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

Episode Date: December 22, 2025

2025 is nearly over, so I decided to put together a compilation of some of my favourite moments from the show over the last year. It was going to be a top 20, but I couldn't choose, so it's 23. Expect to learn Naval Ravikant's advice of overcoming self-esteem issues, Tom Segura on why Gen Z isn't a fan of drinking alcohol. The 3 most important decisions you make every day, according to Tony Robbins, Alex Hormozi's best advice for struggling entrepreneurs, Mel Robbins on how to overcome crippling anxiety, Sam Sulek's top 10 exercises and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening, people. Welcome back to the show. It is the end of 2025. And to celebrate, I've put together a collection of my favorite moments from the podcast over the last 12 months, some huge episodes that you probably saw, some other episodes that maybe you missed. And I've put them all together in an interesting flow and pacing. And I really loved all of these. I love all of my, I love all 140 of my podcast children. But these were just some highlights from 2025. I appreciate you all for being here. I appreciate you all for making Modern Wisdom

the eighth biggest podcast in the world according to Spotify wrapped this year, which is insane. And thank you for all the support and all the shares and all the everything. Thank you for staying patient with me when I've tried to bring in new ideas and guests that you've never heard of.

I really, really do work hard to try and curate a nice art gallery that even if you don't know who the artist is, you're probably going to enjoy their work. So thank you for sticking with me as I go down rabbit holes that you didn't know that you were going to enjoy and commenting in all of the support and everything,

especially this year more than ever, it's meant an awful lot to me. So, yeah, I appreciate every single one of you. Before we get into it, you need to do an end of your review and the review process that I use for myself that I've stolen from all the best, productivity guys on the planet is at chriswillx.com slash review 100,000, literally hundreds of

thousands of people have recorded it and done their work on it already. And you can get it for free. Copy it into your notes app and do your end of your review. So chriswillex.com slash review. Anyway, Merry Christmas, happy New Year. Let's get into it. The worst outcome in the world is not having self-esteem. Why? Yeah, it's a Tough one. I look at the people, and I don't want to offend anybody, but I look at the people who don't like themselves and that's the toughest slot because they're always wrestling with themselves. And it's hard enough to face the outside world. And no one's going to like you more than you like yourself. So if you're struggling with yourself, then the outside world becomes

an insurmountable challenge. And it's hard to say why people have low self-esteem. It might be genetic. It might just be circumstantial. A lot of times I think it's because they just weren't unconditionally loved as a child. And that sort of seeps in at a deep core level. But self-esteem issues can be the most limiting. One interesting thought is that, you know, to some extent, self-esteem is a reputation you have with yourself. You're watching yourself at all times. You know what you're doing. And you have your own moral code. Everyone has a different moral code. But if you don't live up to your own moral code, the same code that you hold others to, it will damage your self-esteem. So perhaps one way to build up your self-esteem is to live up to your own code, very rigorously

have one and then live up to it. Another way to raise your self-esteem might be to do things for others. If I look back on my life and, you know, what are the moments that I'm actually proud of? There's very far and few between there. And it's not that often. It's not the things you would expect. It's not the material success. It's not having learned this thing or that. when I made a sacrifice for somebody or something that I loved. And that's when I'm actually ironically most proud. Now that's through an explicit mental exercise, but I'll bet you at some level I'm recording that implicitly. So that tells me that even if I am not being loved, then the way to create love is to give love, to express love through sacrifice and through duty. And so I think

doing things like that can build up your self-esteem really fast. It's interesting when you talk about sacrifice because a lot of the time people say, I sacrifice so much for my job. It's like, yeah, but that was you sacrificing something that you wanted less for something that you wanted more, as opposed to genuinely taking some sort of cost. And, yeah, I wonder whether if self-esteem is you adhering to your internal, your actions and your values aligning, even when it's difficult, or perhaps even more so when it's difficult, I wonder whether there is a price that people who are more introspective, high integrity, pay, because you think, well, you've got this

heavy set of overheads that you need to pay in some way. Well, if being ethical were profitable, everybody would do it, right? So at some level, it does involve a sacrifice. But that sacrifice can also be thought of as you're thinking for the long term rather than the short term. For example, the virtues are the set of beliefs that if everybody in society followed them as individuals, it would lead to win-win outcomes for everybody.

So if I am honest and you are honest, then we can do business more easily. We can interact more easily because we can trust each other. So even though there might be a few liars in the system, as long as there aren't too many liars and too many cheaters, a high-trust society where everybody's honest is better off. And I think a lot of the virtues work this way, right? If I don't go around sleeping with your wife and you don't sleep with mine

and, you know, if I don't take all the food that's at the table first and so on, then we all get along better and we can play win-win games. In game theory, the most famous game is Prisoner's Dilemma, but that's all about everybody cheating in the Nash equilibrium. The stable equilibrium there is everybody cheats. And the only way you can be, you can play a win-win game is if you have long-term iterated moves. But that's not actually the most common game played in society.

The most common game played is one called a stag's hunt, where if we cooperate, we can bring down a big stag and both have big dinners, but if we don't cooperate, then we have to go hunt like rabbits and we each have small dinners. So most of, and that game has two stable equilibriums And one could be where we're both hunting the rabbit And one could be where we're hunting the stag So the Hightra society is a more more virtuous society

Where I can trust you to come hunt the stag with me And show up on time and do the work and divide it up properly So you want to live in a system where everybody Has their own set of virtues and follows them And then we all win But I would argue you don't need to do that for sacrifice You don't need to do that for other people you can do it just purely for yourself.

You will have higher self-esteem. You will attract other high-virtue people. Would I go on a stag hunt with me? Correct. Yeah, that's right. And if you're the kind of person, if you're the kind of person who long-term signals ethics and virtues, then you will attract other people who are ethical and virtuous. Whereas if you are a shark,

you will eventually find yourself swimming entirely amongst sharks, and that's an unpleasant existence. But again, this goes back to the quillin of the marshmallow test. And by the way, the marshmallow test does not replicate. I saw the complication crisis hard recently. But it is about trading off the short term for the long term. And so I think for a lot of these so-called virtues, there are long-term selfish reasons to be virtuous. Yeah.

Did you deal with self-doubt in the past? Is that something that was a hurdle for you to overcome? Yes and no. I think I dealt with self-doubt in the sense that, oh, I don't know what I'm doing. to figure it out. But I didn't doubt myself in the way of somebody else knows better than me for me or that, you know, I'm an idiot or I'm not worthwhile or anything that. I guess I had the benefit of I grew up with a lot of love. Like the people around me love me unconditionally. And so that just gave me a lot of confidence. Not the kind of confidence that would say I have

the answer, but the kind of confidence that I will figure it out and I know what I want or only I am a good arbiter of what I want. Yeah, that level of self-belief, I suppose, allows you to determine what is it that matters to me. My self-esteem, should I chase this thing or not? I can make a fair judgment on that as opposed to being dissuade. But it's such a good point about even if you think you're not consciously logging the stuff that you're doing, there is some, that's in the back of your mind. Was it the Damon? Is that what the ancient Greeks or something used to talk about?

Yeah, also in computer science, like there's a concept of a Damon, which is a, a, a program that's always running in the background. You can't see it. But yeah, it probably comes from the ancient Greek, Damon. But yeah, what you know that you don't even know you know is far greater than what you know you know, right? You can't even articulate most of the things you know. There are feelings you have that have no words for them.

There are thoughts you have that are felt within the body or subconsciously that you never articulate to yourself. You can't articulate the rules of grammar, yet you exercise. them effortlessly when you speak. So I would argue that your implicit knowledge and your knowledge that is unknown to yourself is far greater than the knowledge you can articulate and that you can communicate. And so at some level you're always watching yourself. That's what your consciousness is, right? It's the thing that's watching everything, including your mind, including your body. So if you want to have high self-esteem, then earn your own self-respect.

I had this idea, the internal golden rule. So the golden rule says, treat others the way that you should be treated, you want to be treated. The internal golden rule says treat yourself like others should have treated you. And it was a repost to maybe people that didn't grow up with unconditional love in that way. On the love thing, one of the interesting things about love is you can try to remember the feeling of being loved. So go back to when someone was in love with you or someone did love you and like really you remember that feeling like really sit with it and try to recreate it within yourself and then go to the feeling of you loving someone and when you were in love and i'm not even talking about romantic love necessarily so be a little careful there

i'm talking more about like love sometimes get complex if you're talking about past romantic love right a sibling or a child or something like that or a parent and uh think about when you felt love towards someone or something and now which is better and I would argue that the feeling of being in love is actually more exhilarating than the feeling of being loved. Being loved is a little cloying. It's a little too sweet. You kind of want to push the person away.

It's a little embarrassing. And you know that if that person is too much into it, that you feel constrained. On the other hand, the feeling of being in love is very expansive. It's very open. It actually makes you a better version of yourself. It makes you want to be a better person.

And so you can create love anytime you want. It's just that craving to receive it. That's the problem. I went to this daytime house music party in Austin on Saturday. It's called Mushroom Cowboy. So it's a... Migrodose, the kind of event? I don't know.

I think they're kind of hinting at that, but it's in a coffee, well, it was outside of a coffee shop, off Congress. Yeah. So I turn up at half ten, it started at ten. And the queue is 250 yards long for coffee. What? And there must have been 1,500 people there. One guy brought a baguette, was raving with his baguette, those dogs, you know, pretty, pretty so. looking from the outside, maybe some people smoking weed.

But I think this is maybe the beginning of us seeing the end of like hardcore drink culture. If you've looked at how few of Gen Z now drink, it's I think maybe 20%. The interesting thing is like the theories on why, because there's obviously, they have to be theories, right, on we don't actually know exactly. yeah one of them is that people the youth views drinking as like what their parents did right so that's like that's naturally uncool yeah my fucking lame-ass dad drinks like i don't i'm not interested and so that's one thing the other part of it is that this uh group of people uh that are the youth right now are so much more informed on what the negative aspects of drinking and what it can do to you, that they're just, like, why would I, you know, why would I consume it?

Yeah, to something like that. And that they've found this whole other, you know, when you want to take the edge off, there's a lot more options. And it's also a lot more accepted today than it was 20 years ago, like the idea that you could microdose or do edibles or smoke.

Or, you know, I mean, and then there's like all the ketamine and everything. is like, I have it, I have different things that I do when I want to have a recreational good time. And yeah, but it's, it's undeniable that it's, it's definitely way down. There's more daily users in the US of weed now than there are of alcohol. Is that for real? Overtaken, or at least that was the most recent study that I saw in the US,

then are more daily or near daily marijuana users than daily or near daily alcohol users. And that, and that thought was just completely, like if you're a teen right now, you don't understand how preposterous that sounds coming from like if you were growing up in the 80s and 90s like you were just like that those were like the fringe people almost you know what I mean like yes it was popular but it was not like a respectable person really wasn't doing that you know it was like the arts it was like hippies and and yeah it was I mean people thought of it as like the absolute worst thing that could happen I mean people from like my dad Dad's generation likened marijuana to heroin.

They didn't even see, like, really a difference. They're just like, you're a junkie. It's like, but what for smoking a joint? And like, yeah, that's the way they viewed it. So the fact that it's that accepted now, it's mind-blowing to me. I wonder if some of it is that drinking in the house on your own feels pretty fucking bad. Yeah. Smoking in the house on your own, you're like, I'm just watching, I'm playing Call of Judy.

Yeah. Leave me alone. But if you're six B is deep playing Call of Duty, it's a different. story. Yeah, and you're not playing well at that. You're just like... I don't know how well people are playing on weed either, but... Fuck.

Yeah. Yeah, you're probably more likely to yell out pejorative slurs. Yeah, I think that, I mean, look, smoking is still not good for you. So, like, you're probably... But we've discovered that, you know, there's other ways to ingest and, like, consume. And that's what I think is part of, like, this youth culture thing about staying away from drinking is they're like, whatever, I do droplets in this, or I, you know, I have my gummy or whatever, however they want to consume. But they're just, they're definitely not drinking, man.

They're not drinking like they, like everybody else before them did. I used to run nightclubs for ages and one of the big downturns we've seen has been in nightlife industry. I think the UK's losing a nightclub a week. There's not like an unlimited number of nightclubs. It's like one is shutting down pretty much every single week. And I asked a friend who's still in the industry why he thought that was the case. And he said, smartphones, man. Back in the day, you could be as loose as you want to. You could sort of have that lairy, louty, drinking spirit, at least in Britain where it's a big deal. They don't want to be recorded?

Of course. Yeah. Like, if you mess up and, like, shit yourself in the middle of a nightclub in 2002, it's a story that you can deny the next day. Yeah. And then after six months, most people have probably forgotten. Yeah. Whereas if that happens in 2025, that's now concretized on the internet for everybody to know and bring back up and make memes out of for the rest of time. I mean, it's, but imagine, like, how the pro athletes of the 80s.

and 90s and early 2000s would just go out and just destroy a woman's hopes and dreams and then now they're all yeah they're like everyone's on edge yeah everyone's got a phone out it's just yeah it's it's it's a totally different by the way do you ever think about why as i still remember that like why was house music and dancing in general so much bigger in Europe than here. People here were never like, let's go dance. I'm not sure. I mean, I guess why does any scene of any kind appear anywhere? We certainly have in the UK, like a good house music culture. Yeah. A lot of people didn't have much else to do other than go out and party and drink. Yeah. If the weather's bad, then we're not going to go out to the ranch.

We're not going to go and see the sunset. We're not going to go to the beach. It's fucking freezing cold all the time. So you kind of just zero in on the one thing that's reliable, which is, beer. Yeah. Pubs or clubs. Yeah, yeah. Now, I just remember, like, so many times, like, being in the States and having, like, European friends are like, why don't you guys, you guys don't like to go dance? And I was like, no, no, no, we're not going dancing, bro. Like, like, no. And and then I would remember, like, studying abroad, being like, oh, yeah, we would, that's, that was, like, a normal thing. Just go to a place that was just, like, packed and everybody just loud music dancing. It just was one of those things where I was like, it just didn't translate

over here. I mean, there's still clubs, obviously, but it just wasn't the same type of, oh, I just want to go listen to this and literally dance. Like, that's what people I felt like were doing a lot more in Europe than here. These are the three decisions that I think everyone makes every moment. First, you're doing it right now. What are you going to focus on? You're going to be focusing on my story I'm telling you. You can be focusing on the next question you're going to ask. You can be focusing on how your stomach feels if you've not eaten. There's a million things you could focus on, literally. But we don't experience life. We experience the part of life we focus on. And so the bottom line is, I know my father and I had a different experience because we had

different focuses that. I was focused on what a concept. This is cool. He was focused on that he had not taken care of his family. And I know that because, you know, he said it about 20 times under his breath. And my mother echoed it, of course. The second decision, though, the minute you focus on something, your brain has to decide, what does it mean? And meaning is what creates emotion. And emotion is where your life is, right? And so the quality of your life is the quality of your emotions. If you've got a billion dollars in every day, you're pissed off and angry, your life's quality is called pissed off and angry. If you've got three beautiful children, a husband or wife you love, but you worry all the time, your life is worry, you know?

So his focus and then his meaning, that was the worst part, the meaning he gave it was that he was worthless and didn't belong here. And that usually leads to the third decision, which is what are you going to do? And like, if you think, if the meaning is something happens, you say this person is dissing me, you know, disrespecting me, or is this person challenging me, or is this person coaching me, or is this person loving me? If you think they're dissing you, you're going to have a very different emotional reaction than if you think they're coaching you or loving you. And then, of course, that's going to change what decision you make. Because if you're angry, you're going to make a different decision that if you're playful or generous or whatever the case may be. So those three decisions

control our lives. So your viewers or listeners, I give them an opportunity to take a look at it because there's some patterns that you can make some simple patterns and change your whole life, a focus. So the first one is, and I'd ask you two questions for you. One, Chris, is what do you think most people's answer this question is? And the other is what's yours if you're ready, ready to play? All right? It's real simple. We all have a pattern of focusing on what we have and at times on what's missing. Which one do you think most people spend more time focusing on what they have or what's missing? What's missing? What do you focus more on? What's missing? Yes. It isn't something that comes, the focus on what's missing is not something

that comes with someone who is a failure. It comes very much with people who are very successful. And the question then becomes, if you're always focused on missing, how can you sustain happiness? You're in a permanent place of lack. That's correct. So scarcity is there. So you'll have drive, right, to keep staying on the hamster wheel of achievement, but you're not going to see much fulfillment, not in a sustainable way. It's impossible. And there's nothing to do with you or me, right? It's just software. And we got a soul. We're not software, but you run your software so often, you start thinking your mind is you versus my mind is a tool that I'm going to use, or if I don't use it, it's going to use me. So the majority people do that. And by the way, during

COVID, that number exploded because so many things were taken from people, they were constantly focus on what's missing and that produces nothing but pain. Second question, and I think I know your answer to this one, which do you tend to focus on more, what do you think most people focus on more, what they can control or what they can't control? And then which one do you focus more on? I think most people would probably focus on what they can't control. I'm an even balance, I would say, between the two. I'm working quite hard to try. I was going to say you strive as part of your philosophy, right, to focus on what you can control. Right? So that's part of the Stoicism, philosophy of Stoicism, right? So, but most people, you're absolutely right. Now, in my seminars, it's different because I got 15, 20,000 people. I asked that question and the vast majority of them say they're focused on what's missing, but the vast majority of them say they do focus on what they can control. That's why they came. Why would they spend their money in time? They want to take control their business or their body or their relationship where the case may be. So they have a different belief structure. If you have both of those out of whack, you've got some real challenges. Most people have at least one out of whack, which

which creates stress. And then the third one, there's many more than these, but just quickly for the people at home, and I'm asking them to do this for themselves if they want to. Where do you tend to focus more? Your past, your present, and your future.

