Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2007: Chris Williamson

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

Have we evolved to reproduce and have a family? (1:59) The existential risks of population collapse. (5:00) From professional party boy to building introspection into what he was meant to do in life.... (15:30) Why it’s very difficult to compete with someone having fun. (20:57) The ‘tall girl’ crisis. (25:04) Young male syndrome. (32:27) The male sedation hypothesis. (36:48) The epidemic of loneliness. (40:59) The Region Beta Paradox of comfort. (44:10) A.I. is terrifying! (47:46) Costly societal overcorrections. (54:55) A conversation on religion and its meaning in his life. (58:38) The difference between wisdom and knowledge. (1:07:02) How he used the pandemic to better himself. (1:11:01) The problem with being your opinions. (1:13:41) The role fitness has played in his life. (1:22:31) The cultural differences between America and the UK. (1:30:10) The theory of why men insult each other. (1:33:06) What he has learned about intersexual competition. (1:35:09) A discussion on trans athletes in professional sports. (1:43:03) Robot lives matter. (1:48:43) The business behind Modern Wisdom. (1:52:31) His relationship and journey with money coming from a small town. (1:57:30) No one can beat you but you. (2:08:40) Related Links/Products Mentioned For Mind Pump listeners only Equi.life is offering a FREE BOTTLE of their best-selling liquid Vitamin D3 going on right now. February Promotion: MAPS Performance, MAPS Aesthetic, and MAPS HIIT are all 50% off! **Code FEB50 at checkout** Birthgap ‎Modern Wisdom: #583 - Stephen J. Shaw - Is Population Collapse ‘The desire to have a child never goes away’: how the involuntarily childless are forming a new movement Modern Wisdom Podcast #577 – David Goggins – This Is How To Master Your Life 'Sex Crisis': Incels, Men's Rights Activists Worry About Lack of Sex Of Boys and Men: Why the modern male is struggling, why it matters, and what to do about it – Book by Richard Reeves ‎Modern Wisdom: #496 - Dr Andrew Huberman There's No Such Thing As Porn Addiction, Says New Research The health benefits of strong relationships Region-beta paradox - Wikipedia TikTok is a New Kind of Superweapon Sam Harris - Death and the Present Moment The Psychology of Mob Mentality | Psychology Today Mind Pump #1165: Bishop Robert Barron On Physical Fitness, Satan, Evolution, Psychedelics & Much More Dorian Yates Blood and Guts full video What Use Are Female Friendships? - Dr Tania Reynolds | Modern Wisdom Podcast 580 How Do Women Compete For Partners? - Joyce Benenson | Modern Wisdom Podcast 571 Accuracy and oversexualization in cross-sex mind-reading The man who married an anime hologram | CNN Why Saudi Arabia Giving a Robot Citizenship Is Firing People Up Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources Featured Guest/People Mentioned Chris Williamson (@chriswillx) Instagram Website Modern Wisdom Podcast Jordan Peterson (@jordan.b.peterson) Instagram Joe Rogan (@joerogan) Instagram  David Goggins (@davidgoggins) Instagram Andrew Huberman, Ph.D. (@hubermanlab) Instagram Jocko Willink (@jockowillink) Instagram David J. Ley PhD (@DrDavidLey) Twitter Tom Bilyeu (@tombilyeu) Instagram Douglas Murray (@DouglasKMurray) Twitter Bishop Robert Barron (@bishopbarron) Instagram Tania Reynolds (@taniaarline) Twitter Tucker Max (@TuckerMax) Twitter Conor McGregor (@thenotoriousmma) Instagram

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Starting point is 00:00:00 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. What's up everybody? You just found the world's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, this one was awesome. One of my favorite conversations.
Starting point is 00:00:24 Chris Williamson, he's one of the best interviewers on the internet and a very smart gentleman. In today's episode, we talk all about a lot of stuff, lots of controversial topics. He's very intelligent. If you want to hear an intelligent perspective on lots of tough topics like dating, men, women, and more,
Starting point is 00:00:44 you're gonna love this episode. This episode is brought to you by the team over at Dr. Stephen Cabral. This is Equalife, a company that works with a functional medicine. They use supplements to help improve your health. And right now, for mind-pump listeners, you can get a free bottle, okay,
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Starting point is 00:01:57 comes a show. Do you think that's potentially unhealthy for someone? And do you think that we evolved to reproduce and have a family? And do you think that we evolved to reproduce and have a family and do you think that there's consequences that maybe they just don't foresee yet? Yeah, I mean certainly different strokes for different folks. Some people can make it to the end of life having not had kids or a family and say that it's the right call. Yeah, but you've had to beat the odds pretty hard. I thought I wasn't going to. You're an outline. Yeah, I'm 41.
Starting point is 00:02:26 Yep. And I have a three-year-old son now. Congratulations. But my wife and I, we've been together for 13 years. And so there was a point where we were very Hormosi-esque. She's part of the business, like you built companies together before, like hardcore motivating like that.
Starting point is 00:02:41 And there was the thought that, you know, maybe we won't have kids and that changed and now I look back and go like, oh my god, like. Imagine if we hadn't done this. Yeah. It's very strange because it's hard, I think. I mean, not a parent, not as far as I know. And it's very difficult for non-parents to imagine the kind of enjoyment that they're going to get out of having kids. Because there's a lot of very obvious reasons about why you shouldn't have kids, right? All of the time that they're going to take up and the difficulty and the potential risk
Starting point is 00:03:12 if them becoming injured or killed and then you're going to be heartbroken and you'll never get over and all of these things. It's very hard for parents to actually explain to you the meaning and satisfaction they get out of having kids. And the moment to moment experience, if you do self-righteous happiness of parents, they're less happy than non-parents, but they have much more meaning in their life.
Starting point is 00:03:32 So like, you know, when you're up for the third time tonight with a one-year-old that's teething or whatever's going on, like that's not happiness, but over time you start to accumulate no other lot more meaning. So people can do whatever it is that they want. I am slightly concerned about childlessness, especially in the West at the moment.
Starting point is 00:03:51 The population collapse is fucking terrifying, and it is coming for every developed country. I want to touch on that because, well, first off, the data on this is actually pretty clear that the people that do find meaning and purpose that don't have kids typically devote their lives to something that they, it transcends them. So it's either something religious or spiritual or they volunteer for work or do something that they dedicate their lives to like Mother Teresa, for example. So and it's hard to explain because you don't know what it's like to truly care about something more than yourself, and I think until you have kids.
Starting point is 00:04:29 Otherwise, you really don't. Unless you have that one purpose in life, I think. Well, that was my experience. My experience was until that moment, I didn't realize that I had never truly loved something more than myself. I love my wife, I love my mom, I love my, I love my friends, and I say stuff like that, but until that moment of seeing another being a part of you that you're now responsible for,
Starting point is 00:04:51 all of a sudden, that what I would say for me was real love for the first time, something that I actually love more. You couldn't have imagined it otherwise. Chris, you mentioned population collapse. So, and if you read about this, and you look at the data, this is a big deal, and some countries are freaking out.
Starting point is 00:05:10 I know Japan is in a bad position. I know Italy, where my family's from, in a bad position, America's on the cusp, we're like the line, where we may experience this. China is suffering now for kind of what happened. What, why are we getting the message that we need to have less kids that populate, that we're gonna get overpopulated,
Starting point is 00:05:30 that we're running out of resources, that population is a threat to us in the sense that we're having too many kids. Why are we getting that message when the data's showing the opposite? It's way worse than you think. However bad you think it is, the current decline in birth rates is significantly worse.
Starting point is 00:05:46 So there's a guy called Stephen Shaw, who's just released a documentary called Birth Gap, and he's been on Modern Wisdom in my show. And this guy just totally blew my head off. He became obsessed by this question around about six or seven years ago. He's traveled to 24 different countries. He's a data scientist by trade. And he has looked at the declining birth rates across the world. First off, why is it that people have a problem with the amount of people that are on the planet
Starting point is 00:06:13 and say that it isn't an issue perhaps that the population is declining? It's because of a fundamental belief that the world's carrying capacity has already been breached, that we already have too many people on the planet. This ties into environmentalism and the green movement and stuff. And no matter what you think about like parts per million carbon in the atmosphere, the earth has way, way, way more carrying capacity than we're at at the moment. Remember the population boom, who's going to be a population bomb or a population boom in the 70s and 80s? Well, that never ended up happening.
Starting point is 00:06:41 It looks like we're going to top out just under about 10 billion people, but the fall-off from there is going to be precipitous. You can have a declining birth rate whilst an increasing population, because the amount of time that people live for is getting longer, right? So if you have an ever-aging population, you can actually drop birth rate and increase the size overall. But what you end up with, if you imagine a graph where you have a zero years old, one, two, three, four, all the way up to a hundred, that creates a shape, right,
Starting point is 00:07:10 of the demographic. Once you've had one year olds, there are no more one year olds that can be born right now. We know exactly how many there are. This is where the term demography is destiny comes from. So we know exactly how many one year olds, two year olds, three year olds, and then in 80 years time, we know how many 81 year olds, 82 year olds, if you account for the drop off. So you end up with this shape, right? To the demographic. What you want is this. You want more young people than old people, because they're the ones that drive innovation, that drive GDP, that are actually physically able to look after old people. If you have a shape like that, this sort of inverted triangle shape, that's really not
Starting point is 00:07:44 good, because you have more old people than inverted triangle shape, that's really not good. Because you have more old people than young people. That's the current situation. 70% of countries worldwide are below the birth rate tipping point. That means that the women in those countries are having less than two children. That's the number that you need in order to sustain society. So if everyone remembers this, are not number right from the pandemic. If you have fewer children,
Starting point is 00:08:05 that means there are fewer children to have fewer children. So you end up falling off a cliff on the other side. At some point, it's just, you can't recover. It's very difficult, very, very difficult. Now what you will end up with in American, for instance, certain subcultures that are repopulating pretty well, Mormons, for instance, you know, you have within particular
Starting point is 00:08:26 mostly religious traditional conservative sect, I mean like Matt Walsh has had like six kids. I think he's a two sets of twins, right? So, you know, there's gonna be a lot of Matt Walsh's running around, but even in the places where people would say at Sub-Saharan Africa, everything's gonna be fine. Every 15 years, the average number of children that each mother has is dropping by one.
Starting point is 00:08:48 So, it's six, and it's five, then it's four, and we're at six to five now, ish. Even in the places that everyone thinks are having it away. Japan, that you brought up, 120 million people in it at the moment by 2050, that's gonna be 60 to 65. China, 1.2 billion people in it at the moment by 2050, that's gonna be 60 to 65. China, 1.2 billion people in it at the moment by 2050,
Starting point is 00:09:05 that's going to be 650 million. South Korea, same problem, UK, USA, or sort of 1.8 to 1.6 in terms of their birth rate. It's really, really, really not good. And the interesting thing about population collapse in terms of demographics, it's the least exciting and least galvanizing of all of the existential risks, right?
Starting point is 00:09:25 There's no super volcanoes spewing out ash, there's no asteroids in the sky, there's no Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger crashing through the ceiling to galvanizers to doing stuff. There's no smoke from chimneys and stuff. It creeps up on you one year at a time, one generation at a time, one lost child at a time. And before you know it, there aren't enough people on the planet. So for the people that have, you know have legitimate concerns about what's happening with the environment and stuff like that, if you think that living on this planet is bad, when you believe there's too many people
Starting point is 00:09:54 on it, wait until you see what it's like when there's too few. Now, what are they attributing this to? Is this also associating this with the fact that we've moved further away from religion because you mentioned some of these religious cultures that are definitely still promoting having multiple kids. Third Ray Lala. So it seems like the two things that cause population birth rates to decline are the education of women and industrialization. Those two are across the board.
Starting point is 00:10:24 And the reason that this happens, the reason you can tell that this is the case is that you have, let's say Japan, in Japan, I think all schooling is private and everybody pays for it in some of the Scandinavian countries. All schooling is supplemented and paid for by the state. You have certain countries that are authoritarian, some that are democratic,
Starting point is 00:10:42 some that are egalitarian, some that are patriarchal, some that you know, you have every different type of culture that you can. So you think, okay, what is it that all of these different countries, 70% of countries are below the birthright tipping point? What is it that all of them have got in common? And it's been this increasing industrialization and education of women.
Starting point is 00:10:59 To put it out there front and foremost, I am not saying that we should stop educating women, right? That's not my proposal at all. We're going to clip that. But this is where... This is the correlation, it seems. As soon as you educate women, the birth rate falls precipitously. That is a really uncomfortable truth, right?
Starting point is 00:11:18 That's just what happens. Why is that what happens? It seems like if women are able to gain education and employment, they spend more time learning and then more time earning, which then squeezes that fertility window down. If you've spent up until the age of what, 23 in school and then you go, spend 18 years in full-time education, I might as well go and actually earn. So then you're talking maybe five years in a career before you actually start to properly look to settle down. Again, this is obviously on average. There's many students at university that will also
Starting point is 00:11:48 have kids at the partner and get married and stuff. Then you're talking 30. It's very, very difficult for women to understand just how limited their fertility window is. And eight out of ten women who are childless didn't intend to be childless. He did her 10? Eight out of 10. He's ready to have time. I did not know that.
Starting point is 00:12:09 It's called involuntary childlessness. So around about 10% of women are physically incapable of having kids for a variety of reasons, which is just brutal. 10% said that they actually didn't intend to have children and that leaves a whopping 4 out of 5, who didn't have children due to life circumstances. That's the most common reason for it, and the most common life circumstance is leaving it too late to find a partner and then have kids.
Starting point is 00:12:35 You break through that fertility window on the other side, and this is Professor Renska from Norway University. It was a huge meta-analysis done in 2010. And it is robust. It's been replicated. This is the case. And the problem that you have is these women who get into their 40s, who always intended to have a family who realized that they now can't, they go to support groups, and Stephen the guy that did that documentary went and these women are grieving for families that they never had, which is just brutal, like to think that you can grieve for something that didn't occur. And he went to this undertaker's funeral parlour in Germany, which has got a birth gap problem already.
Starting point is 00:13:19 So you're starting to see more and more single people get to the end of life without any support structure. And he told me the story where the undertaker said, for the first time in history, we're doing funerals for these people, both men and women, and nobody's showing up. There's no one showing to the funerals of these people. There's no one left. And then when they cut the clothes off of them to embalm the body, or to dress the body ready for this event, which no one goes to. They find that they've got bruising around their wrists and bruising on their arms, and it seems like
Starting point is 00:13:49 in some of the care homes that these people have been staying in that they've been abused by the carers. So you have this alone elderly person who doesn't have any family in the final years of life, they're abused by the people that are supposed to look after them, and then after they die, no one attends their funeral. That's terrible. That's so sad. It's like the most fucking harrowing has on the back of your neck style conversation.
Starting point is 00:14:11 Yeah, I also think that we're sold that popular media in, especially in modern societies, this is where the industrialization aspect comes in, sells having kids or promotes having kids as oppressive, terrible. You can't do fun stuff anymore, it sucks. And so, and that you'll get fine meaning and purpose with your career. So I think that's also plays a big role.
Starting point is 00:14:34 Part, the other side of that conversation with population is that people say, well, we have limited resources, right? Well, how can we continue to just grow when we're only have so much food, when we have so much oil? With that, I like to point to how many times we've been told that we've gonna reach peak oil production, like we only have so much oil, but innovation actually today, we actually have access to more oil today, per person than we did 40 years ago, even though we've been using it the entire time. Same thing with farmland. We use far less land to produce far more food.
