And I'll think about someone that I feel like I owe a debt to in one way or another. And I'll just message them and say, Hey man, I just wanted to let you know, like if there's anything that I can help you with,

whether it be advice on starting a podcast or a lift to the airport or a recipe for good chili or whatever it is like I'll help like the offer is there you don't need to use it now but when you need it uh and that blows people away the the um and tons of people have done it tons of people have asked me for like different little bits and oh man actually one of my friends is starting a youtube channel and. Would you jump on for like 30 minutes with both of us so that we can just get ahead? I'm like, bro, consider it done. So appreciation offer and text your friends

when you think about them. Two life hacks that I really like. Do you still have friends from the club promoter days? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Really? My business partner, Darren, who sat next to at my first ever seminar and 15 years later we didn't get rid of each other.

We went for dinner over Christmas time. he's still running the company that I spent a decade and a half building so I worked an exit from that and gave him everything back he's great and then a ton of the other guys that I've come up with and they're all over the world we created fucking animals in that business we crafted hard working conscientious industrious killers of business acumen.

It was like the bullpen for trading or whatever, but just with, I was going to say less cocaine, but it's actually probably with more cocaine. How much cocaine have you done, my man? So less than other people, but more than some? More than a lot.

It's a performance enhancer in that industry. It would, it'd be like being a power lifter and not being on testosterone. Cocaine is a performance enhancer in that regard. Okay. Okay. Nice. I want to know about this with, with, uh, as you've gotten older, what I've found is that I've been able to become more vulnerable with my friendships with these two and with other male friends I have in my life because I know that in my mid-20s, let's say I was in a relationship or something, and shit would be going down. Shit would be horrible. Buddy asks, hey, man, how's shit going with – things are good, right? And I've found that like over time, I don't know why I've become more comfortable being vulnerable. Maybe it's talking with y'all, but that has been so beneficial to my friendships, to my life overall. Um, and I

just wish, I wish I was able to, I was comfortable enough being more vulnerable in my twenties or mid twenties. When do you think, or what do you think has allowed you to become more vulnerable as a individual with your audience and also your friends and people in your life? Self-confidence, I think, and the belief that I'm not inherently flawed as a person. Lots of people, right? So the difference between your experience of yourself and your experience of everybody else is like a million to one in terms of resolution. Okay? to one in terms of resolution. Okay. So all that I know about you, even though we've spent the last day pretty much together and trained and been to sauna and all the rest of it, all that I've got to see is what you've done in terms of body language and what you've said. Right. And all

that that is, is a squeezed rough resolution version of what you meant to say. And all that that is, is a selection of the things that you thought that you could have said right but what you've got to experience is a million times a second all of the different vacillations between the promise you made yourself about breakfast this morning that you broke and that idea that you could have said but you didn't say accurately and the thought that you've forgotten about all everything and because of that it leads us to believe that we are inherently more flawed than everybody else because from the outside in, everybody else looks like they've got it together. Because they don't vacillate in the same sort of a way. It's like, no, no, no, no.

Everybody is failing forward permanently. Everybody is chronically uncertain about the decisions that they make and all the rest of it. And it takes time to realize, I think, that that's the way that people are designed. And if you get more comfortable over time, you can start to open up. I also think that the sort of machismo, men don't have problems thing falls away pretty quickly because you're like, fuck, dude, who are you kidding? And we've got great role models, people like Cam Haines, Goggins, who open up about a brutal abuse and you know frankly pretty embarrassing things goggins brought in the audio version of never finished he brings his mom on for 45 minutes to hear her speak about how she was going to take her own life when he was 10 or 11

years old and the only reason that she didn't is because she knew that she would leave David and Trunas Jr. with this tyrant of a father. And he sits and listens to his mother talk about this, and partway through he says, Mom, do you want to have a break? And she says, no, I'm going to keep going. I was like, fuck, that's some Goggins genetics, in that you can see that she's got a dog in her as well.

And if you have a role model like that like who the fuck am i to say that i shouldn't be able to open up about being bullied as a kid in school you know like i wasn't locked in a furnace and whipped with a belt like goggin's dad was like you know it's not it's it gives me bravery to go out and talk about stuff like that so So I think that's part of it. And just growing up, man, and realizing that life is richer when you open up to people. And I don't, I fundamentally disagree with people that say, if you're vulnerable to those around you, they'll use it against you. How about opening up to a woman? How do you feel about that? Just because the reason why I ask you that is, you know, red pill ideology, men who are talking about opening up to women on that end of things. They believe that if you do that, well, your woman will see you as a week and she'll leave

you. Never show your vulnerability to a woman is one of the rules. So I think that it's very dependent on the sort of woman that you get with. And I think that if you are hypothetically living in a city, let's say like Miami, where there are lots of supercars and lots of tequila and everybody wears red bottom lubes and they're all, everyone's got a hundred grand Rolex or whatever, the kind of values that the women who are around those sorts of men will be looking for will not be conducive to you opening up. Conversely, relationships that are a little bit more balanced with a woman who is sufficiently growth-minded that she doesn't see vulnerability as a weakness but as a strength can be perceived in a different way this is not for me to say that maybe it's even more than 50 percent of women

get turned off by vulnerability but it's not like 90% of women. There is a huge cohort of women out there who want to be able to support a strong, competent man in times when he is no longer able to be strong and competent. Think about it this way. Why is it that the high-powered lawyer CEO guy wants to be tied up and choked and spanked by his missus on a nighttime. The reason is that when you have polarity in a relationship, the push and pull, there's something exciting about that. The wife typically, or else no one would do it for more than two times and the relationship would break down, doesn't look at the husband and think that he's less of a man because that's something that he wants what she sees is an additional level of commitment from him this isn't me like advocating it this

isn't this isn't my secret by this isn't me like revealing my sexual preference here um the reason that it happens or you could reverse it like the boss bitch high-powered ceo woman wanting that to be a sub when it comes to the bedroom the reason for that is because the polarity is exciting and interesting and i think that the same thing goes for you know i mean fucking goggins if david goggins widely regarded as one of the hardest men on the planet can open up about all of the stuff that's happened to him and yet still go out and crush whatever challenge is put in front of him you go okay is he less of a man or more of a man for doing that um but yeah i don't get me wrong. If you open up to

the wrong woman, they will not be able to accept, they will see it as some sort of a flaw or a weakness. But, you know, some men don't have that either access to vulnerability, or maybe some of them simply aren't vulnerable. You know, there are absolute, just straight up testosterone-fueled mammoths out there who don't stop, who don't have that introspection, who don't have that self-concern. Dude, I've got a group of perfect women for you and most of them might seem to be in Miami. But I don't know.

I think if you are the kind of guy that is going to work incredibly hard and then have periods where you go, fuck, like I really don't know if this is worth it like this is today was hard today was tough you need to find a partner that's going to accept that if you don't have a partner like the girl that i'm with if i have a bad day or if i have a concern she is happy to lean into that and be like beyond supportive like she will ask me questions. She will give me prompts. She will be, and I'm pretty sure that it's like,

I'm probably as attractive, if not more attractive in those moments than I am when I'm out like crushing it on a podcast. Pat Proctor's family, how's it going? Hope you're enjoying the episode. And this episode is brought to you by Merrick Health, the premium telehealth clinic from Derek from More Plates, More Dates.

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head over to merrickhealth.com slash power project and at checkout enter promo code power project to save 101 off of that entire panel links to them and all the information down in the description as well as the podcast show notes how would somebody know if they're with the wrong person do you think oh god i mean that's a big one yeah what are some red flags that maybe you've experienced or seen because i'm sure you get a lot of questions on relationships and stuff like that yeah so um i think that you need to have fundamental value alignment you know uh for instance if you and your partner fundamentally disagree on how to raise children or even to have a kid or i mean fucking hell, yeah. I mean, that's very, very dangerous.