We all spend it all three, but where do you spend more of your time? What do you think most people do? Where do you? Let's say that you only had 10 exercises for the rest of time to build the best body that you could. What are you going to choose?

Talk me through the philosophy. I've got a roster set up. So when it comes to legs, I think that the idea of crazy heavy squats or leg press all the time as a quad builder, it just wouldn't be it for me. Because I've had periods of time where I basically did a leg extension exclusively. Usually when I diet, my leg extension volume increases because, I mean, squeezing-wise, activation-wise,

you know, if you slapped electronic pulse indicators, maybe you could get a real readout of how much they're activating. But for me, like, if I had to pick a quad movement, I would just kill it on the leg extensions because you can really pump them up, go a little heavier. Like if I had to pick one, that would be, that would be it.

Okay. And then hamstrings would be, I'd be a little torn, but I'd probably pick, I'm very torn, either seated or laying curl. But either way, a hamstring curl. I gotta pick one.

I'm afraid, Sam, you can't. I guess I'd have to pick the, I'd have to pick the, uh, I'd have to pick laying. I would have to pick a little bit more stretch. I wouldn't, well, I just, Like, not even because of that, because you would actually, in a seated position, if you pull forward. Would your, you know, hips not be more rounded over where your hamstrings tie in?

So now they're actually more stretched. Like, you feel your hamstring stretch when you bend your torso to touch your toes, not when you're laying down. So, like, the idea when people talk about there's more stretch on the laying curl, I don't even see it. Well, that depends. If you're sat like this, because often there's handles, people press themselves up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so that would be...

You've pushed this off, as opposed to pulling yourself in. So I guess it depends how you position yourself in. So I guess... But right now, I'm on a kick of laying curl. All right, so quad extension, lying hamstring curl. And then for back, I'd probably just have to do regular pull downs. But you can also cheat them into a row by leaning back extra far. All right, okay. Yeah, that's acceptable because you've just got the one machine. It's the same handle, it's the same setup.

Okay, all right. For me, anyway, I need more lats. because I want them to be wider. Like, the thickness of my back is actually fine. Like, I want them to extend out. Like, that's what really gives that sort of look illusion. What do you think about when it comes to lap pull down, hand position, cues, what are you thinking? Because then you can change it up pretty drastically. Like, if I do a lighter set, which is normally toward the end, I can put my hands extra far out.

And it's a bit, a little bit more, like, rather than pulling my shoulders up and down, which kind of gets, like, a lot of my lower lats, I kind of, rector like middle thickness rather you know having wider hands and rotating around my shoulders that gets me a little more upper lats but or you could also make it super heavy and do a closer grip and you get a little forearm and bicep just from the nature of a like that's more of a compound movement of a row but then you can really load it too okay so quad extension lying hamstring curl lat pull down with a little bit of fuckery on the handle what's for yeah for chest i think I'd have to pick, oh, I'm a little torn.

But honestly, if I had to only pick one. No, you've got 10 in total, so you can... But you've got a lot of muscle groups. You've got to at least cover your bases. So I would say, there was a time when I would say inclined barbell. If I was on an inclined barbell kick. But it's a little trick in your shoulders because it's very, like, directly mounted. Like, the only time I ever get my shoulders is usually inclined barbell.

When I like it, I like it, but I wouldn't do it all the time. So that's where I would say dumbbell, but even then, dumbbell is very limited because you can go really heavy. And the individual loading and the fact that they can move out the entire way, you'd still squeeze at the top. You can rest a bench with a bar at the top because it's all just going through your bone structure. Not so much with dumbbells. You're always adjusting. Yeah, you're never going to relax on the top of a dumbbell. But what I think I'd have to pick now would actually be a seated cable press.

So if you've ever seen seat here, cable here, cable here, you pull it in, you're kind of like this. Okay. Because that is... Do you stay neutral throughout that? Pretty neutral, yeah. Yeah. So you're not allowing... Not incline, not decline, like kind of hands up a little bit.

Yeah. Because that's a much more versatile set. Because I can do it really heavy, like a conventional press, but I could also go lighter and be much more squeeze emphasized. Because those are like the two bases I basically cover for every move, every... body part if i do a heavy one i'm going to counter it with a lighter squeezing them and to do only one i think you'd be limiting your stimulus so that uh that puts us of what is it that's that's for now so there's definitely on incline dumbbell press which i think for every guy is always going to be up there for chest it feels good on your shoulders

it's always one of the first movements that you do when you get into the gym you feel like it's building the bit of the chest that you want which is up here um But if you do a really light set, you just don't feel it the same as you do if you're on cable. So I understand that tension, especially because you're being pulled that way, not that way, right? So you always have that kind of, you know, widening force even at the top. Yeah, that's a good point. All right, so that's four. So extension, curl, pull down, cable press.

Yeah, is that on a little incline, 30 degrees? Just flatish, basically flat, flat low. All right. Because then you could also put your hands up a little and get more upper chest, get down a little, get more... They're being very cheeky, okay, number five. So a five and six for arms would be, well, for triceps first. I'd probably have to pick just an easy bar curl push down.

So not the V bar. Like 90 degrees is too much. Straight is also a little too much on your wrists. So a little camber more like a 120, that's about right. Because I can also do that light and squeezing. or you can really get into it and have some heft. What are you thinking about with cues for that? Are you more upright if you got a little bit of bend in the hips?

Yeah, decently upright. But if you're, if you stand too upright, well, then now you're like turning into an app exercise because you're loading your arms downward and you have to keep yourself tense to stay there. So I'll hunch over it. Or if I'm doing a hard one, I'll put my head to the side of the cable and kind of like wrench it a little like that. Not for all of them, but for some of them. Okay. And then dumbbells is just dumbbo curls.

It's hard to beat. Seated, standing, supinated. With the count as different movements? Yes. Got to pick one. I guess I'd have to just pick standing. Standing, supernated. So more of a regular, a classic twist of neutral, you know, your hips into superinated.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because just the, with some movements, being able to change the load completely changes the style of the movement. Because I could do the 30s. and really hold it and squeeze it. Or I could try to do like the 70s and have it be a much heavier kind of brunt sort of thing. So that's, uh, all right, we're getting close to most.

It's a six now, so you got four left. Yeah, so six now. I can chill on shoulders because I don't, I haven't done a real shoulder workout for like years at this point. Because they're just, they're already big. Like they don't, relatively my arms need to grow. So I would want to add a forearm curl cable. Okay.

So you're holding the one D handle. you know, cable up here. I'm loading it down this way. Like, this is the force. Okay. And I'm just doing this. Okay. And it's not a huge movement.

Yep. But it's like enough where you're actually kind of picking this up. And I used to do a ton of that. And then my forums got big enough and then I never did it again. At least not. Now I'm back on it because the arms have caught up. Now I'll add it a little more. But it's, uh, yeah.

And honestly, for just, I think it was a joke that Hugh Jackman or someone, or Stallone, worked their forums like crazy. because when you're acting you're not always shirtless but you're usually sleeveless and having big forearms makes you like extra cool so I guess after that I'd probably have to add a calf raise just because

standing seated? Seated. Seated is a little bit better. Okay. Even though you're going to be hitting I always get these the wrong way around gastron versus soleus whatever. For me I feel it and my calves will grow from it so I've got my own anecdotal evidence of it worked. Okay, you've got two left. So the next one has to be the Cardi bike, which not many people would add because they are thinking, I don't even need to do cardio,

because it's not in their mind. But that's, yeah, so seated. And then the pedals are like where my feet are over here. It's kind of a recline. It's a reclined position. And it's the easiest one. Little backrest. My torso does not move. So I can pedal as much as I want. I'm just sitting playing my phone for 30 minutes. Like, you can do it and also make it easy. Have you got a preferred machine for that, like to pre-core, make a particularly good? Just, And some of them, they have little handles. Sometimes the handles are too close to where your knees are, and you'll bump your knee on them. That's my best point in only gripe, but I'm not picky.

The one I have at my house is like, I mean, it's the equivalent of one that you would get for free if you picked it up from like this out of the road. But it still works. And actually, that one's harder on a, well, it reads harder. Because sometimes the math that they do to calculate calories burned, it's not completely, Because if someone, like me, peddled for 30 minutes at X difficulty at X speed, an Olympic cyclist or like a marathon cyclist could do it at the same speed and the same difficulty, and he would actually burn less calories because he's more efficient, and I'm less efficient. So it's not necessarily, I always aim for the same number.

It's like, I know the feeling of like, this is hard, but it's not too hard. Like this is the right energy expenditure level. I did that on a, I've been getting into incline treadmill walking to get to zone, zone two for me is really hard to hit it's like way faster than a normal walk on the road and it's way slower than a jog and yeah my incline preferred is like 3.5 5% three point or for me 3.2 at 15 is is nice but I don't know what the metrics are of the whatever the machine is that was in the UK and it was 3.2 15 and I was like this doesn't feel right okay I'll just keep going up four like four still doesn't feel right five what the fuck is this number it got to five point

three and like it's about there speed is off yeah is that miles per hour or i don't know because it wouldn't be kilometers over here because it would still be miles per hour whatever it was yeah the exact same you go i can go to a new machine and after you've done you don't even need that many sessions what 20 30 sessions before you go i kind of understand how i'm supposed to feel and where my heart rate's supposed to be at like just by a sense of breathing okay so you got one left what's left Yeah, one left. Why haven't we done? We haven't good, you haven't touched abs, you haven't touched glutes directly,

you haven't touched shoulders directly. What else is missing? I think that's it. Lower back, I guess. In a bodybuilding sphere, you'd want your lower back developed enough where it's got like a little texture, but if it gets too big, it'll take away from your waist. Because the whole point is this illusion of wider shoulders and a smaller waist. So now that they're already developed,

I probably wouldn't I don't hit my abs because they get worked you know kind of secondarily from I even doing dumbbell curls I'm keeping myself stable like once they're there and you're actually still working out they're not going anywhere because you're and then every time you look at yourself in the mirror you're going to flex them like they get worked enough to be maintained so that's a like that's where there's not a lot of ab workouts because I did a lot before and now they're just not going to go anywhere like same with shoulders so I'd have to I don't have to I I'm a little reluctant, but I can't think of anything else I'd want to do.

I'd pick the adductor machine, so that's where you're squeezing your legs together. Okay. Why? It makes your legs a little thicker in the middle, because it's this whole kind of like system of a, like, kind of, it ties in kind of below your knee, more hamstring. But it's this sort of just piece right in the center where if your adductors were completely undeveloped and you just sit up straight with your knee straight, you'd have a really big. gap between your legs and you think you wouldn't be able to fully get that with the extension uh well the extension is quad because that's a like a knee flexion and this is uh like leg well you know i don't even know what you call it that yeah yeah the joke is the uh well it's i know there's like

two versions of a joke because they'll call that one the ball crusher because that's right you're squeezing legs together but the older like The joke that people would say before was that was either the good girl or the bad girl machine. Ah, one's forcing it apart, one's forcing it together. Yeah, yeah, okay. So I don't really, I don't want to perpetuate that name. But that was, that's kind of a reference to those. Okay, very good.

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description below or heading to Shopify.com slash modern wisdom, all lowercase. That's Shopify.com slash modern wisdom to start selling today. The single greatest skill you can develop is the ability to stay in a good mood in the absence of things to be in a good mood about. I think that tweet has been my theme for 2025. it's been it's it's funny because that was the most shared tweet i've ever had um and it was it was like it's it was almost um at the opposite of iran it was fitting right it was completely fitting for the year and it's been because like this year i've had a just i would say a series

of unfortunate events um that has occurred and it's really tested my tools right tools in the tool belt for reframing reality so that I can make my experience less, you know, miserable. And so I thought about that. It's like if I were to boil everything down of all the skills that you can learn, if everything that we do eventually becomes irrelevant, then the single greatest skill that you can develop is being in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about. And so one of the other frames on this is most people don't question someone who's in a bad mood.

I'm just in a bad mood. So it's like, well, if you can be in a bad mood for no reason, it's like, you might as well be in a good mood for no reason, because that one at least serves you. And so I've been trying to exercise, like, because there's, on one degree, there's like, let's count things to be grateful for. On the other side, it's like, why do I have to have things to be grateful for in order to be in a good mood? Like, why is trying to find things a requirement of being in that mood?

Like, can I not find things and still choose to be in a good mood? Because I've certainly not had things to be in a bad mood about and been in a bad mood. And so I've been trying to flex that, which is like, sure, we can find things to be grateful for. And when those things pop up, yes, and of course it's a practice, you get better at it. But like, what if I can just be in a good mood? And so I've just tried to, try to break that relationship between the two because then it makes it contingent on something that I can find. How successful have you been at that? Mediocre. Well, look, I think it's a, it's a lovely idea in isolation. In theory, but I'm not convinced

about how effective it is in practice for the reason that humans have a negativity bias. You know, it's our psychological entropy and your ability to detect things that are a risk to you significantly better than your ability to detect things that are just pleasant. Like this morning, I texted you and I was like, hey man, like I really love the feeling I have of anticipation on a morning before we do a podcast. That's a normal, boring, mundane source of pleasure to me. If I'm not really, really training myself to notice that, I just, it just fucking falls away with the fact that, huh, I asked for almond milk and I bet this would have been better with like whole milk. If that's the thing that ruins the day. And the thing is, is you do notice it though, right? You do notice that. So I've had one of my themes this year has been focusing on moments and on both the positive and the negative. And so like when we think back,

If I think back on the last year, right? I don't remember probably 95% of the year. Like I, you know, I did the same things. And so it's like it just didn't get recorded. Like nothing notable happened. And so really like when we think about a year, we really just recall a handful of moments. And that's it. And those moments in time are usually very short. And so I've been trying to think about the bad, you know, seasons as, well, maybe it wasn't a bad season. Maybe I had five bad days or really five bad moments. that I then thought about for the entire season and turned what would have otherwise been five minutes times five into an entirely bad year. And so it's like, okay, well, if we can do that in the negative, can we do the positive, which is obviously the thing to exercise. But to the point that you said earlier about our ability to detect threat and risk at such a, such better accuracy than our ability to detect good things, it's so interesting because if you use that side of your brain, not to derail us, but like, I think that has been one of the things that's helped me a tremendous amount in business. Because when I think about a business and I want to grow it,

for example, I would think, okay, what are all the things that can destroy this business? And this is Charlie Munger. This isn't me. But basically, he says invert, always invert. And Einstein said that too. And it's because, like, you get to use this way stronger horsepower engine of, like, how do I grow my business? That's, you could obviously think that way. but the alternative would be like how would I absolutely destroy this business in the fewest possible moves and then when you list out those moves you're like cool now let's do the opposite of that and that has been honestly a lot of the some of the sources of my greatest kind of creative moments have come from these apparently obvious things that would kill us well what if we did the even more obvious thing

and did the the opposite of what would destroy us and it's worked it's worked better than I deserve So this is the problem You can be rewarded professionally For focusing on things that you do not want to focus on personally And Ryan Long taught me this He was talking about how He's a comedian, Canadian comedian, really funny guy He spends all of this time

You know, dialing in these bits And obsessing over how it could be better And then he says to himself Yeah, but I don't need to do that in your relationships No, can you let that go when it comes to the way that you show up for your partner or your friends or your body image or whatever? You don't get to compartmentalize stuff like that. And it is a very unfortunate irony of the world that the skill set you often need to become successful in business is the one you need to get rid of to be happy in your life. Yes. So I was thinking about what we were saying earlier with regards to risk and our ability to detect it. So the other part of that that's been really interesting is we also, not only do we detect more threats, we also over-emphasize how catastrophic they could be. And the converse of that is we rarely identify the upside. And when we do, we typically underestimate the upside. And I think this is something that a lot of people don't

talk about as much. Obviously, I always have a business, you know, hat on, literally. And, but I think about this because I think this is where, like, you said at the very beginning that people complain because they cannot accurately view reality. And so, if we tie that to this concept, then it means that people will disproportionately blame the universe and then perceive significantly greater risk for them asking a girl out, starting a business, taking a loan uh you know asking a stranger to buy something making a podcast and for fear of what other people in the internet will say or people who know them right so we we catastrophize this side but the flip side is and you hear this a lot when people you know do make it and whatnot they're

like i never dreamed it would be this big now some people are obsessive and like absolutely have thought through everything i fall more on that side uh but but uh on on the other hand though a lot of people do get there and they're like i never thought it was going to be this big and It's because we typically just under-emphasize the upside, which is where, from the business perspective, it's like that's where the off is. That's where the outperformance exists where most people think, hey, this bet, it could go to zero. And you're like, I don't think it's going to go to zero. But even if it did go to zero, I have a 10x here. And so if I have a 50% shot at a 10x and the other 50 is zero, I should take that shot every single time, knowing that I'm going to

be wrong half the time. It still makes sense to take. And so I think people are not good at making those risk adjust to return bets, obviously financially, but even in the very micro aspect of our lives. And so we talked earlier about, you know, cosmic irrelevance and the frame of the veteran. But there's a third frame that I think about a lot, which is I call it play it out. And so it's like, no, let's sit in there. Because again, fear exists in the vague, not in the specific. And in the resistance. Yes. And so like when we have these specificities of like, okay, I'm going to start a pocket. I can't start a pocket. Like, okay, it's this big vein. thing but not like let's play it out like let's see what actually would happen so I'm

gonna upload something and then people don't listen to it okay well they didn't listen to it okay well then that's not a problem okay let's say people let's see tons of people listen to it which I don't know how that magically happens but let's say tons of people listen to it and they all hate it okay immediately have this anxiety that we're gonna but but let's play it out like what happens next it's like okay is it gonna change what I eat is it gonna change what I eat is it gonna change where I sleep. Okay, let's say all of a sudden I lose all the money that I have. It's like, okay, well, I probably have a bunch of people that if I really needed to sleep on their

couch or in a spare bedroom, I could do that. Okay, so I'm not really going to be a homeless. And if I really didn't have enough money for food, I can go to a homeless shelter and get food, right? So it's like, wait, so my worst case scenario is like, I have shelter and I have food and I'm still breathing air. So that's the downside. And so there's this catastrophizing that we, because we, our brains are meant to keep us alive. We literally think if we fail, we die. Like, everyone will ostracize us from the group, and we will be alone and die. And so just actually playing it out, not one step, but like two more steps after that,

you're like, okay, so my actual downside risk is nothing, but my upside is everything I've wanted. And even if I'm at 50% off on that, it's still worth the shot. It's very healthy to have an inner critic, but it's also, it's the, there's a, the golden rule and then there's the there's the platinum rule right there's the treat others as you want to be treated and then there's the treat yourself as you treat others most people are very kind like you're nicer to me than you are to yourself like if you said the shit you say to yourself to me we wouldn't be friends um and i think that thing of like the the inner critic has to be, it's, as long as it's process driven, I think it's, it's very, very healthy.