Starting point is 00:15:06 So the innovation aspect people don't really consider. That's also a big part of this conversation too, right? Yes. And everybody always wants to be a Cassandra. Me included, right? I'm harping on about the fact that population collapses, something that everybody should be concerned about. There is always going to be like a nostradamus person pointing at the issue and saying, because
Starting point is 00:15:23 it gives them a sense of importance. But the carrying capacity of the earth is not a concern. The population collapses. Yeah, so I wanted to take a step back because you have a very interesting road to getting to where you're at now. Like, first off, I want to commend you. When you do interviews,
Starting point is 00:15:40 you're probably one of the most objective and just excellent interviews I've ever heard. You listen very well, very objective, you can kind of go on both sides, you have the ability to see through the fog a little bit. How did you get to that place? How did you get to what you do now? So I was a club promoter for a long time. I ran owned one of the biggest events companies in the UK, stood on the front door of about
Starting point is 00:16:04 a thousand club nights. Sounds like a natural progression to be in a great interviewer. As you can see, it's the classic intake. So I do that for about a thousand different events that we run over the course of a decade and a half, meet about a million people, run this big company, and do some reality TV off the back of it. I was a professional party boy for a decade and a bit. And get toward the end of my 20s after I've done this second reality TV dating show called Love Island. And I kind of had a fatal dose of contrast on that show between the people that were there
Starting point is 00:16:40 and the person that I thought I was. And I realized that it actually wasn't necessarily the scene for me. And I had nowhere to hide because cameras were on me 24 hours a day, and I had no distractions, and then maybe being able to sedate myself with YouTube and internet and books and bits and pieces, and this really just drove it home. It's like you're not supposed to be here that much. Was there a moment or was it just the whole thing? So, the kind of was was the show was a gateway drug that kind of made me really start to question,
Starting point is 00:17:07 is this what I'm supposed to do? Because that was like the World Cup championships of being a party boy, right? You managed to get on this huge show that's on Primetime TV every single night for a month and a half, and I was in there for about a month. And that was supposed to be everything that society would tell you you're supposed to work toward, right? This is what a young guy that values status and women and renown and resources and all
Starting point is 00:17:37 that shit should aspire to do, especially coming from a working class town, working class background that's exactly what you're supposed to try and do. And I found it lacking, right? Even though I really loved what the work that I'd done in night life and took tons and tons and tons away from it, and I'm very, very proud of what me and my business partner built, there was something missing. This was a good time, 2016-17, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, Orlando Boton from the School of Life. So I'm starting to watch and listen to content
Starting point is 00:18:06 that makes me think about the direction I'm going in life and what I really want to do and how I can contribute. And then I just spent a lot of time exposing myself to crushing volumes of content that made me do introspection, realized that I've been playing a role and a persona for a very long time,
Starting point is 00:18:24 started to strip that back. Okay, if I keep on digging and digging and digging, if I'll hit something solid, which was curiosity and a desire to learn and kind of like this, this nerdy angle, which I'd very much kept away, because on the front door of a nightclub, I can't talk to people about answers to the Fermi paradox
Starting point is 00:18:40 around why there are no aliens out there. They want the VIP band and they want to fuck off inside the club. This isn't the environment in which I could do that. And part of this is a self-fulfilling prophecy because I'm sure that many people would have been responsive to this had I've decided to open up in any case about my interests, but I didn't have the confidence because I decided that this was the way
Starting point is 00:18:57 that people wanted me to be. This was the role I had to play. And also being the leader, I'm sure that you guys feel this as well, as the leader of any sort of company, there is, you begin to put an expectation about what you think of the people want you to do on that. And you start to almost fulfill this role that you've created for yourself. So start the podcast about five years ago, just because I wanted to learn from
Starting point is 00:19:17 people and you roll the clock forward now. And it's one of a 600 episodes, Goggins, Peterson, Jocco, Hebeman. Yeah, how did you start getting guests at that level? I mean, you've had massive guests on the show, and we know firsthand what it's like to try and get a big name on the show, even after we've had traction, and we're relatively big.
Starting point is 00:19:38 So how did you get to the level of getting that kind of guest? I mean, did your show explode overnight? Did you have something that went viral? How did you gain all that? Was your club promoting experience? Did that help you? Correct. So the networking, the background of networking. Most people have no idea how to network effectively. That was what I'd done for, that was my bread and butter for 15 years. So being able to reach out to people, create relationships, maintain relationships, and
Starting point is 00:20:03 then use those to build more. So that was really all that happened. I mean, the show, dude, 96% of my listeners came last year. Spotify gave me the end of your stats. 96% of people joined last year. So you were working for years and years and years, and then it was like, correct. If you ever seen that jackpot show, visualize value graph, where it's flat and flat and flat, and there's a little arrow that points to this is pointless
Starting point is 00:20:27 and it's just before the hockey stick begins. I was at this is pointless for three years basically. And yeah, I mean, like we've done stuff, I think in a day, in a day a couple of weeks ago, we did more plays than the entire first three years of the show put together. Right. So for anybody out there that is thinking, I'm trying to do this thing. I feel like I've got talent. I genuinely believe that my quality of content is ahead of the interest that it's getting.
Starting point is 00:20:55 I just keep going. Chris, what kept you going during that time? Was it just that there was a selfish desire for knowledge and wisdom and learning? So in other words, at first three years, when you had no traction, or it seemed like there was nothing happening, where you're just like, okay, but I love this. I love learning.
Starting point is 00:21:11 What can you tell somebody who's in that period? Because three years of long time, to plug away, invest money and time and energy, and see nothing or very little come back in terms of financial success. It didn't feel like work. Okay. That's why I would happily do this for free. I would happily do, it was six o'clock in the UK,
Starting point is 00:21:30 it's two o'clock in Austin, where I am now. I would happily do that every single day for free if nobody listened. Like that's, it's what I want to do. And it's very difficult to compete with somebody that's having fun because I'm gonna outwork everybody else in the room. I need to not even feel like work to me. For someone that wants to become a great podcaster,
Starting point is 00:21:48 they don't have the same predisposition, whatever it is that I have, which means that every time that they need to get themselves up and prepare for another guest and sit down and have the conversation, it's going to feel arduous. Whereas for me, I'm actually compelled to do it because I want to. It's the perfect intersection. What is the icky guy, what you need to do, sorry, what you want to do, what society needs and what you can be paid for, right? Like that's slap bang in the middle and that's what I've managed to find.
Starting point is 00:22:14 So yeah, it didn't feel like work. For all that, it can be impressive to say that are you plugged away at something for three years and basically nobody took any notice. So well, I would still be happily doing that now. The only difference is now that there's a lot more attention. How would you compare? So how are you a student, I guess, is where I'm getting that versus like, because this quest for learning that it seems like it might have come a bit later for you, or was this always there, even going to school?
Starting point is 00:22:39 Yeah, always curious, but just kind of hit it away, I think, for a good chunk of time. Again, like the... Too busy being a party boy. Correct, yeah dude. You know, if you're running nightclubs and constantly thinking about DJs and all the rest of it, there's only so much time in the day. And it meant that, yeah, that was that curious side of me
Starting point is 00:22:57 was a little bit muted, but it's always been there. And I think a lot of people are like this man. Like think about the entire industry of podcasting, coming out of the whatever you wanna call it, like edge attainment sector. It's people that want to learn about today, I'm going to learn about lithium mines and tomorrow I'm going to learn about human DNA for space flight and then I'm going to learn about what it's like to be a professional porn star. Like why?
Starting point is 00:23:16 Which is because we're curious. And we want to learn about shit. And I think that following that, following that curiosity is a pretty good strategy. It's also a great medium because it's long forms. We could have long discussions, whereas that kind of ended for a little while, where everything would have to be so short. Any guess that really surprised you that you had on, where afterwards you were like, wow, that was different than when I anticipated.
Starting point is 00:23:40 So, Goggins recently, I had him on, he needed two shows, which was very nice of him to choose me as one of the other ones that wasn't gonna be Rogan. And he surprised me because he seems like such an extreme character, you can't believe that this guy is going to be actually that legit in real life. And I was going in there wanting to kind of try and poke holes in, I guess what do you actually spend each day
Starting point is 00:24:04 doing? What do you daily routine look like? And why have you decided to go back to not doing any talks and how come you're only doing two podcasts and blah, blah, blah. However legit and hardcore you think that guy is, he's even more legit than that. It's terrifying how hardcore that dude is. And that surprised me because I was expecting that to be at least one chink in the armor and I didn't see anything at all.
Starting point is 00:24:28 So very authentic. Correct. Yeah. Anybody that you that shifted your paradigm, we've had guests on the show where afterwards we all sat down and talked for another hour or two and it just changed our, our minds or how we thought about certain things. Can you think of a time that happened for you where afterwards you were like, okay, I am totally different after that interview. All the time, man.
Starting point is 00:24:51 I mean, Steven Shaw, that birth gap thing, the declining birth rate stuff. I'd known that it was a problem for a while, but I didn't realize just how bad it was. So that really opened my eyes. A bunch of conversations with evolutionary psychologists about the imbalance in the dating market at the moment, so this mating crisis. Explain that.
Starting point is 00:25:07 Yeah, that's interesting. I've been hearing stuff about this. This is kind of fascinating to me. Okay, so third rail again. At the moment, there is a massive reduction in the amount of short term sex that people are having, and also you have declining marriage rates and family rates, right? The number of men reporting sex in the last year has tripled from 8% to 28% from 2008 to 2018. This is men between the ages of 18 and 30. So short term sex has declined. This is also declined for women as well, but a little bit more for men. For the first time
Starting point is 00:25:41 in history, 50.1% of women are childless at 30 and a report from writers says that 45% of prime working age women between 22 and 45 will be single and childless by 2040. For the first time in history, you have 51% of children being born outside of marriage or civil unions, that's why the single parents or two people that are just in a relationship in the UK. So what that map shows is short term sex and long term mating seem to be on the decline, right? We have greater rates of singleness, you think? Which is crazy in a world of tender and Facebook and Instagram. Correct. It's super fascinating that that that would be declining. How is the ease of access to other partners increasing while what actually occurs in the real world seems to be dropping down?
Starting point is 00:26:29 Yeah, and are they connected? Correct. Yes, so yes, they are. So that's the... Okay, there's something happening here. And I think that everybody, every young single person that has an idea that, you know, the dating market seems a little bit different now, very different. All of the advice that my parents can give me doesn't really seem to apply anymore. So you would think, what is it that could be happening here? Hypogamy is the tendency for women to date what's called up and across. So on average, women want to date a man who is as educated or more educated than them and as employed or more employed than them, so that's wealth levels.
Starting point is 00:27:04 This is Harkens back to our ancestral roots, which would be that women want a man who has status and resources, not a problem at all. Why should women try and like settle or not get the best that they can? The issue that you have is that women have been outperforming men in both education and employment for quite a while now.
Starting point is 00:27:22 So two women for every one man will complete a four year US college degree by 2030 women on average between the ages of 21 and 29 and 1111 pounds more than men do. So you can see a potential issue here. You have an ever increasing cohort of high performing women that are educated and employed competing for an ever decreasing cohort of ultra high performing men. So this is what I call the tall-girl problem. So every guy has a girlfriend who is six foot without heels. If you want to wear heels and look nice on the night out, you're stuck dating professional athletes, right?
Starting point is 00:27:54 Because your capacity in terms of height has selected for a very small cohort of men that are taller than you. This is the same, but it's in terms of education and employment. So the ability for women to outperform men, remembering when Title IX came in, which was the affirmative action thing that helped women to get into higher education, the percentage point swing was 13% in favor of men. Now in 2023, it's 15% percentage points in favor of women. We over corrected. So there was nobody, no one that thought when Title IX came in that they were going to not only reach parity but blasts straight through it and then over correct.
Starting point is 00:28:33 Nobody thought that that was going to happen. So again, you might say, why is it a bad thing that women have got access to education in employment? It's not. Women needed that for a very long time. The brutal ground truth is that when you match up this increased educational and employment achievement with hypergamy,
Starting point is 00:28:53 women who are better educated and better employed reduce down their mating pool. So what's good for their educational and employment achievements is not necessarily good for their dating prospects. And this gets born out in a ton of data, what's good for their educational and employment achievements is not necessarily good for their dating prospects. And this gets born out in a ton of data. Relationships where the woman outends the man
Starting point is 00:29:10 of 50% more likely to end in divorce. Relationships where the woman contributes more than 80% of household income are twice as likely to end in divorce. Relationships where the man is not the primary bread winner, he is 50% more likely to need to use a rectile dysfunction medication. Women are three% more likely to need to use a rectile dysfunction medication. Women are three times more likely than a man to say that important educational achievement
Starting point is 00:29:30 is something that they would judge a partner on. Basically, guys don't care if their partner has got a PhD and earns a hundred grand a year, but women would care more, right? And this doesn't need to be huge effect. They are quite large effects, but it only needs to be relatively small effects to nudge people's preferences. So we have this problem in terms of short-term and long-term mating. We have this imbalance in terms of female achievement and male achievement.
Starting point is 00:29:57 Male labor force participation has declined by 0.1% every month since 1950. It's gone from 87% to 68% and by 2040, it'll be 65%. 65% labor force participation amongst men. So you can imagine the dynamic. You have this group of turbochads at the top, right? The sort of eight out of tens and above. They have this wealth of options. The guys that are super wealthy, well educated and tall usually, they have this
Starting point is 00:30:25 big, big, big block of girls that they can run through if they choose to. These women sometimes get used and heartbroken by the guys at the top. That causes them to be bitter and resentful of all men. The group of guys at the bottom, you know, five out of tens and below, are essentially invisible to most of these women. But they But they get these men aren't worth shit like, where are all of the good men at? They believe that they're one of these good men, but they are being sort of tarred with the same brush as the guys that used and run through women.
Starting point is 00:30:56 So those women retreat into careers and lean into sort of a boss bitch lifestyle. These men retreat into porn and video games. These guys at the top that do have the turbo-chard access, I don't think it's necessarily even that good for them either. Like having a wealth of options is a man who wants lots of sexual variety, doesn't encourage you to be a good man,
Starting point is 00:31:18 and many men can't control their sort of desire for sexual variety in the way that they might want to, like in their best moments or whatever. So you end up with both sexes moving further and further apart from each other. The men that retreat into porn and video games are less attractive potential mates to this group of women, and the women that lean into a boss bitch lifestyle make themselves even taller and taller with regards to the tall girl problem. So you end up with a situation in which everybody resents everybody.
Starting point is 00:31:50 This, you see this online with, you know, McDowell, Manusphere, Red Pill, Black Pill in cell culture, or on the women's side with boss bitch culture, with pink pill, with female dating strategy. All of these are copes for why can't I find a partner from women that I'm attracted to or from men one that's attracted to me. Wow.
Starting point is 00:32:08 And in these apps, these dating apps are showing that there's a small percentage of men, something like in the single digit percentage of men, who are getting all of the matches, all of the conversations, all of the women who want to talk with them. And then the rest are essentially, as you said, invisible. And these dating apps are showing this. Now historically, evolutionarily speaking, because I feel like this is a, sounds like a relatively new problem. It's not a, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,
Starting point is 00:32:35 the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the is what's practiced, but for a lot of human history that wasn't the case, and you had the man with the resources and the military and the harem, and then you had the peasants, and they just didn't have accessible women, and so the argument is that we created monogamy,
Starting point is 00:32:57 and it was a way to keep us peaceful and not killing each other and all that stuff. So it's like, now this kind of natural tendency, where all the women want these few men, and all that stuff. So it's like, we've now, this kind of natural tendency where all the women want these few men and all these other guys are invisible. Now it seems like we've amplified that with technology and accessibility and that's what we're kind of seeing right now.
Starting point is 00:33:16 Is it that guys are just giving up and that women are working harder? Is that part of it or is it more than that? There's an awful lot going on. So Richard Reeves, guy that wrote of boys and men, really great book, short read, everybody should check it out if they're interested in this. And he talks about the structural problems.
Starting point is 00:33:30 Men are dropping out of education, employment, and family life. Why it's happening, it seems like girls mature more quickly than boys. Everyone knows that. They hit puberty earlier than boys. But there's other things that are on average more conscientious, which means that when it comes to sitting down and doing homework, they're better. More boys have got ADD, more boys are restlessious, which means that when it comes to sitting down and doing homework, they're better. More boys have got ADD, more boys are restless and boisterous when it comes to class. That doesn't engender a very successful, like, education outcome for guys.
