Modern Wisdom - #1046 - Russ - Can Ambitious People Ever Have Balance?

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

Russ is a rapper, singer, songwriter, and producer. Is obsession a gift or a choice? If you want to do something truly great, the idea of balance can start to feel like a comforting lie. So what does it actually cost to win? How did Russ go from an independent producer to a Billboard-winning artist by sacrificing almost everything else in his life, and was it worth it? Expect to learn why you have to stop blaming your parents for you life eventually, how to take your life seriously and why that is okay, why your fear of embarrassment is killing your dreams and how to get over it, the verse that Russ resonates most deeply with, what the darkest side of the music industry is right now, how legit the Spotify charts actually are, the moment Russ learned being an independent musician was a non-negotiable 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 New pricing since recording: Function is now just $365, plus get $25 off at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.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

You were talking about work-life balance and your inability to have it. Yeah. Man, I mean, balance is just, it's a luxury now. It's a privilege. You can't have it on the way up. It just has to be full 100% commitment to the grind. So now I'm trying to have more balance, but the guilt is there, you know, still. Like, it's just that PTSD of like, I shouldn't be relaxing.

right now, you know? It's a difficult question to work out, you know, almost everybody's on the come-up. By design, very few people make it or have made it, right? There's way more people that want to be there than are there. And that means, first off, that it's sort of an icky situation because the total addressable market for people who need to learn how to take their foot off the gas is basically zero, and the total addressable market for people that could do with working harder to achieve their dreams is still pretty high.

But a good question to ask yourself is, okay, let's say that you achieve the things that you want to achieve. You get to where you're supposed to get to. Yeah. What then? Then what do you do? That has been beating my ass for like two years, that question. Because here's kind of like how I thought about it. Is the thing I'm scared of now is not having a horizon.

You know? Because in the past, my present self was not my future self. there was a huge gap between who I was and who I wanted to become. And that gap, the distance is what birthed, the hunger and the velocity. You know? And now my present self is my past's future self. Like the gap has collapsed. So the hunger has nowhere like obvious to point.

And it's scary because, you know, it's not really a fear of complacency. It's a fear of like directional ambiguity. You know what I mean? And, you know, kind of to touch on what you said where the market for people trying to get here versus people who are here, it's obviously huge, but a huge difference. But the engine that was driving me, and I think drives most people at the beginning, is here's this person that I want to become, that I can imagine. And that engine works until you arrive. And most people never arrive, so they never have to confront this. but high achievers have to confront it.

And it's just honest, you know? And so now it's trying to figure out, like, not necessarily the new dream, but sort of like relocalizing the hunger, trying to find a new domain for it. I think that's why, to be honest, therapy has been so activating for me and interesting because the ambition, like, moved houses

to this internal landscape where I can, like, attack the internal world because at the beginning, the external stuff is such a motivator, career status, metrics, validation. Yeah, all that. But then you get it and you're like, well, I can't keep tricking my brain into thinking that I want another plaque or another 100 grand, you know what I mean, or whatever it is. It's this internal world is so fascinating because it's untapped land.

It's new. Yeah, it's new. It's, but the issue with this is there's no finish line. And there's no metrics of program. There's no metric of, so it's real easy to just get lost in myself and end up just doing this endless self-monitoring rumination. It's like, all right, hold on. Well, you apply the same hypervigilance and obsession

that you do to finding the perfect kick drum to working out your relationship with your parents. Exactly. And it's like, maybe you need to relax today, not attack this relationship. Think about this. So many people, I believe, have an obsession with personal development,

I certainly know that this is true for me because it was an anesthetic against not liking who I was in the moment. I was able to delay, I was able to put off, put on hiatus, self-love because I knew that tomorrow me was going to be better than today me.

So it didn't matter that I didn't love myself today because tomorrow I'll be better. But tomorrow I might, well, I'm moving in the right direction. I don't need to matter about where I am now. Well, you know, I haven't reached this level of validation or this particular achievement that I've got. And then when you do arrive or get close to arriving, or you outstrip the non-goals that you didn't really have, and you just think, like, what the fuck am I doing here? You're forced to confront a much more difficult question,

which is I can no longer artificially inflate my, like, artificially add buoyancy to my own lack of self-love with tomorrow's promises. Because I'm already so. so out past where I thought I was going to get to, tomorrow all of this feels like a dream. So, yeah, you end up in a very odd situation where you're, this is gold medalist syndrome. It's the same, it's a classic, classic, classic situation that fame won't fix yourself worth, money won't make you happy, you don't love that pretty girl, she's just

hot and difficult to get, like you should work less, you should see your parents more, these lessons that everybody who has just become famous or wealthy or got the girl that they thought that they wanted all along or has just lost a parent, all of them proclaim these revelations with like the vigor of someone that's just gone through a religious awakening. Why? Well, either, one of a couple of things. First off, they are satisfied by this, but are lying to everybody else to try and pull the ladder up after them so that they don't continue going after it. Secondly, they're ungrateful or they're unable to sort of accept the blessings that life and their hard work

has given them. Or thirdly, what they're saying is fucking true. And external accolades won't fill internal voids. And the prevalence of it, the fact it's so ubiquitous and so many people arrive at this and then go, oh, fuck. So many of my problems are still here. All have the same epiphany. Correct. That's what I've been telling people. It was like, what if we're right? You considered that as an alternative. Well, the reason that this is so painful, I think it's very painful for the people that have gotten there, and it's very uncomfortable for the people that haven't. Because if the people at the end of the race tell people who are still running that the end of the race isn't actually worth it, that really fucking ruins the promise. At least they got it and are saying that it's not worth it.

I haven't even got it yet and you're trying to convince me that it's not worth it. How fucking despondent is that? Yeah. Well, it comes out of touch. And I wouldn't even say it's not worth it. It's just not going to be what you feel. think. It's not going to fix the things that you think it's going to fix. You know, it's going to address material issues, which is huge. You know what I mean? That's a huge struggle for most people,

but it does not address any internal struggle you have. And in fact, now that the material struggle is taken care of, now all you have to do is focus on like the internal struggle, which fucks your head up because you're like, damn, you're telling me none of this success fixes it? Like, no money. No, like none of it's going to do it. Do you know what it would be a good analogy here? It would be like talking about food and water. There is no amount of food that you can eat unless it contains water that is going to keep you hydrated. It's a great analogy. It's just the wrong pathway. You know, it's like trying to fuel your petrol car with electricity. Like powerful and there's bits of the car that need electricity to run. But it's not the thing for that particular solution. It's not the right fuel.

I think that's what's fucked my head up is having to reconcile with the fact that the old fuel doesn't work anymore. and trying to find new fuel, you know. And it's tough because I was relying on that old fuel for so long. What did that fuel look like for you? Insecurity mixed with conviction, you know. It was like, it was, I don't feel like I'm enough, but I believe I can become enough. And it was a psychotic level of delusional confidence in the byproduct of that was discipline and consistency, you know, It's like, I believed with every fiber of my being that I was going to become this massive

successful artist. I had already, like, my success was decided by me in my head. The outcome was non-negotiable. It was inevitable. And when something's inevitable, the choices aren't choices. They're just, I was living in the process. It was the identity alignment. It was, this is who I'm becoming and this is what that person does.

which is why my discipline and consistency and work ethic that a lot of people clap for, it never felt heroic or dramatic. It just felt obvious. This is just what I'm, this is what this person does. How long did you release a song a week for? Two and a half years. Right.

Yeah. So like 120, 100 and 40 songs. Yeah. And that was after doing 11 albums, which was like 110 songs. You know? But again, it just felt like it never felt like this huge, undertaking. It was just... What you did? Yeah, if you tell somebody, hey, in six months, you guarantee are going to have

the best physique of your life, you're just going to do the things every day that are required to get to that point. I'd already decided I was successful. I've been thinking about consistency a lot. Not too dissimilar to you. I think the same work rate of a artist releasing a song a week would be podcast doing three episodes a week. And that's the place that we've been at for coming up on six years now. I've always sort of bowed at the altar of consistency. I actually think that I'm stubborn. I'm not convinced that I'm,

I think stubbornness and consistency net out to the same outcome. Interesting. But they come from a little bit of a different place. And it's more, stubbornness is kind of, you don't have any choice but to do it. Right, right. So think about this.

You have obsession, motivation and discipline. Yeah. So motivation is I want to do this thing. Discipline is I will make myself do this thing. And obsession is I can't not do this thing. Right. Right.

But all of them kind of the outcome is the same. The same. Yes. But where it's coming from, the fuel that you're using to push yourself forward is kind of different. So true. Yeah. And at the beginning, like I said, I was running at this version of me that was so far away. But it was such a clear visual was as if I was.

looking at the finish line and I could see myself waiting for me at the finish line. So I knew I was going to get there. But now the version of me that I'm chasing feels like he's like right around the corner. Or behind you. I've already outstripped him. Yeah. I've outstripped my own dreams. I don't know where to run.

I'll run inwards and just attack all my, you know, issues internally and, you know, other patterns. How many times do you see someone do that, but in a more obvious pivot, which is, you know, They were a super gregarious party guy, Lafario in their 20s, and then they turned to endurance racing in their 30s or their 40s, and now they do triathlons and ironmans and stuff like that. Yeah. It's having to relocalize all that energy and hunger. It's tough, though, because, I mean, there's no way to slice it.

Like, I don't want the same things I wanted when I was 22. Those same things can't drive me. I can't be driven by the need to, sell out a tour and go platinum or make my and buy my mom a house it's like I did all that so I can't keep tricking myself into this what I tried to do is like yeah but I got to get another house like I got to get another it's like that doesn't work it's not it's not enough sustenance you know yeah it's a interesting one because habituation happens to everybody you know no matter how successful and unsuccessful you are even if you're working a job that you fucking hate and it doesn't pay that

much. You got excited for the car that you were going to lease. And then when you got the car, after a little while, you got bored of it and you need to get a slightly better one. If you got a slightly worse one, you felt bad about yourself. But if you got a slightly better one, then it was satisfying for a while. And then the same thing, in the same thing, and the same thing. And I think there is an assumption that at some point you arrive and that that compulsion is relinquished from you. You've like exorcised, you've expunged it. The arrival is the facade. This is what me and my best friend were just talking about. We realize It's like, it's cliche, but the race is the finish line.

That's like, that getting there is the most fun to me. That's been a blast. That was the, I wish I saw how fruitful that part truly was. Because like you said, there's no arrival, you know, there's no, okay, I'm done what? Putting in work. I'm done showing up. I'm done being motivated, being dis. No, it's really like all of a sudden you did this journey and you became this

version of yourself that you always wanted to become. And I suppose that that's the arrival, but arriving is so much more fun. It is so much more fun to be a little richer than you were yesterday than merely to be rich, Alice Wellington Rowlands. It's so real. I mean, dude, Andrew Tate, fucking, the philosopher, A. Tate, said, uh, having things isn't fun. Getting things is fun. 100%. And unfortunately, what this means is, it's that Luke Combs' fucking Bellion song, if the higher I climb is the further I fall,

then why I love anything at all? Wow. You know, last week I found out that this is the eighth biggest podcast in the world. I'm the eighth biggest podcaster in the world as of last week's Spotify charts. And it was fantastic. And one of my friends, who is like the new business development manager for me,

rang and was like, dude, I'm so fucking happy for you, but you do know what this means next year. And I was like, yep, it means that we've got to be number eight or number seven or number six. Or I'm a loser. I'm going to fucking hate it. Yeah, right. But if I'd been 12th this year and didn't know where I'd charted, it wouldn't have mattered. Right. So there is a particular type of mindset that you have and learning to relinquish that, learning to be like,

just fuck, it's just nice. Yeah. It's just nice to have that. Clap for yourself. Yeah. But the difference between, and this is one of the great advantages that nobody ever realizes as it's happening, when you're on the climb, it is easier at the beginning in the middle of your journey within whatever it is, even if it's just mastery, even if it's internal mastery, when you start your therapy journey, look at all of the low-hanging fruit about I never realized that my parents did that and that was strange. And I never realized I had that conversation with my sister that was formative and it made me think about the thing. In the beginning of your journey, the nub gains are really. and all of this stuff's just, you're accumulating it all the time, so progress comes relatively easily.