Yeah. It's like imposter syndrome. It's, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, feel like an imposter for a while. As long as it gives you, as long as you can get that to a granular level where it gives you something to work on. Like, the inner critic can't just be, it can't just be like, that's bad. It's got to be, oh, that didn't work, so we need to change it. Or that one's, that one's not going to work, so we're going to write something new.

it's got to be something that's like you're working towards something, you're aiming up and I think criticism is very important I mean Walt Disney used to do this thing where he had like the you had three rooms you know this thing of like one for creativity

one for sort of management like how would you do the idea and then it was only in the third room that you were allowed to be critical it's kind of fun idea of like going to sort of compound ideas compartmentalize. Well, I do think that thing of like, never refuse the muse, if you're working

in anything creative, just write it down. Something comes to you. You just, yeah, that's the Naval one, right? Inspiration is perishable. Act on it immediately. Yeah. Yeah, there's a, Tim Ferriss says, the world rewards the specific ask and punishes the vague wish. And I think that sort of in a critic voice can expand out into, I don't feel good about the thing I did. you're okay well that's probably the first place that everybody gets so i'm not not really too sure about why but there's some sense of discontent but something that just happened or something that i'm about to do probably very normal you don't know where it's coming from and you don't know what it's about and you don't know what to do to fix it okay so how about we get away from the vague

critic and we move toward the specific coach with regards to this. Okay, so what precisely is it that you're concerned about? Well, I don't feel fully prepared for the presentation I've got to give tomorrow. Okay, is that fair? Do you know that it's true? Do you think that you haven't prepared enough? Well, I actually have prepared quite a lot, to be honest. I think this is probably just my fear trying to be sneaky and sort of turn itself into a way that I'm going to believe it. All right. Well, what are you going to do about it? Well, I'll just check my notes a few more times. And actually, huh, it seems like I do know this pretty well. But the inner critic, it's not often wrong.

It's just you can say it in a nice way. You know, it's sometimes it's right. Sometimes you fuck up. Sometimes it's not, it's not, it wasn't good enough. And that's okay. It's like, it's the, it's that idea of like going, it's not repetition, it's iteration. Yeah. It's like lots of different, you know, doing the same thing again and again doesn't,

and that you better, like, tweaking it. And knowing what to tweak is that you have to listen to an inner critic. I think the, is it Holmosey? It's, Hulmosey's so good for quotes. But it's, I think it was self-confidence without evidence is delusion, some version of that. Confidence without competence is delusion. Yeah, it's so true. And you do meet people along the way that have that.

incredible confidence or they they they sort of exude that and then they they don't have the confidence to back it up and you go well no no you need to you need to be able to so finding that i think it's very i think without that inner critic i think we would all be kind of delusional wandering around going yeah you know yeah george says uh does someone with half your talent but five times yourself believe making 10 times the money yes and that's that's true for for every british person there's an American. Exactly. Well, I mean, look, I think for the perennial overthinkers, reframing this very well-trodden landscape of inner criticism, a lot of the way that you can look at that is I'm fragile. You know, my self-belief exists on a knife edge. It feels like I'm tightrope walking

confidence, perhaps. I think a better way to look at it is you're not fragile, you're just finely tuned. and in the same way as a Ferrari can go really, really fast, especially around a track. But if you don't treat it very well, it's probably going to break down quite a lot, actually. And if you treat it really well, it's still going to have a couple of hiccups and days

where it doesn't fully operate rightly. But, yeah, you're not fragile. You're finely tuned. It's a nice reframe. It's so easy to be kind to other people and sometimes so difficult to be kind to yourself. I think you wouldn't let someone else speak to a friend like that.

You just wouldn't stand for it. And yet you're in a critic. You're just like, yeah, yeah, say terrible things to me. Just accept it as it comes. Yeah. That idea on, you had position and disposition. This has happened a couple of times. I misremember things that guests tell me.

And then I write about the thing that I misremembered. And what you realize is that you've actually built on something that they didn't mean. And I think I told you about this before. I'm going to tell you about it again. So, this is after our first episode, 18 months ago, something like that. My chat with Jimmy Carr a few weeks ago inspired an idea. I've been reflecting on how your trajectory is way more important than your position. If you're number two in the world, but last year you were number one,

that is way worse than sitting at number 150, but being on a huge upward slope from 300, 12 months ago. There's a few reasons for this. Recency bias. If your value is increasing right now, that means you have to be popular at the moment. By looking at recent trajectory, you are selecting for only the few people who are trendy right now, which is really all that we can remember. We can also romanticize where someone will be in future if they're currently hot stuff, how high might they climb, who knows, maybe to the top, maybe even beyond the top.

Humans struggle to realize that everything is temporary, including growth and decline. Instead, it's easier to label people as heroes and losers based on what we know of them right now, so we don't have to predict a messy future. There's an old saying, saying that there's three types of people on the ladder. One at the bottom, one at the middle, and one at the top. Which one is the best to be, the one that's still climbing? Yeah. No, I think it's fantastic.

It's very well put. Yeah, I think that, especially in show business, trajectory really seems to be such an important metric. And it's like you could be half the size of some other comic, but they've been around 20 years and they always sell out the arena. So who cares? It's like, it's novelty, dopamine. This is new. buyers. Yeah, I think there's a thing this year where OASIS are playing. And it's a big deal. People are very excited about it. And I think Coldplay are doing, I think it's 10 or 11 nights at Wembley State.

And everyone's like Chris Martin, bored of you, been around for ages. Yeah, well, of course you are. Yeah, a big band. But it's like, but it's not like an event culturally in the same way that Oasis is going together is. There's a narrative to that and a trajectory of kind of where they are that's, and Coldplay have just been steadily, listen, and if Taylor Swift does 15 nights next year, it'll be a, yeah, yeah, of course, of course. Accepted. Yeah. So that thing of, like, other people getting excited about it. And I think, I don't know what it feels like to be, you know, in Coldplay at the moment and maybe people aren't making as much fuss. I hope they're celebrating.

I hope they're taking time to go, this is fantastic. Has no longer having the Olympia impacted your drive and passion in other areas of your life? You know, you've got the dad husband thing, business, desire to work on yourself from a personal standpoint. How have you found drive and motivation separate and also wrapped up in what you were doing previously? I wouldn't say it directly decreased because there's no Olympia, but I think almost as like a byproduct of what the Olympia was for me, of like a schedule of a year, of like the first half of the year is X. You have some time off, you can recover, give yourself a break,

and then you start to ramp up, you travel, focus on business, and then near the end, you go inward, you figure out what's driving you, what's pulling you back right now, self-reflect, spend time away from bullshit focus on yourself be selfish work to intense schedule and like it was just like organized routine and then all of a sudden it was all gone and that on top of the singular goal being like where do i put my energy now i think definitely left me in a place of feeling a little bit lost of not figuring out like where do do i still have the passion for anything where do i find that energy to put into something what do i put it into does it even exist will it exist again

and then it kind of led to me then I had an injury I stopped working out for a while and I just started to wake up in the morning exhausted and not knowing what to do going in and helping with this business going on this trip for that travel and meeting here with a distribution center of all these little things for all these other things

that weren't really like driving me I didn't have like an important big role in them I was just like kind of coasting through and I started to wake up and feel pretty lost in general of like where do I per where am I progress to essentially and that was when I was kind of like what I'm honestly I'm still working through it I don't have this answer but like thing I'm working for is just like empathizing with myself that

I don't need to be constantly progressing towards something that I don't need to be getting better and have this big goal and doing X and I can just sit and rest for a while and like truly just like do nothing and be good enough as that is and let something come and figure it as it goes and that's that was tough for me. It is tough for me and speaking in proper verbiage of figuring that out. And the funniest little thing of what has made me feel better recently was working out again on a schedule and eating five meals a day and weighing out my food and having that little bit of structure of like and not having to as well. It's like all this stuff's going on my life. I don't know. I'm kind of lost. What can I do? Well, I can go work out again. And I don't have to.

So now I'm choosing to. Well, why are you still work out so hard? Why are you training so hard? It's like, well, I just because I love it. It's why I used to do it 12 years ago. Exactly. And that's all of a sudden I'm getting more, more excited to go back in the gym where even in prep last year I started to be, oh, I have to go work out. And then all of a sudden I started to feel better day to day. And it's these little changes.

And I realize this is truly how I fell in love with the gym and why I'm such a big advocate of weightlifting. Like, I honestly kind of hope I don't inspire people to get into bodybuilding because it's tough, it's fucked up. It's not good for your health. But I do want to inspire people to go lift weights, get in the gym and want to get jacked. because it's such like, oh, I'm lost, I don't know what to do. Just go work out.

Apply some discipline, work hard, find something you love that's, like, difficult, that shows you progress, builds confidence, and just go do it. And then from there, then you can clear your mind a little bit, have self-confidence start looking around a little bit more clear, start looking inward and figuring out what is next for you and finding that next goal and working towards it. So for me, that's why I like, I just fucking love the gym so much. And I'm so grateful that I'm back to a point of, like, loving the gym.

This is the cash value. Oh, this was the price that you pay in retirement, I think. Because what you're talking about, it's going to be difficult and things will be hard and you won't have the drive or the goal that you used to in the past. All of those things are kind of fluffy concepts, but they come into land. They actually sort of meet reality with, I woke up on the morning and didn't know what to do. I felt tired a lot. I didn't want to train. I was short and snappy with my business partners.

I found myself getting distracted with lots of little tasks because it made me feel important and like people needed me. I packed my calendar out and did, because a lot of the time in advance of something happening, we probably have a good idea about what it's going to be like in the macro, but what we don't know is how it's actually going to appear manifest in life. And it's navigating those things. So, for instance, I've been sick for the last 18 months or so, and that's been hard. I knew, based on what the trajectory was going to be, what was going to be tough, that I was going to have a lot of self-doubt, that I was going to lose confidence and self-esteem, that I would feel like I was moving backward, all of these things. But the way that that actually appears, like the individual building block thoughts that you have, that mean random little voice, or that one night where you ruminate about that one thing, or you're more sensitive to criticism.

and that one comment from that person. It can't really focus on your meditation as much. Like, none of those are, I am going to lose confidence. They're the individual incidents that contribute to my confidence has gone down. Even if you knew it was going to happen in advance. And even if in retrospect, you can say, oh, wow, both of these things converged, each of the little steps that occurred to make that happen kind of come out of nowhere a little bit because you don't know the effect of each little thing.

Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. So it's the pack calendar, there are lots of travel, the, I, I'm tired. I don't really want to go train. I don't really, I'm not weighing my food. I'm maybe eating weird diets compared with what I used to. And this lack of structure feels alien and uncomfortable to me, but it also feels like relapse or rest or change or variation, but that's also uncomfortable because it's unfamiliar. And yeah, each of these little building blocks

is contributing to that. Like, I don't feel like me. I don't feel like me. I don't. feel like me yeah and and not in the way that i wanted to either yeah and it creeps in like that you have absolutely no idea that it's coming until one day you're like i don't feel good so it's definitely interesting and i feel you need to you need to i've needed to treat myself like a science experiment of like taking and removing pieces and see what's important it's like okay bodybuilding was creating a bit of pressure and stress in my life is it everything related to that or was it the hole you know so like as i pulled out like well i'm not competing anymore i don't need to eat on a schedule i don't need to train at the same time i don't need to leave my phone

outside the gym and be locked in and focused as much i don't need to wake up with my alarm i can kind of sleep i can do all these little things that i can let go of because now i don't have to because the goal is different but then i started to not feel good and it was like okay it wasn't those things that weren't making me feel bad those were actually making me feel good it was the outcome, like I said before. So now taking those things that from bodybuilding put in the back in my life, I'm really, I was like, oh, wait, the structure and the discipline makes me feel better. It fills me with more confidence and ability to go do other things rather than taking away.

Regardless of whether it's in service of becoming Mr. Olympia. Yeah, and I mean, I know those things, but like you said, it was all of a sudden, it was like, oh, well, I'll just cut one meal out because, like, I'm busy now. Oh, well, my shoulder's injured, so I'm going to do my rehab, but like, I don't really want to, you know. I'm going to take today off. I'm not competing this year. Like, who even cares? Who cares?

Yeah. I'm busy. to reply to emails in between sets i'm gonna sleep in because i went to bed late last night like all these little things next thing you know you're like i feel like shit i don't want to do anything and you're way hard to pull yourself out of that and if you cut it earlier so that's life though you know there's no direct descent to the top it's ups and downs and building a new self as you go as a dad you got one job love her if you want to raise successful kids especially boys you have One job. Love his mom. That's so sick. It's crazy, but it's great in its way. It's beautiful

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

professor he could not now i realize he was a nerd at the time he thought he was cool nerd yeah now that i'm a nerd i recognize that but and my dad was a very proud guy i mean he never would have bent the knee to any other man but he was on his knees on Sunday and that had a big impact on a little dude there's something bigger than my dad and I saw it and it's like it's in there right that's really important in every part of life

if you want to teach virtue practice virtue be the person you want your kids to actually turn into and they will become that generally speaking will become that person yeah I I was thinking about you know this generation both millennials and Gen Z are the progeny of parents who didn't have the tools

to sort of relate or navigate in the same way as an infinite number of evidence-based relationship coaches and the podcast world and the self-help and all the rest of it. I think I wonder how they should go about thinking, well, I didn't necessarily have the best example in front of me because there was challenges here and we did have changing dynamics and motivations around the acceptance of divorce. And maybe I did grow up in, a non-intact home and such. But that sets expectations for what a good relationship is supposed to be now. And there's this interesting, not a burden, I suppose, but a responsibility, opportunity

to be a circuit breaker. Right. And to think, you know, Goggins talks about this. So, you know, he explains about how his dad hit him a lot as a kid. And he had a brother. And sometimes Goggins sort of took the beatings. in place of his brother. But he also found out that his granddad would make his father stand in front of an open stove. And if he moved, he would hit him with a belt as a kid. So you have

this lineage, this like ancestral, literal, literal ancestral trauma, but physically being passed down, plus also probably epigenetically being fucking passed down as well. And I asked, David, I didn't even know that this was the case. It was really kind of beautiful of him to say on the, on the podcast i said uh if you had a child how would you hope to raise them right i do have a child i got a 22 year old daughter he'd never mentioned it previously and he brought it up on on the episode and he said he basically sees himself as kind of like a dam sort of a breakwater this circuit breaker thing in between the series of mistreatments of people right like no more and i kind of think i often think about that example when it comes to stuff like um your parents

didn't necessarily have the tools you do. You didn't have an example, but you have the opportunity. And you have the metacognitive ability to manage your emotions so they don't manage you. This is the most important thing to keep in mind. We're talking about the psychology being biology, but we also have will. We also have a prefrontal cortex for a reason. That's the most important part of the neurobiology of all is the C-suite of your brain, where you're actually making decisions notwithstanding your proclivities.

I mean, you've got these urges. We all have these urges. You know, you look at a woman who's not your wife and you go, oh, man, she's really, really attractive and all that. And then your prefrontal cortex, which is the behavioral activation system, the behavioral inhibition system. That's in the prefrontal cortex, Biss and Bass, behavioral inhibition and behavioral activation, right? And behavioral inhibition is more important because, you know, I want to hit my son and my prefrontal cortex says, uh-uh, no, because my father hit me and I'm not my trauma. That's a perfect example of metacognition. That's a perfect example of being the master of yourself.

And we actually can do that, but you've got to have knowledge. You have to be strong, but you also actually have to have knowledge. And that's why all this stuff matters. That's how I teach happiness, is happiness is really a process of understanding the science, practicing habits that go along with the science, and then teaching it to other people so you ingrain it in yourself. And that's anything that you want to do, anything you want to get better. If you want to become a better golfer, learn about golf and golf and teach golf. You know, doctors, when they're becoming surgeons, they always say, watch one, do one, teach one.