Starting point is 00:33:54 There are four times as many female fighter pilots in the US Air Force as there are male kindergarten teachers by percentage in the US. Two percent of kindergarten teachers are men, eight percent of fighter pilots are female. I'm happy to have a discussion about whether there should be more female fighter pilots in the US, but that absolutely needs to be more male kindergarten teachers because they understand how to deal with voice response, right? Oh, I see. So the monogamy argument is an interesting one. It seems to me that almost all human human civilizations throughout history, and cessery were monogamous, right? So this like, polygamy argument really only begins to make sense once you've got agricultural revolution, because no one man can accumulate
Starting point is 00:34:41 sufficient resources to be able to look after more than just him and his local family. So for anybody that says you do have this like huge polygene thing going on and everyone's again, everyone's a wannabe gang as can't. No, not up until 10,000, 12,000 years ago. And you can tell by the, there's some genetic records, there's some anthropological data that suggests that it's just not the case. It's not, most of human history was monogamy. Serial monogamy, perhaps, but it wasn't this polygyny where it's one man with an entire
Starting point is 00:35:12 harm of women. Because how would you, in a normal local tribe, if you don't have tons and tons of resources, how are you not going to stop all of the other men just tearing you apart? And this is a problem called young male syndrome. So this is, we've spoken about individual happiness and stuff. We probably need to justify why people need to get into a relationship at all. We can do that in a bit.
Starting point is 00:35:30 But societal stability is something to be concerned about. If you have a turn of men who are not bought in to the local society, why should they behave? Why shouldn't they cause havoc? If they've not got a partner and they've not got kids, their testosterone is higher because getting into relationship drops testosterone and then having kids drops it again, which reduces risk taking behavior.
Starting point is 00:35:52 Why shouldn't they just go around and push over granny and set buildings on fire and stuff? They've got nothing else to do. And this has happened throughout history, Portugal in the 1700s, they actually shipped off all of the sons that weren't the first son. The first son got married off and the rest of them were put on galleon ships and they got to explore the new world.
Starting point is 00:36:07 What they were doing was they were outsourcing this potential, these roving bands of like future miscreants, and they were just exporting them out of the country. So, young male syndrome is this situation in which a proliferation of childless, sexless young men cause havoc for society. Given that we've got ever increasing rates of sexlessness amongst young men and young people generally, where is all of the writing?
Starting point is 00:36:32 That's a valid question. In-sell killings for all that a lot of the killings that do occur, especially mass shootings, do come from young lonely men. There's nowhere near it. It hasn't tripled in the last 10 years, right? So why is it not going up in line? And this is a theory that I've come up with, which is the male sedation hypothesis. So it's my belief that men are being sedated out of this state of seeking and reproductive
Starting point is 00:36:55 behavior through porn and video games. I think that video games give them the team bonding, goal seeking, forward oriented satisfaction that they need. And I think that porn is giving them a very, very, very slight, titrated dose. Careful you're touching a third reel that wasn't a third reel that long ago. We talked about video games the other day. A lot of you guys did a black backlash. Don't come after their video games. The pornography conversation is interesting because this is relatively new. I mean, pornography's existed for a long time, but not its access.
Starting point is 00:37:31 I make the joke on the podcast all the time that, you know, when we grew up in the 90s, if you had a dirty magazine in the 90s, you could literally trade, you could trade it for some kid's bike. That's how hard it was to come by. And now it's so accessible. It's interesting. Have you interviewed anybody who talk about the impacts of pornography on men and society and what that could potentially do to us?
Starting point is 00:37:54 Yes. I've had a couple of conversations that actually contradict each other. So Dr. David Lay is very anti-pond panic. And I need to dig into a lot more of what he talked about. He said that people are overblowing the concern when it comes to porn. Really? Yeah, yeah, which is the first guy
Starting point is 00:38:10 that I've ever heard to talk about this. But he's deep in the research. On average, I think that porn is a pretty destructive force for men. And the main reason that I think it is is that guys who are in relationships and use porn are less likely to have sex with their partner, right? So you're less likely to satisfy your partner
Starting point is 00:38:27 because you're able to satisfy yourself aside from that. Downstream from that, your partner may start to wonder and worry about why you are not having as much sex. If you're single, it's going to promote you to go out and actually get laid less. Like if the only way that you can get sex is by finding another woman,
Starting point is 00:38:44 you're going to be very motivated to go out and find that woman. Whereas if you can get sex is by finding another woman, you're going to be very motivated to go out and find that woman. Whereas if you can get your rocks off at home on your own, then that's not going to be the case. Andrew Heubenman said to me on a really great episode that people should check out about how porn, watching, can train people to become aroused when they're watching somebody else have sex, but that doesn't necessarily translate over into when you're one-on-one with somebody in the real world. So you can actually, there is a potential concern that you could neurologically program yourself to become a voyeur. And that is a pretty big concern.
Starting point is 00:39:18 I mean, there's all sorts of things that are happening as well with like young kids that learn about sex through porn and then have super skewed perspectives of what sex is supposed to be, how you're supposed to do it, etc. etc. This is I guess more of a concern for women about how men treat them, but like if you're a guy you want to treat a woman well, right? You don't want to be doing something that she's going to absolutely detest or hurt her. So yeah, the porn panic thing, when it comes to video games, again, I don't know, I haven't seen the data on this, I do need to speak to some gaming addiction people, however, it wouldn't surprise me if... The question still remains, if young men aren't having that much sex,
Starting point is 00:39:57 where is all of the unrest, right? Yeah, manifest online in forums and stuff like that, but it's not happening in the real world, and it should be so prolific. This isn't me like campaigning for. Go out there and burn down your local fucking CBS. But something's happening. And the two things that men would typically want would be camaraderie, goal seeking and reproduction. Look, when I was younger, which wasn't that long ago, if you were at home by yourself, you, there was nothing you do. You had nothing to do. Now, it's hard, I have kids.
Starting point is 00:40:31 So I have two teenagers and I also have two, real, you know, much younger ones. And in anybody who has kids now will tell you, look, when I was a kid, if you got punished, you were sent to your room. Now it's almost the reverse. It's like, get off while you're like trying to get actually going to go outside. I'm not even joking. Stand off while you're like, trying to actually cut it. Go outside.
Starting point is 00:40:45 I'm not even joking. Stand on that grass. Stand on that fucking grass. It's true. It's so true. It's like, get off your stuff. And they're like, I don't know what to do. Go outside.
Starting point is 00:40:54 There's nothing to do outside. So I think I agree kind of with what you're saying. This kind of all speaks to, in my opinion, this bigger thing, which is, we seem to be more connected. It's easier to talk to people. It's easier to meet people. Yet there seems to be this epidemic of loneliness. Correct.
Starting point is 00:41:10 And that seems to be across the board, especially with older people, but across the board, where we're more anxious, more depressed, and more lonely than ever before. What have you read about this? It's terrifying, man. I mean, the most common answer to the question, how many friends do you have that you could call on in an emergency is zero. That's the most common answer. That's not the average or the mean, but it's the most common answer. Wow. That's fucking terrifying. In a world where we are more connected than ever before
Starting point is 00:41:39 people are feeling more alone. Being lonely is as bad for your health as smoking a pack of 10 cigarettes every single day. People that are alone have quicker onset of dementia, they have quicker neurological decline, their health span is shorter, their life span is shorter. The problem is everybody as far as I can see, and this is the sedation hypothesis, is being sedated out of things that are good for them. What is convenient is not always what's good for you. In the same way as a child might always want to have ice cream for dinner, they need to
Starting point is 00:42:10 be told that they can't. Even though they want it, it's not necessarily what's good for them. But when you create a world where convenience is paramount, when you can, you know, Uber eats a Michelin star meal to the couch that you Amazon primed yesterday to be built by some guy that you paid for on task rabbit to then watch Netflix from the comfort of your home. All of this is conspired. Just describe my last Saturday. Fuck.
Starting point is 00:42:34 It's true though, you know what I think is interesting about this conversation is how powerful all these things are is how much it can even creep into someone's life who's aware of it. I mean, we talk about this stuff all the time and it's like, man, it's wild to me how easily you can get kind of roped in. We're social creatures at the very least. You have to be around people. In fact, it's been acknowledged as a cruel form of punishment that you said isolate someone like capture a prisoner in war. It's the worst thing that you could do to them. It's to put them alone.
Starting point is 00:43:10 That's considered cruel and unusual punishment. And in major world countries have said, we will not do that if we go to war to each other's captured to captured enemies. So it's pretty wild. I did read that talking with people online gives you the same dopamine as meeting them in person, but what you lack is the oxytocin.
Starting point is 00:43:31 So you get the dopamine, which is the driver, but you lack the oxytocin. So it's like, you get a drug. It's like getting high from a drug versus getting high from doing something physical, an active. The work isn't there, and the meaning isn't there, and so it's just a hit of dopamine. So in essence, it is what you're saying sedating,
Starting point is 00:43:53 I think is the best word. It's like, we're satisfying the driver. So we're lose the driver, but we're not getting what we really need. And without the driver, we'll never get what we really need. Yeah, and with that saturated dose, it's enough to just keep people comfortably numb, but it's not enough to actually motivate them to go and do something. So I learned about this concept called the region beta paradox last year. And the region beta paradox, imagine that
Starting point is 00:44:18 if you were going to go somewhere, you would walk if it was less than a mile. I just shared this with you guys. But you would drive if it was a mile or greater, right? Paradoxically, what that means is that you would drive somewhere, drive two miles quicker than you would walk one mile. Now, the problem that you have is that if people can get themselves into a situation where things aren't quite that bad, that it'll activate them to get out the bottom, they're comfortably numb.
Starting point is 00:44:43 They're in this region beta in the middle. So you could imagine someone that's in a relationship, it's not abusive, it's not that bad, but it doesn't fire them up. They've probably settled, or someone lives in an apartment where the landlord isn't that much of a dick, but there's maybe a bit of mold
Starting point is 00:44:55 and maybe it's a bit expensive, and it's a rough area of town. All of these people would actually be better off if their situations were worse, because it would motivate them to do something about it and come out of the bottom. If your situation is good, fantastic, good for you. If your situation is bad, okay, you're going to do something to change it. If your situation is just about possible, this is how you end up
Starting point is 00:45:12 being comfortably numb. And that's the sedation in the middle. And I think that a lot of people whether they know it or not, they just feel like life is kind of here. It's just this sort of gray is kind of here. Just this sort of gray vanilla pumped into them kind of dopamine flecks up and down throughout the day. Don't really know what's going on. They're not super connected to the things around them. They don't feel or they don't feel dread. They don't feel a massive amount of fear, but they don't feel a massive amount of joy. And this is the world that's being created at the moment. I mean, this is like fucking super black-pilled stuff, right? Like, it's not exactly being the most positive vibes of our, however, here's the fucking thing that I would say. In order to transcend your programming, you have to become aware of it. And the choice that you have
Starting point is 00:45:57 when it comes to happiness in life is between becoming aware of your mental afflictions or the discomfort of becoming ruled by them. The only way that you can get past this stuff, it is we are in uncharted territory here, folks. No one has been here before. The ease of access to dopamine, the lack of connection between humans. No one's been here before. In order for you to deal with this problem, you have to first become aware of it. What you're talking about right now is one of the things or one of the main reasons that we attribute to the rise in the Spartan races and these things were and you see a lot of these guys online now that are selling these groups where they go you know guys are you know young men or paying thousands of dollars to get you know beat up for a mission in the face and basically like Navy SEAL selection. Yeah. So it's and so this is what we attribute to that is that we have this desire for struggle and to go
Starting point is 00:46:49 through these things and know everyone I agree with you is that this kind of even too. I think about the fucking proliferation of ice tubs. Yeah. What are you doing? We have one here. But what are you doing? You're saying, my life is so comfortable. Yep.
Starting point is 00:47:04 Yeah. doing. You're saying, my life is so comfortable, day to day, that I have to go out of my way to buy a $5,000 custom piece of equipment in order to be able to artificially inject some difficulty into my existence. That's what's happening. Your life has become so comfortable and convenient that you have to create a room in which heavy things are attached to a long thin thing, and then you have to pick it a long thin thing and then you have to pick it up and put it down because you have to pick up and put down nothing else in your life. That's what's happening. People are artificially re-engineering the stuff that you would have naturally done as
Starting point is 00:47:36 a cause throughout your entire day and they're having to do it in little blocks. I mean, I've seen this with the creation of gyms and getting rid of a lot of manual labor and hard tasks I mean isn't this where it's just gonna get more crazy with AI and everything solving all these other problems of struggle So where do you see us being able to address this in another form? It's fucking difficult man. I mean the AI thing is Hey, are you going down the rabbit hole or chat GBT yet? Yes. Yeah, if you go spoken about it much. Oh, yeah, it's been the hot topic for like the last couple months, man.
Starting point is 00:48:11 Okay. Well, I've called it a genie. Let's say at some point everyone's gonna have a genie and be able to get whatever they want, that's terrifying. I mean, if you think that social media at the moment is bad, wait until almost all of it is not only driven to you by algorithms that know exactly what to give you, only driven to you by algorithms that know exactly what to give you, but it's written by algorithms that know exactly what to say. Within the next
Starting point is 00:48:29 ten years, over 90% of content that's produced on the internet won't be even made by humans. At least at the moment when you read something that's either useless or interesting and you regret reading it afterwards, at least you know that someone somewhere wrote it. But imagine when it's become automated. Imagine when the content that you read on the internet has become automated. And then imagine when they can deep fake videos of people. So I was with Tom Billio yesterday, they're training an equivalent of chat GPT on every conversation that he's ever had, on everything that he's ever written, so that you can have
Starting point is 00:49:01 a permanent virtual avatar of Tom in the metaverse that you can go and have a conversation with at all times and it'll accurately tell you what time it is. I'm like, hang on. If it's more you than you are, or if it knows everything that you've ever said, like what use are you now? What does that even mean to be you? If I can have a permanent 24, seven, unlimitedly scalable, every single person
Starting point is 00:49:25 that wants to have a podcast, hey, come and have it. Come and do a podcast with Chris. Come and do a podcast with virtual Chris, Chris AI. Come and do that. Fucking terrifying. Now, there's an article from a friend that I want everybody to go and check out. It's by Gwinderbogel on substack gowinder.substack.com and it's about TikTok. So I pulled up. Oh, I think I saw this. Yeah, it's fucking terrifying. I read half of it. I had to stop. It's pretty bad. So in a survey asking American and Chinese children what job they wanted most the top answer amongst Chinese kids was astronaut. Yeah, and the time for answer amongst American kids was influencer. There is a substantial body of research showing a strong association between smartphone addiction, shrinkage of the brain's gray matter, and digital dementia, an umbrella term for the onset of anxiety and depression
Starting point is 00:50:13 and the deterioration of memory, attention spans self-esteem and impulse control, the last of which increases addiction. Indeed, many habitual tiktokers can already be found complaining on websites like Reddit about their loss of mental ability, a phenomenon that's come to be known as tiktok brain. If the signs are becoming apparent already, imagine what tiktok addiction will have done to a new developing brain's generation from now.
Starting point is 00:50:34 Tiktok's capacity to both stupify people acutely by encouraging idiotic behaviour like getting people to drink bleach out of a toilet, which actually happened to go... Eatipods. Correct. Yeah, which gave people brain damage. So you've got acute stupidity, and then you've got chronic stupidity through atrothing the brain. This should prompt consideration of its potential use as a new kind of weapon, one that seeks
Starting point is 00:50:55 to neutralize enemies, not by infecting pain and terror, but by inflicting pleasure. Yeah. Last month, FBI director Chris Veray warned that TikTok is controlled by a Chinese government that could use it for influence operations. So how likely is it that one such influence operation might include addicting young Westerners to a mind-numbing content to create a generation of ninkin poops? It's happening. Well, universities are already banning it now. UT Austin's bandit on campus. There's a handful.