Yeah. But as you get better at anything, and this is unfortunately both true for internal and external metrics, you start going to the gym, you gain strength every session. After 10 years of training, you gain strength every, like three months, every quarter. It's harder to show up when that's happening. There's less motivation. Yeah. And it means that pullbacks are more likely because you actually have something to lose.

A hundred percent. Nothing to lose in the beginning. Tell me about. the therapy insights you didn't know that you forgot. Right? I didn't fucking know them. Now could I forget about them? Whereas now, if you encounter some conversation with your girlfriend and you go, fuck, there's that pattern again. There's that. I know about that pattern. There's an obligation for me to act on it. That means that I have not got, you know, and if I don't act on it, then I'm a piece of shit. I've taken a step backward. What was the point of all of the therapy? Why? Therapy's fucking point. I shouldn't

even go to any other. You know what I mean? Yeah. The higher I climb, the further I fall. It's so true. And I think, you know, I always like, the analogy I use is video games and like creating a player and, you know, starting as a 50 overall, right? And it's so fun and you gain attributes so quickly and get yourself up to a 75 and 85. But then you get to a 98 overall. It's like, it's just not that fun to play anymore. And you just want to start a new career. And so I think for me, that's kind of why I've been like wanting to get into acting. Because again, it's almost like I'm trying to trick my brain into go climb a new mountain, even though I know what's at the top. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, that's a really, I've never heard anybody talk about that before. I think that's so interesting that you already know that this is just a race in a different territory.

I know what it is. It's the same race in a different territory. It just gives me an opportunity to enjoy the climb again, though. Because I'm like, I want to go climb a mountain because last time I wasn't there for. the climb. I was mentally at the summit the whole time. I don't know if it's, I don't know how easy it is to be there, dude, especially when you're thinking, um, the sort of stuff that you do, performing on stage to stadiums and arenas of people and it's your music and they're your fans and they really resonate with you. And then you get off and you've got to work out, are we getting

chick-fil-a or sweet green? What, what time's the lobby call tomorrow? Have we got, because the bus, fuck dude that bus like actually the bed is kind of a bit you know it's a little bit I like the bus that we had last you're the norm the normalcy yeah of the worries that you have are always there and I think that that's why envy about anybody's life especially what looks from the outside like a magnificent life um life is not made of peak experiences like that it's not made of days on stage no and playing to arenas life is an average Tuesday afternoon yeah that's a majority of it Correct. Life is made up of average two-south.

I've had to learn to look around as much as I can and tell myself, this is enough. Like this moment is enough. Because to what you're saying, me sitting with my girl on the couch and our two dogs, that is the majority of the time. It's not selling out a show, you know. And I think part of me sometimes wants to curate a life that is full of as many peak moments. as possible. But I just know that that's not real, you know? It's like, because then I'll do that and I'm missing, like, the thing I can really sink my teeth into, which is balance and

normalcy and just hanging out with my family and all of a sudden, you know, you don't see your dad for a year and a half because you're like over here trying to chase this high of being on a stage or conquering something, you know, so it's tough though, man. Have you found even when you've played your biggest shows that watch the footage back, or watching the vlogs, and all the rest of it. Do you have more enjoyment watching it back than you did doing it at the time?

Do you remember it now through the lens of the camera, not the lens of where you were? Because it looks like it's someone else's shit. Yeah. So I can appreciate someone else's success. Very hard for me to appreciate my own. And when it's happening in front of me, a lot of times it's tough.

It's really hard to be present for me. It's very difficult. I spend a lot of my life living outside of my body. and living inside my head, you know? And so what I used to do on stage was just, I'll just get drunk, you know, I'll turn my brain off. That's how I would turn my brain off. And it worked, you know what I mean?

But it's not sustainable. And so now I do my shows sober. And it's harder to be present because I'll be up there and a lot of times I'm in my head. Yeah, me too. You know, like, when you're drinking on stage, You don't really notice nor care about anyone's facial expression about what you just said, did, whatever.

You're just having a blast. When you're sober on stage and I'm singing a song, I can see you just like, what was that? Did I fuck up? Was this not cool? You know, and it just boom. In a room of 15,000 people. There's one girl in the front row.

Yeah, it's so true, bro. I did, I finished off my tour last week. So I did Salt Lake, Denver, Vancouver. Nice. Which was lovely. It was really cool way to finish it up. We'd started in New York a couple of months ago, and then we rounded it out there. And the final show that I did, the park hands on the curtain behind me were brighter than I was used to, which meant that the first four rows were illuminated.

It's the worst. And they only had one stage light. Look at how fucking specifically like opulent and bourgeois this sounds. But it meant that the first four rows and would just, I could see people's eyes, I could see the facial expressions, I could see if somebody needed to go to the bathroom. I could see everything. Like this fucking sucks. This blows so much. But another stage, another stage, yeah, exactly, put another stage like, oh me, I'll darken them down. This episode is brought to you by Shopify.

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by going to the link in the description below or heading to Shopify.com slash modern wisdom, all lowercase. That's Shopify.com slash modern wisdom to start selling today. I saw you give a break in the middle of one of your performances and said, I just want to say every parent is going to fuck their kids up a little bit, man.

You get to an age where you can't keep blaming them. Yeah. Yeah. What's that mean to you? Yeah, I think naturally when you start therapy, you start descending into the root of a lot of your patterns. And it obviously starts with childhood. And the natural inclination is to like point the finger and be like, why would you, why, why? But the reality is they didn't have the tools. you know like I look back and I'm like my dad was probably my age when he had me you know what I mean

I'm like like I would be this retort yeah it's like what there's no shot that I would do well I would do well now compared to what I would do five years ago but yeah I just had to get to a place of understanding that I love my parents and there's also just things that they didn't mean to pass on to me in behaviors and, you know, yeah, just habits that they didn't mean to pass on, but they did. And I got to unlearn them. And everyone's parents are going to, like, you know, unknowingly pass on unhealthy shit. But it's like at a certain age, you have to, I have to father myself, you know. Can I read you an essay? Please. So I wrote this a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. The Parental Attribution Era. We live blaming our parents, practically a right of

passage in modern psychology, but there's a double standard buried in the trend. We attribute what's broken in us to our upbringing, while claiming what's strong in us is ours alone. Call it the parental attribution error, like the fundamental attribution error, where we blame others' actions on their character, but excuse our own by pointing to circumstance. Like, I cut that guy off in traffic because I'm late, he cut me off because he's a dick. It's a skewed way of assigning credit We externalize the bad and internalize the good. We're quick to blame and slow to credit. You say you're anxiously attached because no one held you when you needed it, but isn't your ability to be alone in your emotions and to endure discomfort quietly, also forged in the same crucible. You blame your

parents for pushing you too hard in school, convinced it made you perfectionistic and neurotic. But when was the last time you acknowledged that same pressure gave you ambition, discipline, and drive? You point to a childhood where mistakes weren't tolerated is the reason you fear failure, but what about your meticulousness, your standards, your refusal to phone it in? You complain that no one ever asked you what you wanted growing up, but could that also be why you're so tuned in to what everyone else needs? You say your low self-worth comes from your never being praised, but isn't that the same fuel that makes you outwork everyone around you?

You trace your conflict avoidance back to all the shouting at home, but isn't that also where your talent for de-escalation and an emotional radar came from? You chalk up your hyper-independence not being able to trust anyone, but isn't that also what made you capable, adaptable, and calm and depressed? You say you're emotionally guarded because no one took your feelings seriously, but isn't that also why you're steady when the people around you fall apart? You've labeled yourself a people-pleaser because you had to keep the peace at home, but maybe that's also why your social fluency and emotional intelligence were born. You blame your poor boundaries on parents who didn't respect yours, but isn't that also why you're so careful to not cross anyone else's? You say your fear of being a burden comes from being treated like one, but isn't that the same fear that now makes you reliable, disciplined and impossible to disappoint?

You attribute your sensitivity to criticism to all of the judgment you grew up with, but isn't that also what makes you thoughtful, receptive and serious about getting better? You say your nervous system never relaxes because your home was unpredictable, but isn't that also why you're perceptive, quick-thinking, and never caught off guard? The traits you're most ashamed of are often just the dark side of something light. Your sharp edges didn't appear out of nowhere, they're often the byproduct of something useful, a strength turned up too high or a gift handled without guidance.

Think about a sword, powerful, precise, designed to cut through resistance. But if it's double-edged and most strengths are, then sometimes it nicks you on the back swing. That doesn't mean that you throw the sword away. It means that you learn how to hold it properly. Because most traits worth having come with risk. The truth is messier than a single cause. Every trait is entangled. Wounds and gifts often share a root.

The self-reliance you're proud of may come from the same childhood where you couldn't rely on anyone. The confidence you carry may have started as a defense over ever feeling smaller dismissed again. Even your drive to succeed may be rooted in the fear of not being good. good enough. But this perspective requires maturity. It's simpler to cast yourself as the victim of bad parenting than to reckon with a complicated inheritance. It's easier to say, they hurt me than to admit they shaped me in ways I'm still figuring out. The cultural narrative rewards blaming your parents more than it does understanding them. Therapy turns them into victims and villains. Instagram makes them punchlines, but how often do you thank them in the same breath that you critique them? None of this

excuses abuse, neglect or dysfunction, but it does ask for honesty. And you're going to draw a straight line from your childhood to your flaws. You should also draw that same lineage to your strengths. If you can't let your parents take credit for what's right with you, maybe you shouldn't be so quick to make them the villains for what's wrong. Incredible. Yes. Yes. You know, it's, because I've thought about that a lot. First of all, that was incredible. Thank you. Yeah. If that doesn't go viral. I don't know what. But I've thought about that a lot. And the answer I've come to with talking to certain people is that maybe there was another way to still give you those traits. You know what I mean? Without the shortcoming. Without exactly. And someone like myself, I was able to use all those

negative things as fuel and still achieve in spite of because of whatever but that's just because of how I'm wired somebody else who's wired differently would be just buried underneath some of that shit you know what I mean under some of the heavy criticism or whatever the negative traits are so it's also it sounds good if you succeed it doesn't sound good if you don't succeed you know because you've alchemized it right which takes It's a special person. So, yeah, for me, it's just the main point, I think, again, is that maybe there was another way for me to develop those traits.

Maybe it didn't have to come through this, like, pain and fuckery, you know? Yeah. But I agree in essence that, you know, this is what my dad always tells me. He's like, yeah, but you turned out, all right? I'm like, that's because I'm fucking awesome, but maybe it didn't need to go that way. I think we asking the question, interesting difference between something being a fluke chance

and something being sort of written in the stars. So if you were to run the universe back a thousand times, how many times does this happen to you? And I think that's an interesting question to ask yourself. Like you could think about convergence, right? This thing was kind of, always meant to be. Yeah.