That's how you become a surgeon. Anything in life actually follows that basic pattern, but you must have the knowledge such that the habits that you practice are not the habits that are just kind of lurking in your limbic system and being epigenetically expressed from the misbehavior of people six generations ago or some crazy thing like that. We should not be prisoners of that. Yeah, there's this gorgeous idea from Robert writes why Buddhism is true. That's a nice book. Fuck, dude, blending evolutionary psychology with Buddhism. Because the book that got me into EP was The Moral Animal. Yeah.

From 1991 or 1992 or something. And it's still, some of the stuff, a little replication crisis, but most of it's shit hot. And I loved it. The replication crisis is a big problem in my field. Yeah, a lot of people made their careers. If it's too good to be true, and grandma would have said, I mean, I can find you a study that shows that conjugal infidelity will bring happiness. I mean, I'm sure I could.

Some motivated reasoning by a researcher there. Darling, darling, honestly, I only did it. Not only did I not love her, but I did this for us. I know, exactly. And besides study shows. So, and anyway, so, but the whole problem, if a study, and this is like, you're talking about evolutionary psychology all the time. time and biology all the time. And this is my stock and trade as behavioral scientist. For everybody

watching, if your grandma would hear this result and say, that's wrong, she's probably right. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. I've been wearing Whoop for over five years now, way before they were a partner on the show. I've actually tracked over 1,600 days of my life with it, according to the app, which is insane. And it's the only wearable I've ever stuck with because it tracks everything that matters, sleep, workouts, recovery, breathing, heart rate, even your steps. And the new 5.0 is the best version. You get all the benefits that make WOOP indispensable, 7% smaller, but now it's also got a 14-day battery life and has health span to track your habits, how they affect your pace of aging. It's got hormonal insights for ladies.

I'm a huge, huge fan of Woop. That's why it's the only wearable that I've ever stuck with. And best of all, you can join for free. Pay nothing for the brand, new whoop 5.0 strap plus you get your first month for free and there's a 30 day money back guarantee so you can buy it for free try it for free if you do not like it after 29 days they just give you your money back right now you can get the brand new whoop 5.0 and that 30 day trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join dot whoop.com slash modern wisdom that's join dot whoop dot com slash modern wisdom why do you think so many girls are drawn to therapy culture Oh, I think it's a lot of things

I do think this is kind of a cliche thing to say now but I do think therapy culture has replaced religion and that's not a new thing to say people have been saying that for a long time so Christopher Lash was writing about that in the 70s Frank Farudy writes about it really well now but in recent years since social media I would say therapy culture has just escalated

to the point where I think young women don't see it as a world view they just see that as kind of life so they interpret everything through this therapeutic lens so their lives their relationships their emotions and I think it has elevated

to the level of religion so you think of all the kind of characteristics of religion we just mimic them with therapy culture so instead of praying we just repeat our like positive affirmations instead of like seeking salvation you'll go on like a healing journey instead of like you know resisting temptation from the devil

you'll reframe your intrusive thoughts and so I think for young women in particular who are becoming less religious this kind of therapeutic worldview has completely replaced that void what does a therapeutic worldview consist of what does that mean Like seeing problems in your life, kind of pathologising problems and experiences as something medical, rather than I'm just experiencing this emotion or kind of age-old anxiety now it's become a medical issue. So things like talking in the language of attachment styles and trauma and losing the language of just ordinary hurt and disappointment and things like that. and for some reason this is giving some kind of solace or comforts or order being brought out of chaos I think it gives the comfort religion gives and the consolation of like you see young women on

TikTok saying things like they won't pray to God but they'll give a request to the universe and like have faith in that yeah and so I think it gives all the comfort of religion but It takes away the inconvenient parts, so any actual demands on you or kind of restrictions on your freedom or anything like that. Being held to standards of behaviour, etc. So it has what women are craving in modern life, I think, which is belonging and security in something and faith in something, but it's a much easier version of religion. Slippery religion. Yeah, yeah. How many of these girls are in therapy, do you think?

a lot. There was a study recently showing 32% of all 12 to 17 year olds in America have either had therapy been on medication or had some kind of treatment in 2023. Over a single year, one third. Yeah, which is insane. And I was talking to someone about that statistic and they were like, oh, that's great. That's amazing. And I was thinking, that's a bleak statistic. So yeah, I think there's the girls that are in therapy which is a lot but then there's also the girls who just like living in therapy culture so it's just they scroll through Instagram and it's all about attachment styles trauma they go on TikTok and it's like a trauma-informed therapist telling them

like red flags they should watch out for and stuff it's just like there's the actual therapy which I'm sure there is there's useful therapists but there's also just this culture which is just the world that they're swimming in Yeah, so you're never able to switch it off. I think Alanda Botton was sat in that same seat as you. Big proponent of psychotherapy, I think trained as a psychotherapist himself too, onto School of Life, which isn't just a YouTube channel, but a psychotherapy facility here in London.

Yeah. And even he, like the biggest proponent of it, I think would very much say that there is a time for therapeutising. Yes. And then there is a time to not in the same way as going to the gym. there is a time to train and then there is a time to recover. And I wonder whether one of the criticisms that's common that I put to him was lots of people online, more old school people, more sort of typical stiff-up-a-lip type people would say you're not fixing your past's problems, you're dwelling on them. And by dwelling on them, you are ruminating too much.

There is some evidence, I mean, a good bit of evidence. Ruminations not particularly fantastic for you. And finding this line between, yeah, mate, we don't want to deny that bad things happened and never alchemize them or transcend and include them into our life. Yeah. And then on the other side, we don't want to wallow in them. But I suppose if you have the online environment that you exist within, permanently using this language, you're permanently having these structures and these thinking patterns reinforced. And then it's how you begin to talk to yourself about what happens offline. Yes.

And then you also have, you know, facilitation or maybe. medication or conversations with your friends, further embracing all of that, you're just entrenched in this all the time. Yeah, well, I used to think, and I think a lot of people think therapy culture is particularly bad for men, because it kind of has a female approach to problems, and it's about, you know, ruminating, and often it's like, if you don't have a female response, there's something wrong with you. It's kind of a red flag if you don't go to therapy. But I actually changed my mind on that, and I actually think therapy culture is worse for women because women

ruminate more. They co-rimanning more. So it's playing into the weakness that they already have or the disposition. Yeah, if you think of an anxious young 14-year-old girl, the worst thing you can tell her is to go further into her own head to get relief and to think more about her problems and to kind of search

her life for symptoms. If you told me that at 14, it's the worst thing I could have heard. So I actually think maybe some men do need to do that a little bit more, but the average young girl needs to kind of cut out i wonder whether therapy language and therapy culture for girls is what gym language gym culture yeah psalms testosterone steroids at 17 uh is for guys yeah i think

it's a form of control so it's like it's our version of control you know if we feel uncomfortable or feel an uneasy emotion we're just like i'm going to categorize that and diagnose knows it, you know, that's my attachment disorder or that's my depression. And I think men do that, they have their own kind of self-optimization trends and the gym stuff where that can become like a form of control to deal with kind of uneasy emotions. And I think, yeah, this is the woman's version of that. It's like we can't sit with it or just accept like a painful situation. So I often think about, so if you look at these kinds of.

of attachment style forums or girls talking about their attachment styles. Very often they'll describe just a bad relationship and then they'll say, oh, it's my attachment disorder. So they'll be like, he cheated on me and I can't get over it because of my anxious attachment. And it's like, it's so sad because they're actually losing the language to talk about the actual problem that they're facing because they're trying to get control. Because it's a lot easier to be like, oh, you know, I'm anxious or he's avoidant. then we have a terrible relationship

and I've just wasted four years with someone. You get the control through the therapy culture. So that's where I see it becoming a danger to girls and young women. What's the difference between a nice guy and a good man? Yeah.

Right about that and there, but a nice guy has a nice guy gets along. Yeah, do that, yeah, I'll do that. They don't necessarily have discernment or judgment, not sure what they stand for, or stand against. It's like, yes, yes, yes, sure.

Yeah, hey, a good man has ideals that they stand for and they'll stand against. And when they're tested, a good man is not a nice guy. That's in the chapter of manning up. You know, I was that time when I was doing the rom-coms, and that's all I could do. I was feeling like my work was just me as a nice guy. And in life, I was not just a nice guy.

Like I said, Camilla was pregnant. I got a child coming. I was, I was feral with masculinity and, and my work, maybe I was feeling a bit neutered. And I was like, well, I'm, I'm, I'm a good guy and a good man in life, but I'm just a nice guy at work. Can I be a roles that can be a good man? And that was dramas. Because the dramas you can stand for or stand to get something, your ceiling for pleasure and your basement for pain are up to you. How do you feel about it?

And no direction can go, that's too much. That's not enough. You got too angry there. Oh, you meant that too much. That didn't come in a drama. Those come in a rom-com, right? Because the emotions and how you feel are compressed to be an aboyant level and a threshold that's up balancing from cloud to cloud only.

Dramas are as much pain, as much evil as you want to go, as deep, dark, you want to go. Get there. Let's see how far you go. How high you want to fly, how close to that sun you get, before you get burned go see how far you go that's what you get in a drama much more like real life um and so you know good guys being a good good being a good man's a lot harder for good reason not going to be most popular not going to be always most affable um it also

doesn't mean you got to be a dick or an asshole just means sometimes you're going to go I believe in this is for me, and that is not for me. And because that is not for me, if you do trespass into my space upon me and my family, there will be, I will do my best to cause consequences. And I'm going to let you know that. I hope that's apparent because I'm not going to intrude on you, but if you trespass that, I mean, I'm going to stand up for it. And that, we can talk our way out of that?

Great. No, it doesn't always work that way, you know. My good man's not looking for trouble, you know. But if it comes, and if he or something he cares about and loves for is susceptible being trespassed on by trouble, a good man does what he can to do to stop that. So, Aaron, Bugsie, tells this story he famously had his health house, a robbery attempt occurred on his very nice house in Manchester. Manchester's got some spicy individuals in it from the gang culture. And there is a CCTV video of him. Now, by this

point, this is I think 21 or 22. So he's been in the first movie. He has had multiple huge albums, world tour, rapping, done all the things. Most played fire in the booth, freestyle in history, all of this stuff, right? So you might think, even though he came from below the streets, sort of he came from the sewers as a kid, he has a public image to keep up, maybe he's got soft, the sort of velvet prison, silk pyjamas problem. And he told me this story. And his girlfriend rings, she's in the house, these men are trying to break in, there's a barricade, so he's driving back with his sister in the car, he's driving back. And there's a guy by the side of the road, and he can see he's got a brick in his hand.

So Aaron stops the car, opens the door, and immediately says, man, is that you? Blue shirt? That's such a nice blue shirt. And he's moving toward him. He puts his hands in the air like this. He's moving toward him. He's moving towards him. Hits this guy, brick drops, finishes him off, gets back in the car. And this bit's captured on CCTV, and somebody overlaid it with the call to the police.

So there's a 999 call going on. Yeah. From, I think, his mum, who's in the house. These men are trying to break in, and you see him pull up in this Mercedes, this guy, being in movies, done all the rest of it, and it's a van of dudes. It's a van of men. Trying to break in. Yes.

Yeah, you're trying to rob his house and see, it's rich. He's got something that we want. He's already dealt with one of them. He might have dealt with another one of them as well. And he falls in in this fancy Mercedes. You see this guy who has got kind of world at his feet. opens the door to his Mercedes, pulls his shirt off, and just sprints at this van. And it was fucking electric.

He told me this story is so electric. And that's on CCTV? That's great. Best video he ever made right there, huh? So hardcore. It's so hardcore. But yeah, that's, you know, good man, not a nice guy. From the inside, it's very hard to know who you are.

And one of the interesting things is how people go a bit mad when they've spent too long alone. If you spend a long time alone, you sort of, you don't know, certain thoughts go a little too far. And one of the great things about company, you know, why do we need other people? Just to be able to kind of hold us slightly in check, in small ways and large, they kind of go, no, that thought is getting a little too extreme, whatever. They define us. But also, the other thing that people help us to do, other people, is give us a compact sense of who we are. are that eludes us. So I see you and I go, there's Chris. Now, when you're alone, you don't think you're Chris. You just think I'm consciousness in the universe. I'm just, you know, I'm just a giant

net that's capturing thoughts and impressions. You don't know that you have a name, a beginning, a middle or an end, et cetera. And when we're in company, people go, oh, you're that guy who does this or, you know, so other people's caricatured vision of us is actually quite helpful to us because you think, oh, you know, I'm, I'm that relatively simple soul that other people... Unifies us, gives us a sense of story. Yeah. And also because, you know, if I look at you, you look unified. You've got two eyes, a nose, a mouth, et cetera.

You know, you're relatively compact, et cetera. But inside you, do we don't feel any of that? It's a vast, shapeless landscape. Is this, is self-esteem related to imposter syndrome? I think imposter syndrome was already something that I was seeing a lot of, and now I'm seeing more about increasingly this sense that the world expects something of me that maybe I've even actually done previously, but I'm scared about whether or not I'm going to be able to deliver it.

Look, I think it's, I know imposter syndrome causes people problems, but I'm reassured if somebody suffers from imposter syndrome. It's a sign of honesty. It's a sign of self-awareness. Of course it has its extreme versions, which, you know, causes people. people a lot of pain. But if someone is aware that they might be a charlatan or might be pulling off a confidence trick, that's honesty. That's great. That's a starting point. It's just like somebody who knows they might be evil is a good person. You know, evil people don't

worry. They might be evil. So it's, you know, you're likely to be authentic and genuine if sometimes you think, am I a fake? That's a good sign. It's a good starting point in the same way as identifying that you're a bad driver is a good starting point for not driving fast. But it doesn't necessarily make you better on the roads. So where do we go to? Where is becoming a better drive? Okay, my imposter syndrome. Thank you, Alain. You've told me that I'm not so up my own ass that I can't see my own flaws. Hooray. What about starting to work through that? What about starting to get a better sense of our own capacities and capabilities? Look, a lot of it is bouncing against the world and testing yourself against reality.

It's very hard to know your talents until you've had to go at something. And I think we all have this sense sometimes that something's come more easily to us than to others. You know, I don't know how great tennis players start, but they must have a sense, oh, I was able to hit that ball and that worked quite well, or a great writer is able to think, I was able to pull off quite a nice

little sentence there, and that's the beginning of a kind of growing confidence. And, you know, you need a, you need that kind of start. And, you know, I think a good life doesn't require you to do everything. It requires you to do the things that you feel you're capable of

and that you're especially good at. It's no humiliation for me that I can't play tennis, for example. If somebody goes, you know, you're terrible tennis. Because I don't sense a talent, but I do sense talent in that tiny area of assembling words. That's the area that, you know, but maths I can't do, you know, architecture,

I can't really do, et cetera, so many things I can't do. So it's about finding those little sweet spots. And one of the great puzzles in life is how do people find their vocation? How do people find their core identity, their talents? And I sometimes think of it as it's like you're passing a metal detector over the ground. And very occasionally something will let off a little beep, a beep of intensity, of interest, of heightened thoughtfulness. And you think there's a fragment here below the ground of my true self.

Now, my true self was shattered or it came in disassembled form. It's buried. It's scattered over a vast area. And the task of life is to recreate it from hints. And I think that, you know, one of the great challenges, I mean, I think one of the big, big challenges, and it happens to every young person is what should I do with my life? It's one of these central questions of philosophy in a way. Because unless you're a very rare person, you will have to assemble a vision of your future. It's not going to come ready made. And there won't be a voice from the sky going, you are an accountant or you are a downhill skier. It's going to be something you have to assemble. And you'll assemble it in bits. You'll have to recreate the original statue of you that was shattered a long time ago and that lies across a vast area. So like an archaeologist of the self, you have to build that out. And you have to build it up out of those little beeps of interest.

And I think a good thing there is envy. People speak very low, an embarrassed way about envy. you're not supposed to feel envious. I think very often when you feel a beep of envy, it's because there's a fragment of your true ambition and your true self in the life of another person. And rather than go, oh, I must run away from it, go, no, this is a clue. What is there that you are envious of? And often envy is a very inaccurate emotion. We envy the whole of someone when actually it tends to be a part of them that we want. And so we go, I'm envious of that singer, actor, business person, et cetera. You want to go, hang on, hang on. It won't be the whole thing. Drill into it. What really is core here? And you might realize, it's actually not their fame, their money. It's that they work with their hands, or it's that they, you know, live in a log cabin somewhere far away from other people or whatever it is. So the best thing to do with envy is to see it as a guide for your own ambition, not a sign of your innate jealousy and inadequacy.

It's a clue. I always think about envy as the only one of the seven deadly sins. that doesn't feel good. Remind me of the other seven deadly scenes, gluttony? Gluttony, sloth. Sloth doesn't feel good. You don't think sloth feels good? Have you not spent a good Sunday afternoon watching some horrible TV show on the town?

But think of the self-discussed that sloth often brings, right? You know, you're lying on the sofa and you know that you're scrolling Instagram, and you know that your better self is being eroded. And so there's guilty sloth. Good sloth and guilty sloth. Yeah. Yeah, interesting. I remember when I came out with the first book, I was being interviewed, I don't know, some Today Show or something like that.

And the guy goes, so you lost everything in your 20s and now you're teaching people financial peace. How did you bounce back? And I remember it just hit me like, that was stupid. And I said, dude, when you fall that far, you don't really bounce. It's more of a splat. And he just looked at me. It's just like that wasn't the answer that fit the. It's not the nice narrative that you're talking about.