Starting point is 00:51:23 We would use it. our CIA would use it. So of course they're gonna use it on us. You know what this makes me think is two things. One is that we think we know what we want, but we really don't know what the hell that we want. And so we're getting everything that we want, but it's not really what we need. And then two is humans fundamentally don't understand
Starting point is 00:51:44 that there's a trade. They think if they get this thing that there's no potential trade. So I'll give you an example. If you look at the statistics on kids today, they're doing, they're, they're, they're having less unprotected sex, less sex, they're doing less drugs, they're doing having less risky behavior. That's great. But what's on the other end of that is more exciting, more depression, more loneliness, less connection, right? So we tend to forget that or not realize that there's a trade like, you know, we work in the health space, right? We don't have to break our backs working. So it's not hard physical labor. We can, you know, nobody starve anymore. Food is
Starting point is 00:52:23 really accessible and easy. And we've engineered it, make it super desirable know, nobody starves anymore, food is really accessible and easy, and we've engineered it to make it super desirable and tasty. All sounds great, except on the other end of that is obesity and chronic health problems. So it's as if we, it's like a lesson we have to keep learning. We want this thing and we don't realize that when we get it, there's a trade-off and the trade-off to all of this because look, I can stay in my house alone and I definitely won't get into a car accident for sure. Or you can get my car and try and drive around and meet people and my car accident risk skyrocket in comparison. So there's always going
Starting point is 00:52:56 to be a trade and the trade is the tough part. We don't realize that. We think it's, this is better, so it's better. But there's a trade and right now we're experiencing the other end of what we're getting and the other end is loneliness, so it's better. But there's a trade, and right now, we're experiencing the other end of what we're getting. And the other end is loneliness, anxiety, depression, or listless. Yeah. You know, now, early, you brought something up, you said, we're comfortable enough
Starting point is 00:53:16 that we don't want to make any change. So we got to get worse. Maybe that's the good thing. Maybe we're getting to the point where it's worse. Like, for example, there's groups, we talked about pornography. There's groups on on the internet of guys that do it's like no fat Like oh, we avoid that happened spontaneously from young men who saw pornography was doing to them and they all decided themselves. This was not government controlled their school didn't do it It was in their parents. It was them saying I'm gonna porn. One of the problems that you have with no fapp is
Starting point is 00:53:45 that people become obsessed about fapping. I know what they do. Like so, no fapp is as obsessive around fapping as someone that is pathologically touching themselves. Like they're constantly thinking about it. And I've not been a part of the no fapp community, but Hamza who's a good mate who kind of taps into this Gen Z young men's space, says that there are's a good mate who kind of taps into this Gen Z, young men's
Starting point is 00:54:05 space, says that there are huge, huge swaths of guys that feel completely disgusted to themselves because they touch their penis. Like if you break your fat streak, you just feel like a total piece of shit. You're totally worthless. So classic overcorrection. Correct. Yes. Yes. Yes. It's this binary thinking, nothing can be in the gray area. But dude, I mean, would I rather somebody obsess over their personal development and fear touching the penis compared with spending two hours a day watching porn? Fucking hell. I mean, that's a pretty difficult, both of them sound like a kind of hell to me.
Starting point is 00:54:43 So yeah, it's a difficult one. And then when you think about how super convenient life has become for everybody, it doesn't surprise me that people aren't bothering to go out. I mean, you know, talk about another over correction. Me too, what it did downstream from that, which was a needed policy to bring powerful men to account for the way that they were using power to leverage
Starting point is 00:55:06 women into doing things that they didn't want sexually. But now there are huge, huge numbers of young men that are so terrified to go up to a girl in the gym or in a bar that nobody is even approaching anyone. 86% of women say that they want their male partner to make the first move, but a huge cohort of men are so terrified of being called a creep. I was out in London a little while ago with a friend, young guy, successful dude, big on YouTube, and we'd finished having dinner and he was boring me
Starting point is 00:55:42 and there was a group of girls over the far side. And I was like, why do we go boring me and there was a group of girls over the far side. And I was like, why do we go over and say hello to that group of girls? And he looked at me like I'd suggested that we go over and like, strangled them and put them into a body bag. He's like, you're not being serious, right? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:55:57 Is that dude I have been told never, ever to approach a girl in a club for any reason at all? I'm like, holy shit. Overcorrection, yeah, again. And that's the thing, like, anybody on the internet that wants to kind of get a rallying cry is like, make women feel safe. Like, that's an easy cause to get behind, right? But also, also like make women feel safe and have some men approach them that they're attracted to so maybe they can get into a relationship.
Starting point is 00:56:31 Blending those two worlds together is actually kind of difficult. And it's very difficult where it doesn't fit into a tweet. No, you ever seen that skit with Tom Brady? I think it was on SNL, I don't remember, but it was like, this is sexual harassment. And it's an unattractive guy. And he's like, hey, you look pretty today. She's like, oh my god
Starting point is 00:56:45 And then Tom Brady shows up and he likes Max on the bunch. She's like, oh, you know Yeah, it was just this hilarious skit that kind of showed the challenge with it obviously it's comedy So it's a little extreme, but interesting. So do you see light at the end of the tunnel because I do also see people who Through technology you mentioned a few people that have been on your show, that I don't think would have gotten traction without the internet, without podcasts. For example, Jordan Peterson wouldn't have gotten any traction and he's done some good stuff.
Starting point is 00:57:16 Do you see the light at the end of the tunnel? Because I also, on the other hand, see people who are saying stuff like you're saying, listening to your show who are reaching out and saying, you know what, I do need challenge, I do need struggle. Wow, this, maybe I do need to go make things hard for myself or go meet people or try to grow. Like what does that look like to you? The internet has created both good and bad things and what we're trying to do is create
Starting point is 00:57:40 a world in which we can have all of the good without any of the bad. That's what we're working toward, right? Yeah, I mean, it's helped people, that helped people reach those people. You know, the Hebemans of the world, a guy that essentially came out of this sort of dusty, old lab in Stanford, and within the space of, whatever, two or three years,
Starting point is 00:57:59 he's probably the number one health and fitness podcast in the world, just relaying an endless list of interesting shit that people can use to make their lives better. That wouldn't be facilitated without the internet. Can you have both the good and the bad? That's the balance that everybody is trying to strike at the moment. I don't know, what do you think? Yeah, I think it's gonna get a lot worse
Starting point is 00:58:21 before it gets a lot better, but I do see, the problem problem is historically the optimistic view is that Things happen and travel so fast now that these overcorrections seem to be Easier but they get balanced faster too. That's so I feel like I mean even I know we haven't we haven't touched this third Real yet either, but I mean I feel like I I'm starting to see a rise in religion again, where I felt like just a decade ago We are on the complete opposite track. So what's that? What's that denomination of Christianity that's all done in Latin? Oh Well, there's a there's a form of Catholicism that's done. What's that one called? I think I'm not quite sure
Starting point is 00:58:58 I Shaila, well, if I think was talking about going to mass was all done I mean it'll definitely be the same one. So it's the fastest growing, sect or whatever, like subversion of Christianity. I don't know. And the whole service is done in Latin. Yes.
Starting point is 00:59:15 Yeah. Shilobo talked about it. He talked about it and he talked about it. And it makes sense as to why it would be appealing. It's like the more things seem structuralists and crazy, the more we're going to want the structure and the rules and the ritual. So to me that seems quite obvious. Yeah, it's so strange, man. I mean, think about how idealistic and progressive and smart and clever and rational and scientific it seemed 20 years ago to listen to Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris just tear down some religious zealot that didn't know what they were talking about. And then you rolled the clock forward a little
Starting point is 00:59:48 bit now and Douglas Murray, who is a good friend, who wrote a book that was very critical of a bunch of different religions, then wrote a book called The Madness of Crowds that was fundamentally based on the collapse of Grand Narratives. His concern was that there are no more grand narratives that bind us all together as a country. It's like, okay, how much baby has been thrown out with the bathwater here? Like it's really, really evident, religion independently arose all over the world, right? Why?
Starting point is 01:00:18 It has to serve some sort of adaptive purpose. It has to be useful to people. And- I also wouldn't have lasted that many years. Precisely. But I mean, think about the fucking rise of stoicism, man. Stoicism is modern, secular religion for people that don't want to have to believe in a higher power. So true. Right. Yoga is exactly the same thing. Psychedelic, psychedelic culture, like the religion of Austin where I'm from, is exactly, is exactly precisely, you know, there was a cool meme I saw the other day that said,
Starting point is 01:00:47 men will literally fly to Columbia to drink Amazonian mode rather than go to therapy. That was one of the questions. So funny touch on that, and it's funny that you're pointing out Austin because that was where we were in our experience of this was almost seven years ago, when we started to get connected to more influential people in the fitness space, and there's this big movement in the fitness space around the Iohasca and the psychedelics and everything
Starting point is 01:01:15 like that. And it's from a kid who grew up in a very religious home. It's just, to me, it's just religion packaged differently. Correct. It feels the exact same way when you're around all of it, but it's interesting. It's like we have this, we're searching for it. So whether you believe in a higher power
Starting point is 01:01:35 or you wanna say you're atheist, you still have this natural thing that we gravitate. If you feel more comfortable saying crystals and mother Ayahuasca, but it's... I mean, universe. Yeah, the universe. Correct. I mean, saying crystals and mother Iohasca, but it's the universe. The universe. Correct. Yeah. I mean, even roll it forward into the fitness world, right? Like CrossFit. CrossFit,
Starting point is 01:01:50 you know, you'll have like sermon Sundays is a non-ironic type of workout that a bunch of places do. Friday night lights. What is it? It's ritualistic. You know, you have the guy that stood at the front that's preparing what's going to go on. You have reverence. You have silence. You have all the rest of it. People are repurposing this kind of structure into a bunch of different ways. What is your personal journey been like for that? Or did you grow up religious? Do you believe in God?
Starting point is 01:02:18 Where are you at with that? And how's your journey been like that? Very secular upbringing. The Northeast of the UK, the UK in general is ahead of America in terms of being non-religious. So I really hesitate to use the spiritual but not religious crowd. However, I'm interested, I'm open to the idea that there might be more going on than I can see with my own two eyes, but I don't have any proof for it. So tell me how that has come to be for you,
Starting point is 01:02:47 because if you come from a place that is very secular, I'm imagining that you probably would have claimed that you were atheist in your younger years, and now you're a little more open to that. So where did that transition happen for you? That would probably be about correct. I think I don't have, so atheist is having an active belief that there is no God, right? And the difference between that and agnostic is I don't know. There's this
Starting point is 01:03:11 line from Angels and Demons by Dan Brown and Tom Hanks is in the movie and he's speaking to you and McGregor who's the acting Camerlango and he wants to get into the Vatican archives. He wants to get down there to find something that Da Vinci wrote or Michelangelo or whatever because it's going to tell him why the next clue is. And he's trying to convince you and McGregor's character to let him down there. And the Camerlango turns to him and he says, do you believe Professor? And he gives some like wishy washy wanky answer where he's trying to evade what's said. He said, I didn't ask you that.
Starting point is 01:03:44 I asked if he believed. And Tom Hanks turns and looks straight at you and McGregor and he goes, faith is a gift that I'm yet to be given. And I fucking love that line. I absolutely love that line. I don't think that most people who are convinced of a high power of religion of the ideology that's behind it would discount it, especially not now, especially when we have this lack of meaning, this death of existential crisis and stuff like that. I think people would be pretty happy to accept that.
Starting point is 01:04:21 I think that would be something that would be pretty cool for them, but there is a, this sort of, scientism rationalist approach is creating a very high bar for people to have this proved to them. So for me, my mom is a raky master of 20 years, so she's spent a long, long time doing decent healing crystals, all that sort of stuff, and I enjoy hearing her talk through her stuff. I don't know how much of that I fully subscribe to, but I enjoy the process of it. I enjoy hearing her talk with reverence about the practices that she goes through and stuff like that.
Starting point is 01:04:55 So yeah, for me, I was never like a card carrying atheist. I thought it was cool to be like all cynical and kind of staunch and rational and stuff. I thought that it was a bit of intellectual posturing probably that this seems like I'm real rational and I'm not going to believe with these hokey kind of stories about fucking. Which is probably why you were attracted like a Sam Harris type of poster. Yeah, although even with Sam, dude, the stuff that I love to do with him was to do with the nature of your own mind. And he's got this amazing talk called Death in the present
Starting point is 01:05:26 moment. It's an hour long. It's like 12 years old. And people should go and check it out on YouTube after they've finished with this podcast. It's just outstanding. You just explain that a lot of your life is going to be spent waiting for the next moment to come. And when that moment finally comes, you'll realize that it was the moment ready for your death. People are always looking past the present moment's shoulder, just peering past it to see what's coming next. And you will realize when someone that you care about dies or you get sick or someone close to you get sick, that you wasted your time thinking and worrying about things that ultimately didn't make any difference to you. And we all know that this is coming. We are all able to prepare ourselves for this to happen.
Starting point is 01:06:10 And yet people don't decide to fix it. So that for me was like where Sam really came into his own. But with the religion thing man, I'm perfectly open and I've been meaning to go to one of these Latin mass things that a bunch of different friends that I play pickleball with go to and they've been singing the prizes of it in Latin. And yeah, I think that it's something that more and more people are going to lean into
Starting point is 01:06:31 now. Yeah, atheists are real atheists are actually closer to believing in God than people who just don't think about it all. Because real atheists is constantly thinking about, I was an atheist for a long time. And it was something that I pondered and thought about. And that's how I got to that point. Think about how that relates to know-fap. Mm-hmm.
Starting point is 01:06:50 Yeah. It's just extreme. Correct. It's the obsession. It's the inversion of the obsession. Mm-hmm. But it brought me, it made, because I thought about it, I was doing more than a lot of people,
Starting point is 01:06:59 which is they don't think about it at all. Correct. What's the difference between wisdom and knowledge? Wisdoms and the title of your podcast, you talk about that. What is wisdom? Wisdom would be knowledge applied for me. So a good definition of wisdom would be something like
Starting point is 01:07:16 understanding the outcomes of your actions, being able to accurately predict what's going to happen based on what you do. Knowledge would simply be an understanding of the actions and what they mean. And I think trying to understand myself in the world around me was a question that I asked myself a lot. You know, guys, I call it the Manopause. Guys get to the end of their 20s. I'm like, fucking, what's going on here? All of the values, all the things that I thought
Starting point is 01:07:47 and was told I should really take pride in throughout most of my 20s, they just really don't seem to be serving me and they changed their training style. Like how many guys that are on a push per leg split or like five by five or like German volume training or whatever, doing a bro thing up until 25, 26, 27. And then they go, you know what it is, man,
Starting point is 01:08:08 I can't touch my toes and I get out of breath going up a set of stairs. I really should start doing yoga, or CrossFit, or fighting, or Brazilian Gigi, or whatever. And it's just this period, that was the fitness manopause that then translated into the manopause for me. And I think that as that gets thrown up in the air, you become a little bit more aware of like,
Starting point is 01:08:28 is this really what I wanna be doing? Does it is the peak of my life to get a bag in with the boys on a weekend? Like is that really what I wanna do? And wisdom for me is about understanding yourself in the world around you, understanding how your actions will have outcomes in the real world. Knowledge you need to spend that time absorbing it, but I mean, everybody
Starting point is 01:08:49 has a friend that's smart but not wise, right? Everybody has a friend that's smart but not wise. We're going to have a lot more of them with chat, GBT in the direction of virtual virtual people that a lot of people that have all the answers. Yes. Well, that would be stupid, but not wise. Right. I don't think they're even going to be smart. By extension, I mean, if you consider your chat GPT or AI as an extension of you, you'll have all the knowledge you want, but zero wisdom. And zero knowledge.
Starting point is 01:09:18 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At least in yourself. I mean, I was on the plane coming over here last night and I was sat next to this guy and we were trying to remember a movie that Bruce Wallace had been in.
Starting point is 01:09:31 And I caught myself saying, I fucking, what was that movie? Was it Unbreakable or Glass? The one where he was with Samuel L. Jackson and the guy had like real brittle bones. Unbreakable. Unbreakable, thank you. But I was like, what the fuck's up?