Or coincidence. This thing wasn't. So is it coincidence or is it convergence? And I think that's a cool question to ask because what you realize is that the inheritance you've got in terms of your traits, I actually be pretty fucking rare for you, that you shouldn't be this person, really. Oh. You know, not just that you're a rare person, but of all of the persons you could have been,

this is a rare version. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, there are way more versions of you, and maybe there's not, maybe most of the versions of you result in you being a multi-platinum. That's what I have to. Yeah. Yeah. It's very, um, the self-authoring nature of that, the fact, it makes you feel like you

are the, um, rider on the top of the elephant that's actually controlled it, as opposed to this fucking elephant was going where it wanted. And I was like, just thought I was guiding it along the way. Isn't that interesting? That's a, uh, that concept is what I name my deluxe. album after, the elephant and the writer. Is it so interesting to me, you swear you're in control. But that elephant, once it decides where it wants to go, it's going.

Yeah. Yeah. Fuck. I've heard you talk about people dismissing internal struggle. Well, people only validate struggles that they understand. Yeah. There's a line from Oliver Berkman that says, just because someone carries it well doesn't mean the weight isn't heavy.

Yeah. I think it's so great. God. Yeah. Yeah, and I think with men especially, you know, the whole cliche, like, we've been taught to hide it and to carry it alone. And that's what makes you be a man is carrying all your shit and keeping it under wraps, you know. And I also like, there is truth and validity to the fact that material struggle is vital, you know. Having food, water and shelter is necessary.

there are so many internal struggles that are harder to see and it doesn't mean that they're not real. You know, and I think, I think everyone is just so quick to get into this, uh, like struggle competition with people. Like, yeah, but I had to go through this.

But there's always going to be someone who can say, that's cute, I had to go through this. It doesn't mean that your shit isn't real. It didn't have, it doesn't mean it didn't have an impact, didn't affect you. Yeah. I don't know, it's so divisive to me. Well, it's an interesting one because,

and this speaks to your age and stage of development, two things can be true at once. Many people who don't deserve the term victim use it as a way to gain leverage and status and accolade. And also, lots of people are denying just how fucking hard their life was. So Rogan's got this idea where you say, the worst thing that's ever happened to you

is the worst thing that's ever happened to you. So if the worst day of your life is somebody misgendering you in a Starbucks, then that's a pretty big deal. But if the worst day of your life is you running into battle at the fucking Battle of the Somme, that is also, and everything then becomes kind of relative to that. And it's also, there's a recency buyers. Yeah. There's a, well, life's been pretty good recently.

Yeah. And you begin to get a bit of sort of like, you know, velvet nightgown. syndrome where you think, well, stuff doesn't really need to be that. And then you get hit by something and you realize, me 10 years ago would have dealt with this more differently. And now me now feels like I'm more fragile. We're not static. And one person's ability or lack of to deal with discomfort needs to be sort of scrutinized carefully.

You go, I don't think that that's that big of a deal. And there's a very easy way to call that out. But also going, dude, you need to accept when you've been kicked in the dick. and when it's really, really hurt. Yeah. I think lately I've just been trying to expand my capacity to handle bullshit, you know? How do you do that?

Ugh. God, I wish I fucking, like, new really actionable advice. For me, I think it's just interrupting patterns, catching them. When I start to spiral and start to catastrophize certain things, just at least step one being aware that I do that, step two is now interrupting it and being like, I'm okay. My world is okay.

It's not a fucking tragedy. But it's tough. And I think that was a lot of my resistance with wanting more success was, well, more success means getting hit more. And I've been hit before by my last version of success.

I don't want to be hit again. But then I don't want less success because then I'm stagnant. So the only answer is, you need to increase your capacity to handle shit, you know, to juggle. Me and my therapist always talk about is grief and gratitude simultaneously, you know? And that's been, um, that's been challenging, man, because I could have swore once you get success. It's just all things that you're supposed to be grateful for.

There is no more grief. Just all gratitude. It's all fun shit. I used to always like look around and be like, this is fucked up and they fuck that launch up and this just happened, whatever, and just feel like I had some broken version of success. Like, surely there's something wrong with the version of success that I bought. I need to trade this back in. Like, this is malfunctioned.

This is not right. But it's like, no, man, there is always going to be some bullshit and some good shit going on. And it's just the ability to hold both, you know, and not just ignore the bullshit, you know, acknowledge it, but not ignore the gratitude and not think that it's just supposed to only be that. Well, that's a painful realization for everybody that there will be no point when you have no problems in life. Yeah. What did you think that one day you were going to have no more problems? Like getting to a level in a video game and there being no enemies left. That's not the way that life works. There will never be a time when you have no problem. Right. And unfortunately,

that's not what they sell you though. Yeah. Oh, no, no, no. Reach the escape velocity, dude. Out in space, they can't hear you. scream and they definitely can't hear your fucking problems. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know one of those balance boards, it's like a skateboard deck and it's got a cylinder underneath it and people use it for working on their balance? Yeah. I think about life a lot of the time kind of like that.

Even when you're, it looks really flat and I'm looking at you and you're almost perfectly still. Yeah. You're making these little micro adjustments at all times and then sometimes you go, whoa! And you're real, whoa! On one side or the other. And I just, the more.

The more that I experience life, the more that I think it works like that. Yeah. That there is no point where you reach stasis. There are times when you are more steady and more flat, and there are times where you are more extreme. And sometimes you meant to because you're playing around, and sometimes you were forced to because there was a big fucking gust of wind. Yeah.

But there's no point where you're not fixing. Making those micro adjustments. Fixing things and making micro adjustments. Yeah. You'll never be able to fully take your eyes off the ball. And I think that was, it still is a big. The hurdle of mine is overreacting and catastrophizing the small little like, you know, adjustments that need to be made.

And it's because it feels, it feels like a, it used to feel like a threat against who I was and what I built and did I build something unstable? Did I build something not that great? Wrong. Did I build something wrong? Am I wrong? Am I fucked up? Well, what that reinforces, if you don't.

ever hear this and it's why it's so wonderful to hear the inner workings of somebody's mind it helps people to realize oh this isn't a personal curse yes on me this isn't because i did it wrong this isn't because this is just the way life always is for me everybody else has arrived everybody else is going to have it in such an easy gentle way they're whole they don't have problems yeah no no no this is endemic. This is a feature. It's not a bug. Yeah. And everybody else feels this too. They just don't talk about it. This is why I envy bands. I envy bands because you guys all go through the same shit together. That's so incredible to me. Like I think about the Beatles. I'm like, you all got famous

at the exact same time. Like, so you always had each other to talk to. But when you're just an artist, everything you're experiencing feels like it's happening in a vacuum and you're sure that nobody else is having this experience well what they, even if they say they are having your experience you can excuse it away because well the way that they play or the music there

the genre, the fan group that well you know their Instagram game is like totally don't know they actually came up on the there's a way to excuse it but yeah you're right you have a it's a wonderful a wonderful split test when you're in a band if you're one of four or six or whatever members of a band you go well everybody else is experiencing the exact same thing

maybe they play a different instrument but we're all and so the similarities we can assume are because of the situation and the differences we can assume are just mine right because I my constitution is different to theirs and it helps you to run a pretty good experiment on why you feel the way you do yeah and I think that was comforting on the come-up because me and my friends were all at the same place. You know what I mean?

So there was a bit of synergy there psychologically and there was community inherently. And then when one of you kind of ascends to this crazy level, it's kind of like, well, now I know nobody who gets this. And you expect me to what, go like make friends as an adult? That's impossible. You know what I mean? So it's just fucked. Yeah.

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about why it's okay to take your life seriously? Because I think people downplay their own passion and zeal for wanting to make a dream come true out of fear of embarrassment, fear of coming off cringy because you really want that. It's that whole, like, I'm going to downplay what I want so that if I don't get it, I can just say, I didn't even really want it anyway. You do want it, and that's okay. That's why I love, like, Timothy Shalomey coming out and saying, I want to be great. I'm in pursuit of greatness.

That's awesome. All this fake modesty, like, too cool shit, I fucking hate. I think it's fake. And I think that that's just, it's posturing, it's image management. You're trying to be relatable. It's not real, though. Like, I love hearing people claim that, I'm trying to be the biggest artist in the world. I want to be the best.

I think I'm the best. I love that. Because we all have something we desperately want, you know, and I think it's okay for you to be serious about getting that. I think that there's times where you shouldn't take yourself and certain things too serious, but it's okay to take your life serious. This is your life.

You're not going to take this serious? If not this, then what? You know? It's strange to me. It's very strange. I think seriousness gets a bad rap. Yeah. Because it's seen as a stern, not fun having, too rigid, to contrived.

And yeah, totally effortless achievement from the outside doesn't trigger many of the defense mechanisms because, oh my God, he must just be so talented. You know, like how amazing. And he's not sort of shoving it in our face and he didn't say what he was going to do before and so on and so forth after. But I think taking things seriously and the bravery to take something seriously is a wonderful skill to develop. Ernestness as well. Yeah. Think about seriousness in your idea, I think, is to do with saying what you want, frankly, and showing the level of effort and commitment that you're prepared to put in to go and get it.

It might be a good way to look at it. Yeah. But earnestness would be the same but directed inwardly toward emotions. So earnestness would be the bravery to take your emotions seriously. And I like earnest people. You know, I think your point is basically that detachment is self-protection. Yeah, 100%. By keeping things at a distance.

I don't really connect myself. It's the person who's never fully committed in a relationship. Yeah. because, well, if they reject me, they're not rejecting me, because I kept this little bit of me for me. Yeah. They didn't, you know, they didn't get to see all of me. Exactly, yeah, because if I'd really wanted them, if I'd really tried,

I would have. Then I would have had them. But I didn't. I held this little bit back. Yeah. So you... You always come out on top. Yeah, you avoid failure publicly by guaranteeing your failure privately.

Wow. Yeah. It's a defense mechanism against embarrassment, you know? And, yeah. Yeah, it's It's just okay to Want something in your life and want to take it serious You know, it just is

And I think It's kind of interesting I always like related back to watching certain anime And certain characters Who didn't have the innate skill They were fucking annoying They had to like really bust their ass To like get good and get their powers and shit

And they were annoying to me They were not as cool as the character Who was just nonchalant and just like had the shit. Yep, yep. And I think as dudes, we all look at that guy like, he's fucking awesome. He's not even trying and he's badass. And we look at the main character who like doesn't have the skills yet has to work as like annoying.

But to me, that's just because it's confronting a lot of times, you know. There's a lot of times when I see somebody busting their ass and saying like this is the journey I'm about to go on. This is what I want. This is what I'm willing to do. This is what I'm going after. I'm not there yet. but I believe I can get there. I see how people react to that.

And I just think it's confronting because it's a mirror for most people. It's asking you, are you willing to do the work that this person is willing to do? What are you doing with your life? But it also suggests that success is more in reach than you might think. That's the part that fucks people up. Yeah. Because, well, actually, it's not because of blaze innate talent that's this mystical, ephemeral, difficult to replicate thing. Yeah.

Oh, he just worked hard. and oh fuck that means all I needed to do was work hard and therefore the fact that I'm not where they are might be my fault because I didn't try. You know what's easier to say? I think he just sold his soul. I think that's like it's got to be what it is. It's so much easier to just do that

instead of the truth. The truth is far less sexy. Correct. That's, I mean, that is increasingly the direction of this podcast going in, very unsexy truths, unfortunately. Over and over. And, you know, some of the seductive mirages that I was facing when I was a younger man.