Yeah. And so the thing I would say, though, is if someone's watching you and I right now talk about this and they go, yeah, I'm in the soup, people do react two different ways to being in the suit. We all have the fear and then the momentary courage or the momentary hope followed by, you know, another injury, followed by another betrayal, followed by a momentary. We all have that. then the choice you have to make, the individual has to make while we're in that, and I made that choice semi-consciously, was you can choose, all right, I'm going to quit. I'm going to adopt the victim language, and I'm just going to sit down because I quit. And those are the people that never recover from their divorce.

They never recover from their business loss. or you can say, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm so lost, I don't know what to do. But I do I'm going to take the next step, the next step. I'm going to take the next, I'm going to do the next right thing that's in front of me and the next right thing that's in front of me. And it might even not be the right thing, but I'm going to do the next thing. And sitting is not an option.

I'm going to keep walking. So keep walking if you're in this. And the old country song, you know, if you're going through hell, keep going. And so, but I meet people that, uh, And they call on the show as like a lady called the other day and she's talking about her divorce like it happened 20 minutes ago. And I'm like, how long ago were you divorced? 40 years. I'm like, honey, you're still living emotionally back in that thing.

The language she was using was fresh. And she's still sitting there mad at him and he's gone and gotten two other wives since then. I mean, you know, right? And move on. And so, but it's real easy to quit in that. And it's not a quitter thing. it's um it's just this natural reaction i'm going i'm going to get up one more time even though i don't feel like it and walk out into the sun get a little vitamin d get a little prayer meet with my

buddy and let him make fun on me and then i'm going to get after it again and i'm just one more time one more time right yeah i i i remember toward the end of my 20s and i was really trying to sort of work out some of the predictors for when i felt better and when i felt worse when i was when i was in the soup, as you would say. And I remember I wrote it, action is the antidote to anxiety that you really don't fear the future when you're moving yourself toward it. And it's a vicious spiral because the very thing that's hardest to do when you are struggling is precisely the thing that would make you feel better. Your motivation is at its lowest. You don't want to get out of bed. You don't want to go to work. You don't want to think of a new idea. You don't want to apply effort to something

or pick up the bar or not eat the comfort food or whatever it is, stick to your routine. So, but then when you start to roll that boulder a little bit, it accumulates an awful lot of momentum, which is exactly how you see people get unbelievable outcomes. Like, it seems superhuman. How does this person get so much done in a day? How are they so successful?

How are they so balanced? All the rest of it. It's like, well, they are on the positive side of the same momentum that is currently kicking your ass. Exactly. Now, we developed a little theorem around here to talk to our team about this, called the momentum theorem, focused intensity over time, multiplied by God equals unstoppable momentum. And one of the things we talk about in the little book I did on it was just this idea that when you have negative momentum, you are better than you look. When you have positive momentum, you are not as good as you look.

That's great. That's right. And so don't believe the lie either way. So, you know, if you've got positive momentum, you are harvesting crops that were planted yesterday, not this morning, that they were planted a year ago, we put them in the ground, and today I'm getting this fruit. And everybody thinks I'm a genius, but it was actually a year ago. I was a genius. And or you got, you got crops going in the ground. There's nothing coming out of the ground yet, and you're planting, you're planting, you're planting, nobody can see you.

Nobody knows you're there. You're anonymous, but you're a lot better than you look, because wait until they're. the rain and the sun comes. There's going to be a crop in the spring, and suddenly you're going to be that genius. So, you know, that's how that stuff works. I remember talking about going through this stuff, this idea of walking, continuing to walk, that was something that you brought up. I love that. We were snow skiing the other day and tell you ride, and I'm a mediocre snow skier for a 65-year-old dude, right? But I like to go down the hill and go fast. I enjoy it. So, you know, go. And so I'm skiing with my kids, they're like 40 and 30 years old. And they haul butt. I mean, they

go and so the old man's trying to keep up and he's huffing and puffing and so we jumped off a lift we were running cruiser blues you know good and double blues that kind of stuff he had a black every now and then but they were cruisers they were groomedies so we jumped off it and there's this one run on tell you ride that when you get the top of it on black it's a it's a it's a groomed black and it's unbelievably steep you can see downtown tell you ride and it looks like you're going to fall into main street when you fall i mean it's right there it looks like a toy box and there's nothing between you and main street it's just air it's that steep it's an unbelievable and i pulled up on top of that thing and i looked at one of the kids you know these 30 year olds i'm like uh they went

that's steep and i went yeah and if i stand here about three more heartbeats i'm going to walk back because i'm getting really scared so i got to go where the fear's going to take me over and i thought You know what? That's what I've done half my life. You got to go or the fear is going to take me over. Because if I stood there, my heart rate was going, this was just the other day. I was scared. You know what I mean? It's like, I was scared. But I thought, you know what, I can do this stupid thing. I can ski it. I know I can ski it. But if I stand here and think about it, it's going to, the fear is going to kill me. There's a, I want to give it a better term than cultivated stupidity. Conscious ignorance, maybe you could say, or tactical ignorance around things that, yeah, a lot of the time there is there is a period where you're supposed to plan, where you're supposed to reflect and ruminate and sort of think about stuff, but that can be a trap as well. And I think that a lot of people who like to listen to shows like yours and like mine, they'll be thinking about their thoughts. They'll be thinking about themselves. They'll be strategizing. But there is just a, there is

absolutely a time for straight action without having to ruminate too much. Yeah. You, you can get paralysis of the analysis. Before we continue, I've been drinking AG1 every day for years now, because it's the simplest way that I found to cover my bases and not overthink nutrition, and that is why I've partnered with them. One scoop gives you 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and whole food ingredients in a single drink. And now they've taken it even further with AG1 next gen, the same one scoop, once a day ritual,

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you your money back. Right now, you can get a free bottle of vitamin D3K2, free AG1 travel packs, a welcome kit and that 90-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. So this was a longitudinal study that was done in a relatively sort of academic setting? Yes. He did a large-scale longitudinal study and he's fantastic. Those three traits were predictive. Conscientiousness, which is being a combination of thoughtful and kind. You know, I'm not, I don't want to get too into definitions in case I misstate something.

But the way I understand conscientiousness, and there are different personality models, right? And each personality model, and not every personality, there's really no one personality model that has ever gotten it completely right. They've all been dispelled in certain regards. But the way that I see conscientiousness as a whole across different personality models is it's got a couple of things combined. So it's not just nice. Nice to me can also mean low self-esteem, a pushover, trying to be liked. Conscientiousness may not even look super smiley-friendly.

It's more of an action. So to me, it is somebody who's smart enough to actually notice and anticipate somebody's needs. My husband is incredibly observant, and it's something that continues to also bring up admiration. So it's got that observational quality, intelligence, and then also motivation. You can't be lazy. They're industrious. They go and get things done. They're industrious. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. I was more thinking, I was trying to sort of interpret it, I guess, into the language of romance. But yes, if you're talking straight up, What is conscientiousness, I think.

Good definition. They are flexible psychologically. If there is some sort of perturbment, they end up getting back to baseline in not an insane amount of time. If something occurs, they're able to adapt to it, which is maybe distinct, but kind of sounds a little bit like a subset of agency, which I would put not too far away from consciousness as well.

Right, okay. So you want highly agentic partner. You were so smart. Oh, thank you. Yeah, I'm going to have to have my game now. from a different level and then your final one

you want a degree of openness to new experience presumably that's somebody that just doesn't want to sit on their ass all the time it helps to keep things exciting but that is something that you can overshoot for

and you end up with someone who is going to be very open sociosexually they're going to be looking for high adventurousness predicts cheating yeah correct so okay those that's interesting

is three traits I guess a question would be let's say that you are on an early date with someone or you're early into a relationship what are some of the ways that you can adjudicate how much or how little

of those traits your partner has you know this is the great question I learned about these I'm going to speak from my own experience okay so I've experienced this because I knew about these traits before I met Ty and I absolutely intended to try this out.

When I learned about them, I was actually dating somebody. We were not happy. And that person, I would say, lacked these traits. Both of us probably lacked these traits, to be completely fair. But we were in a conference together watching Tai Tishiro speak about this. And I remember sitting there at this conference not having a particularly good time with the person I was with. and thinking, I can do this. I can follow instructions. And the reason I also thought that was because Tai Tashiro was emphasizing how difficult this is, that our evolutionary brains really want, so if we're talking about a straight female, we want that strong jawline, we want somebody who's all brawn, we want money, we want height, we want protection for our young. I, and he actually did this experiment where he had everybody raised their hands if they were a straight male single. And so you had about a hundred men in this room

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

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

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

Swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe. Ty was one of the first people to respond. He was online, and so was this male model. And the male model was that baseline instinct to me. I was just like, and you, even though you're putting up a lot of like ab pictures. I just can't help it. So I actually had two contenders. I lived this.

And Ty, I didn't know what he actually lived. looked like. He was wearing a giraffe costume on his main picture, which I thought was funny. And there was some pictures of him working, but he had like hard hat stuff. So I really, I had no idea he was hot in Australian and 6-2. I mean, I did win in this case. But I mean, texting, I'm messaging him. I'm messaging this other guy. Ty is so wonderful. And he's just asking me these really intelligent questions, sort of like this conversation, right? So you're one of those rare ones who has all of those qualities. Ladies, watch out. But he, I could just tell he was wonderful. And we're talking, you can tell. If you know what these three things are, I could just tell. I just needed

to be aware of them. It was there. And he kind of became more of a friend. And in the meantime, this model is sending me like emojis of wet splashes and asking if I want a massage. Granted, I was on Tinder. I need to be fair. And I kept talking to the model. I just couldn't help myself. But after about 24 hours, I was done with the model guy. Ty was just becoming this friend. And then something kind of scary happened with my work two weeks later. And I realized I wanted to tell my friend about it. And that's how it evolved. If I was to just chuck a little bet on for something that's very, very reliably going to happen over the next three years before the end of this administration, the mother of all blowups between Elon and Trump.

So how do you see that happening? I've heard a lot of people. Charlemagne talks about this all the time. Trump thinks that, sorry, Charleman thinks Trump is going to put him in prison. Okay, that's a take that hadn't heard before. But yeah, but what do you,

now, you know, Charlemagne is very Democrat, like obviously he's going to have some bias that goes into this. But what is your take and how do you see that relationship going? I just think that when you've got two people with so much power and ego, and I do, from what I can tell, Elon's ego and that sort of self-focused self-belief, like it's me and I am going to be the center of all of this, seems to be ramping up. That is probably a pretty dangerous cocktail based on some stories and stuff that I've heard about behind the scenes from Trump, about some levels of vulnerability and sort of like flimsy,

senses of he doesn't like to be shown up doesn't like to be sort of upstaged and I don't know if I don't know if Elon has the emotional intelligence of J.D. Vance to be able to tiptoe around

and yes sir, no sir, three bags, false sir. J.D. And what I say do not treat that man lightly. I think he has like, he came from like poverty. I think his mom was like a drug addict like and then he ends up going to Yale.

And then he becomes the VP of a guy that he campaigned against and said was horrible and like a tyrant. Do you know the level of emotional intelligence it takes to go from like a broke middle America, broken family to an Ivy League institution to then VP for the guy who does not, he doesn't always keep in it. Like you can say things about Trump, but if it's advantageous for whatever his plan is, he will forgive you. You know, he's kind of like Vince Mann in that regard, like whatever works for the thing.

But, like, that takes high EQ. Even in that moment with Zelensky, he's managing Trump. Like, he did have a moment for himself, but everything he said was, and you show respect to Trump and Donald Trump's office and what. So he knows the game he's playing. Oh, what I'm saying is don't treat him lightly. What our coastal elites, we always do is when someone has a kind of southern accent, we think they're idiots.

And we don't, we don't even really pay attention to them. And that man is someone, I see a problem with J.D. before I see Elon. But what do you think is going to happen with Elon long term with Trump? Nothing. Now you think that he's going to dance through the minefield? I don't think, I think he's acutely aware of his limitations in America. He cannot physically be president. If he could be president, I think there is a concern. Because eventually he'll go, when they have an impasse, he'll just go, well, I'll just run against you.

he cannot the laws dictate he cannot so inevitably you're going to have to bow down at some point this is the high as you're as high as you can go that's only that's only based on the fact that you can put your the outcomes that you want for your projects behind your ego yes and i'm not sure which one is going to be the priority the only other thing he could do is leverage the democrats which have already made him radioactive like no democrat can side with eliz so Elon is as far as he can go in America He can't go any further Like this is outside of being present

Like there's that great line in Game of Thrones Where like Circe is talking to Little Finger And Little Finger is like you know You know Little Finger the character And Little Finger goes You know what I've learned over the years Is that you know knowledge is power And there's all these guards around her and them

And she goes Guards slit his throat And they all walk up and put a knife to his throat And then she goes guards stand down guards take two steps back guards take six steps back and then she goes power is power

and it's just so fire and it's like Trump has power power's power that is the closest Elon can get to power and I don't think there's another president

that will allow Elon to have that access to power so Elon either has to hope there's another person that he could ride with and establish a relationship and maybe that's J.D., but he have to wait to the next administration anyway.

So what he can't do is sour all the Republicans on him. Like, I cannot see the situation where they get into trouble because there's nowhere else for him to go. He either have to jump parties, which is very difficult after chastising the left all this. Like, he's kind of made his bed. And he's high. He has access to all these things.

And I think it does benefit him the most if America is successful because all his businesses are up in America. He could jump ship to another country. But that's not the thing I worry about, because I think he's smart enough to understand the position he's in. Eventually, you hit the, and this is what happens with all rich people that actually want to move weight around. You hit the impasse of government. And you have people who are way less successful than you, way poor than you, telling you whether you can or can't build a factory or do whatever you want to do. And in that moment, they go, fuck, I just work my ass out. I got.

fucking yachts and everything and now I got to go kiss this guy's dick like you saw them all lined up behind Trump during the inauguration Zuckerberg baize everybody went to kiss the ring and he set him up letting everybody else know they're kissing the ring and I think Elon goes I got the best seat it don't get better than this and this guy trusts me and believes in me I can't fuck this up and he's dealt with governors mayors and all his other shit that he doesn't respect at all So he's like, it's not going to get better than this. I don't think he can ruin it. If they change the rule to let non-citizens become president, now we have an issue.

But Trump would never change that rule because it's his security blanket right there. It's actually kind of like brilliantly done by Trump. It's ride with me against the left. Now Elon can't go to the left. So he has to be loyal to you. It's like he's Zelenskyy. Well, everybody that's, everybody that's associated with Trump is so unspeakable and toxic that they're never going to be allowed back. So now you got the loyalty built right there.

Yeah. Circling back to Chris's opening question, is it possible that everyone's having less sex because of the Lubbubu man? But seriously, like, maybe we do need more. Yeah, we need more polarity. Well, look, this is, to me, this just seems like the progeny of me too. in many ways, that the message that a lot of men, the vast majority of well-behaved, sexually disciplined, not-pushy men took was, I shouldn't be pushy. It's like, well, yeah, you already weren't that pushy, and maybe you actually weren't

pushy enough. So the issue with the message, don't be too pushy, is that the men who really need to hear it will ignore it, and the men who are already predisposed to be. believe it, will take it to heart. So what you end up with is this weird selection effect where the bad actors still act badly and the ones who actually probably needed a little bit of a helping hand to go forward like, oh, holy fuck. And maybe the Labuba Man is just the final form of that. He's taking it too seriously. At the risk of just pouring petrol on this conversation and then flinging a match him, it strikes, you know, it strikes me that, you know,

if your thesis is right and in fact somewhere buried in all of this is actually a low level of sort of low level revulsion at Lububuman and a yearning for a more direct and unmediated form of masculine sexual aggression, it has been suggested by people on the internet whose names I now forget that this is some, this is in fact a factor in the extremely politically sensitive. subject of migration into the country across the English Channel, as in, there are progressive women who kind of enjoy the appearance of young men who haven't been lububified yet. Wow. This is not my thesis. Because Laboubu has not reached Syria. Laboubu has not reached Syria. These guys are not noodle armed.

These guys, in fact, have demonstrated considerable gumption. making it from wherever it is that they've originated to England. I mean, it's a genuinely impressive level of gumption involved. And I don't know, maybe. That's spicy. What did you say? Yeah, you really. So, okay, two things.

One is. So having, having just, I'm just going to hand you the petrol can. So I do actually agree with you. I was speaking to a journalist friend recently. No, you're not agreeing with me. You're agreeing with people. the internet. Sorry.

His names I don't know. I was speaking to a journalist friend recently who had been in Calais and speaking to these guys who went over the channel. And he said like, what is really amazing is you'll talk to these guys about their life stories and it will be like, oh yeah, so I came from Sudan and I walked across half of Africa and then I got to Libya and then I got enslaved and so I was taken to another country where I was a slave and then I was gang raped and then I somehow escaped from that and then I swam across the channel or whatever.

It's like, they tell this story. And it's the most appalling thing you've ever heard. And they're physically, it's evident that they've been through this. And these are like 20-year-old guys or something. And then you ask them, why do you do it? And they're like, just like Manchester United. They'll offer some like really weird inadequate answer. It's not even like I want access to the welfare state

because you could have got that in other European countries. It's quite like strange. And I do kind of get your point that there's an element of like crazy machoness about it. Wow. If you're prepared to go through all of that for Manchester United. imagine what you do for your family and your partner. I suppose so. The only thing I would say, though, is the impression I get from a lot of women

who are very, very invested in refugees welcome kind of stuff is that they really infantilize these men at the same time. And there's a degree to which they're kind of scooping up the vulnerable, you know. You think this is a bit like the American pit bull ladies phenomenon. Yeah, yeah. He's just misunderstood. I'll just add some. I'll just add it in that.