Other things as well, though, like not to get political, but like your view of the world is actually pretty informed by your politics, right? Like if your partner is super pro-life and you're super pro-choice, if you are incredibly pro-immigration and your partner is anti, if you're very pro-free speech and they're not,

if they're pro-gun and you're not not like there's going to be some conflict in there because it's not just about that one issue it's about what feeds into that belief right this isn't for me to say oh you need to have a sortative mating where you only date within your own political party but you need to have some shit in common right you need to have some common interests you need to be able to go and train together if you you like training, get a partner that you can train with because then you can actually enjoy the thing that you enjoy with them. Like that's a pretty good idea. In terms of red flags, I think the most important things to get right are, and this is for both guys and girls, is your partner psychologically stable? And what that means is after any incident that takes them

off center in terms of their mood, how quickly do they return to baseline? And you want it to be within six to 12 hours at most. You want them to be able to deal with some stress, some disagreement, some argument or whatever it is. And within a not forever amount of time, get back to baseline. I have some friends for whom them and their partners will have an argument and they're both blocked on every social media and every messaging app for like two weeks

and they're like how many will you mail each other or do whatever it is and you go dude that is I've dealt with that that is not not in my current relationship

babe I love you so that would be one having a growth mindset would be another one so somebody that is prepared to grow and can believe in change both for you for for themselves, and in the relationship as well. We were talking in the sauna last night about the Michelangelo effect. So this is an effect whereby

people in a relationship begin to form themselves into a more and more optimized, idealized version of what their partner wants. So you could imagine- Become more and more attractive. Correct, yes. Or open or appropriate for them, right? You, if you are committed, will begin to forge yourself into some sort of amalgamation of who you are truly

and who your partner wants you to be. And if your partner is well-balanced and has a great perspective in the world, they want you to be a better version of you. They don't want you to be less you, they want you to be more you and they can direct you in that way. So having the growth mindset is super important. The reason is that if you do encounter challenges, so at the moment, my relationship is long distance. Like we've been able to get past that because both of us believe that there are solutions that we can work around. Like that's important,

right? The final one that i would probably say would be conscientiousness and that is because all of this whether it be the um growth mindset whether it be the psychological stability being conscientious allows you to sort of deploy grind and grit and motivation in an effective manner and it seems that this bears out in the data as well seth stevens davidowitz wrote a great book called don't Trust Your Gut. And he's a data scientist that applied it to use big data to answer like 12 of life's biggest questions. What's the most attractive way for me to look? Who should I marry? What job should I take if I want to become a millionaire the quickest? How do I become more lucky? How do I raise a child to have good outcomes

in life? All the way down and the interesting shit to do with dating was psychological stability growth mindset conscientiousness you have those big three pretty much everything else will get sorted out mark i'm kind of curious about this from you and it's kind of within this um as far as like you in your relationship as it's been a long time you haven't been dating for for a minute but have you went on a date last night with your wife she has you guys been in relationship for what more than two decades now yeah have you always been comfortable being vulnerable with andy your wife um

yeah i think so um yeah i think um you know there was uh yeah i mean i you know i i don't know i was like fully exposed like when we met you know i didn't have anything so there was like uh i didn't have really a lot to be proud of other than like my – I guess like lifting and stuff like that. So I just – I didn't have a license. I didn't have a bank account. I didn't have a car. I just didn't have anything. So there was like – I couldn't even like not be vulnerable.

I needed a motherfucking ride. You know what I mean? So yeah, I was just the way that I was. There wasn't like, I couldn't sugarcoat or hide anything. I just, I didn't have much of my shit together. That's a powerful foundation to build upon though, right? Because you've already pre-selected

for the sort of woman that's going to be prepared to grow with you. You know, like if you were to think, how much do you have to beat the odds by to go from that guy to this guy? Right. You know, every single day beating the odds financially, developmentally, psychologically, spiritually. And that is one of the beautiful things about relationships that last for a long time. And that's one of the things that you don't get if you do have transient transactional relationships that you cycle in and out of every couple of weeks if you're a guy that's just blowing through goals you're never going to actually be able to

grow with any one goal you're never going to be able to find someone that can make you better again the red pill ideology would be why the fuck would you want to be friends with a girl right like that they don't basically bring anything to your life and you know there are some things not really that funny i'm glad that we got the racism in early but ahead of the sexism i really wanted to get that done first here we go um if you there are certain things that women are very competent at that men aren't right their their psychological insight their ability to use emotions is way way way

better than men's now they can't throw for shit like they are really really bad at throwing um however i don't need them to throw i need them to use their emotional insight right like that they are really really good at that maybe you can find your boys and stitch them together in a good enough group where they can be a solution for that. But I don't know. I think that there's something beautiful about being able to grow with someone. And again, everything is up for grabs now.

You know, the grand narratives that held previous relationships together, everything is up for debate. Should you stick together in a relationship forever or should you just be this sort of polygynous, super turbo Chad man that, you know, just dominates Miami's nightlife scene. Like, you know, pick your route, Western man. Yeah. You know, when paying attention to your content,

we were talking a little bit about this yesterday. Um, a lot of your content is reaching men, young men, and it seems that your content is helping men to become better, but it is not, uh, at the expense of women. It is not making all women look a certain way. And I've gone down the red pill rabbit hole just to learn about it. And as we've mentioned, it says women are like this and this is why you can't trust them. This is why you need to be careful. This is why you need to play the game. Like you mentioned, it's adversarial.

It's adversarial. So what do you think that men should be focusing on if their goal is to be in a good monogamous relationship? Because one thing I do notice is that a lot of the focus of this red pill ideology is on the lack of good from women and like the – where they're falling short as as far as relationships are concerned it's very easy in the world of dating dynamics to point the finger at women and the reason for that is that hypergamy which is this tendency that women have to date up and across women on average want to date a man who is taller better educated and wealthier than they are right or at least as on all of those men don't't have that, the same. They'll date what's called a cross and down, women will date a cross and up. Now, the thing is, it's very easy to point at the preferences of women and say, see, like this, you have no, do you remember Kevin Samuels? Do you remember that guy? Yeah. So Kevin Samuels sadly passed away halfway through last year. And say what you want about him, the guy was a great communicator and he really did have style um he basically made a

career out of live streaming with girls and telling them that their uh perception of mate value was skewed it's like what would you want from your partner they would say i want him to be six foot one earn 200 grand a year and do this sort of a thing you'd go okay like can you cook can you clean what's your what's your dress size like how many guys have you been with etc etc etc and you'd say look you're skewed your hypergamy is showing basically and it's very easy to point that out no one ever turns the finger around at men within the manosphere space and says okay so women's preferences for men that are better resourced more statusful than they are men's preference is for women that are

younger than they are no one ever turns it around and goes guys have you ever considered dating older well no like that's you know young fertile women like you use them and use them and lose them like that's the way that you go okay so what you're saying is that women need to readjust their biologically predisposed preference for men that have greater status and resources than them. But your biological predisposition for women that are younger and more fertile than you, that's locked in.

That shouldn't be changed. But theirs should. Like, that's an asymmetry. And it's the exact same fucking conversation so talking to men and teaching them that women are the enemy is not going to make for a good society as far as i'm concerned and if the only way that you can raise men up or if your belief is that the only way that you can raise men up is by putting women down that doesn't sound like a very noble masculine thing to do like how are you going to call yourself a real man by

standing on the shoulders of women that you've mistreated that's not a particularly virtuous approach to life for me and this is why if you look at the conversations i have on the show about evolutionary psychology at least 50 of the researchers are women. Tons and tons and tons of the women in this space are fantastic researchers. And they can give insights around women's mating preferences that men can't have. And for every single person on the internet that says, don't ask a fish about how to fish, fuck off. Like you are not doing any of the research that these girls are, right? These are highly trained PhD and above that level researchers doing cutting edge evolutionary psychology, anthropology, social sciences research. And they are finding out stuff to do with mating preferences, wrapping that in and folding

it into an ancestral lifestyle and coming out with really, really fucking interesting insights. For some red pill bro on the internet to go oh don't don't ask a fish about how to fish man like dude you cool cool there is a corner of the internet for you and i'm glad that you stay there basically i'm curious about this because along this line of thought like women have become more well educated they're making more money they're now in the workforce and this is a good thing and like you mentioned as women do make more money they're not generally maybe looking for a man who makes less but an aspect of this is that men generally are also looking at this from

a traditional perspective where they're like i want to provide i want to make the money and that's all i need to do but if women are already making money and money isn't the only thing you can bring to the table now don't doesn't it seems as if we need to kind of like think about what more we can bring to the table rather than just income what like i don't know emotional stability uh support also like support on our side not just money, but emotional support, more emotional awareness. It seems that like the only thing that the red pill side of things is looking at is you need to be attractive to the most amount of women possible. That means you need to be able to make a certain amount of money so that women look at you in a certain way. But outside of that, there are other things they kind of talk about, but that is the key thing.