And now that I'm young but slightly less younger man, a lot of, I've got to them and realized it wasn't some oasis. It was just like this sort of vision thing. And one of those is earnestness and seriousness and taking things seriously. And I fucking hate, I hate ironic speech. much. I think it fucking blows. This sort of cynical side eye. I never plant my position in the ground. I never say like, hey, you went too far. Like, you're not supposed to say that. It's always lull, but actually you're the vote. It's like, no, don't say lull. Say, fuck you because that's how

you felt. Yeah. But because you don't want to say to somebody that you actually hold a position that you can be hurt by something or that you care about something. It's as soon as you say that you care about something that's a flag that's planted in the ground and that gives a territory that other people can try to attack. Whereas if you're, I didn't really care about her all that much. It wasn't really that important to me. I didn't want the business to go that way. Like, I'm not that, you know, like I'm just doing comedy on the side.

Like it's just like, you know, whatever, whatever. I had another essay recently. Procrastination is often about fear. We like to pretend procrastination is a time management problem, but regularly it isn't. It's often a self-protection strategy wearing a Fitbit. When we delay doing the thing that we know we should do, we're sometimes not wrestling with our schedule,

we're wrestling with our self-worth. The logic goes like this. If I try and fail, everyone will see. So if I never try at all, the failure is private, denial, and safe. This is the psychological slight of hand at the heart of much procrastination.

It feels like avoidance, but functions like armor. You convince yourself the task is scary or the conditions aren't perfect or you need to feel ready first. But really, you're just terrified that doing your best might not be good enough so you don't do anything.

Yeah. I think that's everyone. I think you nailed it too with, you know, it's just you get to fail privately. And that's, and you can handle that, you know. But I just, I have a lot of respect for people who publicly go after shit. And I think deep down, it's an attractive trait. That's why a lot of times those people attract a lot of fans and a lot, because we all

know as society, ambition and earnestness is attractive because we know it's a really tough thing to have and it's no surprise that it's also polarizing. With that people need, feel the need to like temper their ambition and their earnestness though. Because if you're too much, then in the UK you would be called a keynote as in keen, like you're too keen. You're overly enthusiastic. Yeah. It would be cringe. Right. Like this person who believes this thing. And like, yeah, maybe he got there or whatever, but like he sort of loves it too much or whatever. And it's strange because some people seem to be able to play it off with sort of an artistic, likeable quality. And then for some other people, I don't know what it is.

They're just the way that they deliver something similar, the obsession sort of leaks out of them in a less aesthetic shape. I think, you know what? I've noticed, and I'm guilty of this for sure in the past, sometimes it comes off like you're trying to prove it to you. yourself. Yeah, that's interesting. You know what I mean? It's the guy at the party who introduces himself is saying just sold a business for one billion dollars. Right. As opposed to just it coming out naturally in the course of the conversation. And you people can feel the intention, you know. It's like, this feels like you're trying to prove to your stuff. Yeah. But I do think that there's just an issue with society wanting to control and own the key to other people's confidence. Oh, that's great.

Like, no, no, no, we will let you know when you're allowed to feel confident about yourself. Because again, kind of what you said earlier, they have to believe that because it reaffirms the hierarchy in their head that we're in control. Confidence is something given by us to you. As opposed to the truth, which is, no, no, no, no, no, I give myself confidence. I own my confidence. This is a good one. So this woman went on a pod recently. I'm going to play this clip for me.

This woman went on a pod recently and gave a really wonderful insight about the relationship of how much reputation people think that you deserve. I thought this was so cool. People have an assumption of the level of celebration you deserve. Interesting. Right? Like how good you are and how much reputation you. you deserve. How do people decide that? Let's get to that because you want to try to engineer it. Yep. If you're above that, people think you're overrated and they want to bring you down and they don't like you.

If they perceive that you're below that, then you're underrated. Like, underrated is a compliment? Like, underrated is a good thing to be poorly rated. In my mind, it's sort of like you fumbled. Like, what do you mean you're not well rated? Like, go fix it. It's an interesting point. But underrated is a compliment. Overrated is an insult. You would think that being highly rated is good, but overrated is not. So people want to fill that delta. Yeah. If they think you're underrated, they'll try to bring you up. So this is like what people, we'll get to this too, but this is what people have been saying about Google Gemini. It's underrated. It's like it's high status to say. Yeah, it's a compliment. But it's a compliment. But it's also like seen as insightful and valuable and useful to point out that Google Gemini is good. That's true. Yes, people feel good when they make that point. Yeah. They're like, I'm pointing this out. So I'm writing some kind of wrong in the universe. I'm feeling that in balance. I guess people also feel good about themselves when they call it something overrated. People just feel good. good about identifying the discrepancy. We're all kind of reputational carins. We feel off when something isn't where it should be. And that's why all these phrases exist. So cool.

So real, though. That's why I like, I'm of the opposite mind. I like seeing the Chiefs win the Super Bowl every. I want them to win the Super Bowl every year. Like, I want the Chiefs to win the Super Bowl every year. I like when Taylor Swift drops an album and it goes number one and people say, well, she couldn't just let that girl go, No, beat me.

I love shit like that. I love shit like that. I don't even, I have no favorite NFL team. When my brother was like, who do you want to win the Super Bowl? This year, I'm like, the Chiefs. I just want to see dominance. You know what I mean? Because I hate all this like, let someone else win.

It's like, you're not even that great. Prove it. Yeah. You know what I mean? I love shit like that. Yeah. But that, I mean, again, that's just like society is just, in my opinion, bitch made. It's just a bunch of like,

weak-minded people who don't want to face the reality that they themselves lack the quality in the fuel that this person used to become great. Well, that's why the, I think it's called the bigotry of small differences or the narcissism of small differences, that the closer you are to somebody, the more rivalrous you feel your relationship to them.

If it's someone who grew up in a different country, a very different sort of upbringing, or from a different family. Like, yeah, you might not rate their success, but it doesn't have the same sort of visceral status rivalry that you would expect. But if it's the person who grew up down the street from you and you basically had the same opportunities,

that really hurts, yeah. It's another reason why I've chosen a profession and industry that is very easy to criticize because everybody does this, over the dinner table. Right. Right. I have not tried to put together a track.

I have not tried to open up fucking Ableton or Pro Tools or whatever the fuck and make a song. Therefore, when I see what you do, I can say that I do or don't like it, but it's so removed from the skill set that I have. But the closer that you get, the fact that I haven't had to put in 10, 20, 30 years

on logic or whatever to work out how to fucking make this thing, anybody can do a podcast. How many times have someone been over dinner and said, bro, we should have recorded that. That was such a good. That was better than like fucking Joe Rogan.

Like we should put that, we should have put that on the internet. Maybe we should start a podcast, like every white guy. Yeah. And the fact that people feel close, it's the same reason that everybody has an insight about how Nike should be doing their social media.

Oh, I didn't like that social media post. They shouldn't be using AI because everybody's got a social media profile. Yeah. So everybody has some. Everybody's an expert. But not everybody files the fucking P&L tax return at the end of year for their company. Right. Well, I mean, I would have done it differently.

You don't know how the spreadsheet works. You know how to do a V luckup or any of this stuff? Yeah. So you have more of an opinion and you can be more triggered and push back more when something that somebody else does, it feels like you're a part of the industry in a roundabout way. And the more walled off, the further away, that particular industry is Elon. You can laugh at the fact that a rocket bursts into flames

if it doesn't work right, but you don't know how it happened. I would have done it differently. No, of course not. But if you listen to a podcast that goes bad, you have an opinion. Right. Well, you have an opinion about that. Why?

Because you think that you, oh, if I'd been there, and then maybe some people could play football, so they'll think, well, I would have, you know, that play is just stupid. Why did they call that play? That play's fucking dumb. Yeah. And the further and further away that you get, if you're some microbiologist that's just come up with something,

you go, it was good or bad. The resolution with which your criticism or compliments can be deployed lowered, the more difficult the task is, basically, and the further your skill set is away from it. I think because brilliance is boring and it's subtle. I was watching this documentary on Pixar, and the guy was saying, the trees in the background, the animation.

it's so perfect that you don't notice it. But if that tree was drawn fucked up, you would notice it. Same thing with soccer players, basketball, like the music I make, whatever. There's certain decisions that are getting made that are the culmination of so many hours in a high level of taste or intelligence, whatever,

not just in my field and all these different fields, that the average person doesn't recognize them. They only recognize the fuck up. But it's like you don't recognize the brilliant. when you don't recognize when it's going well because you don't know what goes into this. And you think that your volume of commentary replaces your lack of credentials.

You don't know what's going on. Well, one of the problems as well is that people bind together over criticism way more than over compliments. Well, misery loves company. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's, to me, you give yourself an excuse if you reject the truth, which is there's a lot of,

lot of people, kind of what you're saying, like similar opportunities, who just worked harder. They worked harder, or they just were naturally better than you at this thing. And they develop their skills or whatever it is. And so the truth is that you didn't maximize your opportunities. And that sucks to hear. And what's easier to do is reject their journey, dismiss it with some rumor or some nonsense, because the truth is that you could have been here too. But you you fucked up. Take it up with your mirror. This has got nothing to do with me.

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Genuinely have an issue with it. Don't want to criticize this thing because it's triggered in me Something that I feel uncomfortable about. Yeah. And the idea that being a black sheep is still being a sheep Just because you're against something doesn't mean that you're in the minority. It doesn't mean it's a more sophisticated position.

Yeah. You know, you don't really like anything. Yeah, you regularly dislike most things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What a sophisticated position to hold. Right.

Congratulations, dude. You must have such refined taste. I was just talking about this, man. Like, this whole community of people who hate anything that's popular because it's popular. Not because they actually don't like it. They just don't like it

because it's popular. Whether it's an artist, whether it's shoes or whatever. It's like sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes things are popular because they're good. And sometimes things are not popular

because they're not good. Not all the time, but sometimes. And it just, it's people who feel like they get to have some sort of autonomy and some sort of like leverage over the rest of society. Like, you guys like that.

That's the underrated, overrated thing again, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah, it is funny. There's sort of two camps of people. there's one who are creators that are underground. Oh, dude, you know, it's just my work's so sophisticated. No one gets it.

They just don't get it. It's like, oh, maybe it's just not that good. No kidding. But just because something is big doesn't necessarily mean it's good. But on average, it typically is. Like, people vote with their feet, and there's a lot of competition out there. A lot of competition. You think it's got to be that?

You think Luke Combs has got to be that big if he can't do country well? Right. No, obviously not. I have a good friend who said something a long time ago at the beginning of my journey. And I'm sure we were, like, hating on some artists or something. And he was like, you know what? Every artist that's like wildly successful or famous, I can always find something about them that I think is like really genius.

Like every single one. And I was like, wow. And this is a conversation from 10 years ago. Ever since then, even artists where I don't like their music, I'm always able to find something about them, whether it's their branding or their visuals. something where I'm like, that's fucking genius. It's much more useful because I can take it.

Yes. Allow me to take the one thing. Oh my God. I think this person sucks. Yeah. And I've found something that I think is great. So if my opinion is right, how much of a compensatory mechanism is this one thing? They must have the best Instagram on the planet.

Right. Right. As opposed to this just sucks. Everything about it sucks. It's like you're just doing yourself a disservice. You could be stealing and learning and, evolving. This is, I think, related to the fear of embarrassment that a lot of people have. You've got a line that's very similar to a friend. You said, people who are less talented than you

simply care less about being criticized and made fun of will get so much further. Fear of embarrassment is friction. Another friend of mine said, there's someone with half your talent and five times your self-believe making ten times the money. That would, like, I think, to be honest, that's me. That's why I've always talked about. But how do you, so I'm trying to work out. how lots of insecurity married with lots of self-belief because those two things don't always comport. No, I think the insecurity was

I'm not good enough. We'll just keep it simple. Early on it was, I'm not good enough at making songs. My raps aren't good enough. My singing isn't good enough. The beats that I'm making aren't good enough. The mixing isn't good. None of this is good enough.