It's okay. This is another one of these. these discourses actually probably related in a obliquely to Lububa Man

one of these memes that sloshes around in which a certain subtype of usually single American

progressive women are accused of adopting actually obviously murderously sociopathically dangerous

rescue pitballs as a kind of proxy for the sort of man they would never dream of admitting to fancying

in real life right okay so so in a sense you know, officially they're only allowed to date Lububu Man and that's in fact the only people who are within their social circles immediately. And so they adopt a pit bull to just kind of compensate. So I see his lack of...

I see your Lubu Man. Yeah? And I raise you the newly nomenclatured hymbo, which has actually come back around. The new dream guy is beefy, placid and politically ambiguous. Amid pitch debates about masculinity, the hymbo stands stoically above it all. As an alternative to the thinking man,

the Renaissance man or the family, man. Today's hymbo offers just man, a blurry image, a blunt political instrument, or just a caricature, the human equivalent of a smiley face. The hymbo is, in many senses, unreal, a wish-fulfillment fantasy. His true self is concealed

behind a set of dough-like eyes, the content of his inferiority forever unconfirmed. So is this like Ken in Greta Goerwigsby? He says towards the end, if I'd realize patriarchy, wasn't just about horses, I wouldn't have bothered. Honk with a heart of gold. Hunk with a heart of gold. I think, um, who was the dude that did

Magic Mike, who was the guy, the actor that played Magic Mike? Channing Tatum. Channing Tatum is often put forward as like himbo. I actually, Channing Tatum follows me on Instagram, so I actually quite like him. But Hunk with the Heart of Gold, the human equivalent of a smiley face. What we've got here is basically I think you're trying to cross the streams between Luboo Man in terms of disposition and front cover of a dark romance novel in terms of presentation. I mean, it's a tricky tightrope for women Because on the one hand you want

And this is an eternal conundrum You want a man who is going to protect you And protect your children And provide for you in times of extreme threat Right But you also don't want someone who's going to beat you up And beat up your children And so that's tricky

The line that you've got to perennially walk Yeah, yeah And so the hymbo is, I love a hymbo Right And the impression from my female friends Is that hymbo is a very high status Over a friend talking to me About how attractive a hymbo was

And she said she really, really didn't want, I guess, a Labibu Man, who was, like, excessively intellectual. She said, if I came home and he was like, I just read something in the New York Review of books, I would kill myself. It's not what she wants to a man, right? A hymbo does kind of tread that Tyro. Like, he's physically capable, clearly, of doing what's needed if you're at risk. But he's so sweethearted that he would never turn on you. Well, again, I mean, skipping sideways through this sort of untidy territory. There was a piece, I think it was in the New York Times, which is often a sort of barometer for what American middle-class women in the 30s think about stuff in general.

I think it was the New York Times, but it was somewhere in that zone, that discursive zone anyway, on how, on a fascinating new trend of women marrying down. And what they were actually talking about, but what they were talking about wasn't actually women marrying down. it was women marrying below their educational level. Yeah. Actually, they were, financially, they were marrying up because these were, these were women with maybe a degree in a master's or a degree in a PhD or something, but no money in a mountain of debt. It's like complex hypergamy.

Who were marrying construction, you know, construction entrepreneurs or, you know, a successful plumber with several employees who was turning over, you know, chunks of change. And so, you know, in straightforward financial terms, you know, it's at least a match, if not marrying up. But in intellectual and in terms of a particular type of caste as distinct from straightforward economic levels, you know, she was experienced, you know, some of these women were experiencing it as kind of marrying down. And I think there's something, you know, I think that speaks to your hymbo in the sense that very sensibly, these extremely overeducated women, have married some guy who's going to appreciate their brains and also be able to pay the mortgage, you know, without trying to compete. It seems like the hymboos. The hymbo is economically

prepared and maybe educationally underdeveloped, whereas the Labibu man is maybe economically underdeveloped and overeducated. I mean, would you rather have a guy who can talk? Would you rather have a guy who can talk contemporary literature but can afford to buy you dinner? Or some guy who can fix the plumbing when it goes wrong

and just doesn't care what you think about books? I have a funny story about this. It occurs to me that my parents technically have that dynamic because my mom has a PhD and my dad. dad has an undergraduate degree and then became a lawyer. But anyone who knows, PhDs don't translate into big money, right? So my dad's always earned more. But there was this funny story about a time when he was at work, this is the age full of the internet. And someone referred to King Lear in talking about office politics. He was like, oh, someone is, someone's behaving

like King Lear in relation to someone who didn't understand what they were saying. He called my mom like very quietly and said, what happens in King Lear? It was a funny example of this. Well, there's something there. How much do women find that endearing? How much do women find needing to intellectually coddle their partner beyond, up to a certain point? How much do they find that as, oh, noble savage? I personally find that endearing. I don't know if he's also, if he's also sort of generally red-blooded in his bearing behavior

and is also capable of fixing stuff around the house that goes wrong, I don't really see the problem. Read by fiction is very girly. What about if it's the opposite, though? What about if it's somebody who can tell you what has been happening in the New York Review of Books, but needs to call his dad if there's something broken in the toilet at your house? I mean, competence. Competence is very hot or should, you know. Right, but this is competence within a particular domain because you can say the noble savage is incompetent when it comes to his intellectual development. I mean, I suppose, you know, zooming back a bit, you could probably make the case that we're currently in an age of flux where these never-ending growth really does feel like it's come to an end.

You know, politics is quite uncertain. You know, we've got war in Europe for the first time in a very long time. And all kinds of things don't feel as certain and safe and stable as they used to. And it could be that in fact some of these very instinctive mating patterns are shifting, are going to shift or are perhaps already shifting in the light of how people assess their own prospects in that very much more uncertain world. People want to become more high agency, presumably. We've said it's important.

We've identified what it is, how. it works, some ways that people can fall into traps to stop them from being it, some beliefs that those people have, are there, give me something, give me a pair of breasts, give me something tangible, up-ease sake. I'd say, so there's a few, right? So the first one that I've mentioned a few times, but I really want to actually get into it, which is the, does it defy the laws of physics question? Because, okay, going back to the brain is a question answering device. So if you say, say, why, or what's great about my life, it'll start finding answers. If you say, what's awful about my life, it will start finding answers. And let's say we go to a venue together and the guy

on the front door says, sorry not tonight, mate. And then you go, okay, accept that social reality. And it's, well, does it fundamentally defy the laws of physics? Does it go against Newton's laws of motion, Chris getting into tiger, tiger tonight? No. Does it defy Einstein? Stein's relativity. No. And that point sounds trite, but when when you actually begin to understand that, well, as long as it doesn't defy the laws of physics, anything is theoretically possible with human knowledge. And again, it sounds trite saying that, but you just look at the last few hundred years since the Enlightenment. When you have this period before it where nothing happened in humanity, we would just, your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, granddad's

life looked the same as yours. And meanwhile, we have this change and the ability, and the ability for humans to understand how things work and implement it into reality and happen to life and shape their environment that we just now completely take for granted like me getting annoyed at the flat Diet Coke on the Emirates flight is a big thing. The second thing, which is probably a little less esoteric that I really, really like as a metaphor, is when you're in the complete low agency and everything is super general, and it's like, I don't even know, I don't even know where to begin. I don't even know where to start.

One thing I love doing, a little experiment I got, was going, okay, let's say have a problem right now of, I had a friend at the minute, who he's an extreme, but a friend we both know, actually, he's an extreme workaholic to a point that I've never, I've never seen before. And he was talking about how it's a problem, he just doesn't know where to start. And I said to him, I go, okay, where are you at right now? out of 10. And it suddenly takes this kind of general infinite universe all the way down to, okay, well, we're a bit of a binary choice. And you can never say seven, right? So he goes, he goes, I'm a three. And I go, okay. And I go, why are you at a three, by the way? Like, why aren't you had a two? And he goes, to be honest with you, because I've actually like not worked tonight. I've come here to see you. I go, okay, so we're getting some specificity here. And I go, okay,

well, what would take it up to a four? And he goes, well, if I left the office before 8 p.m. I'd give that a four. I'd go, okay, great. We've got a little step that. I'd go, what would take it to a five? What would take it to a six, seven, eight, nine, ten? And I go, okay, first off, let's just do the four immediately. And then as soon as you have that, you have momentum. One of the things I love, and I'll probably put it in the piece of like a template that people can use is just what I call the video game Apple Note. So you have, let's say, for example, to do list. Apple note, build a website. The problem with that is that starting the video game on level 56. So one, I had this fascinating realization that two, sorry, one person that I knew was the

laziest person I've ever met, couldn't like open his mail. I couldn't get out of bed and like make himself some food, but was one of the best video game players at that specific game in the world. I would spend 16 hours a day on this video game. And I go, well, do they have an agency problem? Or is there a reality just a poorly designed video game? So the video game Apple note is just level one. Let's say whatever it is, whether it's from opening mail to going to Kitty Hawk and taking the planes into the sky, there's always a level one. And that's what video games are incredible at, that they adapt to where you're at and then just slowly move you up, again, completely the opposite of school. So level one is always just dump down thoughts on topic.

and what I love about that is the matter how complex the thing is from curing cancer to flying planes to opening the mail, you can always dump down thoughts and then you check it off and level two is create the next five levels based off level one and what's beautiful is when you check level one

or a level one's small enough to start but isn't overwhelming so you have that video game bit of dopamine then when you check it off you're like fuck let's go I'm on level two and then each step is enough so keeping with video game design is it's enough of a step to feel a challenge, but without overwhelm.

And if it's too big of a step, like level 56, build website, that's too big of a step. You're just constantly in frustration, so you just quit the video game. It's a terribly designed video game. But breaking things down into micro steps is such a key thing in video game design and ultimately increasing agency. Yeah, I mean, this is the productivity 101. You write your epigraph. you work in seven-year seasons, you work in three-year blocks, you work in one-year

sprints, broken down into 90-day chunks, broken down into daily actions, and, you know, minute by minute, you've got your life planned out. And it's kind of trite because it's so obvious, but the smallest first step imaginable is how the Wright brothers managed to get their plane. It's how you launched your marketing agency in a different country. It's how this podcast started. Yes. And yeah, you need to be able to,

if you can figure out ways that you can constantly make that first step, because 50% of the battle is that first step. So if you have that, great tool. Another tool more related to,

so we spoke earlier about the four tenants of high agency, you have clear thinking, you have bias to action, you have resourcefulness and disagreeability. On the disagreeability point,

which I think is a huge, huge part of it. The question I like to ask people is who's your favorite podcaster, creator, thinker. So let's say, all the people listen to it right now who have the Spotify wrapped with you top of the list. Yeah. What do you disagree with Chris on? Because there'll be a percentage, nothing, right? It's all good, baby. But there'll be a percentage of the audience, unfortunately, probably less so with your audience, but there'll be a

percentage of the audience that says, Chris says sky is red, therefore sky is red. And that's actually a great disagreeability test because the amount of times I put gurus on a pedestal and then they'll say a lot of wise shit and then I'll just start drifting out over their skis yeah yeah and then they'll start drifting and I'll just go with them but that ability to say who do you admire the most and what do you disagree of them on is a great disagreeability test that's really lovely another one is who do you disagree like who do you what's the maybe the strongest held opinion that you have whether that's politically business wise theoretically, and who's the best person on the other side that you've heard?

Yeah. Can you answer those two questions? Have you ever read Richard Feynman's love letter to his wife? No, I read the pleasure of finding things out. Okay. But I love Feynman. Love, love. I mean, you can see a lot of influences. I might not be able to say this without crying, which is going to be very embarrassing,

but I'm going to try. October 17, 1946, to Arlene, I adore you sweet. heart. I know how much you like to hear it, but I don't only write it because you like it. I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write you. It is such a terribly long time since I lash wrote to you, almost two years, but I know you'll excuse me because you understand how I am stubborn and realistic, and I thought there was no sense to writing. But now I know, my darling wife, that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and that I have done so much in the past, I want to tell you I love you, I want to love you, I will always love you.

I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead but I still want to comfort and take care of you and I want you to love me and care for me I want to have problems to discuss with you I want to do little projects with you I never thought until now that we can do that what should we do

we started to learn to make clothes together or learn Chinese or get a movie projector can't I do something now no I am alone without you and you were the idea woman and general instigator of all our wild adventures when you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed you needn't have worried just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much and now it is clearly even more true you can give me nothing yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else but i want you to stand there you dead are so much better

than anyone else alive i know you'll assure me that i am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don't want to be in my way i'll bet you are surprised that i don't even have a girlfriend except you sweetheart after two years but you can't help it darling nor can i I don't understand it, for I have met many girls, and very nice ones, and I don't want to remain alone. But, in two or three meetings, they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real.

My darling wife, I do adore you. I love my wife. My wife is dead. Tough. to play the reverse out it's like what i want leila to write that letter and i don't think i would unless she was happy writing that letter if the removal of me as a contingency of reinforcement for her meant that she couldn't find that in somebody else would sadden me.

And so I've already, so like with Lay Life, I've told her, I tell her a lot. I was like, I'm going to die before you statistically. There's, I'm for sure going to die before you. She's a little younger. She's younger and I'm bigger. Female. And she exercised, like, she's for sure going to live longer. And I was like, I want you to spend as little time as seemingly possible from the time that I die to finding somebody else.

You do me no service by making yourself miserable. And you do not discredit or dishonor me by finding somebody else to spend your life with. So, yeah, just, I only think about that from reverse. There's a, the joy of melancholy. Yeah. is an interesting kind of emotion that's kind of this complex you know this strange like wallowing satisfaction in wistfulness um and yeah wallowing wallowings maybe a little a little more loaded um but melancholy i you know there can be odd joy and sadness and and a kind of

beauty that you get to experience after something is gone that you can't experience during it. I've not had anybody in my life die. Only child with a mother and a father that's still alive. Like, I've got, there's no one. Must be nice. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, fuck.

But there's not been many things that I've lost. And this is me fucking Monday morning quarterbacking. I don't know, but maybe. What's a mood setter? Modern women see Leila and think, I'll wait to establish myself in my career

before I date or get married or have kids but they forget we got married when she was 23 and we built this together love is one of the rare times you don't do life in order but rather all at once if you find someone

that makes your world go around and makes the world make sense to you where you both look at the same thing and say, oh, you saw that too? Like, I feel like I was the only one. I think that for high-achieving individuals, finding someone who sees the world the same way is incredibly rare.

And when you find that person, you should stop what you're doing and then you should get them to stay with you. And it's been, you know, one of the best decisions in my entire life, marrying Layla. And... there's there's this especially unfortunately for women right now there's this huge you know put it off delay there's no rush but it doesn't actually take into consideration two things one is that biology hasn't advanced with culture and society you can't have kids past you know 35 I mean you can but you're a geriatric you know it's a geriatric pregnancy past 35 ruthless time yeah I'm just being real

Right. Yeah. And so, I mean, I, this is like super prevalent. And I know this is a much more common theme on the show and I don't touch it very much. But it's, it just, I just say it more like, because I think it sucks. It's unfair. It's not. Yeah. It's objectively, it's not fair. Guys can wait the rest, you know, their whole lives. They can do everything. And you have to, if you go to college, graduate college at 21 or 22. And if you want to have four kids, assuming that you have perfect pregnancies and you have. exactly one year, you know, or 18 months between each one. Okay, that's six years by the time you're done. And so if we rule out geriatric, that geriatric pregnancy is our last, then it means that we have to basically have, or we, you have to have your first kid at 29. Well, okay, maybe it'll take, let's just tack one year on of marriage to have the kid and be married. Okay, 28, you're married. All right, do you want to marry somebody within six months of meeting them? Let's give it two years to give our logical, you know, brain in. Okay, so 26. 26. You graduate at 22. You have 48 months. And I think that, again, this is if you have, if you don't want kids, then all of this is null. If you do, then you have a very small window to piece that together. Now, of course, there's surrogates and maybe in the future, you know, like I'll say in general, betting on, I'll smoke, I'll smoke cigarettes now because by the time I'm old, they'll have a cure for it.

I don't know. I just, I don't make those bets. And so, it's easier to work with reality the way it is, not the way you hope it's going to end up landing. Yeah, to knowingly incur basically a guaranteed price

for the potential of maybe a non-existent solution is probably not the best decision-making process. And to be clear, I say this, Leila and I, you know, we don't have kids, she's not 35.

But I think that we have these unrealistic expectations that someone is going to make our lives, that they're going to complete us in some way. When I think that, for me, the best thing that a partner can do is help you be the best version of yourself. I love what you said about really appreciating small victories,

so forth, to go back to the nobility, and I kind of relate to that in a early Buddhist frame, of these are the truths for noble beings, not noble by birth, but noble by effort. There's a nobility in letting yourself feel, deeply or be revealed deeply, like to go back to that maybe conversation at dinner that went bad to say, you know, at the end of the day, I was there in good faith. Maybe I was unskillful. I said this or that. There's lessons to learn for the future. I was

there in good faith. I was there with my whole heart deep down, and I was brave enough to be earnest and sincere enough to kind of lay it out. Like, yeah, take pride. in that healthy pride you know appreciate yourself for that the heroism the nobility in that and the uncommonness of that to me that's that's where real bravery is that's really cool yeah i love that uh i get the sense as well that this is one of the reasons why allowing yourself to be puppeted by your own fear to not show up there's an equivalent in the world of content creation, which is audience capture. So continuing to throw red meat that is predictably going to be liked by the audience, but doesn't necessarily resonate with you as a

person. It's actually, you know the word grifter? Do you not familiar with that? Right. So I asked, it's a word that gets thrown around on the internet a lot, for all manner of different individuals. And I genuinely was interested. I said, hey, for the people that use the word grifter, what is the best working definition of what that word means for you because it's just it's just kind of a slight it's a slur it's a calling yeah it's just a very odd nebulous term that people tend to use for someone that you think might not be fully authentic like I mean come on like let's get a bit more specific and somebody said um and I actually really appreciated this and this is currently my working definition uh somebody promoting a product or staking a claim that they wouldn't use or don't

believe themselves. So it's, here is what I'm doing out front. This is what I believe in private and behind. And I was like, huh, that's okay, I can work with that. That's like a functional definition, I think, for what people think they mean when they say that word. And my point is with the audience capture thing, it's you, not being you. It's you trying to be manipulative in a way. It's this sort of meta you. It's playing persona, not person. It's projecting, et cetera. And that conversation at the restaurant that was ungainly or didn't go the way that you wanted, the difference between you showing up with vulnerable sincerity, or just straight up sincerity. Like, this is me and this is the position that I hold. And I said it, all right, could I have said it with a little bit more deafness?