And if women are already making money, it's like, what else can you do? Or what else can you bring? And what I'm trying to get at here is that it just doesn't seem that as we're continuing to get further as a society, men and women, that it's not just that you're a high earner as a man. You need to have more or you need to be more developed. You need to be more well-rounded versus just being an earner. Because if you're, and that's only if I guess you choose to be with a woman who's in the workforce,

because what a lot of these men tend to look for too is they're not looking for a woman who's in the workforce. They're looking for a certain type of woman who's going to have to depend on them financially. Correct. Right? The woman I'm, for example, the woman I'm dating, she's in school. She's going to have a good career. And I appreciate that purpose about her.

That's why I'm with her. Like, I like her for that. But that wouldn't be the type of woman that a lot of men in the Red Pill space would even find remotely attractive. Right? So it's an interesting thing. But it's just like, I guess it depends on what you're looking for and the type of woman you want. But know, I got to give the guys, they're due. They misquote a lot of my friends in the studies that they've done.

But the basics, they get right. Fundamentally, if you're a man who doesn't earn as much as your partner, your relationship is beating the odds if it stays stable. Like you need to be at least as educated and at least as employed in terms of wealth as your partner. It is very, very difficult to make a relationship work if you're a guy who is not the breadwinner in the household.

In relationships where the woman out-earns the man, they're 50% more likely to end in divorce. In a household where a woman out-earns more than 80% of the household income, it's twice as likely to end in divorce. Women are roughly three times as likely as men to say that educational achievement is important to them when choosing a mate and men that are in relationships where they are not the primary breadwinner are 50 percent more likely to use erectile dysfunction medication the other thing which i think you're starting to allude to here is that if a woman is a breadwinner perhaps she can financially support both partners and the man could maybe bring something else to the table perhaps the man could be a great stay at home dad or perhaps the man would be able to contribute in other ways he could emotionally

support her in the way that we spoke earlier on about how women can emotionally support us a sad fact for both men and women suggests that as women become more educationally and professionally successful they show an increased preference for more successful men so as women become better breadwinners they don't reduce their hypergamy it increases not only have they risen up through their own dominance hierarchy but they've risen up at a greater rate and are now looking for an even higher angle on who it is that they want to date. So if you're a PhD woman – and I have a friend in the UK who is 36 and she's just frozen some of her eggs. She is a millionaire, self-made millionaire in the fitness space.

She has a PhD. She has like three guys that she can date, right? If she wants a guy that can out earn and out educate her the the cohort of people and i think she'd maybe like five nine or something without this is a single person but is she also looking for like hard she so she's looking for somebody who's above her and what she's looking for anybody but like fundamentally her mating preferences are that she's going to try and date a guy who has these um resource and educational backgrounds. And it doesn't get smaller the more that the women earn.

It gets bigger, which is, again, give the red pill guys their due. Like they understand this dynamic about women and railing against hypergamy is like railing against the laws of thermodynamics. It just is the way it is. It's the preferences that they have. Now, you might say, maybe somehow women would be able to overcome their preference for better resourced, more educated men

because they are now the breadwinners on average. Two women for every one man competing a four-year US college degree by 2030. Men have dropped out of the US labor force at 0.1% a month every month since 1950, excluding COVID when it fell through the floor. By 2040, the labor force at 0.1% a month every month since 1950, excluding COVID when it fell through the floor. By 2040, the labor force participation is going to be 65% for men. It was 87% in 2050. Seven times more men dropped out of university during COVID than women.

For the first time in history, you have 50.1% of women being childless at 30. More women without children at 30 than with. More women had children over the age of 40 than under the age of 20 in 2019 in the UK. And last year, the ONS survey data from the UK suggested that for the first time ever, 50.1% of children were born outside of marriage or a civil partnership. So they were born to single mothers

or to people that were just in relationships. So all of this together is a big, big, big, big mix-up. You might say, if women were born to single mothers or to people that were just in relationships so all of this together is a big big big big mixer you might say if women were able to reduce down that hypergamy which is you know what kevin samuels was trying to achieve they might be able to open up their dating pool a little bit more which would mean they have more mating options now there is some evidence that suggests that they are doing that however it is going up precisely in line with female-only infidelity. So women are perhaps prepared to date down a little bit, but they can't get around the thermodynamics of attraction. Did you see the, and don't forget thermodynamics of attraction,

but did you see that clip from Gabrielle Union? Gabrielle Union, there's something where she talked about cheating on her former husband. And the reason why she mentioned it was okay was I bring home the money. Yeah, she didn't feel bad about it. She didn't feel remotely bad about it because she was the breadwinner.

It's an N of one. It's a single person saying this, but it's just interesting that it does fall in line. Well, dude, think about, again, to give the guys from that side of the internet their due, if a woman really needs her man, it's very difficult for her to not respect him. And I think that respect is something

that does need to flow both ways, but a woman really, really needs to respect and admire a man. So the thermodynamics mean that you are, um, you permanently have to fight against your own nature to find a guy who is less statusful and less educated than you as attractive. Again, this is on average. This isn't to say that women – I have tons and tons and tons of white-collar women dating blue-collar guys. And there's other evidence that suggests that earning can actually be offset by the job title that you have. So for a man who is a firefighter

to be as attractive as a man that works in hospitality, guy in hospitality earns $300,000 a year. Firefighter only needs to earn $60,000 a year to be equally attractive. So for all of the men that say it's very difficult for me to get a high-paying job in order to become attractive to a woman, it's like, you can actually change some things

with regards to the type of job that you have. Lawyer as well, surprisingly. $60,000 a year, lawyer and firefighter are as attractive as someone that works in the hospitality industry but earns $300,000 a year. So female-only infidelity seems to be on the rise and here's where it gets really nasty. Hypergamy decreasing a little bit from women. Female-only infidelity increasing a little bit

by women. Also completely in line with domestic violence increasing at the exact same rate. So women perhaps date down. They're struggling to find a mate. They decide to date down a little bit. That woman then begins to stray or at least starts to pull back a little bit from the relationship, and then men switch from a benefit-affording to a cost-inflicting mating strategy. And the way that when mate values start to differ a little bit, what happens is the partner that feels like the other one

is pulling away from them can start to apply a little bit of pressure. Sometimes that can be through psychological manipulation. Sometimes that can be through vulnerability and opening up and saying, I feel anxious, I feel nervous, I feel whatever. And then other times it can be through physical violence. So you have this little cascade of hypergamy into infidelity, into domestic violence, and all of this seems to be linked. Not good.

I think both sides, you know, it's really beneficial to just work on being a success of some sort through work, through some sort of dedication to go into school, exercise, having a healthy body. You mentioned earlier somebody being able to recover from, you know, something happening fairly quickly within a couple hours, having a healthy mindset. At least from my side of things, you know, I've always been driven towards doing, you know, being a doer, somebody that's, you know, working out or just out there trying to get better at stuff. And I think for me, that's what my wife saw in me. I don't think it was necessarily a particular job,

but she saw like a particular direction. And I like what you said about like the firefighter, maybe police officers almost like too dangerous of a job. Not that firefighting is not, but there's all kinds of crazy shit that can happen in either one of those occupations. But I think from a guy's point of view, I think just that the person is just trying to get better as a person.

That's the conscientiousness. It's a really attractive, really valuable thing. And they say to be a success, to attract success, you have to be successful. And it's like, well, how do I be successful before I'm successful? Well, you might be successful just at really small incremental things that maybe don't seem like that big of a deal right now. Maybe you just read Jordan Peterson's book. But that's a success right there. That's part of it.

And maybe you can start to put that into practice. Think about why any girl sees the starving acoustic guitar player singer who's 24 and sleeps on his friend's couch why do a lot of girls look at that as like a romantic aspirational partner well it's because they see the trajectory of that person it's not about current success it's about where you're going to be when she needs you. And if you're going to have kids in five or ten years' time, you go, okay, maybe this guy's not got his shit together, but fucking hell, there is a lot of raw potential.

I think there's something else there, too. I think the motherfucker loves his guitar so much, how do I pull him away from that thing? He loves hanging out with his buddies. He's just sitting there jamming on his guitar. How do I get his attention? He seems like he doesn't care. Maybe.

That would be true. Playing it cool, like you're not obsessed over the girl winking at you or saying hello. Yes, yes. But the conscientiousness, anybody that can deploy that to something, if the shit hits the fan with regards to your family, you're going to be able to fix that problem as well. And that's why the Matthew principle, if the shit hits the fan with regards to your family, you're going to be able to fix that problem as well.