I knew that deep down because I would make shit and I would love it, but then I would go listen to established artists at the time, Wiz Khalifa or a Drake or Kendrick or J-Kor or whoever, and I'd be like, damn, there shit just sounds like way better than my stuff.

And so I knew that my shit wasn't there yet, but I really still genuinely liked what I was doing, and I had this belief that I could become good enough. And so the reason, I always tell people it's like, I loved everything I was doing, but if I loved it to the point

that I'd never thought I could be better, I would have stopped going to the studio. It would have been like, no. I made my best song ever. It was last night. My best song ever is the one I'm making tonight, and it always is, you know? But yeah, it's that,

that marriage is the old fuel that I'm talking about, you know? It was, because how long am I supposed to not feel good enough? You know what I mean? Because now I don't feel like that anymore. I feel like my music is years now where I felt like it's good enough. But yeah, it's, it was a, It was a conundra, man.

It really was. Strange. What was the original question? Fear of embarrassment. How do we work that in? Because I said there's someone with half your talent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so.

So I really was not the most talented person at all. There's artists who, their fifth song they've ever made is a massive song. I'm like, I simply did not have the talent that my fifth song could have even been that big. I was 110 songs deep before I think that I think on my eighth album so maybe like 85 songs released but probably hundreds of songs made

before I had made something that was good enough to even be a big song. You know what I mean? That's a lot of work to even just get to the starting line. And that's why I kind of preach what I preach to up-and-coming artists

which is the majority of y'all are going to be like me. You're not going to be like the dude who picked it up on his fifth song, it's a billboard charting song because he's just a freaking nature talent. The majority of us are me, where this shit sucks for madlong. Like, these songs are not good enough for like 200 songs. You know what I mean?

That is the majority of us. And I think the belief that I could end up making a great song is what kept me going. And still to this day, while I try to figure out the direction my hunger is supposed to be pointing in, that. you know, nor stars never changed, which is I still think I can make the greatest song of my life, you know, and I still think I haven't made it.

So, but again, it's like, I think I've beaten out so many people who were so much better than me. I had friends growing up that were way better than me, way better. But they just, what I'll say is this, I think a lot of people cannot tolerate uncertainty the way I can. I think that's a very underrated, skill. The ability to withstand uncertainty over an extended period of time is a pretty big

indicator of if you're going to be a successful artist or not. I had a lot of friends who they put out one song, didn't blow up. All right. I'm going to college. Or they put out one mixtape. It didn't blow up and they're like, this is bullshit. I'm out. Up and coming artists that I've talked to over the years who they put out a couple songs a year. They're mad. Their career is not moving fast. It's like, you're not moving fast. How fast can the career move if you're moving slow? You know? And you have to deal with that uncertainty of the external uncertainty.

And it's, for me, I was able to tolerate external uncertainty. I was able to tolerate lack of external evidence because I gave myself to certainty. I knew I was going to make it. So I didn't need early on. I didn't need the external validation. My own internal certainty was enough to temper the fact. the fact that when I put the song out, it gets two streams, you know, because I just knew that y'all were wrong.

I believe that. I seriously thought the first mixtape I ever dropped, I thought it was going to blow up. I remember, like, tweeting, tomorrow my life's going to change, you know what I mean? It's like, it did it at all. But I believed it, you know? What about the fear of embarrassment thing, overcoming that? I didn't have that. I was consequence blind early on.

which I think is just a trait of being young and ignorant. You know, I didn't, I didn't know there was pitfalls. I thought you put out music and it blows up and then you ride off into the sunset and everybody loves you, you know, which is why this is probably not going to be a popular opinion, but I encourage everyone to go after that crazy dream as young as possible. Because the older you get, the more aware you become that all that clitters is not going,

and you start becoming aware of the trade, of the cost of everything. You also have more to trade, right? Yeah, right. And so for me, now even, it's like the fear of embarrassment, all that stuff is amplified now because I know there's people watching. I know there's people looking at me.

Well, I mean, someone asked me this, maybe the Vancouver show this week. And they said, basically, I want to do my first podcast. But I'm really nervous. I'm nervous about what people think. I'm nervous if people are going to have judgment on it or the rest of it. I'm just going to, it's a wonderful question,

and it's one that I think a lot of people have. I'm going to stop you right there. I can promise you that no one is going to laugh at you for your first podcast. Do you know why? No one's going to see it. No one's fucking listening. That's why.

Because no one knows who you are. No one cares. So you have this beautiful upside only. You already are not a podcaster. You already are not a recording artist. Yeah. There is only upside. Imagine if you did a trade and you said you can bet

the whole, obviously you can fucking put money down, you can leave a job, rah, rah, rah. But assuming that you don't do something insane in order to get your first mixtape or podcast off the ground. Right. You can only get better. It's only upside. You can only get more views.

There is no, you've already done no views. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Congratulations. Yeah. You have an infinity more views that you can get. Right. Yeah. You're competing with zero.

Correct. Now you're competing, like you said at the beginning, you're competing now next year with number eight. Yeah. but it's it's funny i always tell up-and-coming artists take advantage of the fact that nobody gives a fuck because they spend so much they spend so much time like do you think that i can drop a song like this right now or what do you think people will think of i'm like you got 10 fans bro nobody gives a flying fuck like this is the time to do whatever i envy the

anonymity that up-and-coming artists have to a degree obviously me not being anonymous. Me being successful gives me all these great things but the purity and clarity you get to operate from when you don't have

anyone listening. You don't have any feedback. That's why people use pseudonyms, right? Are they start side project? Oh yeah. Put on a mask. Yep.

Alter your voice. I've thought about doing shit like that. Mm-hmm. Like starting a whole other career and just alter my voice, pitch it down or pitch it up, change the production. And that'd be cool.

I've thought about it almost every day for like five years. You know that sick kick guy? Sick kick, no. Sick kick. So he's a, fuck, like a lot of things. He does live sequencing is one of his big things.

So big fuck-off midi-pad. And he always wears a mask. And I did a big, doom scrow. I wanted to call it a deep dive, but that makes it sound too sophisticated. I was doom scrolling. And went through his Instagram. I was like, oh, nobody knows who this motherfucker is. Yeah.

The guy can sing, he can rap. He can definitely fucking produce and mix. and he does some originals. He's got original albums, all the rest of it. And he said, I'm never going to release my face until I get a Grammy. And the whole thing, if he sings, he lifts the mask up just so it covers the bottom of his nose. He'll sing through that and then he'll pull it back down. He plays DJ gigs and does all the rest of it.

And I thought that was really cool. There's a big rapper right now, SD Kid from London, who everyone thinks is Timothy Jalemi. Isn't that awesome? And he's rapping with like a Scowse sax set. Right, okay, I can promise you it's not Timothy Shalame. It might be. Wouldn't that be fucking, and Timothy Shalame is like feeding into it. They're asking him in interviews.

They're like, is this you? And he's like, oh, we'll be revealed it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, brilliant. What if it's in. Imagine if you're that artist, though, and you find out that Timothy Shalamee, love that through no, like, construction of your own is somehow feeding into your own law. Right. Like, hey, Timothy, dude, fucking appreciate you, man.

Because you know it's going to be time in five years when everyone's like, you remember when people thought. Yeah, yeah, of course. But it's, no, it is a, um. anonymity is freedom you know there's a liberty creative liberty and freedom you have when nobody knows who you are but again the higher you climb the further you have to fall that there's a big difference between never made it and fell off holy fuck dude that fell off hurts so much harder than never made it well because you had it yeah you were there you were there yeah but by design by design unless you continue to be the best in the world like mike tyson you're not going to continue to be the most

Dominant. Athletes, I don't know how they do it, man. It's a lesson in humility. Because the stuff that we do, we can do forever. You know? But athletes, it's like, you got, what, a 10-year window? Maybe. Especially, like, if you're running back in the NFL, eight.

Well, think about, even from your industry, musicians. Oh, yeah. Female artists. Yeah. Female artists have an additional price that they need to pay. Yep. Like, oh, you want a family? Guess what?

You want a couple of kids? That's like a four, five-year hiatus. I think about that all. all the time, man, to be honest, because I know in my industry, specifically rap, youth is equivalent to cool. Old is lame. And the currency in rap is being cool.

And so how do you be old and cool in a genre where those are anthems? You know what I mean? But that's why I love seeing older rappers have success. Who's a good example? Clips. Push the Tea and his brother Malice who Grammy nominated.

They're like 49 years old. The album's great. It's like that's important for hip hop as a whole. Whether or not you feel this way about them or whatever the music, it doesn't matter. It's what it's doing for the genre, which is telling people you can have maturity, wisdom,

and still be cool in a genre that appears to only clap for youthful, energy, I'll say. You know? It's like, oh, man, that is inspiring. So you're telling me it doesn't all end. Without being a legacy act,

without you just having to run it back. Right, just play your debut. You know what I mean? They're putting out a new album that people love. Like, it was their debut album. That, to me, is inspiring. We're seeing an artist like Kay Lani catch her biggest hit ever 10 years into her career.

Like, I just posted that today. I'm like, if this doesn't inspire you, I don't know what will. Like this is, for me as an artist, the scariest thing is to consider the possibility that, well, at some point, your best years are going to be behind you, right? Surely. Like, your biggest song was the one you put out five years ago,

and you'll just never do it again. And so I always get scared that, is that this year? Well, it's a good excuse to not put out your best song, right? That's why somebody would, I'll just hold a little bit back. Right. Hold a little bit back here. And that's why. People don't understand why for me and other artists I know, the numbers, it's not ego anymore. It's existential. If I look at streams and I see they're lower than I think they should be, I don't have an ego situation happening. I have an existential crisis happening because I'm thinking, oh my God, is this it? Is this the start of the decline? I'm no longer able to take care of myself.

family, the responsibility, is this it? Is this it? So it's not ego. It's not, my songs are so much better than this. This is some bullshit. It's, it feels like it's, feedback turns into a threat instead of just data, you know? And it's scary. Well, because your sense of self is wrapped up in this thing now. Oh yeah, when the work becomes your worth, over with. Of course. Yeah. Do people love me for who I am or for what I do? Yeah. And if all I do is what I do, then what happens when that gets taken away. That means that the love's going to go too. That people only want me because of what I can do.

And if I can do less, then I am less. And it's strange because people want to win. He has men, right? Not to do the woes me men shit, but we do get taught that we're only as good as what we provide, as the value we provide. And so as an artist, as a man, it's like, well, I'm providing. value now. But to your point, if the streams are going down, does that mean I'm providing less? And if I start to provide less value, does that mean the love is going to declare it as well?

It's a great point. And the first, I've talked so much about sex differences. And the first conversation I ever had this year where someone just called it out direct. And it's the first time that anyone's ever done it. I thought it was so great. There's having a conversation with a guy who wrote a book about the female orgasm. And he was basically saying that as far as he could see, the female orgasm is a selection mechanism, that it is a physiological embodied way of the woman's desire responding to how she perceives her mate.

And I basically mentioned that, well, this feels a little bit ruthless, that guys are sort of being judged in this manner, that they don't really get to control. They just sort of are who they are and they've worked on themselves to the extent, that they do and they turn up and, you know, this, whereas for women, they don't have the same type of judgment. Like, men are more mechanical, let's say, in that regard. And instead of equivocating, instead of needing to say, well, you know, because men have got it and you went, no, you're right.