Starting point is 01:09:42 What the fuck's the movie called? And I was like, this is why we need Wi-Fi. And I'm like, oh, you've just outsourced part of your brain. So the internet. How many phone numbers do you remember? None. I can remember my parents' home phone number, which is just a world that they never moved.
Starting point is 01:09:56 And I can remember mine, and I can remember my old business partners, and the only reason for that is because the number of times that he's, I've hit voicemail with him. And I can only say it to myself if I go like, oh, double seven nine five three double eight, like, I'd do it in the cadence that the lady on the fucking phone did. But yeah, I, the wisdom thing, people want answers, they want to understand how to live a good life, what it is that they should focus on. And that was the main reason that I started my show. And that was the reason that every time I sit down with a Jordan Peterson or whatever,
Starting point is 01:10:31 I've had him on the show twice and he's become a good friend. Every time I speak to him, I don't want to talk about cultural stuff. I don't want to talk about sports illustrated models. I don't want to talk about, like, Canada, just in Trudeau's new overreach of whatever it is, that's him, I'm sure that they're important conversations for John to have in his own time. I want him to help me deal with the existential weight of existing because that was the problem that I struggled with toward the end of my 20s. So for me, getting that knowledge, putting it into practice, understanding your outcomes,
Starting point is 01:10:59 understanding yourself in the world around you, wisdom. So being as, I guess, aware aware as you are because you're obviously very aware, how was the last few years for you looking at the just how people behaved the behaviors, the fears, the you know, just were you like like for me looking at the whole thing and going through it, I just couldn't believe the insanity and how crazy it got were Were you in the same position, were you going through going, okay, is this at some point people are like,
Starting point is 01:11:29 that's enough, or were you just like, well, it's human behavior. It's probably gonna get much worse. Good question. So I really didn't get to emotionally invested in any of what happened between 2020 and now, at least with regards to the response to the pandemic. It was the first time in my adult life that I had a stable sleep and wake pattern,
Starting point is 01:11:49 ever, because I was working until three or four in the morning, two or three nights a week for forever. So I got to go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time, and I was like, what the fuck is going on? So I used the pandemic, probably quite selfishly, So I used the pandemic probably quite selfishly to just better myself. I spent a lot of time doing meditation, doing reading, growing the show. I stepped up the show from two weeks to three weeks, which I've now maintained,
Starting point is 01:12:14 even though the pandemic is over, I figured that people would be more alone or whatever, and even my like poultry audience that I had at the time, I was like, look, I can do something to help people. But I really quite fortunately managed to avoid having my brain turned inside out by anything that was going on. I'd sure, I didn't want to be told by Boris Johnson three days before Christmas that I wasn't supposed to go home to see my parents.
Starting point is 01:12:41 I'd ruptured my Achilles, I had a full Achilles detachment during that summer. So I was already in like a bit of a, like, I know, down place. I didn't want to hear that, but I was really, really happy with how I didn't let those things get to me. Now, some people, perhaps rightly, might say, well, that's because you didn't, like, put your money where your mouth is
Starting point is 01:13:02 and you didn't stand for something or whatever. It's like, I did other stuff. I supported people with interesting conversations that distracted them away from it. There were enough people talking about that over the last few years. They didn't need another person, like putting my completely uneducated,
Starting point is 01:13:17 completely unprofessional opinion in, just like horse-shitting my way through, like hot takes to do with stuff. I wasn't prepared to put the work in, to get myself to the requisite amount of knowledge to be able to have an opinion that I would feel comfortable standing behind. If only everybody thought like that. You actually did the right thing, as you focused on making yourself better. Yeah. If everybody did that.
Starting point is 01:13:36 I mean, that's, yeah, Jordan Pierce would say, right? You cleaned your own room. Yeah. So tell everybody else what they need to do. Douglas Murray, I was in New York with him last year, and he was saying to me, I mentioned why he hadn't really commented on COVID all that much and with sat down, it's like two in the morning in New York and he's drinking a man hat and he said, sure it is Christopher, I did something which is very rare in the online world now, which is not to contribute to something which I know nothing about. And you think, fuck yeah.
Starting point is 01:14:07 One of the problems that we have in the modern world with hot takes coming from everybody and with this ubiquity of ease of access to give opinions is that everybody believes that they're supposed to have an opinion on everything. It's like, bro, I really, really love the way that you can talk about personal development and mindset. I don't respect or care about your opinion on Ukraine, right? Why, what makes you think, like, is it that you're not supposed to have an opinion on stuff? No, obviously not. But, you, let's leave it to the global policy experts, right?
Starting point is 01:14:40 Let's leave it to the people that understand international relations and like Cold War, warfare, and game theory and systems theory and shit like that. Like, that's leave it to the people that understand international relations and like Cold War, warfare and game theory and systems theory and shit like that. That's for them to do. You can have your little heart take or whatever, but don't make it your new hill to die on, unless you're prepared to go through all of the requisite work to get there. But the problem that you have is people very much are their opinions now, right? Yeah. Like, in a world where your words are more important than your deeds, because nobody sees your deeds, but everybody sees your words, you are your opinions.
Starting point is 01:15:13 The problem is that there's precious few original thinkers in the world. So what happens is a large cohort of people repurpose opinions from whoever their favorite thought leader is. So you could argue that the culture war is largely Is largely two armies of NPCs being ventriloquized by a handful of original thinkers, right? You have these guys at the top they repurpose opinions down to all of these people below and then they just spew them back out Yeah, and what's the worst part about that is when you become your opinion changing your opinion is death. So you're stuck. You're literally stuck. It's so hard to, and I see this with people
Starting point is 01:15:51 now with, you know, what's happened and, you know, information changes and they just, they can't possibly change their opinion because it changes everything. Well, who am I then? And I, you know, it's like killing myself. Dude, that's such an amazing point. I talk about this all the time and you're so right. The fact that your side sees an absurd ideological belief as a show of fieldy, right? Can imagine how ancient tribes and ancient armies and stuff
Starting point is 01:16:22 would have to show fieldy to their local king, or Lord, or Baron Baron or whatever. Right. What you're doing when you take on an absurd belief is saying, I value adherence to the group ideology over what my own eyes and ears tell me that I will push aside rationality and reality in order to show to you that I believe whatever it is. If, for instance, somebody is adamant that everything is cis-hetro, patriarchal superstructures, misogynistically keeping everybody down, despite the fact that it doesn't really say, oh, somebody believes that the world is the worst that it's ever been, despite every objective
Starting point is 01:17:02 metric that we care about showing that that's not the case, right? What you're saying is I'm prepared to push reality to one side to show my field to this particular belief. And what that means is that other members of the group can see you as a reliable ally. Well, if this person is prepared to fucking not see what's evidently in front of them, we probably don't need to worry or scrutinize about them with anything else. So it's loyalty, display to your own side and it's a threat
Starting point is 01:17:29 display to your enemies. It's like, oh, you think that you're going to convince me with that. This is how certain I am of my stance. And the problem that you have is twofold. If you do decide to have a non-typical opinion or some sort of nuance, by the other side it's seen as a chink in your armor. It's seen as a weakness in terms of your adherence to the group. And by your own group, it's seen as a lack of loyalty. So there is very, very few incentives for people to not just adhere wholesale. The greatest term for those people are called useful idiots. Yeah. The greatest criticism you'll get, and I mean, the most heat you'll get if you change your opinion on something or from the, it's from the group that you're originally aligned with. So you see some political,
Starting point is 01:18:10 you know, commentary all the time where somebody's on one side and then they go against their side on one topic, destroyed, completely destroys them. And that's the biggest fear that we have is to be ostracized by our group because for all human history, it meant death. You know, if you got up and said something to your tribe and everybody didn't like what you had to say, you're out. And cast aside. And you're dead. Well, if you know one opinion that a person holds and from that one opinion, you can accurately predict everything else that they believe, they're not a serious thinker.
Starting point is 01:18:40 No. Right? If I know your stance on abortion and from it, I know your stance on immigration and gun rights and the First Amendment and the Second Amendment and on taxation and on capitalism and on bid bid bid all the way down. You've just taken this cookie cutter pre-prescribed like onesie outfit, right? Zipped it up and gone like, hey, that's me. No, everybody is so idiosyncratic or they should be.
Starting point is 01:19:08 I mean, there are some people out there. I'm sure there happens to be some people that just land perfect slap bang in the middle of Republican or Democrat, believes Christian or Mormon or fuck whatever it is, right? And they just, that happens to be genuinely where they come from. But for the most part, it's not, right? For the most part, somebody should be like a pro-gun,
Starting point is 01:19:26 but a pro-choice, let's say. That would be something that wouldn't necessarily always. And they're even, it's like they have nothing to do with each other and yet. Correct. You would find that you could probably actually predict that somebody whose pro-choice
Starting point is 01:19:39 is four lots of gun control, which, and those are two topics that don't seem to be connected. It is very interesting. It feels like it's going to implode eventually because of that, because you have to believe that at least a large percentage of those people that are putting that onesy on deep down don't really believe they should be wearing that. You know what I think when I look at it all, it's human behavior and human behavior doesn't change. Our environment changes, technology changes,
Starting point is 01:20:08 circumstances may change, but our behaviors remain the same. And unless we're aware of our tendencies, then it's just going to fall. I mean, you know, people look back. I mean, how many times have you heard people say, oh, if I lived in Nazi Germany, I totally would have rebelled and thought, no, you wouldn't. You would have been like 99.9% everybody. I'm carrying Nazi along with the rest of the world. Yeah, like everybody else. Like you, most people would have been doing that or if I lived in the Soviet Union, no,
Starting point is 01:20:32 you wouldn't be in the Goulogs, you'd be doing exactly what they told you. It's all human behavior. So in my opinion, the key is to, we have to constantly become aware, rise up, be objective, have discussions. Otherwise, you will fall back and you're, me included, you will fall back in human behavior.
Starting point is 01:20:48 It's just, it's just the way we're wired. Yeah. It's wild that you can have truth and accuracy in an individual, but lies and falsehoods in a group because group dynamics cause people to compromise on something that they know individually. Proven, by the way, this is proven. Studies have shown this time and time again. That groupthink, mob psychology is very different from an individual. It's very strange.
Starting point is 01:21:12 Well, they did a study in a classroom, a university classroom, which you might be familiar with, where they asked students to put their hands up based on which line they thought was shorter between a choice of three. And everybody else except for maybe one person or a couple of people in the class were plants that were all saying that an evidently longer line was shorter. And sure enough, people just fucking, am I missing something? Yeah, it's okay. There we are.
Starting point is 01:21:39 And the hand goes up. That's like the one, the other study where they have them waiting outside in a waiting room. Oh, it's a doctor's office. And then there's all, they're like 80% of them are plants. And so that like a bell goes off and they all stand up. And so then before I had to, you just do it. Like how crazy is that? The one Justin brought up was the elevator
Starting point is 01:21:58 where everybody's facing in one direction, single file line and people walk in and they, well, they get ready to do it. Yeah, we're all looking in this direction. Yeah, evolutionarily speaking, there was, I mean, all of these behaviors had, you know, some purpose, right? And evolutionarily speaking, when you, you know, we lived in tribes for most human history, I mean, it makes sense.
Starting point is 01:22:15 Preservation. You got to do it everybody else does because you don't know that there's a snake over there or there's a lion or there's going to be, you know, a ditch that you're going to fall in. But with large societies, this can become toxic and poisonous, and easily manipulated. Very easily manipulated. Chris, I'm gonna change directions.
Starting point is 01:22:32 You have a long history of fitness and exercise you've mentioned earlier in the podcast, splits and five by five. So you have some knowledge with exercise. You're very growth-minded. What role for you is fitness play in all of that and has how you view Fitness and exercise for yourself has that changed through that process? Like was it for one thing before and now something totally different?
Starting point is 01:22:53 Correct. That would be right. Yes, so as most guys I'm 18 years old. I'm super super skinny like 63 kilos I don't know what that is in your mind 130 pounds. Yeah, super super small right? When I get to uni and I wanted to be more attractive to girls, I wanted to film more confident. So I started training just total, bro split. And this is what 2006, 2007. So this is like even before the bodybuilding.com forums or maybe just at the very, very beginning of that. So it was like the Wild West. No one knew what they were doing. No one knew what they were doing, no one knew what a macro was.
Starting point is 01:23:26 This was before if it fits your macros, right? So I had no idea. So you go in, you left things, you like eat a lot of subway and hope for the best. I remember one of my housemates was adamant that like breaded chicken goons were the best way to get protein in. So, and then I just kept training
Starting point is 01:23:44 and I was training for the way that I looked very much so. And then that carried me through a good way. I accumulated a good amount of size, pretty like relatively quickly. I remember the day that I broke 70 kilos. I was like 21 or something. And I was like, wow, like I'm massive. 71, 70 kilos, 71 kilos is fucking huge.
Starting point is 01:24:08 And yeah, I just kept on going, kept on going. And then I got towards maybe 24, 25. And it was just a bit sick. I was kind of bored of doing more bro split type stuff. So I went on to do Thai boxing, my Thai went out to Thailand and fought out there, which was fun. Then came back, did some more boxing stuff, got in a CrossFit, 2017, and the changed, what do you want to say? Like, philosophically, with it previously, it was something I did to just look good, whereas now it's something that I do to feel good. And I still want the byproduct of looking good from it, but I just didn't care how I felt previously. If I was jacked but felt like shit, that was worth it.
Starting point is 01:24:49 Yeah. And it didn't care what my blood sugar was doing and didn't care about how it's performing mentally. Whereas for me now, my main pursuit is the podcast, right? I want to be as dialed in as possible mentally for the podcast and whatever can support that is good and the gym support it. Yeah. Fitness has, you mentioned this earlier too, about Sunday sermons. Yes. There is, when you interviewed Bishop Baron a while ago, he's a Catholic Bishop, very smart man,
Starting point is 01:25:14 and I asked him some questions about other religions, and he says, you know, there's spiritual truth and lots of different practices. And after that podcast, I thought, I think there's some spiritual truth in fitness. Not necessarily because you're seeking spiritual enlightenment, but because the discipline and the process of it, I mean, the squat rack has been, you know, called the altar, right? Go to the altar of the squat rack or, you know, Jim is my church. There's definitely
Starting point is 01:25:38 some spiritual truth. And I think you figure this out after doing it for a long time, because we all started like you did, you know, wanted to look good, but you stick to it long enough and it kind of becomes this like practice, this is almost like this spiritual practice. Have you found it to be kind of... Well, you have rituals around it as well, right? This is why I've always struggled to train in the house. So we've got a ton of stuff in the garage where me
Starting point is 01:25:59 and my house might live, but there's something about getting in the car with your boy and you pre-work out or you knock over or kill Clifford or you're drinking, putting the music on, arriving in the gym, putting your bag down, speaking to the receptionist. It's ritualistic. It's part that you do it at usually at the same time each day. There is a prescription. So yeah, I mean, it's very transcendent. That being said, since I've been in Austin, I have become the equivalent of polyamorous with my gym memberships. So this is a hack.
Starting point is 01:26:31 You're not monogamous gym memberships, yes, correct. This is a fucking great hack, and it only really works if you're in a place that's got a ton of good gyms, but I must have, I think I've got three of four different gym memberships now. Great fitness community out there.
Starting point is 01:26:46 Fucking flip it over. Absolutely phenomenal. So lift ATX, great gym, indoor outdoor garage, old school style bodybuilding gym, but a really good split of guys to girls, which makes you feel a little bit less like, I don't know, inselly by going that. Do you know what I mean? Like going to a bodybuilding gym and there's like half a woman in there. And you think like, oh, God, like, this is, you go in there and it's a good split of guys and girls. Gold's gym, I use if I'm prepping for a guest
Starting point is 01:27:11 and I just want like a quiet session where I can just chug away and do bits and pieces. On it is really, really fun. They've got a ton of unorthodox equipment in there, reverse hypers, belt squats, all sorts of fun shit. These are belt, these are belt, these are belt, these are belt. Yeah, exactly. So having a bunch of different gym memberships is a hack.