And that's why the Matthew principle, which is to those who have everything more will be given, to those who have nothing more will be taken, it's from Matthew in the Bible. And it's like, if this person has conscientiousness that they can deploy to the guitar, how do you think they're going to get on if their kid's having a hard time at school? They're going to be able to deploy some attention to that as well.

They should be, on average. So, yeah, it's not just about where you're at. It's not just the success that you're at at the moment. It's like, what's the trajectory? Like, what are you broadcasting out into the world? Do you seem positive? Do you seem like you've got a growth mindset? Are you working hard?

Because those things can carry you a hell of a... I mean, you've, you know, again, your partner, there is no way that your missus could have predicted where you were going to end up. Not in a million fucking years. You couldn't have probably predicted where you were going to end up. And yet, it worked. But I think that's also why, like, from a practical approach, because when you look at, when you even listen to the statistics that you've mentioned, it's quite bleak. When you listen to the statistics and pay attention to the things that the Red Pill guys are saying, it's quite bleak.

But at the end of the day, you need to pay attention to the individual that you choose to be with. And it's tough because for men, it seems to be at the barometer is like, what is she out of 10? It's literally just – it's just what they look like. And don't get me wrong. You need to be attracted to the person you're with. just what they look like and don't get me wrong you need to be attracted to the person you're with but there has to be some substance underneath that to see like what type of person is this going to be in a relationship outside of literally the vagina outside of literally what the body looks like and they don't tend to really care about that side of things let me give you a

thought experiment can you imagine a woman who is hot but not beautiful? Dog, give me a second. Yes. Okay, now imagine a woman who is beautiful but not hot. Yeah. Okay? So what we're operating with there are two different dynamics. One, beauty should appreciate with age. You know, you imagine some sort of J-Lo type woman

or some lady that holds herself with like poison grace as she ages. Like the way that she moves, the things that she says, like it's still sexy, but it's not hot. It's not front cover of fucking FHM or GQ or Maxim magazine hot. Now you can see the other, which is like Miami chick, right? Like it's hot, but not beautiful. It's like high dress, maxi heels, big lips, big tits. It's like, yo, that's hot, but it's a depreciating asset. If you're looking to have a long-term relationship with a woman, you want a woman who is beautiful first and hot second. If you optimize for hotness,

you are investing your money into a depreciating asset. Now, that's not to say that hot girls can't be beautiful and vice versa, but a lot of guys optimize for hotness because it's so there and in your face. But what you actually want is someone that's beautiful. You're going to have to talk to this person if you want to be in a long-term relationship. Let's say that serial monogamy becomes a thing, right? And you end up during your adult life having like 2 or 3 10 to 20 year relationships and maybe kids come out of 1 or 2 of those perhaps you need to sit down with that person every single night for a decade

after you finish work and you need to be able to have a conversation with them how long do you think Silicon is going to cover up the fact that you have nothing to talk to her about you know what I mean like that clip piercing is only going to go so far however if you're able to sit down with someone that you think fuck like i admire this woman i really really respect her i love the way that she does x and y and z and she's fucking tired of what she's saying but that clip piercing that's the devil pussy i wish that she would shut

up so that i could get a pants off damn it woman um that's that's what you're optimizing for right beautiful beauty beauty is what you're optimizing for and that's the thing that appreciates with age i didn't know it was a thing i've always called it classy hot classy hot classy hot yeah that's like a modifier on just normal everything's hot and then there's like modified but yeah i mean you can call it whatever you want but everyone's been most people that have done that thought experiment beautiful but not hot hot but not beautiful yeah i can see it i know what you mean okay and when you're saying okay so what is she out of 10 and you go well is that on the hotness scale or on the beauty scale which one do you want

beauty yeah but if you're just having a one night stand you don't care beauty just goes by the way Is that on the hotness scale or on the beauty scale? Which one do you want? Beauty. Yeah. But if you're just having a one night stand, you don't care. Beauty just goes by the wayside. Yeah. What has fitness done for you, especially when you were working on personal development and when you were just, I guess, transitioning from feeling depressed and things like that?

Yes, I've always trained. I trained from when I was 18. I was a commercial model for a long time in the UK. I did a decade and a bit of being a fitness model or just normal commercial modeling. So it was a big part of my life. It was very bro-y. I came up through the bodybuilding.com MISC forums

and the If It F fits your macros sort of renaissance was happening carb night and like kit who's that fucking guy kip Lachlan kit no who was the fucking dude who did carb night and backloading yes thank you I forget his last name yes

yes something yeah skip loading as well that was something like dude we tried fucking everything we were trying to get shredded on haribo we were playing around with like whatever we could like if it fits your macros was such a a funny period of the world and no one it was the wild west you remember um christian tibideau released that fucking blueberry extract thing called like blueberry power and it was you you had to put it into this maltodextrin shake and we were like this is it it's like we always knew that it was the blueberries that we were missing in life it was like this fucking blueberry concentrate so we

just played around with everything um and then yeah the fitness menopause or the manopause is something that a lot of guys get through especially if you start bro lifting earlier in life and then you get to like 27 28 29 30 and you go dude i can't touch my toes like i'm i look fucking jacked but i kind of don't feel great i'm not gonna lie like i blood rushes to my head when i lie down so you went through menopause a little bit later indeed but the fitness menopause is coming for everybody man it really really is. You have to beat the odds if you're going to be a guy that bro lifts from the age of 18

and keeps doing it when you're like 60 and you've never tried running, you've never tried fighting, you've never tried BJJ, you've never tried blah, blah, blah. But it's a huge, huge, huge part of my life. I've actually found

a few injuries that I've been through uh two disc bulges and an achilles rupture have been the biggest ones and that was a very interesting achilles takes like a year right full 12 months of rehab yeah it was in a moon boot so uh had my surgery back of your ankle gets opened up peel the skin apart peel the flesh apart and you've got these two ends of the tendon which is like a braided rope right so you can imagine if you cut a braided rope and it's just like all of the fibers are everywhere and then your calf your calves moved up like your calf moves up your the back of your leg right so they take the two ends of these sort of broken threads and they bunch them up into knots like that.

They put them back together, suture them together with dissolvable sutures, move the flesh back in, stitch you back up across the back of your leg, and then away you go. And that's you for three months in a moon boot. And you start off with your foot in complete what's that plantar flexion that's that one right yeah um and within two weeks or so you go from your foot being like that to just a tiny little bit less so they'll remove a wedge a wedge is around about a centimeter and they'll just move it down over the space of uh three months two months or whatever i think

it was about two months so every so often it just extends the length of the tendon, right? Some of the shit we do still seems so Frankenstein-like, you know? Like don't we have better technology than some of this? But you need to allow it to bind back together. And the easiest way to do that is to shorten the length that the tendon is apart from each other, right? Because if you started like this, the tendon is apart from each other right because if you started like this the tendon would grow uh it would grow really long now the strange and scary thing is that if you do that once it's been sutured back together every single time that you go from being in plantar flexion

like as pointy as your toe can get right to remove one centimeter to go down to there and it felt like the tightest calf stretch i have ever done in my entire life like i was up against a wall in as much dorsiflexion as i could all day long no when they took the wedge out okay uh so the doctor there is this is 13 days after the surgery which is a little bit earlier than it should have been but i was gonna have to wait for like 22 days if i didn't do it and i was like i'm gonna get this done now to get this first wedge out. And then I can be on the hamster wheel. So he's there and I'm like, okay, take the wedge out. And my foot's hovering at where it used to be with this one centimeter, one and a half centimeter gap. And he's like, okay, so just nice and calm, relax into it. And I'm shitting myself. Cause if

you re rupture, it's a really, really big deal. It's not good. You don't want to do that. It's like the number one thing, do not re rupture. And the doctor comes over and he says, you got a little bit of movement in there? I was like, yeah, it was still a bit far off the next wedge. And he leans on my knee. So you can imagine that I'm sat down like this with my foot and he's leaning on the top of my knee, applying pressure. And I'm like, ha, ha, ha, ha, just scared. And it was fine. Nothing, nothing happened. Nothing went pop, but the tightest calf stretch that you can imagine going from full like ballerina plantar flexion to like one centimeter down that's how tight it is when it happens so uh long story short um a number of injuries meant that i had to um dispose with the i'm the big jacked guy that's always at single digit body fat and I take most of my or a good

chunk of my self-worth from being one of the biggest guys in the room like because that was me throughout a good chunk of my 20s fitness model all this stuff and that's a lesson that was really humbling as well because I had to take my self-worth from somewhere else it couldn't come from the fact that I was this big jacked dude because I wasn't able to train as hard. You know, every 18 months for like four and a half years, there was something that put my training back a little bit. And that meant that, well, who are you? Who are you when you don't have your fitness? Who are you when you don't have your condition anymore?