Yeah, probably. And, you know, I could have delivered it. But I tried. Like, I gave it a crack. And that was actually what I meant. I said what I meant and that, you know, I can take some lessons from it. The difference between that and the lessons that you can take from that situation and a situation where you didn't say what you meant and you were still rejected

is the kind of the last bastion of, well, I tried. And, you know, fuck, like I guess, you know, you can kind of laugh it off. There is an ability to do humor in that. But where is the humor that you find that I compromised myself to try and be somebody else and that was rejected? There's an additional level of difficulty in getting past it. And I think it's just a nice justification for, yeah, showing up sincerely, showing up earnestly, you know, sort of playful seriousness, I think is, huh, why? I have this additional level of protection for all of the fear that you are going to have by being seen. and by this being me

and by a rejection of that, not being a rejection of a projection, but a rejection of a person and that person happens to be myself, what you do gain in that is, well, at least I was myself, at least this weird character I tried to play, this role that I tried to perform,

wasn't rejected, because to be honest, that's kind of more pitiful than the other way around. That's so true. I'm thinking the ways in which playfulness is a great aid to aspiration without attachment. And if we're incredibly not just earnest, but if we're self-righteous or pompous about our pursuit of even a wholesome goal, that's not so good. but to be playful about it, I think about, I've made a play, using the word, for a woman in my late 20s, I was part of this whole personal growth context, kind of half a cult. I won't name it now. And so everybody was really deep in each other's business, kind of all knowing each other. And there was a woman in a relationship with like the head dude. So I was like a layer or two down from Alpha, and she was with Alpha Boy. And I fully played, went for it. It was public. It was known. I wrote these nice little notes. I told them what I was doing. And I went full out. And I didn't know if I would get it. I didn't. And she was

relatively kind and it was okay. But at the end of the day, I felt good about myself. That I, little Ricky, kind of the dork, had still stuck my neck out and, you know, made a play for a particular woman. And I feel great. You know, I went for it, right? If I hadn't gone for it, I'd be thinking, you wussy, you should have gone for it. Why not? Take the risk. But what enabled it is there was a playfulness about it. It was like an improbable goal, and I could be playful about it, which helped me be less attached to the outcome. My friend Charlie did a wonderful video breakdown of Jordan Peterson's most recent debate against 20 atheists. It was on the Jubilee YouTube channel. So it's a series called Surrounded. And it's doing huge numbers. It's really cool.

Kind of like speed dating for debate, I guess, is kind of the way that I would put it. What a format. We used to call them a fishbow. You're in the fishbowl and you've got 10 or 20 people around you. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And each person. comes in individually and you do a bit and then they move on and so on and so forth. And he does this comparison between Jordan when he did that Cathy Newman interview in 2019. So what you're saying is that really famous one in front of the purple background and this most recent one.

And Charlie is very interested in charisma and he's talking about likeability, being into playfulness and he's very deep into self-work and mindfulness too. so I think that sort of percolates through. And he has this, it just compares them side by side. And I'd never even thought of this because the way that people change, especially over a long period, it's been six years, nearly seven years since that first debate came out and then there's this new one. And if someone changes slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, you kind of,

you don't really notice, right? It's like, when did you get fat? It's like, I don't know, one day at a time. And he just makes a really lovely distinction between Jordan in that first one, where Kathy's sort of pointing her finger at him and saying, so what you're saying is this thing? And he goes, no, I'm not saying that at all. I think that's silly.

I think that's, I do. I think that's really silly. And you just have this, it's keeping him regulated. It feels more casual. It's much easier to get on side. It's a much more likable approach. Now, he's standing his ground, but he's standing his ground in a sort of,

you know, really fluid sort of Bruce Lee kind of way. You've sort of touched on them a few. times, but just do a rundown for me of the most common places that people are getting exposed to the highest levels of microplastics. Yeah. So the most, I would say common places, one is drinking out of bottled water, like bottled plastic bottles, right? Like a lot of people drink out of plastic bottles. That would be a big source. Tap water, that's unfiltered. So tap water, again, also has microplastics. Unfortunately, our oceans are contaminated, so microplastics are also found in a lot of fish. And particularly, they accumulate in the digestive track of fish.

So if you're eating shellfish or clams or oysters or anything where you're eating the whole digestive track or a sardine whole, whole sardine, then you're going to be getting microplastics. Heat is a big, big one. Okay. I would say that is one of the main, you know, culprits when you're combining that with plastic. So a lot of your to-go coffees that you're drinking from Starbucks, Starbucks, anything. Like that is going, that is a huge one because you're, you know, there's been studies looking at BPA leaching into liquid when it's, when heat like boiling water is applied. It increases the leaching by 55 times, which is huge. It also increases microplastic, you know, breakdown, right? Because you're breaking down the plastic itself. So only you're getting more. You're making the plastic smaller,

allows it to be permeating through the gut more effectively. Exactly, exactly. I can't tell you how many, like, to-go coffees I've had in my life. And, you know, another big source now, this is, like, new coming out. I mean, there's been a couple of studies that have come out on this is tea bags. Because you're adding hot water to tea, and the tea bags themselves are made of either polypropylene, they're made of nylon, or they're made of, interestingly, cellulose, which you would think wouldn't have microplastics,

but I think there must be mixed, there must be a mixture of stuff in there. And there's, this new study came out, you know, really just a couple of months ago, showing that you can get anywhere between millions to billions of microplastic particles per milliliter. I mean, per milliliter. How many, how much is that compared with the normal sort of,

that's a lot? It's a lot. Okay. It's a lot. What I'm getting at is, you know, know, I, you know, there's not, I think what's happening is the, the heat is breaking the plastic down. These tea bags are made of plastic. And so, you know, consuming these tea bags, again, when you're getting to go tea, it's like, I now I'm like, all I can think about is like, I'm consuming a plastic tea. Yeah, yeah. But you have to remember, there's a lot of studies, at least with green tea showing that green tea has huge benefits for cognition. It delays dementia.

It might even offset the microplastics you've had to consume. Yeah. So, I mean, clearly people are drinking tea out of probably tea bag. So it's not like, at least with green tea, it seems like there's some benefits. Right. But so, so those are some of the major sources. And then there's also, it's in our salt. And then air, right? So like that that's another one if you're living in a polluted place. If you're again, you know. Internally venting your dryer. Dryer ventilation in your house. That's another major source. And then another one would be also to consider would be black plastic. plastic. So I know, you're like, what? This is, this is kind of some new data coming out. Black plastic is often made from recycled electronics. And- You mean bits of plastic that are black? I mean black utensils, like your black spatula, or black plastic, you know, forks and knives, or your black plastic lid on a coffee to-go coffee cup, black sushi, the bottom of a sushi container. bottom of like a rotisserie chicken. If you've ever bought a rotissory chicken from the grocery store, that black, right? Black plastic. It's often made from recycled electronics. And recycled electronics often have chemicals in them that are added to prevent fires from starting

like, they don't want electronics starting fire. So they add these brominated flame retardants, which are carcinogenic. They are not supposed to be in food. They're not supposed to, they're not, you don't suck on your electronic. They're not supposed to go in your mouth, right? So these black plastics have very high levels of carcinogens that are normally not even found in regular plastics that were, you know, in things that were consuming. And there was a study out of the University of Plymouth that found black utensils, black toys for babies, you know, they're putting in their mouth. They contained between 30 to 40 times the safe limit of these brominated flame retardants and other carcinogens and endocrine disruptors in them than, then safe. So that's another sort of, and think about it,

if you're buying like a rotisserie chicken or like you get it to go fuh or whatever soup and it's in like a black container, you got the heat. That's the added factor on top of that, right? So that's another major source. What about dermal stuff? Yes. So again, we mentioned the phthalates, right, which are in personal hygiene products.

And that's something I do want to mention because you might think, oh, I'm looking at the ingredient list and there's no phthalate on there. But there's two different chemicals that are very, very sneaky because they mean they're thalates. And they're in a lot of personal hygiene products. One is fragrance. If the word fragrance is in the ingredients list, that means there's thalates. And perfume. Not perfume, but parfume. That is another chemical that means there's thalates.

So you really want to look for thallate-free personal hygiene products. Again, very important, especially for people that are considering conceiving, because those are the chemicals that are associated with the sexual, you know, disrupting sexual development in boys. And then the other one is receipts. And this is a really big one because maybe not for you and I, right? Receipts are, they're a thermal paper. And so essentially they're coated with BP. P.A. Because there's a thermal reaction that happens when heat is applied to the BPA, it prints, it prints text on the receipt without actual ink. So that's how it works. And if you ever see like a white coating on the receipt, like that's BPA. So the BPA in like plastics, at least it's kind of contained in a plastic matrix. Like this is just. It's purposefully liberated. Yes. Exactly. It's like free for all on the receipt. And so there's studies looking at people that hand

a lot of receipts. Like, when I was in the airport. Check out stuff and stuff like that. Yeah, I was in the airport on coming here. And, you know, I would, the guy that was like handling the receipt, he's like, do you want the receipt? I'm like, no. And I saw him take it out and put it in the trash.

And like, I thought about, there's this huge line of people. You're doing that 500 times a day. Exactly. And I looked at the guy and I was like, hey, dude, you know, I just want to tell you that these receipts are lined with endocrine disruptors that disrupt hormones. And he goes, you mean? wish somebody had recorded this oh my god this lady who's going through the airport i met this lady earlier on today and she started ranting and raving about the receipts said it's sort of covered in

this magic dust that's killing me or something like i couldn't i couldn't help me i felt like it like i couldn't not say something right and he looks at me he goes you mean like testosterone i was like yes testosterone it's been sure it's been correlated with a decrease in testosterone i was like you need to wear nitrile gloves so bottom line is bpa it's lined on the receipts nitral gloves can stop people from absorbing it so people that are like you know basically any kind of cashier

anyone that's handling a receipt multiple times a day highly recommend they wear nitral gloves latex doesn't do that also if you wear cream or hand sanitizer it's been shown to increase the dermal absorption of BPA by a hundredfold fuck off

Some people are like, I don't want to get my hands on the thing. I don't want to get COVID or whatever, right? A hundred X. 100x absorption. Think about how many times these regs. I've seen them do it, you know, and then they touch the receipt. So I think this is like something that is not really talked about. And here I am worried about my like one-time exposure.

So, you know, for people out there, it's like, yeah, you can opt for no receipt. Two-decade career of working in Target or something like that. So the first time that I ever learned about receipts, you won't know who this is, but Owen Schroyer, who is Alex Jones's sort of second in command. I went for dinner with him when I first moved to Austin forever ago. It was him and a bunch of other people. There was a couple of girls at the table with us as well, just downtown in Austin. And the receipt came out and I'm sort of new here. I'll get the meal. It'll be like nice. It'd be a nice thing for me to do. So I did it. And as I'm going to get the receipt out, one of the girls that sat around the table like hits my hand away. I'm like, what? She's like, what are you doing? as if I was about to walk out into open traffic. And, like, I was going to take the receipt and I was going to put the tip on. She was like, are you crazy? You're going to touch that? I'm like, so it kind of does show that the fringe insight from three years ago,

some of that stuff ends up being a bullseye and sort of percolates around. Now, I'm not saying that all of it is, but some of the stuff ends up being legit. Right. It is. It's definitely legit. And it is a concern, particularly for people that are handling them daily, multiple times a day and I don't know that I've really I've seen a couple people wearing gloves at cash registers like they've got um special ones that are like finger things have you seen those

an individual so maybe just the sort of your first two fingers and your thumb or something rather than having to wear sweaty gloves all day and I imagine that's I mean significant well it gets through latex as well it gets through latex there is no way of getting it perfect there is no complete no finish line no done there is simply what's the next experiment there is only play yeah yeah so the yeah the way i think about that one is uh so when is an oak tree perfect when it's an acorn when it's like a sapling when it's like a hundred years old when it's 200 years old like when is it perfect but yet somehow or another we have to be perfect but it's not it's just iteration it's just it's just evolution evolution doesn't end the only thing that ends is

is an idea in our head and our egos. Egos can't exist. If you actually really understand that there is no end, the ego has to evaporate. Say more on that. Right? So oftentimes the people who are searching for enlightenment, they think once they get the enlightenment,

then it'll be done. That's just the ego talking. That's just, that's just, oh, there is going to be this end point where then I'm going to be happy. Like that is an ego thought. process so that they can so you can whip yourself and beat yourself up to get to that place and it is just a way to convince yourself that what you want can't be found right now so if i said to you right now without going into the past without going into the future you can't find any evidence from

the past or any evidence in the future find a problem with you yeah that's funny yeah there's none You can't find it. So you need an end because the other choices to be in this moment, which is where the ego doesn't get to exist. I wrote this quote from Van Gogh this week in my newsletter that said, if I'm worth anything later, I'm worth something now, for wheat is wheat, even if people think it is grass in the beginning. Oh, I like that.

That's so fucking good. the same thing you're talking about right it is the acorn okay i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna a wheat is wheat even if people think it is i'm gonna geek out let me geek out for just a second so today i got a text from somebody who is zen uh teacher that i know and he was worried about AI and uh and so found out that i'm working you're the guy to ask yeah apparently am yeah are they coming for my zen teaching say again are they coming for my zen teaching tell me joe Yeah. And my response was, just like everything, this river is going to find the lowest ground. So where it's going to end up is already determined. And it's the same thought process that you just said there. Like, even the action that I take and that all the people will take towards influencing AI, like all of that is set. And from that same kind of point of view. So our job is, is the same it's like show up with love do what you're called to do you know draw the boundaries

say the truth that you can see and but the whole idea of like i have to manage my entire world to get to the place is just it's just a huge amount of stress it's all self-talk yeah yeah again to sort of fly the flag for the insecure over achievers out there the uh the the the desire for control. You know, if I can prepare sufficiently well, if I can know every different permutation of every different outcome, then I reduce down the play

within the system, so it's so precise so that what I think is going to happen and what is going to happen end up being so tightly correlated that there's no variance at all. Ah, okay. There we go. There's a bit of certainty. Isn't that nice? Isn't that

death? Yeah, I want I want this wholly under control and absolutely predictable existence. Yeah. Yeah. I think about this in a slightly different way, but there is no life without tension. A cell doesn't exist without tension. Your lungs don't exist without tension.

A salad? Cell. No, cell. A salad doesn't exist without tension. Dude, I had this vision. I had this vision in my mind. I was like, why has he got like bits of fucking lettuce leaf hanging across a string? I had like a tightrope walk, but it's just individual leaves of lettuce hanging over a salad bowl.

Holy fuck. Wow. Yeah. Okay. Getting back to it, a cell doesn't exist without tension. Yeah, there's just, so life doesn't exist without tension. So the idea that you're going to be at peace when there's no tension, the idea that you're going to be at peace when you've narrowed everything's down so that you don't have to actually feel that tension. is death.

So you don't find peace by having no tension. You find peace by enjoying the tension, welcoming the tension, looking forward to the tension. Is safety got anything to do with it here? Is there a degree of unsafety? There is no safety. Safety is an illusion.

What the fuck is safe? Like we're sitting in, like we're in Austin, Texas and a cool thing. Like, yeah, it's pretty safe, but hurricane earthquake fire they're like safety is just something that we like to pretend exists yeah and and also like a form of death if it feels scary to say it's important if it feels scary to say not saying it will hurt your connection if it feels scary to say not saying it prioritizes their imagined reaction over your truth.

Yeah. Why? Why? So I'm not scared to say things that aren't important to me and vulnerable to me. So I could qualify that and say that quote. I could qualify that quote and say with an open heart. To say it with an open heart, and I think that would probably be more accurate. But if I'm scared to say it,

it means that there's something important and it's something vulnerable. If I say the important thing to you and I'm vulnerable with your connection deepens. Always the case. If I am not willing to say that, it means I'm scared of a reaction that you're going to have for me,

which means I'm prioritizing you more than I'm prioritizing my own needs. Yes, yes. I'm actually prioritizing my fear over our connection as well. And over yourself. And yeah, and over myself.

That's right. So it's... And so this is how I run my business. It's how we run our marriage. It's how everything... It's like... And this prevents resentment. Like, it's amazing.

If I find something that doesn't feel right, I will speak to it. I might not speak to it right now. It might take a day. Because I'm not going to be heartless and not pay attention to the person or have compassion or empathy for where they're at. But I'm going to say the thing that's scary to say

or the thing that's bothering me. And my expectation with the 18 or so people in our organization is that they do the same thing. Like that's a, we tell them that's the job. You've got to say the hard thing. We actually start our meetings with what's the scary thing you're not saying? Because that's what keeps relationships clean. That's what keeps the problems at bay. That's like stepping into it instead of trying to avoid it.