Yeah, yeah. It's tough. And that's the way it is. Women, women have this particular type of blessing or curse or judgment or ability to scrutinize or bestow status or take it away from a guy in the same way as is true here which is I think that you just need to accept as a man yeah your value to the world is going to be tightly tied to your competence yeah and if your competence seems to be dipping, the world is going to love you a little bit less. They're going to need you a little bit less. That's why you can't rely on that. And it's also why you need a fucking partner who sees outside of that.

Like if you have, I've got a couple of friends who are in relationships with, I don't know what you would call it like high, highly status sensitive women. One of them. That is such a gentle polite. But I'm really trying to use because one. Well, look, one of them is Diana Fleming. who is the ebullitionary psychologist, and she's married to Jeffrey Miller.

And Jeffrey's told me this story before. But she's, like, got some dark triad tendency. She's wonderful, warm lady. I think she's fantastic, and I like her a lot. But she's definitely got some sort of psychopathic tendencies in her. Enough to make a fantastic mother and a great partner, but also that she has some sensitivities that I've heard, like just great story.

Like if they're driving and Jeffrey misses a turn because he's not watching or because he like gets bullied by somebody who's in the lane that he needs to get in, she has like a little bit of an ick response because her sensitivity to his competence level is quite tightly attuned as talking to a girl not long ago. And she said that she saw a partner trip on the street and was like, I'm not really, I don't want to like, you know, for the next five minutes, you're not that attractive to me. And I think that in some ways, that kind of a relationship would compel men to keep doing more. Not only do you have to perform out there, but you've got to perform in here too.

But that's bad. And for certain guys, like Jeffrey, for some reason, this guy is just construct. These two are built to be together. Yeah. So constructed to be together. He's got no jealousy. He's got no insecurity. He's just like, it is what it is.

And he keeps on showing up. Yeah. For me, with my construction, I need a safe harbor. I need to feel like. Same. Same. I'm done being Chris Williamson, and I get to come home and be Christopher. Yeah.

And that, like, there's a line I wrote this a little while ago. Sturgiel Simpson has a song that my friend played at his wedding. And it was the best man at his wedding. And I came up with what I think basically every man wants to hear, which is, I know you can be more, but you are enough already. and even if you just stay where you are I'll be right here next to you. You're going to be great, but you don't need to be great

and I'm with you no matter what. Or as said best by Stodiel Simpson's mum, boy, I don't care if you hit it big because you're already number one. I would say I do right now. Right, get down on you. But that I think... That is so spot on, man.

Yeah, I agree. It's so spot on because we feel like we have to go out there and conquer and perform and accept. and climb and if you feel like you still have to be on your fucking A game and be on. Vigilant. You know, with your partner.

Oh, man, that would just be a wreck. And to be honest, it's been a hurdle of mine because that's my default setting, right? Is to perform beyond be perfect. And, you know, that I think has caused vulnerability issues for me. Because if I'm vulnerable, then I'm not. in the armor. Then I'm going to not be perfect. You're going to see me not be great. You're going to see me with training wheels on. I don't want you to see me training wheels. My love will be withdrawn. Yeah. You know, it's been great. Come back when I'm doing flips. Yeah. A quick aside,

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a checkout. One of the wildest things is this year I've probably been more below the neck than I ever have. It's a journey that I kind of regret and regret. I hate previous me for embarking on it because it's really fucking hard. I think future me will be proud. But at the moment, I'm in the valley of just eating shit with emotions. But one of the things I've noticed this year, more people have said that they love me than ever before. More friends have said.

You know, just guys, dudes, I like, I fucking love you, man. And then like, you know, just like, it comes out of you sometimes, sometimes. Maybe it's because we're getting a bit older. Maybe it's because we're part of this movement. Maybe it's because I've released like 30 podcasts this year on fucking emotions and they've all been listening to them. And I've read Pilled them. Yeah, yeah, I've read Pilled them with the same kryptonite that I redpilled myself with

and now we're all in the Valley of Despair together. I'm not too sure. Yeah. But more of my friends have said that they love me this year than ever before. And I just have to. to fucking assume that that's because they actually got to see me a bit. They genuinely got to see me. Gary though.

You know, I'm backstage at some show and I'm just in the fucking trenches, like everything, everything, everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong. And one of the shows two weeks ago, one of my boys like, hugged me for two minutes. Must have been two minutes. And the other one said a prayer while we were there. And then I go out, did the show, show went good, came back. And I was like, fuck, like I borrowed his nervous system. Yeah.

Like, I fucking, like, mine was not, mine wasn't robust enough. So, like, he fucking lent me some of his piece. Yeah. Wow. So great. What would you do in that moment if they're not there? What does that look like? The same thing I've done my entire life.

I'm an only child, dude. Like, I can get through, I can get through anything, but I'm sick of fucking lone rangering it. I'm sick of white knuckling my way through it. Because now, not only do I know that the show went great and everybody really loved it and the people from CIA were there. And they've got all of these notes and oh, we need to do the blah, blah, all this stuff. But now I've got the memory of, like, me and the guys backstage.

And it's not a memory of us high-fiving or drinking beers or celebrating. It's like this very small, like kind of mundane, very private, normal, like, beautiful memory that I've got. I'm like, fuck. Like, I borrowed some of Max's nervous system and Bennett said a fucking prayer. And, like, that's, you know, seared into my... It's like microdosing going through a hard time. time together. Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're watching. Yeah, they're seeing it. And they're like, fuck. That's beautiful. Chris is really fucking suffering at the moment. And that's what gets them. And I'm like, oh, if I'd kept that in, I would have not got the support that I desperately

needed. She didn't even give them the opportunity. Yeah. They would have not had the opportunity to give that to me. We would not have all gone through this shared experience of difficulty. that we came out the other side of, which has now bonded us all together. You know, just an endless list of reasons to do it.

And, like, the reason to not do it is that some people might laugh at you. Right. It's like, well, I don't know. If the people around you laugh at you when you show your emotions, if you're the sort of person who feels them, and I'm not convinced that everybody feels them equally, sort of widely or deeply. But if you're the sort of person that does,

like, you need to be around people that can hold that. Yeah. Need to be around. I think, you know, Connor Beaton. Oh, yeah. Good friend of mine. Yeah. And he's got this line where he talks about,

your friends need to be able to hold you in the complexity of your emotions. And some people have got more complexity and some of less. And that's why I think so many friendships that don't work and relationships that don't work are just to people. It's incompatibility. It's not that they're bad. It's that you're fundamentally incompatible. And the...

You think it's a capacity issue though, yeah? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes. Yeah, that would be, that's an even better way to put it, yes. And that's almost like a choice, though. I'm not sure. It's almost like, is it incompatible because of something innate, or is it incompatible because you're choosing

to not expand your capacity for my shit? I had a great conversation with Conner sat in that seat like two weeks ago. Yeah. And coming out in between Christmas and New Year. And I basically asked this question. I was like, does everybody, because, again, me putting on the diving mask and going fully down over the last 12 months has,

it just keeps growing and getting bigger and bigger and bigger and the, the amount that my emotions can sort of permeate everything that I do and like my fucking daily experience is so great and so painful at the same time. Like, does everyone feel shit like this? And his position was, genuinely there are some people

who just don't have that big of a breadth Or maybe their sort of net of positive and negative is skewed in different sorts of ways. Yeah. So, you know, if you're talking about excitement, they're happy to go there with you. But if you want to talk about wistfulness or rumination or vigilance or sadness or anxiety, they're not. And the same vice versa, too. Stan Tatkin has this idea of airplanes and submarines. Airplanes and nervous systems are able to move real fast and they're kind of up high.

And submarines, they go slow and deep. and then they take a little while to come back up and repressurize. But maybe it is a... Far more people than know it are not feeling feelings because they choose not to than because they can't. Yeah. Like there is a much bigger proportion of people

who should be feeling them and aren't than like can't. Right, I agree. Yeah. I think there's also... I've had to learn that not everyone is meant to know everything and you're not meant to share everything with everyone. certain friends are. Selective.

Yeah, it's like, this is for that. And this is, that used to fuck me up, though. It made me feel like I was being fake or something, you know? Like, no, everyone in my life needs to get every part of me, otherwise I'm being inauthentic. It's like, no, this is, you know. How do you balance vulnerability and strength? You're in an industry, which is not exactly renown

for its acceptance of male fragility. Yeah. and inner work. Yeah. How do you think about balancing those? It's scary and it's getting less scary because I'm doing it. So naturally I'm, you know, kind of disarming the fear by just facing it. It's scary because I know that not only is the genre that I'm in sort of resistant to vulnerability,

but the audience of men are resistant to vulnerability. So, you know, I think my music and my career has gone through this transition where I would say before Santiago, this album that I put out at 2023, everything before then was me about conquering the external terrain. And then Santiago marked the shift in this line of demarcation where it was, well, now I'm going inward, you know, let me explore this. And now the most recent album is sort of the integration. That's what I'm working on now. Because again, I said earlier, I don't want to just endlessly self-monitor and just stay in here.

You know, I do have to figure out what's the new dream now, you know? But I'm just a very big believer in being vulnerable and confronting the parts of you that are, you know, that you've been trying to act like don't exist. That's real strength. I don't think you're strong for being scared to face yourself. You know,

and I think I haven't said it on this song clue that I just put out like a couple weeks ago where I said the monsters, I'm making ends with monsters that you're scared to face, you know, and the demons you pretend it don't exist, I'm fighting publicly. It's like that to me, what I'm doing, you know,

is courageous and I know it is because this is the kind of shit that I was scared to do in private. I was scared to sit with, the parts of me that I didn't like in private. I'm telling you about them on a song. You know, I'm not rapping about someone else's life. This is my shit. You know what I mean?

This is my life. These are songs that are sparking conversations with my parents and family members. I'm like, yo, what? You know? Like, this is real life. I'm fighting this shit publicly in hopes that, one, it's because it's cathartic for me and I need to. And it's exciting for me to just talk about.

It's what I'm passionate about. But two, it's the hopes that, A couple more years of doing this, the men in my fan base be like, okay, I can do it now, you know? You've given them permission. Right, right. You've given the permission, and the scariest thing is someone who does that permissionlessly. Yeah. There was no permission to do that.

Yeah. Or fewer role models, fewer archetypes. Yeah. Is the reverse of yours that still resonates with you sort of the most deeply, this huge, massive back. catalog of yours. Is this something that you come back to as a philosophy lots? Wow. I've never been asked that. Shit.

I have recency bias, though. It's just whatever the most recent song is. Probably a clue. Because clue is the first song where I have said what I've been trying to say for years, which is you just don't have a clue about what it's like to be me. And I didn't know how to articulate it without sounding like whining about success, you know?

And so I was very intentional about not making it sound like that, not talking about anything material really. But, you know, the second verse is, I resent your audacity. You can't last as me, you spineless fucker. You can't hold your life together, let alone the lives of others. So you talk into it. And it goes into this whole thing about just like, I don't resent you. I resent your audacity that you think you know what this is.

You don't, and that's okay. And what I tell people is sometimes your level of understanding should just be that you don't understand. And that's got to be enough. You're claiming that you do. And you haven't done the life experience to understand. And you're commenting. So you just haven't earned.

the experience to comment on this. And that goes for so many people. That's what spawned my posts about people comparing struggles. It's like I would never critique or comment somebody's struggle that I just don't know about. I don't have the resume. I don't have the credentials to comment on what it's like to be, you know, you were a single mom and this had and you lost your job. A med student. Yeah, it's like I don't fucking know.