And I think that that was actually really beneficial for forcing me to focus on the show because it meant I had to cultivate other things that wasn't just the way that I looked. And that was the main thing for you that at that time, like I'm wondering, cause even when I think about that physically, whenever I get injured, um, I still have other things that I can do that will allow me to, to expend energy. Like I do better when i have expended i think better i'm sharper i just know that right for you at that time how did you navigate feeling good if you weren't able to i mean you still probably had something you could do right that would allow you to express

yourself physically or there wasn't much with the uh disc bulges that was only you know a week of really really acute pain and then you're back and able to move and do bro stuff as long as you're with a neutral spine. That's pretty fine. But the Achilles injury, you're really laid up. You're on a knee walker. You know one of those things? Have you ever seen that?

It's like you put one leg up. It's like a little trike. It's like a little scooter. Yeah, a little scooter, but it's for one leg. So I'm rolling around on one of those. And I can't go for a walk. Where am I going to walk to? Crutches were super hard.

My sleep is messed up. I was on oral morphine and codeine after the surgery, which is just like I'm a fan of like playing around with opiates if it's justified for like a day or two, right? I hated it. I didn't enjoy that. It made me muddy. I constructed because I didn't enjoy that. It made me muddy. I constructed,

because I didn't want to let it stop me from doing the show. So I had an outlet, but it was intellectual rather than physical. So we constructed a horizontal recording setup where I was laid down with my foot elevated and then I had the laptop up on one of those little bed table things at my lap. And then the mic arm was coming off the side

of a table so i did a couple of um podcasts where the guest was essentially positioned where they would be giving me a blow job like that was the the angle it was very much the like suck off angle yeah so i did i did that for a few times but i i had some physical outlets but dude i remember the first time that i walked um more than within the kitchen and i have this walk this loop that i do back in newcastle which is about 15 minutes and the first 100 meters to the end of the street was this tree and i used to like this tree was one that i focused on i was in a boot that you could start to walk in after a while they upgrade you to one that you can put weight on and you don't necessarily need to have the crutches but i still had them with me in case i like fell over

or whatever and i was terrified of falling over and i felt silly and all the rest of it but it's during the pandemic so it was an okay time to to do this not much else was happening in the world and i remember i got to this tree and i was like holy fuck like i've just done 100 yards and it felt like a marathon I'm sweating super difficult I was super nervous um but I learned a lot I learned a lot about rehabilitation I read The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday I read The Art of Resilience by Ross Edgley um the guy that swam around the UK yeah and I watched a documentary called Resurfaced with Andy Murray you ever seen this?

I haven't. Fucking great. So Andy Murray, British tennis player, rightful heir to the throne after Tim Henman left. And he is seen by the press as this sort of miserable Scottish guy, right? But he's just an absolute monster worker. And one of the problems that he had was that his hip because of that lateral movement his hip and uh ball socket joint was wrecked you can imagine that

sort of lateral left and right um movement that you have the outside of the hip is wrecked and he works so fucking hard you know experience is extraordinary two-year journey and he goes all over the world he starts doing bouncy castle stuff he is vlogging the whole thing um when he's in bed crying his wife's incredibly supportive you can see that he's doing that movement you know that's the side to side problem he's doing absolutely everything that he can and then toward the end of it he ends up getting a like steel and porcelain new hip and the guy is the hardest worker in the room and it was so inspiring to watch him that's his mom there so inspiring that's his girlfriend to just see this guy not say no right resurfacing yeah that's it and that's because they resurfaced his hip so if anybody out there is suffering with with an injury and wants some inspiration it's on amazon prime yeah

phenomenal and this guy just doesn't say no doesn't say no what you want me to do and he'll hate it and it's really it's it's very charming because you get to see why the press dislike him so much the press dislike him because he he's like a bit of a fucking stoic british we were talking about this yesterday he's going everything's a bit fucking shit isn't it however he will hate every single second of the work and he will do it to clinical precision of what his trainer wants him to do okay how many reps how many sets what weight what form he'll hate it and he'll complain but he'll get it done and i was like fuck that's cool and he that was like the before i even had

the um operation i watched that and i was like that's the approach that I'm coming into this with. And I think I did, I must've had like 95%, 96% compliance on my movements every single day, every single morning, the stretching, the overload, the plyometrics, everything, TB500, BPC157 for six weeks at a relatively high dose. And then that ton of collagen ton of curcumin um fucking tart cherry juice like i did i did the research i got i i consulted with anybody that i could find i managed to call in a bunch of favors and get the second best uh surgeon for achilles re uh like reattachment in the uk um i managed to like sneak in i kind of like how a barber shop it's like oh uh well you're not on the books but we'll fit

you in at the end of the day type thing so homeboys stuck about and and did and anyway i just did everything that i could and the outcomes have been great and today you know we've got to do some sled pushes and sled pulls and i ran 10 miles with cam haynes including a bunch with a rock the other day and that achilles feels fucking rock so i actually i told you this before i overshot building up my injured calf to the point where I had to work on the other one to play catch up. I was like, fuck, why didn't I see this coming before?

But yeah, resurface with Andy Murray, The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday and The Art of Resilience by Ross Edgley is like my three-car garage for anybody that needs to overcome a bad injury. What you got over there, Andrew? I mean, we went pretty quickly through it, but like kind of going back to the club promoting days

and then you kind of stopping drinking. I just recently talked to these guys about like my, like it didn't quite have a hold on me, but drinking beer like was a huge part of my life. It was like my identity almost, right? And it took a very personal like experience for me to look at that and be like, oh shit, I don't want to end up like my brother is right now. Um, so mine's very, like I said, personalized, but for you, like, how were you

able to kind of step away from that? Because there's a lot of people that maybe they understand that drinking is not the best thing for them, but they're like, how do I have fun? You know, when I get together with my buddies, this is what we do. If I let go of drinking, maybe I'm going to lose my friends too. And I'm not going to be the same person. So how did you do it? And how do you recommend people can, you know, kind of start straying away from drinking? It's a really great insight that a lot of the people that you spend time with, if you're a young working class guy, perhaps they're drinking buddies first and friends second, right? But if the only way that you can bear to be around your friends is to drink, you need better friends. And if the only sorts of people that want

you to be friends with them are when you're destroying your health along with them, then you definitely need better friends. And that was the way that i saw it it was like a a way of culling barnacles off the bottom of the ship and it made it threw into very harsh reflect a bunch of the relationships and friendships that i had in my life and the ones that stuck about were the ones that mattered and the ones that left by the wayside you know like they're still doing their thing and great that was fine but they weren't for me um it is difficult especially if your friends are used to it alcohol is the only drug where if you don't do it people assume you have a problem no one says dude why are you why are you not taking heroin this evening like if you're not do you not fancy smacking up tonight

do we not are we not are we not gonna get like fucking blazed out of our mind like no one says that right it's alcohol alcohol has a cultural position that is completely different to every other drug and most people i think have it in the back of their mind that they probably would be a bit of a better person if they took a break from drinking especially if you're getting toward your 20s into your 20s toward the end of it and you go fuck like maybe this isn't quite right for me and people can get pretty upset when you start to throw into harsh contrast the errors and lapses that they know that they're making on a daily basis so my advice would be commit to a period of time don't just say i'm going to go

sober you need to give yourself an end point the reason for this is that it seems that goal setting and craving is anticipatory. They did a study with smokers that are also air hostess, air host assistants or whatever on airplanes. Both flights leave Dubai at the same time. One flight goes to Paris, the other flight goes to New York. You would presume that both sets of cravings would set off at the same pace and that the New York one would just continue increasing, right? Because you're on the plane for longer. It's been longer since you had your last hit. What it seems is that your anticipatory craving is all about how long it is until you get your next hit rather than how long it's been since you got your last one. So when you look at the Paris flight, the onset of cravings came in much earlier because people were waiting for them to