I was trying to think about the difference between selfish and selfless. And this is a third one that's not, that's not either of them. So you're not being selfish because you're actually hurting yourself in it. You're not being selfless because you're killing the connection. And like, what the fuck is this? And you're not, and you're not trusting them. Yeah. It's like, what is it?

It's not, you know, it's one of those interesting situations. It's neither selfish nor selfless. Yeah. Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, there's no. It's just, well, it's actually, it's kind of, it's destructive to the self and it's destructive to the other as well. I guess that's one way to put it. Yeah. Right. It's like it's bad on all fronts. Yeah. I remember having this moment. So I, we did this in our company and I was just like,

we, we do this. We're going to, if something's upsetting, anybody, we talk about it. That's how we're doing. And one day I came into, and I was the woman who I, at the time, worked with most closely. And she, her name, Sarah, she's, anybody who's worked in our, or done anything in our organization, no, Sarah. She's amazing. And I walked in, I was, like, frustrated. I was like, oh, I'm so excited that you're frustrated. I was like, what? She goes, every time you're frustrated, it means that you're seeing something that we're not seen and we're going to make a big improvement.

So what is it? Totally, like, changed the whole, like, my, the way I hold my own frustration, it changed that. And then it also changed, like, how I, like, looked at the whole business because I was, oh, wow, this is really important. It's like alchemy. Yeah. doing that exactly why do you think it is that people are drawn to relationships that are very

tough that from the outside look turbulent difficult challenging uh the classic i can fix him meme uh what have you come to believe about that yeah uh could go on reverse there so you're not going to fix anybody to tell folks out there uh it's a common belief people almost seem to have it as sport or hobby, right? Like, I'm going to fix, go fix people. It almost just never, such low odds that that ever ends up working out. Why?

Because people are, people are stable, you know. There's these really beautiful studies of personality where they track people for 40 or 50 years from the time they're in their teenage years, the time that they're retired. And if you were neurotic when you were, highly neurotic when you were teenager, you're like the grumpy person at the retirement home.

You know, it's just like a stable kind of thing. You know, also if you were the sweetheart, really nice, always helping people out kind of person in high school, you're doing the same thing. Do you reckon that's the same for sociase actuality? If you were the girl that was sleeping around a load in high school, you're still the girl that's sleeping around the load in the retirement home. Well, you know, that is a concern actually with older adults right now.

So there's this, STD concerns, one of the places is most acute in public health is among older adults. Phenomenal. Which is amazing. So, yeah, people don't change because traits are, you know, traits are stable. And folks might see these articles every now and then that you can change your personality. And that is true to an extent. But the number of people who would change their personality, like the rough way to be put that is about 20 to 25% of people, like, for example, who are neurotic will turn themselves

into not neurotic people anymore. The remaining 75% to 80% will show stability over time. And the reason I like to put things that way is if you're in a position of choosing a partner, you know, this is a bet, really, right? And you're saying, okay, so I have this person who's high in neuroticism. Do I think that's going to change? 80, 75% chance, yeah. It's going to be exactly the same way for the rest of my life. 25% chance they change. That's not a bet I would probably want to make, you know. Yeah.

It's interesting when you think about sort of what people are doing when they first find a partner. They're kind of, I get the sense, and you may tell me that my belief in personal growth and malleability is misguided and must be subdued. But you're trying to find somebody that is as close to the bullseye of what it is that you're looking for whilst making the decision rationally before you get into passionate love using evidence-based insights from somebody as educated as yourself trying to find somebody that's close to the bozzi but also has I would guess as strong of a capacity to grow to work on themselves to be able to update their beliefs the way that they operate as possible and it seems

like those two variables how close are you where's the starting point and how how capable are they of running and maneuvering towards something that is more healthy? Yeah, yeah, I know exactly. So you're kind of identifying this trait that sits outside of personality a little bit, right? Which is this interest and this persistence to grow as a person.

And I think you're, gosh, if people want to put something in our top three, that would be another great trait to put in their top three. Capacity for growth. Yeah, it's capacity for growth. and that dogged commitment to it because it's one thing, you and I probably both know people who have some bright idea every other month about, oh, I'm totally going to change myself in this way.

He usually has the word radical in front of it, you know? I'm engaging in radical self-disclosure or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Radical honesty, radical painting. Yeah, and I'm always like, you know, what I'm more interested in is, I mean, that's cool and that's part of it. It's a necessary first step, but then how many people now have the dogged determination to actually make that happen? Because it's so hard, right, over the course of really years to, you know, turn that huge ship around and make it so that you have this better range in your personality.

You've got to be dead-ass committed if you are going to actually do anything. I mean, yeah, you're right. I think the way to look at it is these forces. is personality, whether it's infant upbringing, genetic predisposition, time, place, confluence, nature, nurture, whether it, you know, whatever it is, whether it's personality, whether it's attachment style, whether it's values, whether it's ideological belief, whether it's all of that stuff. It is, no matter which of those you're playing with, it is a marathon to try and get that to be nudged.

And, you know, that's where, you know, the 20% sits, right? For the most part, these are probably, I imagine there's not many people that fluke themselves into lowering the neuroticism. It's probably, you know, the people that listen to podcasts like this one. You know, the insecure overachieving personal growth maximizers who are really sort of trying to better themselves within the world.

They're thinking very carefully. they're very reflective, you know, they're really trying to work on themselves. But that's a terrifying minority of most people. That's so true, you know. So maybe for some of your listeners who, you know, maybe are really into fitness, for example, if you think about, I'm always annoyed, like January 2nd in the gym when you can't get on anything, right? Just this overrun with all the proteins taken. That's right. That's right. All these New Year's resolution people. I mean, the same exact mindset and outcomes could apply to something like personality. Like, okay, someone could have this really bright idea like they want to get fit or they want to change

their neuroticism. But who's going to be there even in March? You know, who's going to be there much less in December? And, you know, as your listeners know, who are really committed to fitness, it's not even a year, right? It's the course of numerous years and being really disciplined and constantly evolving and learning about new things and nutrition and technique and other things that actually lead to a meaningful change in their body composition and their and their fitness and their health. Same thing with your mental health and your psychological health. It's that degree of commitment and obsessiveness, right, to make some sort of long-lasting change. I want to talk about something that's really important to me.

So you're big into inequality as am I. I grew up as working classes. is possible. The only thing that was famous about the town that I grew up in in the UK is it had the highest teen pregnancy rating in the UK. And then it lost that, so it didn't even have that anymore. Fatherlessness, boys who grow up apart from their biological father are about two times more likely to land in prison or jail by age 30. Fatherlessness is a better predictor of incarceration than race or growing up poor. Young men are more likely to end up in prison or jail in the US than they are to graduate from college if they are raised in any non-intact family set up. Regardless of family income, children in intact families are about half as likely to be

diagnosed with depression. What do you make of that? I make it to be a serious crisis. And I make it, I believe in family. And I believe we have got to create the conditions for young people to be good dads and good moms, and to raise health each other. Thinking about some of the groups that you've brought up today, one of the ones that's obvious in its absence is men. Why have the left tended to not talk about men's issues, do you think? That's a good question. And I think, I mean, we thought with, I think the, I think the,

underlying issue is that for a very long time, women were second-class citizens in this country. And people were saying, does it make sense that you have women who cannot become police officers, soldiers, carpenters, governors, presidents of the United States? And that's wrong. If we believe in equality, we want to give everybody an equal opportunity. So I think there was that focus on that. I think the issue you're raising is getting more discussion and it needs far more, is that what we have seen right now, and I was on a plane coming from Washington back to Vermont, sitting next to a woman, and she's visiting her daughter at the University of Vermont. And we were chatting, and she mentioned to me that something like over 60% of the

kids in her daughter's class were women. Correct. Okay. Two women for every one man completing a four U.S. college degree, basically, yeah. All right. Not a good situation. That's more, that's a bigger gap than when Title IX came in 50 years ago. All right. This is the other direction. This is a serious issue, and I think it is not incompatible to say that we believe in women's rights, the right women to control their own body, that we don't want women to be second-class citizen, but say it the same thing, of course, we want our young men to be able to have all of the opportunities that they deserve as well. And there has not been the kind of focus on that that I think needs to be. Before we continue, if you haven't been feeling as sharp or energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start, which is why I partnered with function because they run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that take the data, put it in a simple dashboard,

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Did you know Richard Reeves he does the American Institute for Boys and Men? Policy one. I have heard of it. He wrote of boys and men. So this is just a passage from an article he wrote a little while ago. So I want you get you to react to this.

Suicide rates among men under 30 are risen by 40% since 2010 and are four times higher than among young women. Male suicides account for as many deaths as breast cancer. Men are less likely the women to go to college or to buy a home. They're more likely to be lonely and more vulnerable to addiction. Young white men from lower income homes are worse off than their fathers on almost every economic and social indicator. There is a bigger gender gap on campuses today than in 1972 when the government passed

Title IX to prevent sex-based discrimination in education, but today the disparities in college enrollment and performance are the other way around. There is no strong evidence that young men are turning against gender equality, but they have turned away from the left because the left has turned away from them. The problems of young men are not the confections of reactionaries. This is a story of elite neglect, not voter chauvinism. The Democrats have failed to address these issues. Under the Biden administration, the Centers for Disease Center Control and Prevention has refused to acknowledge the gender disparity in suicide rates. The White House Gender Policy Council has not tackled a single issue primarily facing boys and men. There have been initiatives

to promote women in STEM and construction, but nothing about encouraging men into teaching on men's health. There is women's health research initiatives, but no office on men's health. The Democrats and progressive institutions have a massive blind spot when it comes to male issues, and this is exposed in the election. At worst, men are seen as not having problems, but as being the problem. That was Richard. He's his policy wonky, D.C. Fluffy as you get. I agree with much, not all what he's saying. I think, look, here is the issue. The world in the fight for women's equality,

the world has changed. All right? 50, 60 years ago, men were the breadwinners in most households, right? Men were the bosses. Men made the most money. Men were the governors. Men were the presidents.

Men were the centers. It was a man's world. That's changed. And the fact that we have fought and achieved more equality for women is a positive thing. I agree. All right. But, but you're suddenly seeing, and I think half of what he says is very true. You're suddenly saying, Ben Phil, does anyone give a damn about me? You know, what's going on in my life? Good. We want women's equality. What about me? Have we paid enough

attention to that, attention to that? I think we have not, and I think we need to do a better job. I don't believe that everything that Reeves are saying is accurate. I understand. I was watching that now infamous interview that you and A or C did on CNN last week. It was infamous? What was Fox television picked up on it? Yeah, yeah. Well, it's just gone everywhere, right? What was infamous about it?

Well, this is what we're talking about. And then you kind of blew through when it was asked, is this going to be a challenge? That wasn't what I was interested in, primarily. What I thought was real interesting was she said, the reason that Republicans have appealed to young men is a dangerous way, they are able to radicalize and target and exploit a generation of young boys

in particular way from healthy masculinity and into an insecure masculinity that requires the domination of others who are poorer, brown, and darker or a different gender than them. Do you think Democrats have done a good job of giving men a positive vision about themselves? She's saying that this is an insecure masculinity

as opposed to healthy men. I'm not a great expert on this. I think this is a real issue and I think we've got to pay a lot more attention to it. 90% of anxiety is anticipatory, not about events, but about control over them. Uh-huh. And this link between uncertainty and anxiety being intrinsically related is so true. There's this wonderful idea called compensatory control.

What is it called? Compensatory control. Compensatory control. I'm going to speak in a language that you may not be familiar with, British. My husband went to high school in Britain. Okay, good. Did he retain? No, I just don't understand the big words.

Compensatory control. Yeah, to compensate. Oh, compensate. Okay. Compensatory control. Okay, got it. When people were told to imagine an uncertain medical diagnosis, they were more likely to see patterns in meaningless static on a TV.

Really? So basically, if you have a sense of threat coming from the outside, if you feel like control and uncertainty are very common in your life, you are more likely to construct narratives. and personify and create archetype and myth and believe in conspiracy and attach meaning where it's not there. This is from Matthew Syed. It was in the Times forever ago.

It was actually around COVID. And he basically made this point that this is before Lablich hypothesis stuff was supported or disproven or anything. It was just a notion at the time. And what he basically said was it is far easier to believe that the release of some global pandemic is the plan of a maligned scientist than it is the chance mutation of a silly little micro because at least if it's a scientist we understand there's motivation and there's desire and it feels like it's within our realm yes and i think for many people the what feels like

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

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

and probably made every single mistake personally to make it worse. And also being a mom who had kids who had anxiety and making every single mistake you could make. So I am personally responsible. You've got skin in the game. Not only skin in the game. Dude, I have bruises and broken bones when it comes to this game because I have fucked it up.

Because I didn't know. I didn't know. And if you're somebody that has really struggled with anxiety, and you then have somebody around you that's anxious, it then makes you anxious. And I can see now, in hindsight, all of the things that I did wrong. This is why I pay gladly for my children to go to therapy, adult children, because I'm like, I fucked you up in so many ways, and I didn't mean to.

Allow me to compensate. Yeah, well, let me support you in identifying the things that don't work. And let me support you in working with somebody who can help you change the settings in your mind and who can help you understand when life triggers you because it's going to. But to that point on anxiety that I want to talk about, I actually believe now that anxiety, if you can simplify what is happening in the moment, it will help you apply what every expert tells you you have to do. Because the world is so overwhelming right now, whether you're talking about the world at large and AI coming or the headlines that are distressing, or you're talking about the issues going on in your life, whether you are struggling to pay your bills, or you're scared about the rising cost of living, or maybe you have somebody in your life that's struggling and you don't know how to help them. and any one of these things can cause you in this present moment to start to feel anxious about what's going to happen. And so in that moment, God, I wish I knew this. I wish I knew this decades ago. I wish that decades ago somebody could have explained to me that any time you

feel that alarm going off, because that's what anxiety is. It's just an alarm. system in your body that is designed to wake your ass up in this moment, either because there's something that you care about that you need to do. So it's coming online as an alarm to wake up your body and your brain to help you perform. That's one type of anxiety like performance anxiety that a lot of people get. Or you have the kind of more nagging, chronic anxiety, which is what I had, which is this nagging sense that something is about to happen. And you then have this moment where you separate from your own ability to handle it. Like, I love Dr. Russell Kennedy's work. I love Russell. Yes. And yes. And the fact that he says that all anxiety is separation anxiety. I'm like,

what the hell are you talking about? It's not separate. I'm a, you know, grown-ass woman. I'm not It's not separation anxiety. My son, you know, is not, I have separation anxiety. He's like, it's not separation from another person. It's separation from self. Because, you know, if you've got a situation, let's just take, for example, you know, something that I'm seeing, and you're probably seeing this too, from a global fan base, people around the world feeling incredibly anxious about AI,

incredibly anxious about whether or not they're going to lose their job, incredibly anxious about the changes that it's going to have in the world. First of all, that's a normal thing to feel because it is completely out of your control if you get fired or not. It's completely out of your control if your job's redundant or not. It's completely out of your control how this is all going to play out. And so in the moment where you feel this alarm going off, what happened in that moment is you started to go, what if this happens, what if that, what if that, oh, my God, you separated from the one thing you can't control, which is your response to it. And so instead of going up here and going, what if this, what if that, what if the other thing, which only makes the alarm that you're feeling worse, because when you go up here, you now double down on doubting your ability to handle it. And so in that moment, if you could take a breath and drop back into your body and into the moment, go wait a minute.

Okay, so I don't know what's going to happen with AI. I don't know, you know, what's going to happen with the state of the world. But here's what I do know. I know that through my attitude and my actions, I can handle it. I know that even though I don't know what's going to happen or what if this or what if that, I can also say what if it works out. What if something bad happens and I surprise myself and I'm able to just digger it out as much as it may suck? When you start to drop back in and double down on the truth, and the truth is you can through your attitude and through the actions that you take, you can handle even terrible things that happen.

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

They're all over the U.S. He said the single thing that people do wrong with anxiety is the moment you have that separation, you go, God, what if this, and I can't handle it? Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. And then you, like, send yourself into a state of complete panic. You freeze, and now you avoid the thing you're scared of. So most people right now, if you're worried about your job, I guarantee you, you know what they're doing?

You're probably doing what Mel Robbins used to do. You're bitching to your friends. You're worrying about it. You're frozen about it. You're pissed off about it. But you know what? You're not doing the one thing that you can do, which is fucking update your resume.

Learn new skills. If you're scared about it, lean into it. Ask yourself, do I even like what I do? Maybe now is a time to tighten the belt and cut back on all the spending I don't need so that I can create a longer run away and figure out what changes I want to make. Because you're not stuck in the job.

You're not stuck where you are. At any moment, you can fucking change. But if you do what I used to do, which is separate from your power to change and separate from your ability to change your attitude or to learn from somebody like you or to get the support that you need, then you're going to trigger a bigger alarm. And you're going to become the single biggest reason why you stay stuck. And it's in these moments. in these moments where life overwhelms you,

that's the mistake I made for years. And then the mistake I made as a parent? Oh, Jesus. My kid would be overwhelmed. And, you know, as a mom, you're like, okay, no problem. You can do a sleep under, not a sleep over. Oh, no problem. You can sleep on the floor of our bedroom for six months since you're scared to be in your room.

You know what I'm signaling as a parent? I'm signaling I don't think you can handle it. Yeah. And so you should be scared. Because I'm showing you that I don't think you can handle it.