Like, I kind of get imposter syndrome When fans hit me up with like Certain stories of theirs where they're like, I'm going through this, what do you think I should do? I'm like, I have no fucking idea. That sounds fucking hard, dude. Yeah. And, you know, that's something I've had to learn too

is within my own family is That fine line between empathy and jumping into the hole with y'all. You know? You're going through a hard time. Well, fuck it me. to now. Because that to me is what love is and caring is, but that does us no good. Have you got into Joe Hudson? Are you familiar with Joe? No. I'll send you some of his stuff. So he's good,

really, really great coach, East and Western stuff, and he's got a framework for conversations, view, vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, and wonder. So vulnerability is speaking your truth, especially when it's scary. Impartiality is not trying to change your experience. Empathy is sitting in the emotion without becoming the emotion. And wonder is curiosity without an outcome. Wow. So view, vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, and wonder. Really, that's just emotional sovereignty is what, like, all wrapped up is that.

That's been the toughest thing for me. How do I hear about a hard time my mom's going through without wanting to make her emotions, my emotions? Well, the problem, there's two reasons. there are two multiple fucking horrible things. First one, if you absorb somebody else's emotions as yours, you're now in a much more unfunctional position to be able to help them. Exactly. You don't have bandwidth.

Secondly, if someone is upset and they see that they're upset is causing you to be upset, that means that they feel like their pain. is hurting you and they'll clamp it down. Exactly. So there isn't room for it. And I mean, one of the things that Connor says that I've never heard anybody say before, which I think is such a fucking wonderful, like reassuring third place. So Joe talks about speaking from the third place.

So first place is judgment. Second place is savior. Third place is just impartiality. So you can even feel it when you sort of sit in it. So the next time that someone's trying to have a difficult conversation with you, just sat across if you've got like an open posture. So your feet are on the ground and your hands are just sort of on your thighs. And you're not sort of forward and you're not sort of back and doing the judgment thing.

You just sat in a third place. And you're balanced between that judgment and that savior position. Wow. And Connor had this line where he said, your emotions aren't too big for me. Hmm. Oh, dude, your emotions aren't too big for me. Yeah. I can hold you in this.

That's fine. I'm safe. I'm okay. Yeah. You don't need to worry about you. You worry about you. You don't need to worry about me. Yeah. Right?

And I just thought, I thought it was so wonderful. It is, man. God, that has been a challenge of my 30s. I've gotten better at it now. But it used to be, I couldn't understand why me swooping into fix things and being so affected by your emotions to the point where they feel like they're mine. What I was doing wrong. I could have swore like, no, you're the one that's fucked up for,

catastrophizing small shit and freaking out to the point where I got to feel like I got to swoop in. But I had to learn that, well, wait a second, I'm not doing anyone a service by jumping into this fucking lake with you while you're drowning, but you're not really drowning your feet on the floor. You're just flapping your arms. And I'm starting to flap my arms too. Like, yeah, what is going? You know what I mean? That's not doing anything.

So I had to learn my emotions end here in your. start there. And there's space. And now I can still be here for you. And I can help. And if you don't want a solution, that's fine. I can just be here. And I have so much more bandwidth now.

I had no bandwidth my whole life. Because I wasn't just dealing with my emotions. I had hers. His. It was all part of my shit. You know? And it's not like perfect now, but just understanding that concept of emotional sovereignty has been life-changing. When you start off as permeable, as absorbent as you were, even the smallest movement in the right direction feels like a massive gain.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if it's such a normal response, it's such a normal response, somebody's going through something and you want to say it's going to be okay. You want to make them be okay. Because they're in pain and you don't want them to be in pain. But you saying to somebody who's in pain, it's going to be okay, is the same as you saying, your not okayness is making me not okay. And I need you to be okay so that I can be okay. There is no room for your emotions.

They're too big. They're too big and they're making me uncomfortable or I don't think that you can handle them or something. So I'm going to step in and I'm going to like pervert this direction that you're on. as opposed to just going, fuck, man. I'm really sorry that you're feeling that. Yeah. Really sorry that you're feeling that.

You know what Connor told me one time? Is getting to the place where your partner or someone that you love has a bad day, you're allowed to have a good day, though. Them having a bad day. Oh, wow, yeah. And it's not threatening to them

and it's not guilt-ridden to you. Yeah. Your wife, your mom, whoever, they can be having a bad day and you're still allowed to have a good day. And that was a huge shift for me because I was like, nah. If my girl's having a bad, I'm upset.

But then that creates that whole, oh, so me being upset is now making you upset? Of course. And it's just a mess. Obligation. Yeah. Obligations are weird. Yeah, man.

In order for you to not be okay, yeah, in order for me to be okay, I need you to not be okay. Like, that's the inverse. which is people who take a degree of like cathartic, resentful pleasure in their part, somebody in their life falling behind. That's the rivalrous sort of nature thing. So it occurs on both sides.

Like the people that you're coming up with, you're brushing shoulders and a couple of sharp elbows with and you see somebody fall behind. And then so if you reflect on that enough and you're an empathetic human, you realize that that's kind of a toxic fuel and you don't really want to be using that. you don't want your success to stand on the other shoulders of other people's downfalls. And then the people in your life, if they feel bad, now you feel bad. You felt guilty for that one. And yeah, so that emotional sovereignty, I think, is a lovely way to think about.

Joe, an equivalent of that is vagal authority. Where he stays in a room if somebody is losing their shit, do you maintain your vagal independence? Yeah. And yeah, I think that's a, it's cool that you've arrived at the same. Realization. Well, yeah, my default setting was to be intertwined, you know? Mm.

So even with my career, you know what I mean, projected onto my fans, like the emotional emmeshment I'm in with my fans and careers damaging sometimes, you know, because sometimes I'll feel, again, I'll catastrophize what's happening in my life because the streams, being low this time feels existential, and then I'll show up. with that energy to the world and to my fans. And it's... What does that energy look like? I don't know if it is...

I think it's covert. I hope it's covert. So like, no, we can tell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're a mess. Yeah, you're a mess and we know. I honestly, I don't know what it looks like for them. I think for me it's more visceral.

It's frantic. It's panicky. It's, uh, bouncing off the walls. It's, I got to make something happen right now. I got to make something shake, you know?

And yeah, it's like sometimes, I don't know if this, I feel like this is related because I'm feeling compelled to say it. Sometimes I wish I was the kind of artist who could drop one album

every two years and it's huge and massive. You do the tour and I'll see you on two years. Right. You know? It's 50% of, the reason why I drop so much music is because I love making songs and sharing them genuinely.

The other 50% is because none of these have gone huge yet to the point where I can take time off. You know what I mean? And it's some of that franticness, some of that existential, oh my God, the ship is sinking, is what fuels the output still to this day. Same for me, dude. Yeah. Six years in, a three a week, you'll be episode 1,150, 1,100, something like that. I don't want to give the universe a chance.

Yeah. Just crushing. A chance to move on. Crushing volumes of evidence. Yeah. Like there is no way that with this much output that it won't want to happen. Yeah, exactly. But it is a, you make yourself a victim of your own work right.

Yeah. And there's an idea called the Red Queen Effect. I think anyone's ever talked about this, at least not in music, which is crazy because it's a fucking sick idea. So in Alice in Wonderland, Alice is really. running around a tree and she runs faster and faster and faster around the tree, but she starts moving more slowly. There's a line from the Red Queen where she says, you see, my dear, you now have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place. Oh, shit. I think that's really cool. Yeah. It's the classic full calendar day and now you need to become more efficient and you need

an assistant to take on the extra calls and you've got to do the day. And before you know it, in order to just stay in the same place you have to work as hard as you ever have. That's why the idea of climbing another mountain is fun. Because I kind of alluded to when you're cutting weight versus bulking versus maintenance. Maintenance sucks for me because there's no big change happening. Cutting, you see weight flying off or bulking, you see weight flying on until your point it's just it it gets exhausting having to exert so much energy just to maintain yeah yeah because you set yourself a a pace when the fuel was different and you know this is another joe hudson thing

where he says when you become successful your job is not to work hard your job is to have great ideas and if if your goal is to make it and then you do make it and you're still punishing you yourself just as much as you were in the beginning, you've still got that sort of come-up energy in many ways that's compelling, it's inspiring to people. It fills grassroots and sort of upward aiming and noble. But so much of that is you being terrified that if a few things, if people see you take your foot off the gas, maybe you'll become irrelevant, or if people see you take your foot off the gas, they'll think that you've become a bourgeois, luxuriating, like, incumbent, right? You're like a, you're a Nepo baby, but you're the father and the child.

Yes, yes. That's the real fear is that it's, I'm going to lose relevance. And the only way to find out if I can be one of those artists who can go away and come back and not is by doing it, but then you might find out too late. Not everyone's John Bellion. Yeah, I've seen that happen to artists. You know? Or, yeah, the, oh, who do you think you are?

You think you're just this. You don't need to work so hard. It goes back to the overrated, underrated thing. There's a real sick part of my fucking mind that is terrified of more success because right now to my fans, I'm still very much slept on and underrated. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right? What happens if and when I catch the Billboard top 10 song and it's massive? well now are you going to root for me now because now I'm Tom Brady you know what I mean? Now it's like are you going to root for the person who's winning? Even though I'm winning

but to the like from an optics viewpoint it's like well he's not this super mainstream guy he's still so slept on he's not in the conversations and part of me is like let me just stay right here I'm an underdog forever you know.

Yeah well again so much of that is a very accurate representation of the way that human psychology works, unfortunately, and it is that underdog overrated thing, that, yeah, when you're on your way up, people support you because you remind them of their dreams, and when you're at the top, people try to tear you down because you remind them of what they gave up on. And, God, yes. It's a, Alex, one of my friends, has this story about where he started off, his gym business sleeping on the gym floor and it was underneath a car park that had these metal

rivets in so every time a car drove over it at night we go, dung, gung, gung, gung, gung, gung, gung, and he was sleeping on the gym floor and he was the underdog. People loved him when he was the underdog. All they wanted to do was see him succeed. And now he'd know that he's slept, he's moved his bedding over to the far side of the gym and then he'd take the classes and then he'd move it back at night. And then 18 months later, I think you'd maybe expanded to a couple of locations. And when people came in, they'd be like, boss man, how's everything going? And he's like, well, I did what you, I did what you said you wanted me to do. I did it. Yeah. And now that I've done it, you, the dynamics changed. Yeah. And you're no longer in my corner. People want you to be in

pursuit forever. Because that's relatable. It's real. Oh, that's great. That's so true. They just want you to be in pursuit. They never want you to get there. If you get there and I'm not there, what's that say about me? Oh, you think you're better than me because you got there. Well, also, you're no longer relatable. Oh, 100%. Because if you're, if you've made it, then you're not, and maybe that's part of the reason that if you appear to take your foot off the gas a little bit, that it doesn't seem like you're still on the climb.

Of course. It feels like you're just sort of floating with momentum. In a fucked way, I'm scared that if more people like me, more people will not like me. Well, that's true. You know what I mean? Any increase in love often feels like an increase in hate because we forget the compliments and we remember the criticism. So if any time that your platform grows and you get, you know, the proportion of love stays the same, which is what you're trying to do and you should do on average, right? It's like, you know, 99 to one, love to hate.

Yeah. But because you forget the love, any increase just feels like an increase in hate. Right. Because your brain is like Teflon for good thoughts and Velcro for bad thoughts. Yeah. It's a radar for negativity. Correct. On the pun.

Always looking for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's an interesting difference between the UK and the US. And I wonder whether this will happen within sort of small communities too. But in America, I think on average, more people want to see you win in case you take them with you. And in the UK, people want to see you stay where you are in case you leave them behind. Wow. And this disparity between the two.