land. However, the New York one, it didn't even kick in until halfway across the Atlantic and onset of cravings came in much earlier because people were waiting for them to land however new york one it didn't even kick in until halfway across the atlantic and then it ramps up around about the same sort of distance so set yourself a goal you need to have i would say 28 days every year 90 days every two and six months every five that's like the the process that i would go through and if you've not done it before, just do six months, commit to six months. You need to either make it very public so that your friends support you. And if you find that your friends take the piss out of you trying to do something that betters your life, straight away, those are perhaps some of the highlighted ones that you might not want to spend so much time with anymore. It would be really great if you do have a buddy that

wants to do this with you. The problem that you have is that if one of you breaks, the likelihood of the other one breaking as well is pretty high. So I actually prefer doing it on my own. I didn't try and do this with a friend. I didn't try and do this with, I had support of people, but they weren't coming along on the journey with me. If you say that there's a non-zero chance that one of you is going to get tempted and that trickles into the dominoes falling and both of you getting tempted, that's not good. When it comes to going on nights out, yeah, man, you know, this is something that I pissed the alcohol-free community off with

when I was a part of that for a while because a lot of people in there are either recovering or quite ideological about alcohol-free, the AF movement. I'm going to go back to drinking, and I actually think that drinking can make nights out better. They said, how could you say that? You know, it destroys people's lives. I'm like, if you don't think that alcohol can make a night better,

you haven't had a good night out. I was a club promoter for 15 years. I know how good nights out can be on alcohol. But they're only like 20 or 30% better. They're not 10 times better. It's not hell to be on a night out when you're not drinking and also let's say that you do go out classic night out in a working class town bar club whatever if you leave at 12 30 or 1 you've got the lion's share of the cool stuff

i've been to a thousand club nights in my life and met a million people, right? Nothing good happens after one in the morning. I can promise you, I have, this isn't N of one, this is N of 1000. Nothing good happens after one in the morning. If you go home and you're a bit tired in the morning, you've still got to socialize with your friends. You still got to see that funny story that happened or whatever. You still don't feel too left out and you feel great. And you can be high and mighty and moral on your high horse the next day which is like literally there's no price that you can put on top of that um so yes that's important now the second one in case we haven't pissed enough people off today talking about dating dynamics and like black guys dying in movies and stuff you have to bring it back up again caffeine i did 500 days without caffeine and damn that's a long time 500 straight days 500

straight days without caffeine now i can talk about your alcohol use i can talk about dating dynamics i can talk about all of this and people are open to it intellectually they're open to it but you come for someone's caffeine use and it is like the fucking seat of their soul right here for what you say next precisely um a lot of people don't realize that they are papering over the cracks of a very poor wake sleep health cycle by buttressing their life with caffeine um if you can't perform without it, it's stopped conferring a benefit. If you need it to get up every day,

to go and do the things that you need to do, that's no longer a performance enhancer. That's a buttress that supports your life. And that is caffeine for a lot of people. Most people don't even say, I'm tired. They say, I need a coffee. coffee hang on so what you're saying is that you have supplanted fatigue for the caffeine concentration in your blood that's what you're telling me yes okay well have you ever stopped to ask yourself why you're fucking tired at 11 in the

morning should you be trying should you need caffeine after being awake for four hours? Or after you just slept for eight hours. Precisely. I mean, you know, you'll have spoken to Huberman about that, but your adenosine system that caffeine acts on isn't even active for the first 90 minutes of the day. So, I mean, that's something that people can straightaway do. Like, what's your guys' electrolytes partner? Yeah, we have some of our own electrolytes.

What's that? Within you, brand new. Yeah, so you take one of those, magnesium, sodium, potassium probably, first thing in the morning. Adrenal system is going to be nice and optimized. 90 minutes later, have your coffee. There you go, fine.

You've reduced your caffeine by one coffee for the day. It's actually going to, you're going to feel the hit when it first happens. Okay, there's one way to dial it back. Oh, well, I like the taste. Okay, well, there's some great, like low and no caffeine options or decafs okay so maybe we start to get to introduce a little bit of that but dude doing 500 days without it was the same as doing a thousand days without

alcohol and now my process after having reintroduced caffeine there you go every other day i never do two days in a row of caffeine so I've done this monster today which is why I was vibrating at the start of this podcast because I'm not used to how much is in this 150 milligrams 150? yeah okay that's less than I thought

it felt like a lot that'll be the most caffeine I've had in a day in a long time Kill Cliff they do a 25 mig which is really nice and they do a 125 as well and Jocko Go is 90. So that's like my usual sweet spot. But anyway, I can't ever have caffeine two days in a row. And that just means that my tolerance is super, super, super low. It means that when I actually take it, I feel it.

That's what I'll try. When you do take it, do you choose like the day, like it's every other day, but is there like a certain day where you're like, I'm going to have caffeine today because tomorrow I know I don't really yes yes exactly so you need to plan ahead so i know that tomorrow i'm probably going to be okay so i don't mind taking it today but yeah you do you need to plan ahead if you're like fuck i might need it tomorrow you go well how much do i need it today compared with tomorrow and dude i the the thing is it doesn't make that much of a difference to me anymore it doesn't make that much of a difference to me anymore. It doesn't make that much of a difference. It's great for training,

but you don't need it. You need, you don't need it as much as you, as much as you think. I'll give the every other third day thing a shot. It's really, really good. Yeah.

We did it for sober October, I think two years ago now. Shut up. Just shut the fuck up. Don't even Mark. And I did it for sober October. And then I, how'd you get on?

They're on testosterone. Okay? So, no, these motherfuckers are like, we're going to do Sober October and we're not going to drink any coffee. Right? I will inject myself with some testosterone exogenously every day. I was like, fuck y'all. Ten days in, I was like, I'm drinking coffee. But it was a good experience overall.

days in i was like i'm drinking coffee but it was a good experience overall well i kept it going because my son or sorry my wife was pregnant with my son and she couldn't have caffeine so i kept it going as well just to be like i'm gonna support you know try to support you in any way i can i'm not gonna do caffeine either um what i noticed right away was the insane headaches which was you know like a big eye opener to say like, whoa, I think I have a problem here. What was your usage before you stopped? I would say at least one of those, like Monday through Friday, maybe at the, at the most, um, coffee, maybe a couple of times in addition to that. So it wasn't too crazy, but it was daily. And then, uh, it's safe to say the same thing on the weekends like nothing too crazy but definitely something every day so that was like a really huge eye-opener and then obviously

obviously the the fatigue wasn't what i thought it was going to be i thought i was going to be like a zombie it's just that my energy wasn't like through the roof so instead of it like going up and down with like here's a shot of caffeine and through the roof and then drop down, you know, 11 o'clock or whatever. It was more like lower, but just kind of like right here, middle ground. But as time went on, I would notice like when I'd hear the podcast, like, man, I'm talking real slow. I'm slurring my words. I'm looking at the computer screen trying to edit a podcast and I'm just sitting here just staring, not really doing anything. So I ended up, you know, as soon as I could, my son was born.

I'm like, all right, it's time to hit the caffeine. And I just like me and Nsema, we 100% agreed on this. And it's like, okay, well, if it is somewhat of a performance enhancing, you know, drug, but it's not really like a bad thing like isn't that okay like it's it's helping me produce better podcasts it's helping me speak better because without it like like i said i'd stumble over my own words so that's why in my opinion i don't think it's really that big of a deal so at what point does it become like an issue is that you're having three four monsters a day or is one still okay? Dude, the same with the alcohol thing. Like the only difference between the caffeine and the alcohol is that you know the long-term health outcomes for alcohol genuinely are worse, right?