Starting point is 01:27:29 If somebody's feeling like the training is falling off a little bit at the moment, I would highly recommend just switching the facility that you go to. And that's been really good for me to have different locations for different types of days that I want to go to. And especially in Austin,
Starting point is 01:27:44 like memberships aren't that much. So 40 bucks, 50 bucks a month. You're gonna accumulate this for the price of one bigger name, one like, and a lifetime fitness or whatever, and you can accumulate all this. I don't do that. I shared this hack.
Starting point is 01:27:57 I used to have, like, depending on where I was into my training cycle, where my mindset is, like, I would choose the gym based off of that. It's like, oh, yeah, I need to be more, and I think more inward, I'm gonna be going to this place. It's so quiet, it's an older population. I like going there for that. I sit in the sauna afterwards.
Starting point is 01:28:13 Oh, I gotta get after it. The Golds Bernal's got all the competitors. I need someone to push me and see someone else lifting heavy. So I love that. I think it's a great hack to bring you around all of it. I like the old dungeons. That's my favorite kind of workout. I like to go in and feel, I don't like it to be too new. I mean, I work out in a great hack to bounce around all of it. I like the old dungeons. That's my favorite kind of work. I like to go in and feel, I don't like it to be too new.
Starting point is 01:28:28 I mean, I work out in a gym now that's like that because that's, it's accessible and convenient. But if I had a choice and I have four kids and I, you know, have work and I could just go pick, I would drive to an old dark, Dungy, chalk filled dungeon. That just feels bit sad. Yeah, you know, like, like, Doreen Yates,
Starting point is 01:28:44 you ever watch his old videos of him working out. him working out and yeah like that. That was a basement He worked out there's no windows in that I don't know if people knew that or not But you actually had to go downstairs blood and guts that series. Yeah, that's a great. No, and I really want to work on the place like that Come on diesel Epic bro, there's never been another training vlog like that. Again, every single YouTuber has tried to recreate Doreignyates, Blood and Guts training vlog, and everybody's fallen short. No, no, no, no.
Starting point is 01:29:11 The intensity in those is just palpable. Yeah, the original. You can't watch them. Everyone needs that guy as the training partner. Squeezing and fucking epic. Yeah, you've gotta watch that. If anyone hasn't seen that. Blood and Guts on YouTube.
Starting point is 01:29:24 Yes, you mentioned your housemate. Is that your business partner? No, no. So business partner, me and Darren, my previous business partner, have partied ways because I exited the club stuff. So he took back all of the share. I worked an exit from that last year.
Starting point is 01:29:39 He's absolutely flying. I caught up with him of Christmas with still best friends. I love his Zach Talander, weightlifting YouTuber. Oh, okay. You know him, coach ZT. He's phenomenal as well. He's a big stiff idiot, but he is, he's great and we very much get on. What I like about America is the positivity and kind of the outgoing extraversion that just seems to be a bit more than it is in the UK. And he has been a very good counterbalance
Starting point is 01:30:06 to my British stoicism. Let me ask you about that. So my wife's family is from England. And one of my best friends was from the UK. And one thing I appreciate, especially one of my best friends, what I appreciate so much is your sense of humor. And you, I mean, you guys basically fuck with each other. Like you just did right now.
Starting point is 01:30:24 You were just talking about your house mate, and you had to throw in. He's a big stiff idiot. He's a big stiff idiot. Yeah, he is. I feel like there's some value in that, because here it's like rude to do that, or people don't get it all the time.
Starting point is 01:30:36 I mean, my friend, his name is bad. It's endearing though, when you say. Oh, he used to say, oh my God, he used to call me all kinds of shit, and it was great. I absolutely loved it. Yeah, it keeps people down to earth So this this like a little bro sciencey
Starting point is 01:30:49 Theory that I've come up with about the way that the UK and the US differ So tall poppy syndrome is a big deal in the UK if you diverge from the norm You're going to be called out quite quickly like if you start doing anything different in school You're immediately going to be called gay. It's like, that's fucking gay. Why are you trying to do that? So, different time. But, people are gonna point at you and say, that's something that is from the norm
Starting point is 01:31:12 and it's not gonna be super encouraged. What this means is, as you grow up, you are kept incredibly humble by a crushing amount of piss taking, right? Now, the disadvantage you're only grow up is that this can lead to some quite sort of limited thinking and a little bit of a scarcity mindset. The alternative, when you look at America,
Starting point is 01:31:31 is that there is still, for all that America's the worst cis-hattro country in the world, it still has a big blue sky vision, right? People believe that they can be largely whatever it is that they want to be. There are, the American dream is still very much alive and well, I think, culturally. And that means that when kids do try something new
Starting point is 01:31:49 or do decide that they're going to become a business person at 12 years old or whatever, that's like applauded, that's raised up, both amongst their local friend circle and online. Now, the problem that they encounter when they grow up is that the world doesn't necessarily deliver to them that which they were promised as a kid. Everybody doesn't think you're special.
Starting point is 01:32:05 Correct. Correct. And this is why I think that the picture... Just your mom can't be everything. The victimhood mentality in America is largely contributed to by this blue sky vision that you guys give to young people, which is not a bad thing. But if you could somehow blend the feet on the ground,
Starting point is 01:32:22 spit and sawdust work hard mentality that the UK has with the helicopter blue sky vision thing that the US has, I think that you end up with a really, really nice blend. And piss taking is like the enforcement mechanism that keeps people's feet on the ground, but blending that so that you don't constrain what someone believes that they can achieve is that's the delicate balance, right? The value of bullying, right, Justin? Oh, I'd like, I'm listening to you. I think this is a recent phenomenon. That was definitely my experience growing up was, you know, everybody taking shots and it was very brutal. Right. You know, pretty much the same. But I think I'm sure that's in pockets around the
Starting point is 01:33:00 U.S. in terms of how. I'm sure there's some positive pockets in the U.K. as well. I'm sure it exists. Well, it's, it's out, Sal has a evolutionary theory for it, right, that we, that was important to test other men to make sure if I was going to go to battle with you, I didn't know you could take a little insult or what do I do? Well, my, my evidence for that is just look at the nicknames
Starting point is 01:33:20 that men give each other versus the nicknames that women give each other. Like, I tell the story, I had a friend who went to restaurant. And he was touring me around his new restaurant. And I'm walking around, good friend of mine, his name is Spiro, great guy, owns some Greek restaurants.
Starting point is 01:33:34 And we're walking through and he's like, oh, this is John, this is George or Susan. That's nine over there, here's Fred. And I'm like, nine. And I'm like, he's not like German, like, that's weird. And he goes, no, no, he goes, hey nine. And he looks over and he goes, show Sal what we call you nine. It'm like, it's he's a little German like that's a weird and he goes No, I go set he goes hey nine and he looks over and he goes show South what we call you nine It lifts up his hands and he's missing a finger Yeah, yeah, and I thought and I cracked up because that's how guys give each other nicknames
Starting point is 01:33:54 You know my my father-in-law he was it's normally after an insecurity you probably have he was born without he was born without One eye so he was an eye patch or a glass eye and his nickname, you know what, with his buddies was one eye. That was a big day. One ball pat. Yeah. Testicular cancer. A terrible thing to call him. And my theory is that, and I heard Jordan Peterson kind of talk about this and it, you know, it kind of strengthened what I think that men do that with each other because we evolved to hunt and go to war and do a lot of stupid shit and risk taking. And you want to mess with each other to see who's going to crack, because however hard I'm going to tease you, there's nothing compared to when we're out there. Correct.
Starting point is 01:34:32 And we're trying to hunt or go to war, like you got to keep going, otherwise I'm going to die. So if we poke at you now and you cry, you're not coming with us, you can stay over here. We're going to go over there and go hunt. There's a rule in intracactual competition when it comes to friendships that men will incite insult each other and not mean it and women will compliment each other and not mean it.
Starting point is 01:34:55 That's so true. That's so true. I've heard my wife say like someone will say like a woman will be give a compliment and afterwards she'll be like, what a bitch. I'm like, what? She totally meant this. I'm like, she said something nice. She said she had nice hair. Like, no, what she meant was that her hair looked shitty. Yeah. So I've spent a good bit of time learning about intracactual competition.
Starting point is 01:35:13 So this is how men compete with men and women compete with women. And frankly, all of us in this room should be very thankful that we're not women because female friendships are fucking vicious. Yeah. Yeah. Way, way more vicious. Whatever you found, we'll tell felt it share some of the stuff. Fucking hell, man.
Starting point is 01:35:26 So I mean, this has been, there's two episodes that people should go and check out. Dr. Tanya Reynolds, which just came out very recently and Joyce Benenson, both of them are on the Chris Williams and YouTube, or Monham wisdom spotify whatever. One of the interesting ones is the effectiveness of sexual gossip that women use, right? So if you look at, on average, how men derogate each other,
Starting point is 01:35:46 they will derogate each other through, um, pokes at their level of masculinity and sexual prowess. So you'll say, like, uh, you're a soft, small cocked bitch. Like that would be the sort of thing. I'm gonna use that. Whereas soft, small cocked bitch. Whereas if you were to look at what women will do, they will tend to derogate chastity, right? So, um, chastity and youthfulness slash attraction. So, like, you're a fat slag or you're fat hole. Like, that would be where they would go. And this is so funny, right? Because it identifies just that little thought experiment. Think back to what you was a guy call your guy friends, or if you were a girl, how you would insult a man that you didn't want to feel good.
Starting point is 01:36:28 You would start to try and poke at his manhood in his sexual prowess. And if a guy wants to make a girl feel bad, even if it's just someone that cuts him up on the street, right, where's the first place that you go? If you're going to shout and expletive at a woman, you're gonna call her a whore, or like a stupid bitch, or something, right?
Starting point is 01:36:44 As opposed to, so you have this side of urgent. The reason that sexual gossip is so useful is that chastity is something that men really value in women. They don't want a partner that is super promiscuous because male parental uncertainty, i.e. not knowing whether the kid is mine or not, means that I need to have the greatest sense of loyalty and certainty that I have that this woman is not sleeping around, the more comfortable I can feel. This is why in studies they show that women would be more upset
Starting point is 01:37:12 if their partners fell in love and didn't sleep with someone else in the manner the opposite. Correct, that's correct, yes. And the interesting thing that you see with this sort of sexual gossip is that it is a precision targeted tool that women can use and it works within all of their sexual competition. So women don't want to have upfront physical violence with each other. They want to be a subtle and safe, the two things that they'll try and do.
Starting point is 01:37:41 Safe as in, no one can see that it's actually them that's delivered it. And subtle as in, it would be very hard and obvious to point out. So sexual gossip. Let's say that I'm going, generally it is, I'm really worried about Mary. She just keeps on spending all of this time with different guys.
Starting point is 01:37:58 And I'm just so worried that she's going to get hurt. And I keep on asking you to go out for dinner, but she keeps blowing me off for all of these different dudes. And I'm just really worried about her. What she's saying is, Mary's a whore and she's sleeping around. Right? Right?
Starting point is 01:38:13 So venting is a very specific type of gossip. And it is this sort of exasperated, personal complaint that very subtly delivers a message about somebody else. If I say Mary's a whore and you should avoid her, that's quite open-faced, right? That's neither safe nor subtle. However, if I vent, it feels like me just naturally letting go of some discomfort that occurred. Now, what it does, if you do that type of sexual gossip as a woman about another woman, it broadcasts your sexual chastity because you immediately, because you're worried about it.
Starting point is 01:38:47 You immediately posit yourself as, I'm worried about married, but me, I would never, ever consider all of these different guys to pure, I'm just here looking out for my friends. So first off, it broadcasts yours. Secondly, it's almost impossible to disprove. Like you can't run around town showing people all of the sex that you're not having.
Starting point is 01:39:05 That's not a thing that you can do. And then finally, it really points a finger and derogates women that are the biggest competitors. So men, it seems, infidelity from men is done with women that are sexually open and visually provocative. Those are the women who are precisely the easiest targets of sexual gossip because it makes sense.
Starting point is 01:39:30 It's like, I don't know, does it? Maybe this girl just doesn't like wearing a lot of clothes but doesn't actually spray it around. There's been tons of girls that I've known throughout my time in night life who'll go out dressed provocatively, but no one ever goes home with. So it's not exactly a one-to-one correlation. But yeah, sexual gossip is just this precision targeted tool, broadcasts the gossipers sexual chastity,
Starting point is 01:39:52 derogates something very important about the woman that they're talking to, and also is this sort of safe and subtle thing as well. Yeah, when you have kids of both genders, you see this when they're really young. I remember when my older kids were younger, I'm talking like first grade, and you'd see the little boys running around playing, and then one boy would push another boy down and they'd cry, and the teacher would separate them, and they go play again, and then another
Starting point is 01:40:19 boy would take something from another kid, and then they'd, you know, fine, and then they'd start playing again. And then I remember this, like it was yesterday, and then I'm looking at the little girls, and there was this one little girl that the other girls weren't playing with. And I walk over and I kind of listen in and I can hear these first graders, first grade,
Starting point is 01:40:37 and they're saying, don't play with someone so. I don't like someone so, don't play with her. They had organized a group to ostracize this one little girl. Whereas with the boys, it was like, I'm gonna punch you in the face, take your stuff, teacher comes over. And then we'll be best friends after that. And they were okay.
Starting point is 01:40:52 Yeah, really. Well, this is why, the male and female friendships are so fascinating in their differences, that men need to be able to get on very, very quickly with other guys within that group, right? Yes, I need to trust you. I need to trust you.
Starting point is 01:41:04 You've got my back. But if we're going to, it's like me, you, grabs beer, go get my mouth. Like we're going to go take this fucking thing down together, which means that you need to very quickly be able to bond together and you need to not have any underlying nasties that are lurking within this. Whereas women who would have done what's called alloparenting, like this sort of distributed shared parenting of non-kin children amongst friends, aunties, et cetera. I'll go get some berries, we'll bring them back, and then you can look after the kids for a little bit, and do all the rest of it.
Starting point is 01:41:33 It's much more important that women know a small group of incredibly tight friends, but that they ostracize the ones that aren't a part of that group. An interesting thing that you see for the denial of sex differences, crowd, which is just the most insane philosophy that I've ever heard. Joyce Banninson did this research where she looked at kindergarteners, so three years old, three and four years old.
Starting point is 01:41:58 And she's observed hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of these kids. And the girls, if you look at what the girls are doing and what the boys are doing, it is precisely getting themselves ready for the sort of roles that, ancestry, they would have done. So the boys, they will create an enemy of some kind. Maybe it's another group of boys that they're playing some sort of team sport with.
Starting point is 01:42:18 Maybe it's aliens, maybe it's cowboys, maybe it's whatever. What is that? Woffer. They're practicing warfare as children, right? We will band together over the, and we will overcome an opposing tribe. If you look at what girls are doing,
Starting point is 01:42:32 girls are keeping something alive. They're keeping a pretend rabbit alive. They're playing nurse, they're playing doctor, they're doing some sort of teacher role. They are keeping things alive. That's the fucking role that they're going to grow up into. And boys are killing something, killing something. They're wearing the guns and spears. Precisely correct. Yes. And you think, okay, this is at age three or four,
Starting point is 01:42:54 it's cross-cultural. This is not socialization. This is what boys and girls are disposed, predisposed to do. Another really interesting thing. So the discussion about trans sports, right? Let's fucking kick this third rail. This is something that nobody ever talks about. I don't know why this is a third rail, by the way. This is so ridiculous to me, but anyway. So this is something that no one ever talked about. Everybody relies in the discussion around trans athletes
Starting point is 01:43:20 in sports exclusively on the power thing, right? Almost exclusively on the power. It's bone density, it's muscle mass, it's all the rest of it. Nobody bothers to look at the different mental capacities that men and women have, because even the most ardent anti-trans-in-spots promoters haven't done the work to look at the fact that men and women mentally are incredibly different in terms of their capacities. At age three, there is a 50 to 70% disparity in throwing accuracy between boys and girls.