Whereas I think you can have up to about a gram and a bit of caffeine a day before you start getting into risk territory for seizures. And even then you need to be pretty fucking high. And there's some good evidence that suggests people that have caffeine lower insulin sensitivity, better longevity, thermogenic effect, et cetera, et cetera. People don't need to stop their caffeine consumption if they don't want. What I feel is that my performance is now better without caffeine than it was with caffeine previously

and I have the opportunity to add that in and create headroom if I want to drop it on top. So no, I don't think that it's like a necessity. There is a part of me that likes having complete control. Like I like to be very sovereign. So I don't like the idea of needing anything at all to facilitate my performance. I want to be able to do it underslept,

undereaten, underhydrated. I want to be able to do it. There's this great story from Ben Bergeron's book, Chasing Excellence. And he talks about Katrin, undereaten, underhydrated I want to be able to do there's this great story from Ben Bergeron's book Chasing Excellence and he talks about Catherine David's daughter going into training one day and she had a terrible night's sleep

maybe she had an argument with her boyfriend or did whatever and she came into the gym and he said it was one of the times when he realized that she was going to become CrossFit Games champion because she came into the gym having slept three hours last night or something

and Ben said how'd you three hours last night or something and ben said how'd you get on last night so i slept terribly isn't it brilliant i'm going to have the opportunity to train today and see how well i can perform when i've been suboptimally recovered you go that's a fucking champion mindset like and sure enough that year or the year after was the one where they added an extra day onto the crossfit games and said oh wednesday by the way get your passport leave your coach come on a flight we're going to the crossfit ranch and you're going to do a trail run in a deadlift within the space of like an hour of each other and you didn't even know that this was happening and everybody was underslept and everybody was

under under recovered and katrin had been working toward this and he go fuck that's cool um so yeah i like the idea of being able to strip everything back and know that if all hell broke loose, that I could still do the thing that I care about. What were the biggest profound discoveries in cutting out caffeine and alcohol? With regards to alcohol, it was how much I was using it to buttress my social confidence.

It showed me which nights out I actually cared about, that I didn't like being in loud clubs, despite the fact that that was what I ran for a decade and a half, that I would much sooner be in a quiet bar or restaurant talking with a bunch of interesting people. It made me genuinely develop self-confidence. So I didn't need to rely on alcohol to give me that sort of Dutch courage to go up and either make friends or talk to a girl or do whatever and it also gave me consistency in being able to build habits when it came to caffeine I didn't really learn a massive amount other than I didn't need it I was so fortunate I didn't get any of the headaches I didn't get any withdrawals I didn't have any anythingals. I didn't have any anything. All that happened was I had slightly worse sleep for a little while when everything was rebalancing and then sleep improved and I just stopped using it.

How did you move from the UK? And I mean, it must have been a very difficult decision. You have a significant other over there, I believe, right? How were you able to do that and why did you move here why'd you move to texas yeah so i think i could realize that during covid i decided to turn pro with the podcast which is taken from stephen pressfield's book of the same name which everybody should read read um the war of Art first and then read Turning Pro. It's an hour and a half read and it completely fired me up

and I read it at the start of the pandemic. And I said, right, I'm really going to make a go of it with the podcast. I feel like I've got some raw talent and this would be good. What would it look like if I treated this pursuit like an athlete does? We were speaking about this last night, think like an athlete. So I started learning about different strategies for YouTube and the physics of the platform. I started working with a speech and diction coach.

I started getting comedy coaching. I'm now doing improv. I did everything that I could to try and improve my performance. We moved from two a week to three a week and I loved it. I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed the routine

and I finally had a stable sleep and wake pattern. Rolled the clock forward two years almost to the end of the pandemic and the US was locked down from March of 2020 until November of 2021 right so almost two full years that no one was allowed from the Shenzhen zone to come in so there was no temptation to do it in any case and I'd kind of been feeling a little bit like a crab that was outgrowing my shell and David Dada talks about this in the way of the superior man where things that previously used to give you meaning now no longer really do and you don't know why that's the case and the case for me was that club promo just wasn't my passion that much anymore and the podcast evidently was pandemics aren't good for very much but they're fantastic for online content and also really bad for nightclubs so i couldn't get to do the

nightclub thing anymore and i was forced to do the podcast a lot so really enjoyed that figured if i want to grow this if i want to continue turning pro austin texas seems to be a great place to go before the pandemic it was between miami new york la nashville go. Before the pandemic, it was between Miami, New York, LA, Nashville, and Austin. The pandemic put stop to LA and New York. There was no way that I was going to go there after the sort of dystopian nightmare that I'd seen occur. Nashville seemed quite cold and Miami just didn't speak to me. I spent a month in Austin, November of 2021. Got on super well with a bunch of people, was made to feel incredibly welcome. Did like a shit ton of shows

within only one month of being there. Was on Tim Pool's show, was on a bunch of others as well. I was like, fuck, this is the place. And then start of last year, had this big episode with Jordan Peterson in San Antonio, spent a couple of weeks in New York and then just went back to Austin.

I got an O-1 visa, which is technically referred to as an alien of extraordinary abilities. That's literally what it's called. And it's like the artist visa or the celebrity visa. And that lasts for three years. And I could extend that if I wanted to for as long as I want.

And that means I can do whatever I need. And now I'm in Austin and continuing to do the same thing I've always done, but with, you know, greater opportunities, more support and stuff like that. But it's not easy. Like, I don't know, being 33 at the time and going around, I'm going to leave behind all of this world support system, structure, status, renown, respect respect all of this shit that i've spent ages building up to go and try and make go of it doing this podcast thing in a brand new country

in a brand new city with no friends with no bank account with like i hadn't even got my visa when i moved out i moved out on a tourist visa and still ran everything through the uk and then after i'd been here for a couple of months we were in the process. It was all like legal and fine. I went to Guatemala, connected my visa and then came back and I was like, away we go. But it wasn't easy. Like there's not, you're supposed to have your life together

by like your early thirties, right? You're not supposed to be bouncing around the world. Or at least that's the story that I told myself. And it was nice. It felt really, really good to be, to have that opportunity to get opened up in that way power project family your normal shoes are making you weak this is why i partner with vivo barefoot shoes because they have a wide toe box they're flat and they're flexible so with every single step you're taking if you're taking a 10 minute walk outside or when you're working out in the gym your feet are able to do what they're supposed to do in this shoe they have tons of options for

hiking running training in the gym chilling and relaxing casual shoes if you're out on a date you need to check them out and andrew how can they get it yes that's over at vivo barefoot.com slash power project and you guys will receive 15 off your order automatically again vivo Again, vivobarefoot.com slash powerproject. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. I want to kind of pick your brain a little bit on air about your YouTube channel. That shit looks amazing. It's grown quite very well. Do you remember any changes that you made specifically off the top of your head that started to like grow your reach and like

you know start getting a lot more subscribers yes so like i say uh start of 2020 uh i took a course called 30 days to a better youtube channel that's by video creators and that is 200 bucks and it's run by a youtube partner uh coaching company uh and it just teaches you the physics of how the platform works, teaches you the basics of thumbnail design, of title, titling. And then I did Ali Abdaal's Part-Time YouTuber Academy. Now I didn't really, Ali's a good friend,

I didn't really need to probably do that because it's very much meant for YouTubers, but I picked up a bunch of great stuff from that too. Part-Time YouTuber Academy is good but expensive and you can go and check that out. It's about $3,000, $4,000, and the 30 Days to a Better YouTube channel is $200. There's no reason not to do that. We focused on a hard rebrand. If you were to go back to 2019 to 2020, you'll notice that we changed the thumbnail style, we changed the colorway,

we worked with a really great designer called Connor Fowler. He's Connor Fowler Design, I think, if you want to Google him and check him out. We set a very rigid design criteria for the way that the thumbnails were going to look. They were always going to be the same color, the same font, the same layout, the same everything. We started to watermark all of the episodes. We started to refine down the quality of my camera,

really, really, really dialed in over months and months and months of iterating on color grades, on angles, on lighting, on everything that we could. I wanted it to look as good as a virtual podcast could. So we did that. That made a really big difference pretty much straight away. We became very disciplined about releasing clips. So we do three. That made a really big difference pretty much straight away. We became very disciplined about releasing clips. So we do three episodes a week, Monday, Thursday, Saturday, and we release clips Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday. And we don't miss. Every single week there is something that's in there. And that meant that it made me and Dean accountable. And we fell off a couple of times. There was periods where we would drop behind, but we won't have missed a day for

over a year and a half now. I don't think every single time it's been done. My editor, Dean, is bought into the channel. So that's another good thing that you can do if you choose the person that is in charge of the creative and the editing process, if they're invested in the channel because they're a partner. When I was with you in Austin, you were going back to your place to edit, right? Correct. Yeah, right? Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fucking psychopath. I do that.

Well, it's just, as far as I can see it, man, like most people that have got successful YouTube channels are outsourcing a lot of their work to somebody else, which is absolutely fine and it's probably the smarter way to do stuff. But no one knows your content better than you. And the closer that you are to the creative process of the design of the thumbnails the titling of the episodes the trailer the intro all that stuff the closer that you are to that you are going to make an impact is going to make a difference

so that was a big deal and then the growth strategy has been continue to have good high quality guests that i have a great conversation with and then pick up the big ones. So last year we did Peterson, Huberman, Jocko, Schultz and Goggins. So on average, around about every other month, we had some world famous top 50 podcast guests. And then this year we've got our hit list of big names that we want to bring on. And if I can get another five to six of those every other month, that's the growth strat. So that'll continue to bring in new eyes and that'll continue to bring on. And if I can get another five to six of those every other month, that's the growth strat.

So that'll continue to bring in new eyes and that'll continue to keep us relevant. And then I can iterate away on finding these underground heroes. I can, you know, every time that Douglas brings out a new book or Andrew Doyle brings out a new book or whoever, like they're always going to come on. And then by no means they're still fucking

elite level guests. But you can continue to push away and then i guess the final thing that we did was we really wanted to see what we could do with high production value uh video so peterson hubeman jocko schultz and goggins um we spent i don't know probably 200 grand last year between 100 and 200 grand just on those five shoots and we wanted to see what happens if we film it on 6k netflix cinema cameras with this disgusting like 120 to 50 lens and there's a two guys on a monopod and it's got reverse fill lighting and we build a sound state we build a set inside of a sound stage and we use haze the first podcast i think that's ever trying to use

haze effectively that we did for the Goggins thing. And that really set us apart as well because no one's really, really pushing the limits when it comes to production for podcasts. And then this year we've got a couple of things that I really want to do that I'll be able to release in a little bit. We're working with a friend in Austin to try and do like a world's first on podcasting which will be really really cool uh we want to do some on location stuff i really want to do i can

talk about this one i really want to do uh a podcast in the middle of the arctic tundra so have a like diesel generator that could power everything and set that like half a mile away and just have table chairs me guest and then just white mountains in the background but just nothing just whiteness and not even it doesn't need to be brought up it's just and then you're away andrew hubeman welcome to the show and you can just talk it through and i really want to do that and i think that that would be like what the fuck is this because no one's pushing the limits like that like there's a limit to the number of great guests that you can have right

and I can continue to find these underground heroes and what not but like Huberman's always going to be Huberman and he's always

going to do great plays because he's a legend and Rogan's always going to be Rogan etc etc so what else can we play around with you could shoot

in one of those glass houses you ever see those naked like in the from below well yeah you could do it naked, yeah.

No reason not to try that angle. It might actually work. Yes. Yeah, the perineum angle. Get that sun eye. Why not? Yeah. Sure.

What about how to become a better interviewer? Did you go through anything, any courses like the one you just mentioned for YouTube? No, there isn't anything for that. I might fix that at some point over the next year. I might work with Miles, my speech and diction coach, on trying to... It would be for conversationalists generally, but for people that just want to become better communicators.

The principles that I follow behind that that I think are most important are don't be scared of silence. You need to be able to use silence effectively when you're speaking, and especially as an interviewer give the guest room to breathe there's a really famous clip of lex interviewing elon and he says when will we make it to mars and someone quite rightly because it's an epic segment of the podcast started a timer on this clip and it runs for 32 seconds of silence while he's just sat there just watching and then elon goes 20 42 32 seconds later really really good and the reason for that is if you're talking about

interviewing it's not just a conversation between you and the guest it's a performance it's a performance for the entire audience to enjoy. And they have their own thoughts. They're not contributing to the conversation. But we talk about bullying in school or something, and you need to give their brain time to fill in what they're thinking about. And if you just plow through all of your different topics, it's not sitting with them. They're not able to reflect on what you've just said because they're constantly being distracted by what's coming up next.

Use of silence is important. Not doing double questioning is something that nervous people do. Nervous interviewers do this a lot and I was so bad with this. This is all shit that I've learned, right? This isn't me like pointing the finger at shit interviews. This is me pointing the finger at me four years ago so um let's say that

you've got a question you want to ask somebody and you're not quite sure if you're pushing the limits personally or you're not quite so confident in the question so you'll say something like uh and sema i know that you suffered a little bit um with not having too many friends when you were younger and you played a lot of role-playing games how did you get over that when you needed to start doing a podcast was it the sort of thing that you needed to do in step by step and your your nervousness interjects after the question and you start to offer up options. And the problem when you start to offer up options is that you've now constrained the creativity

that the guest has into perhaps a binary. And if you say, okay, here's two things. Was it that you used your confidence from football or was it that you just learned how to do it as a byproduct of getting older? Well, what if it was anything that isn't those two? I now need to say, no, it's not that, and no, it's not that, and then run on.

But most people will, that's a leading question, right? So you will make the episode less creative by giving someone a leading question. So don't double question, like just ask the question and let it sit. And that leads into the silence thing, right? Because you need to be comfortable with just going, like me saying to Goggins, why would you go back and see a tyrant of the father

and just allowing it to be like that's a fucking awkward question like why why why go back and you wrote an entire book about how this guy affected your life the first time around and you've gone back to go and see him again but you need to leave that to sit in the air getting comfortable with silence but getting comfortable with awkwardness as well um asking why is super super important so earlier on um there was a question about the galaxy thing and i'm like what do you mean like you have to have to have to be clear when someone doesn't uh when you feel like there's a little bit of a hole in whatever it is that they're talking about and it's kind of like how you feel the membrane of a surface or whatever and you're like there's a little bit of a hole in whatever it is that they're talking about and it's kind of like how you feel the membrane

of a surface or whatever and you're like there's a gap there something is missing from the explanation and if you don't understand the audience probably doesn't understand so like treat yourself like the avatar I think for the audience so comfortable with silence and awkwardness

don't double question and ask for clarity when you're uncertain around what the guest meant with regards to something. They bring up a topic or they use some term or whatever and you go,

hang on, hang on, hang on. What's that mean? And the audience is really, really appreciative because it shows that you're being intellectually humble as well. So those would be like important elements, I think, that can contribute to you

being a better interview and the final thing is just do crushing amounts of conversations you know if you do a thousand hours of anything you're going to get good at it and that's why you look at a Rogan or a Tim Dillon or a Sam Harris those guys cut their teeth doing thousands of hours of keynote presentations or live comedy you didn't get to see everyone says like you know rogan he's only he's 2 000 episodes in he's been great go back to episode one and see how different it is and go yeah but his episode one was actually like episode 5 000 if you look at the number of hours that he put in in terms of presentation that guy had done so much preparation before he ever stepped foot in front of a podcast microphone

because of his comedy career because of a podcast microphone because of his comedy career because of his acting career because of his presenting career because of his commentary career you go okay you podcast fledgling podcaster from wherever you are you have to practice in public and you have to learn out loud right everyone is going i don't know joe rogan's first two decades of comedy i've never seen anything from back then so all of that stuff just been lost your stuff is going to be permanently recorded on the internet for the rest of time so yes you're going to suck when you first start it's going to be it's going to be terrible but just continue to iterate and like a final uh interesting

statistic is that 90 of podcasts don't make it past episode three and of the 10 that do 90 of them don't make it past episode 20 so by making 21 podcasts you're in the top percentile of all podcasters ever in history that's all it takes that's all it takes yeah and there's like a like something like 45 percent that only have done one episode yeah that's all that's a fucking yeah it's a crazy market to get into but i'm all good now if you guys are good all right make sure you guys stick around for smiley's tip before we get out of here and head over to powerproject.live for everything podcast related including the sick ass power project hoodie uh follow the podcast at mb power project on instagram tiktok and twitter my instagram tiktok and twitter is at i am andrew z

and make sure you guys subscribe and hit that like button on the way out and sima where you at discord is down below and i don't see my yin yang at instagram and youtube and i don't see my yin yang on tiktok and twitter chris where can people find you at chris will x on instagram and twitter chris williamson on youtube modern Modern Wisdom Podcast, wherever you listen. If you want to get started, the David Goggins episode or the Jordan Peterson episode are both fantastic ways to get yourself kicked off. The episode with Goggins was pretty damn amazing.

Congratulations on that. Thank you. That was really sick. I'm just going to steal from you because I like what you shared today, like what you said today about the people around you that you don't like their behaviors. You can kind of take note of those things and say, I don't want that for myself. I don't want to communicate with my wife that way. I don't want to drink the way that guy does.

I don't want to. So I found that to be really beneficial in my own life. Maybe you will too. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.