Starting point is 01:43:49 At age three, brain scans can determine somebody's sex up to a 96% accuracy by knowing nothing else about them, just through their brain scans, right? So, men males have better what's called spatial rotation. So, they're able to manipulate 3D objects in their mind, and you can imagine my this would be useful. I've got some will-debeasts going left to right, I have a spear in my hand, and I'm running in this direction. I need to be able to work out how fast it's going, how fast I'm going,
Starting point is 01:44:17 how fast this spear is going to move, and I need to get all of them to intersect perfectly, right? Women have better memory localization. So this is why men lose their keys around the house and women find them, right? That they are very good games where you have cards down on a table and you've got to turn two over and match them. Women will piss all over you when it comes to that.
Starting point is 01:44:39 They will wipe the floor with you with regards to that. Their ability to do local memorization just is phenomenal. Why would that be? Well, women wouldn't range as far as men would. They wouldn't need to know how to navigate themselves back as well. Men over long range finding have better return accuracy in terms of where they're going, which is why like women don't know where they're going without GPS is like a bit of a meme and a cliche, but it's also generally true. But also guys don't know where the fuck they without GPS, it's like a bit of a meme in a cliche, but it's also generally true. But also, guys don't know where the fuck they put their keys and they can't keep the house tidy, is also true.
Starting point is 01:45:10 Women need to know that bush is good in June, but it's not very good in August because the berries become bad. And I need to know where the best water is, where the best rocks are, where the best cave is, where the place that we're not supposed to go is. And that's this local specialization. So when it comes to trans athletes in sport,
Starting point is 01:45:24 everyone can say, we don't want fighters in the UFC because fundamentally, you know, a person that's grown up as a male for almost all of their life, it's gonna smash seven shades of shit out of some poor and suspecting girl, quite rightly. But when you're talking about athletes going into especially throwing sports or kicking sports or ball sports, like there's a reason that the WNBA
Starting point is 01:45:45 isn't quite as exciting as the men's, and it's that mentally the capacity of the athletes is optimized for something else. You did touch the third rail here. This is great. Well, you know why? Okay, so the physical differences are obvious, and I think that's why people focus on them.
Starting point is 01:46:03 Correct. You're talking about, it doesn't seem as obvious, although when you discuss it and think about it, it is quite clear. Now, what does this mean? What this means is, and by the way, just to be clear, generally speaking, men and women are far more similar than they are different.
Starting point is 01:46:17 It's at the ends of the extremes where you see the... Like, in professional sports. Yes. So, if you look for the most empathetic, nurturing person who can read someone else's emotions from a distance, you're gonna probably see mostly women, if not all women. If you're looking at for the most violent,
Starting point is 01:46:36 most single-minded, then you're gonna probably find most men. And sports is the extremes. Professional sports is the 1% of the 1%. I mean, I've never competed at high levels in sports, but I did do martial arts and I did go against black belts who were local black belts and then I would go against black belts who are world champions. And it's like a different, it's not even the same species.
Starting point is 01:47:01 Like a normal black belt versus a world champion. I might as well have been going against a child versus, you know, a gorilla. It was so different. So these are good conversations to have precisely because I think it helps us understand each other. Like I'm married, okay? And if you're married, it's very important that you grow with each other and try to understand each other because you're going to communicate it first of all, you're two individuals.
Starting point is 01:47:23 But then you're also a man and a woman in many cases. And it helps to understand how women think and how men think so that when you communicate, you're not thinking that you're talking to your girlfriend or your guy friend, you're like, well, I'm talking to my wife and she's explaining something to me and she's telling me how she feels and she doesn't want me to fix it.
Starting point is 01:47:41 She just wants me to listen to her. Whereas if Justin comes to me and tells me how he feels, he wants me to fix it. He wants me to give him an answer. He's like, Yeah, you can empathize, but not sympathize and the reverse is true as well. Yeah, this is thing called cross-sex mind reading.
Starting point is 01:47:53 She's what you're talking about. It's a failure of cross-sex mind reading. And it happens a lot in mating. You have an over-perception and an under-perception bias of attraction, right? Men on average believe that the woman that they're speaking to is more attracted to them than she is. And Men on average believe that the woman that they're speaking to is more attractive than she is, and women on average believe that the man that she's speaking to is less attracted to her than they are. So even just in that one example of, let's say,
Starting point is 01:48:15 an awkward encounter in an office, right, where the guy's like, she keeps on lingering her eyes at me, and the woman's like, oh, it's he nice? She's like, I got something in my eye. Yeah, exactly. Do you know what I mean? And even in that situation, you can see one person sees one world and another person sees another world. It very much is two different existences that are going on. And yeah, absolutely. The way to transcend your programming is to first become aware of it. This is one of the reasons why,
Starting point is 01:48:43 among other reasons why you see like the popularity of things like only fans and the big, big money makers or women, part of it is that men are more visually stimulated, but a big part of only fan, because pornography is free. So you think why is only fans so popular? It's because guys think that these girls actually like them. Oh, you know, I send her stuff and she comments,
Starting point is 01:49:04 I mean, you know, she actually kinda, it's comments me, and you know, she actually kind of, it's like back in the day when you go with your buddy to the strip syndrome. And you leave and your buddy's always like, oh, no, no, no, no. She actually, you know, it's most ironic about that point that I think is crazy or that I think is just,
Starting point is 01:49:16 the person who goes to the strip club and the person that goes on only fans, I actually think they know that and yet still partake. Yeah. Like, how often have you met somebody who goes to strip club and really believes that he's coming home with one of the strippers like, no, no, and then same thing goes with the only fans. Like, I mean, do you, this, this girl's in Australia.
Starting point is 01:49:36 You're in the States and I think they're actually even aware that it, that's happening or the assistant is actually probably, but it's like you want to bro you want to fucking bring this full circle. Yeah, imagine when chat GPT is deployed under the back end of only fans and they don't even need some Vietnamese virtual assistant to do dirty talk because you're just going to be speaking to chat GPT. Imagine how scalable it's going to be for that. You're gonna have a 24, seven dirty talk sex partner. They program that and sex robots are ready to be able to sex to you.
Starting point is 01:50:10 There's a guy that married this dude in Japan that married a hologram. Oh, a hologram. Oh, that's gonna happen. He's married a hologram. I'm gonna make a prediction right now. I'm gonna predict that the next... The next civil rights movement,
Starting point is 01:50:24 the next big crazy civil rights movement, is going to be people demanding rights for artificial intelligence. Robot lives matter. Yeah. That's going to be the next big one because they're going to be somewhat indistinguishable if not totally indistinguishable from humans. They'll say everything you want, they'll be very charming. They will have the technology to read your pupil size
Starting point is 01:50:45 and pulse and skin temperature, know exactly what to say, what to do. And people are gonna love them and we're gonna fight for their right to have rights and get married and do that kind of stuff. I think that'll be the next big, huge. A decade ago, a robot was given citizenship. I think it was Singapore that gave it full citizenship.
Starting point is 01:51:04 And that was really dangerous. I had a couple Singapore that gave it full citizenship. And that was really dangerous. I had a couple of great conversations around robot ethicists. There's a lot of people that are working very hard at this, right, to like really think like hang on, hang on, like fucking pump the brakes on this stuff. And he said that it was something that nobody, it's created a precedent, which is actually pretty fucking concerning, like being able to give a robot citizenship. What does it even mean to, okay, is that robot a person with rights?
Starting point is 01:51:29 It can fight, what does that mean? Yeah, it's really, really strange. Yeah, I think they did it kind of like as a publicity thing, not really realizing what it could potentially mean, but that's like, like what are you doing? Like that's gonna be weird. I feel like the future, I feel like there's gonna be a future market for,
Starting point is 01:51:47 I don't know what you would call it, organic, media, organic content. Like now you go by a car that's made by hand, even though it takes way longer, and machines probably make it even more precise. It's more expensive. Humans are crafted. I feel like we're gonna have to eventually make our podcast.
Starting point is 01:52:02 It's gonna say, you know, Mind Pump, organic by real humans. And people are gonna listen to be like, oh, these guys messed up all the time. They're not as good, but, you know, it wasn't people. It wasn't like Mind Pump AI. Yeah, whatever. Dude, it's really, really fucking concerning. But again, it comes back to that convenience thing, right?
Starting point is 01:52:19 You know, if you can get more better crafted, only fans, quicker, response,, better moods or whatever it is that you want out of it. It's gonna be difficult for people to say no to. They won't, they won't for sure. You know, I wanted to ask you some questions around business. I haven't actually heard you talk much about your business. What has that journey been like for you?
Starting point is 01:52:41 Did you have any monetary motivation behind everything that you did? Are you trying to scale and grow? Is it just you and a partner? I haven't heard you talk about anybody else. Tell me a little bit about the business behind Modern Wisdom. Cool. So it's very, very strip back. It's a straight up creator economy at the moment for me. I work with a bunch of partners that I absolutely love, Crafted London, number one's Menjulery Company in the world, is a sponsor, Jim Shark, my protein, better help, athletic greens, etc., etc. Some of partners that I absolutely adore, but I'm not monetizing with my own products. I don't sell anything, I don't have courses, I don't have coaching. There is basically
Starting point is 01:53:20 no backend, there's no members area, there's no nothing. And the team consists of me, a video editor, and an assistant, and the assistants only been with us for about 18 months, two years. So I assume this is by design. Correct, yeah, it's very lean. I'd spent almost all of my 20s managing teams of between 500 and 1,000 people. So when you run a nightclub, in order to fill a nightclub
Starting point is 01:53:41 with about 2,000 kids, you need 1,000 people to bring one friend. So you need a lot of staff. And I enjoyed learning how to manage people, but it was something that I was really ready to kind of strip back. And I very much enjoyed me and my editor, Dean, just it's us to making everything happen, making sure that the episodes are up, getting the edits in there. Now when it comes to the bigger productions, we've got a team that we come in to do. This
Starting point is 01:54:07 Goggins thing, I keep on hopping on about that we can put in the show notes or whatever if people are interested. We fly an entire cinema crew out with a director of photography and they build custom sets in the middle of soundstage. I was going to ask you about that. That set look way too sick to be just like throwing together. It wasn't, it didn't exist. It was custom made. Everything was custom. Wow. Custom light and custom backdrop. Custom built boards with the brick. That's not real brick. Would you spend to put that all together? About 20 grand. Yeah. Yeah. That's actually not bad. That's not bad for what I saw. It's not but that is because I've built up an existing relationship with all of the different guys. So I know this person and this person and this person
Starting point is 01:54:43 and this person and this person and this person and then there's one guy in the middle who is able to wrap it all together and make it happen. Yeah, because originally organizing that probably was a monster, but now you've got your system. Correct. Yes, and that's unbelievably powerful. I'm going to do some more cool stuff this year. You know, if and when I get the next, whatever the next big guest is that comes on, we'll continue to do that and to really try and push the limits in terms of production. Like, how far can we go in terms of cinematography. But when it comes to the business man, it's just, it's good affiliate deals.
Starting point is 01:55:09 I am gonna start releasing some products this year. There's some stuff that I think that's missing in the market that I really want to do. So we are part way through moving that along. I think I'll be writing a book this year, as well which will be fun. But I don't know, this, I'm not really materialistically minded. And it's like an ongoing debate in my mind at the moment that is probably quite
Starting point is 01:55:31 timely to talk about. I don't have massive material goals for my life. I already earn like a fucking 50 times more than I ever probably should have done coming from the place like the most working class town in the UK Which was famous only for having the highest teen pregnancy rating in England like and I'm already report It's called Stockton on Tees. It's tea side. It's 50 miles south of Newcastle, which is where I went to universities just below Scotland and I'm already so far out ahead, but since coming over to America, that blue sky vision that I talk about with you guys has, don't leave it on the table,
Starting point is 01:56:15 is the thing that keeps coming to mind. It's like, how much of this you just, like just leaving out there because you don't, it would be easy if you to not push. It would be easy if you to not monetize more effectively to not write the book because everything is comfortable. We've been talking about comfort a lot throughout the conversation today. I'm like, okay, fucking hell.
Starting point is 01:56:32 Well, maybe I do need to write a book. Maybe I do need to try and release some products because it would add value and maybe it would generate some revenue and maybe it would take people away from other either products or courses or learnings that I think would be suboptimal, and I think I could maybe even add more than why they're going at the moment. But I've realized I'm not actually all that massively business-minded. Even though I was a business owner, managing director for a decade and a half, I was just really good at doing a thing and that grew. And it's the same with the podcast. I'm really good at having a conversation
Starting point is 01:57:08 with someone and it grew. So I'm probably going to need to get, I need like a business manager or something who can just come in and like, work out what would be really aligned, really virtuous with high integrity, but also monetize more effectively and then spread the message more. But my own, the only thing that I'm bothered about is good conversations, good conversations, interesting people. Yeah, you come off that way. That's why part of the reason why I asked, well share with me then your relationship with money because actually someone who comes from small town, I also come from a small
Starting point is 01:57:39 town, I actually had big dreams and wanted so much more. So I have an interesting journey of not having, not being happy, then coming for circle. So tell me about your relationship and journey with money coming from small town. Yeah, so just your entire perspective of what is a good wage is so skewed. So like, let's say that a pound is like $1.2,
Starting point is 01:58:04 something like that, probably like 1.05 at the moment. But for me, anybody that earned more than 20,000 pounds a year, it's like $25,000 or $30,000 was like insane, like absolutely crushing it. And I'm thinking to myself, wow, well, you know, if I come out of university, even when I went to uni, right? If I come out of uni and I get on a graduate scheme that pays 25, remember I've done two degrees, did a bachelor's and a master's, both in business, I could come out and start working for Accenture and maybe if I get paid to have 28,000 pounds, that's like an insane starting wage.
Starting point is 01:58:36 I remember one of my friends at uni, one of my housemates started working for little, you have a little, it's like Aldi. Okay, I know that. And that graduate scheme is the most trial by fire thing ever. It's like 80 hours a week for two years, but you get a free Audi A4 and it's 40 grand a year. So this guy just crushed himself for like 24 months. He had his life, but he was earning 40 grand a year and we all thought he was the shit.
Starting point is 01:58:58 And um, relationship with money is just I'm really not very materialistic. Most of the stuff that I wear is either being gifted to me by companies or is stuff that I've had to pick up when I'm going away on some trip or whatever. Has down from parents or I mean, where does it come from? I actually really, really like it. It's one of the things that I'm happiest that I inculcated in terms of a value in myself. Mom and dad were never very keeping up with the Joneses. E. It was birthdays and Christmas celebrations weren't particularly big occasions in terms of the presents.
Starting point is 01:59:35 It wasn't really about the presents. And I think that I can see in some of my other friends, parents who were more about keeping up with the Joneses, that they gave love through showing gifts, right? They showed love through giving gifts. And that means as they grow up, that they're a little bit more finger on the pulse of maybe I do need the new car, maybe I do need the new shoes, maybe it does matter what watches on my wrist, maybe it. And the way that I see it, if you are someone who is similar to myself and perhaps you with not being super materialistic, it's a competitive advantage because the amount of money and possessions that I need in order to make me happy is like 10% of some of the
Starting point is 02:00:18 friends that I've got. That's the number one common thread found actually in millionaires. A lot of people don't realize that is that their ability to live significantly below their means. Not their job or profession or their degree or any of that other shit. It's literally the ability to live well below your means. That's the most common thing amongst all millionaires. Yeah, that's interesting.
Starting point is 02:00:36 But yeah, and then the journey now is we kind of coming out the other side of this and thinking, right, stop leaving so much on the table. Let's really try and make a good impact. I enjoy raising up other people along with the show because for a long time, and you guys know this, right, that you're slip streaming in the wake of other people who've got as much cloud or more cloud than you do, right? I'm holding on to John Peterson's curtails, our undercute men's curtails, our jockers,
Starting point is 02:01:03 curtails, our goginsies, or whatever. And after a little bit of time, you generate your own momentum to the stage where you can move on to your own steam and you can be that springboard for other people. So a Gwinder, the guy that I said that wrote that amazing TikTok article, I managed to get that article in front of Rogan,
Starting point is 02:01:16 and then he tweeted it. And it's like, That's where I read it. Yeah, and it's like fucking, like millions of people. I don't know how many impressions, like five million, 10 million people, or whatever, they've seen this article. And I was like, hey dude, like, by the way, I think this is ended up like millions of people. I don't know how many impressions, like five million, 10 million people, or whatever, they've seen this article. And I was like, hey dude, like,
Starting point is 02:01:27 by the way, I think this has ended up in front of him. And then sure enough, he tweeted it that night. I'm like, that's fucking, like that makes me. That's a really cool feeling to do that. So fucking gassed. Yeah. My editor as well, Dean, he got to leave a job that he wasn't super happy in.
Starting point is 02:01:38 He's an unbelievable creative, fantastic photographer. Left that and got to go freelance doing whatever he wanted and then the other half of his week is spent doing the podcast. And you know, the first year that he was working with me, I think we both earned because we were 50 50 on AdSense together from YouTube. He made like 50 bucks. And then the second year, he maybe made like a thousand bucks. And then two years ago, after we had a little bit of takeoff and up to now he's driving around in this BMW M140i with a straight through exhaust V6 turbocharged Batman Bield thing and that's been funded heavily by the podcast and that gasses me up to think that because we decided to take a chance on this thing that he's not. Oh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, being very dangerous when he drives in this real-wheel drive, 400 horsepower car. So that's great.
Starting point is 02:02:29 And I think, okay, well, if that makes me feel so good, maybe I can do that a little bit more. But it's, I've had to like reverse engineer it. I'm having to almost artistically step my way through, why should I try and earn more money? Why should I try and monetize more effectively? Because the standard of life that I have at the moment is already great.
Starting point is 02:02:48 I live in a house that's gorgeous with a cold tub outside. I've got a housemate that's cool. I do a job that I really love. I can fly wherever I want. I get to, what would I do? I have a slightly more expensive coffee. Like, what am I going to do? You know what I mean?
Starting point is 02:03:03 The things that I take my value from, I Uber everywhere in Austin. Right, right. But then on the flip side, since being in Austin and being around guys like Tucker Maxx who started Scribe Media, good friends with Aubrey, good friends with Michael Cashew and a D from working against gravity,
Starting point is 02:03:19 I'm like, that pool is fucking nice. Like, that pool is really nice and that new brand new Porsche Cayman is pretty fucking sweet. I know you've got a ranch and you've got a holiday home up in Vermont and that's cool and that's cool. But it doesn't feel like I'm compelled and that's really... Well, it's one of your great strengths, but I always say that you're great at strength. I want to know about you all your sort of little reject. Well, I so I We bounce around and nine different homes growing up most of them we were evicted from my dad committed suicide when I was seven my mom
Starting point is 02:03:53 Remarried into abusive relationships who so to summarize I had a less than privileged Rocky. Yeah, growing up, right? So and a lot of that was rooted from a, a lot of the arguments and fights were rooted in us not having, not having enough, not being able to pay. And so that really motivated me. And so all through my, I was working at a very young age and all the way through my teens and early 20s, I worked really hard. Like my number was 50,000. I thought, I made 50,000 dollars a year.
Starting point is 02:04:22 I'd be rich. Yeah. Because I was like more than my parents made combined with raising four kids. So I thought I would be filthy rich making that. And I had this arbitrary number in my head that once I reached that, like that was the number. And I actually reached that about 27, 28 years old.
Starting point is 02:04:42 And for about a year or two, I probably would have told you during that time, this is the greatest thing I was flying to Vegas and paying for all my friends to do, shit, the cool cars, all the cool stuff. I woke up one day, about a year to two years later and looked at myself in the mirror and I was in the worst shape of my life.
Starting point is 02:05:02 I had two very close friends of mine from childhood, we fell out of a relationship, we were no longer friends anymore. The girl I was dating had just cheated on me. I wasn't seeing my family and so on that and I realized like, holy fuck, I'm the most unhappy I've ever been in my life and I have this dollar amount.
Starting point is 02:05:20 It's tied all of the wealth. Yeah. And so now the cool part about that was, it allowed this time that I didn't have to go work. I had enough money stacked up that I could live for a while and not worry about making a paycheck. It really allowed me that time to self-reflect and go, okay, what does make me happy and what I want to do?
Starting point is 02:05:41 I remember that health and fitness has always got to go took a little hiatus from it to chase money, from fitness, and I've always loved that. I've always loved health and fitness, and maybe I'm not gonna be rich doing it, but that's where my heart is, my passion, I love helping people. And so I went back into pursuing that. It was right at the height of when Instagram and Facebook
Starting point is 02:06:02 and YouTube was, it was like 12 years ago or what that was really starting to blow up, you know, and you're starting to see people. And so I turned on social media. I didn't have any of it. So I was like a, a people person and didn't really mess around online at all. Turned it on with the intent to build a network of people to eventually build some sort of a fitness business. And that's actually how we all get connected.
Starting point is 02:06:23 So we got connected, and we're all doing different things, but actually all came together at one point and had a conversation in my mother-in-law's house in the living room, and we all hit it off, and we started the podcast, not with any intent necessarily to monetize and make money, but because we had this information and content that we wanted to share with the world, and especially in our space that we felt was so convoluted with all this bad information, and we saw the rise of that, and we wanted to disrupt it. We thought, and then hopefully other people would go on on to it and want to listen and share with their friends.
Starting point is 02:06:59 I mean, that's how mine pump really started to go and take off. But during that time, I went from being the kid that was so driven and wanted money, had reached that point, and now my relationship has changed. I still enjoy the finer things of life. Like I still like having a nice car, I still like the nice watch, I still like some of those.
Starting point is 02:07:17 It's never gonna be boring to fly business class. Yes, right. That's right. And I appreciate those things. I actually really like that I had that journey that I went from being very driven by that, getting a chance to reach it and then realizing it's not all it's cracked up to be. Does it quote from Naval RavaCount where he says it is far easier to achieve our material desires than to renounce them? And what he means is that you can drive a beat up a
Starting point is 02:07:39 corer if your last car was a Ferrari, but if you go through your entire life wondering what it's like to drive a Ferrari, it's going to be an unopened loop that you just never get past. And I think that Transcendent include is a nice way to look at a lot of the things that you've spoken about today. Right? Okay, I have this endless list of guys and girls on the internet that I could date. Right? I need to accept the fact that that is there, but I also need to transcend it. I need to understand that money might not be everything that is there, but I also need to transcend it. I need to understand
Starting point is 02:08:05 that money might not be everything that is going to make me happy, but that I have this bias, where if I don't achieve some of the things that I want to do, I'm always going to have that open loop in the back of my mind about what if. And most people regret the decisions that they didn't make, rather than the ones that they did. The most interesting part is, and ironic, is that when I let go of the chase of the money, more money came. More money came. So that's the funniest thing about it, is that I finally made that switch over of like,
Starting point is 02:08:36 oh, it's not what's important to me, and then it all came in. So it was really funny how that happened. Yeah, well, I mean, the other thing is that what we said at the very, very beginning, it's super hard to compete with somebody that's having fun. It'll be very, very difficult. There's this study done on a Steffi graph, German tennis player, like Savon, German tennis player, and they rated kids in the German kids tennis program on motivation to train and skill aptitude. And she came in as a 10 on skill and aptitude and a 10 on motivation to train. So even if you're as skilled as she is, she's going to artwork you and to her, it's not even going to feel like work. Unbelievably difficult to compete with somebody
Starting point is 02:09:18 that's having fun. And nobody can beat you at being you either, right? There is one version of you every single different iteration and different encounter between all of your ancestors from the Eukriotic double-celled bacteria two billion years ago right up to now. It had to be that animal at that time in that ovulation period with that particular sperm. It had to be those two over and over and over and over again for 200,000 generations or however long it is, right? In had to be those two over and over and over and over again for 200,000 generations or however long it is, right? In order to be able to create this particular unique combination of genetic predisposition
Starting point is 02:09:52 and then the way you've dealt with past traumas, your environmental programming, that all of the things that you've gone through has created you. You know what's most crazy about that to me though is how many people think they want to be that person. Like you mentioned like a superstar, like tennis player, and I think of like the Stefan Currys, the Michael Jordan's, the Tiger Woods. You want a monster?
Starting point is 02:10:13 Yeah, these people that we see just the highlight reels of the fame, the money, the cool cars, the girls, all these things like that, but don't realize how potentially tortured they are inside. And with the formula, it takes to be that great at that sport. That one thing. And I've been lucky to have been around a lot of these athletes,
Starting point is 02:10:37 and it's very, very rare that I find one that I would want to trade places with. Most of the people that you admire aren't superheroes. They're normal humans that have sacrificed pretty much everything in their life to be good at one thing. If you had the opportunity to look at the intertext, you're of an Elon Musk's life, or Kim Kardashian when she goes to bed, you probably wouldn't want to trade places with them. You don't know if Elon Musk hasn't had an erection in fucking six months
Starting point is 02:11:04 because of how stressed he is. You don't know if Kim Kardashian can't bear to have a conversation with any of his sisters because of how tortured her and her family life is. You don't know all of these things, right? You only get to see what is shown to you. And Eddie Hall, I always use this example of Eddie Hall. Eddie Hall wins World's Strongest Man in 2018, I think. And he says straight after that, he quits, right? He leaves strongman on the stage. And he says, it's for his grandma, he sort of holds the thing up and he's crying and he says, this is for you. And then he immediately retires from competitive strongman. And somebody asks him, like, you know, you've just won, like, you don't want to go for the
Starting point is 02:11:43 like two-peat or the three-peat, and he says, if I keep on doing this, I'm going to be dead, single, and with no relationship to my child, because he was like, what, six, four, 200 kilos, like, 440 pounds, this guy weighed. His blood pressure was through the roof, his heart rate was all over the place, his health, the probably the drugs and the steroids
Starting point is 02:12:02 that he was on wouldn't have contributed very well to that, die everything is fucked. He said he was on wouldn't have contributed very well to that. Die everything is fucked. He said he was training so hard and he was so obsessive about winning that his relationship with his wife was breaking down. His relationship with his kid was basically non-existent. Okay, I want to be the world's strongest man. I want to be able to be the guy that can stand on stage holding trophy in the air and say,
Starting point is 02:12:20 mum, grandma, thank you for helping me. This is for you. Okay, do you want to have no relationship with your kid, risk your health and also your marriage in order to be able to do that? Connor McGregor is another example. Everybody looks at Connor, this sort of Sevant martial artist
Starting point is 02:12:36 that's having an unbelievable career. I actually think, I mean, now he's kind of embarrassing. He looks like he's going down. Super, super, super. He's like the most cringe guy in the internet. However, when he was at this prime, you would say, that's the guy that I want to be. He's walking out on stage and he's like an artist.
Starting point is 02:12:51 You know, he's sort of this like demigod fucking artist. Carries Maddick guy. Okay, do you want to spend the first decade of your career living in the attic of your parents' house in Ireland with your girlfriend, with no idea about whether or not things are going to work out, going to the gym and rolling the same sequences, throwing the same combinations for hours and hours and hours, and nobody picking you up, having self-belief, but not knowing if it's going to go anywhere.
Starting point is 02:13:19 That's the price that you pay in order to be con on McGregor, and most people wouldn't pay that price if they had the opportunity to do it, if you got to see the inner texture of the people who you admire as minds, you wouldn't pay that price. This is what I tell people when they say, I wanna have a six pack, no you don't. You really don't wanna have six pack abs.
Starting point is 02:13:34 Fucking miserable. For what? It's required of it. You don't want to. The room of people who've all had six pack abs, it's fucking miserable. Yeah, it's just not a surprise. Part of the reason why, I don't know how much you went
Starting point is 02:13:44 through our stuff, but you don't see any transformation photos, you don't see us doing all kinds of stuff like that is because we don't think about balance. We just, well, we just don't think it's a healthy message for a majority of people because you're not presenting the other side of that of what it takes to do that. And I went through, what, three, almost four years of dieting for bodybuilding became a pro men's physique athlete, and I'll never forget Katrina,
Starting point is 02:14:08 my wife looking over to me and she goes, is this gonna be our life? And I was like, fuck, no, we're gonna reach a point I'm outta here. And it was really just to help catapult this, to use my name that I was building in the competing world to pivot over to this, because, but I could see how many people get trapped in that.
Starting point is 02:14:24 I mean, it's crazy. Well, it's the, it's far easy to achieve your material to size them to announce them thing, right? But if someone continues to, okay, now I've achieved one goal, but oh, well, I've got a local championship. How about I go for like a regional? Okay, well, how about I go for a national? Well, how about I go to the world?
Starting point is 02:14:39 How about I go to the IFBB? Like, you can continue. There is always going to be another motherfucker out there that's going to be better than you. And even let's use this as an example, Tom Brady, how many rings do you need? He's only got 10 fingers. And he's got what seven championship rings. Yeah. Okay, so let's say you just three more and then he's out of fingers. Is that enough? Yeah. The gold medalist syndrome is a big deal.
Starting point is 02:15:05 What do you do after you've done that? Well, if you go to the gym, where's your identity outside of that? Yeah, who are you? Who are you when you let this thing? When you let this thing go? Well, imagine trying to reverse that though after you've already double, triple down
Starting point is 02:15:18 and committed like someone like him. I mean, you've been all in for decades. Forever. Yeah, listen, I've talked, we talk about this a lot. He probably, someone like that would probably rather die on the field. Yeah. Well, because it's like, once you stop, who are you? I mean, you know, we talk about this all the time, that the value comes from the journey
Starting point is 02:15:35 and not necessarily, or almost never from accomplishing the goal. We haven't spoken about him yet today, but Andrew Tate, one of my favorite takes from him that he's got, is having things isn't that fun, getting things is really fun. And you realize that he is a man that has got essentially unlimited material wealth as far as he's concerned, and his only enjoyment in life comes from getting more. He can't be happy with the things that he has, but that's the same with regards to it. And it's one of the beautiful things about podcasting, curiosity, learning, skill development,
Starting point is 02:16:09 is that it's an endless game that you can actually enjoy the process of. There is always something new and interesting for you to learn about the world, like today, the sexual gossip thing. It's almost everybody, it's kind of pointless, but it's kind of interesting. It's very interesting.
Starting point is 02:16:23 I never knew the way that women use venting as this and then maybe you see it and you go, fuck it. It's like, it's like unlocked this other area of life. And if you are the kind of person that listens to your show, or listens to my show, you take pleasure in seeing code where they previously used to be computer program, right? You go, fuck like like that's why that thing happens. Or you watch an Eddie Hall documentary and you go, oh shit, I didn't realize that he was actually on the cusp of this thing and it was kind of cool because if he hadn't one at that maybe he
Starting point is 02:16:56 would have ended up being in a really bad health crisis or he would have been single or whatever. And you get to that for me is that's what fires me up. What fires me up is Understanding the world with greater resolution like understanding it with more detail And that's just it's just endlessly interesting and I think that the game of Satisfying curiosity is such a beautiful endless game to play or a An eternal game to play pursuit of growth the pursuit of personal growth if you fall in love with the pursuit You're just always gonna have a good time. Yes. Absolutely. Well, this has been a great Chris. Yeah. It's been a lot of fun having you on the show, man. I appreciate it. I appreciate you coming into the studio and doing this with us. It's been awesome. My pleasure.
Starting point is 02:17:35 Yeah. Thanks again. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance. Check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at MindPumpMedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballad, maps performance, and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased, expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs. With detailed workout blueprints in over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having
Starting point is 02:18:12 Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainer's butt at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money bag guarantee, and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at MindPumpMedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review on iTunes and by introducing MindPump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support and until next time, this is MindPump. Until next time, this is Mindbomb.

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