So there was an article that came out in The Times. And the lady who wrote this article was basically saying, we've got three podcasters from the UK in the top 10 this year. And it's really cringe and embarrassing because they're all doing personal development. And British people should be, they should satisfy. finally wallow in their own misery and they should be stiff up a lip in their own loneliness and discomfort and trying to sort of improve yourself is sort of like lame and cringe and very Americanized and not cool. And I just thought, what a shame. I mean, our country is not exactly

showering itself in glory at the moment. And if there was any better representation of how much the UK culture is one of Tall Poppy Syndrome that even in the opportunity to celebrate the fact that we're punching above our weight on the world stage when the country's kind of eating shit at the moment Yeah. No, it's crazy. We shouldn't have done it. We should have done it. We should have You should have succeeded this way.

Ironic speech. It was too honest. It was too serious. You were trying to make you remember your place. Remember where you are. Remember where you're from. Right. And I thought what a what a wonderful example of of our culture. Like that That's our cultural export at the moment. Not this, not a conversation about earnestness and bravery with emotions and trying to improve yourself. Not a ungainly, unwieldy, delicate conversation about how to balance lots of conflicting and intention desires in life. But like a piss-taking comment

going, lull, this is fucking gay. Dare I say on brand, because it's a bit snobby. Dude, it fucking works. But it works, it works for a very specific cohort. And this is why, unfortunately, the UK, for a wild variety of reasons, but the culture is not insignificant. We have the same number of universities in the top 10 globally as America does, but we produce 80% fewer entrepreneurs. And you've got Kings College, London, Oxford, Cambridge, maybe Durham's in there, I'm not sure, it's at least three. And you think, so our candidate, remembering that we'll have Americans, right? So, like, We'll imbibe people from other countries.

Yeah. Fucking Stockholm syndrome into our culture of like you would, don't get too big for your boots. Yeah. Yeah. Dude, this is so hilarious. I just thought it was so interesting. I think society wants to keep people at arm's length when it comes to

relatability. It's too scary when you're so far away from where I'm at, you know, especially when I knew you when you were right there. It's just confronting for people. And I just say people want you to be successful, just not more than them. You know what I mean? Like, climb up the ladder. Just don't pass me, though.

I want you to climb as high as you can, as long as it's not higher than me. Yeah, as high, but just a tiny little bit. Yeah. And then stay here forever and let's grind it out. Yeah. Forever. Let's be in a perpetual grind. Yeah.

I love that idea about people who want to always see you in pursuit. Yeah. Yeah, there's something romantic about it. There's something relatable about it. But that keeps people sort of with their foot on the gas. Again, like, if the things that you want to have happen, happen, if you build the business, the body, the whatever, what happens when you get there?

What is your plan when you finally get there? Because you kind of need to have one. And what you'll find is if you think about you're doing this big fucking journey, this massive, massive journey, and you've got to get to this place that's really, really, really far away. And the start of the journey is you going across a river,

so you're in a boat. And then you realize, 500 miles later, that you're out of the river, but you're still carrying the fucking boat on your head. You're like, this tool, this fuel, was meant for then, but it's not meant for now.

And I think we have a very poor judgment of when we're supposed to let go of those tools of need for validation, insufficiency, desperate desire to be liked by that goal. Yeah. to the kids that didn't believe in me in school, like finally make mom and dad love and whatever.

Like, you're very bad at switching fuels. Yeah. Well, but again, it's because most people live in this suspended chase forever. Most people are chasing the thing forever.

And so they're not trying to hear any sort of pitfalls of the thing. I'm chasing that. Do you mind? You know what I mean? Like, that's the mentality. And what can you tell them? It's kind of like, you know,

the thing about the Alchemist book and Santiago just getting to the oasis. Is that where the name for the album came from? Yeah. Have you walked it, the Camino? No. So I don't know whether I'm going to, but I might do the epilogue to the Santiago over New York. Wow.

So you do the big Camino to Santiago. You finish in Santiago Square. Is that the, I think, talking about Palo Coelhoela that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Santiago's, it's a different Camino, but I think Palo Coelah walked it and it's got to be related to his name. The journey that he takes, takes him through fucking Egypt and the rest of the stuff. But anyway, you walk from east to west and Santiago's kind of northwest of Spain, kind of above Portugal, but there's an epilogue to the walk, and it goes from Santiago to Finisterra, and they thought it's a

It's the most westerly point of Spain, and they thought it was the edge of the world. Oh, shit. Because out in front of you is just the Atlantic. Wow. So it's about 90K, something like that. You can do it in five days-ish. So I'm thinking I'm going to go to my mom and dads for Christmas,

and then I'm going to fly there on my own, and I'm thinking about doing that over New York. Yeah. So, yeah, walk to the edge of the world from the Middle Ages. Perception. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You were saying Santiago album. Yeah, I just think that.

You know, it's kind of like Santiago goes on this whole journey. He falls in love with the girl in the desert. The oasis. He wants to stay at the oasis, but he's like, that's not even what the fuck I was supposed to be doing. And she's like, you're a man of the desert. You're supposed to keep going. And he goes to the pyramid.

He gets to the pyramid. And he swears that there's gold there. And, you know, that's why he was going. And he's digging the shit up and there's no gold. And then he just, like, hits his ass beat. And they joke with him like, oh, he's probably thinking about the gold. that's buried under that tree in Andalusia, which is where the story starts.

Is Santiago waking up under this tree where the gold was at the whole time? So I still kind of oscillate on what to make of it, but I just think it's kind of, how I interpreted it was, it was you all along. That was the last kind of song on my album was, you were looking for you,

but you needed to go on this journey to end up kind of right back where you were, which is, with yourself and understanding that the journey was beautiful. You met this girl. You met Fatima. You know, you met all these people. You learned what you're capable of, which I think is kind of why men have this fascination

with self-sabotaging, you know, is because we all want to see what we're capable of, you know? And it's kind of fucked. It's a very toxic attraction to bottoming out, you know? What are we capable of? But that goes back to that. When the chips are down. Yeah. But that goes back to not having enough initiatory experiences.

Yeah. Well, I think it's certainly the thing, and this wasn't my insight, I'm stealing it. That wasn't mine either. Yeah. I think that it's the best reading of that story, in my opinion, is ending up at the place that you started is not the same as having never left. Right. Right. That's beautiful. In order to go on this journey.

So there's this example, I think it's... That's so beautiful. Some ancient Greek philosopher like Aristotle or something. And he said, imagine that you have a cork bobbing in the ocean and you have a ship that goes out and they're friends. And the ship goes out, it sails around, goes and visits places and people get on and people get off and there's a cork that's bobbing in the harbor. And then the ship, eventually, after this long, long, long journey, it comes back and

the cork and the ship, they talk to each other. and the ship says to the cook, well, sort of what did you do? Did you go on a journey? I said, well, you know, I was here. I was out in the ocean. I've been to the ocean the same time as you. It's the difference between going on a journey

and staying in the harbor and bobbing up and down. The time's going to pass anyway. You're still in the water. Yeah. But what have you done? What did that adventure? About fulfillment, right? Yeah.

It's funny, too, you know, I always think about that old, like, fisherman proverb when you talk about what do you do when you arrive? You know, the whole, like, the guy's out on the boat fishing, the businessmen cars. This is what I'm doing right now. You know, it's, but it's so, it's just so strange to me. I can't, I can't get a grasp on where my hunger are supposed to be pointed.

Well, humans aren't designed to arrive. We've never been designed to arrive. Yeah. You know, even ancestrally, when agricultural revolution, like 13,000 years ago, something like that, before that, the amount of food that you could store was as, much as you could collect that day plus a bit. Yeah. There is no arriving.

There is just constant pursuit. Yeah. Just strive. Yeah. So we are really maladapted to an environment in which you can actually take your foot off the gas. And then if you've been given a lot of reward by the world and you've habituated it and you've built all of these patterns and these sources of validation and just your daily behavioral routines, I need to let go of all of this plus a few million years of programming. in a desperate attempt to just be able to go

to just be I've arrived yeah yeah good luck and then where does your sense of self-worth come from that and I think that that's the big question that people

you know lots of people that listen to your music and listen to my show will become successful and they will face a question that's not too dissimilar to this which is fuck I thought that this thing

was the answer to my problems it's not am I going to keep eating more of the food that I know doesn't hydrate me in a desperate attempt to think that it will, or am I going to turn around and try and find where the sort of problem comes from?

And that's the therapy thing. I think in the meantime, I just keep doing the work. I keep making the... What does that look like to you? Well, for me, just learning that the fruits of my labor, that whole saying, the labor's the fruit, you know? And so while I try to figure out

what the fuck to do and where to go and where to point my ambition and hunger and where to get a charge from in the new dream, I'm going to at least keep my feet moving and keep doing the work of my artistry because that is still a huge sense of fulfillment for me. To still make a song, to have an idea, turn nothing into something, to execute an idea

for it to sound like this in my head and then it comes out sounding like that. It's still extremely rewarding. It's visceral when it happens. And so it's been a huge support system for me, my creative side, because while I try to figure everything else out, at least I have sustenance from this thing still, you know, without any metrics. I always tell people, if I make what I want to make, the song is a success.

It has to be. I can't keep living and dying by the industry's metrics. As existential as it feels to look at those numbers, I can't play that game. I have to change the metrics of success to, did I make what I want? Did I put out and share what I want? And did I share it in the way I wanted to share it? And when I want it to and all that.

That creative freedom and creative execution has to be my metric. It feels like authenticity. Yeah. Well, the problem there is. Like alignment is the new reward. Yeah, congruence. Yeah, exactly.

There's a massive problem with audience capture that people don't realize. Throwing red meat to your audience, making what you think that they want to hear, et cetera, et cetera. You know, it's the YouTuber or podcaster that just starts beef with anybody they can because... I love how you just said that. Throwing red meat to your audience. It's so... I love that.

It's so true. It's the musician that just has reverse engineered the exact type of beat or sound that's popular at the moment and I'm going to do it and then it'll work or whatever. But the problem is, there's many millions, gazillions of problems. One of the really existential ones, if you do try and go down that route, is if the audience doesn't like what you did, you have no route out because you don't know what you were trying to achieve because it didn't come from you internally. And you will fucking hate your audience because you said, I did this for you. It's like being the child of a tough parent, not wanting to go and play violin, playing violin,

making chair and then your parent not being impressed. And you're going, but I did it all for you. I did it for your adoration. I didn't do it because I wanted to. And you will hate your audience. You will hate your audience if you make something for them. You will hate your audience if you just make stuff for them, no matter how successful it is or not.

But if you make something for them and then they don't love it, you're going to feel, yeah, it's going to shoot you through the hucks. You go, I didn't even do it. I didn't even do me. I did this for you and you rejected me. Yeah. That's, Rick Rubin always talks about the audience has to come last. which I think is just so true.

And it's harder when there is an audience, kind of what we were saying earlier. It's real easy to put the audience last when there isn't an audience. Of course, I don't care. It's like no one cares. You don't care. Nobody cares. It's, man, that creative freedom,

that is maybe the biggest thing I miss about to come up and being like an up-and-coming artist is the innate freedom that just comes with it. You know, I know nobody's watching. So I don't have a doubt in my mind that I'm making what I actually want to make back then. But now I think I'm making what I want to make. But there's no way I can say that with full confidence because even if it's subconscious, there is something that's saying, you know people are going to hear this, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the one advantage, I think, I have many disadvantages over the world of live music and recorded music. One of the advantages is that during a conversation, your ability to restrict what it is that you mean and what you say, your ability to perform does get eroded a little bit. You know, if you're two hours into a conversation, you're usually sort of bits of you start to leak out. Authenticity begins to bleed through. Very difficult to keep the endurance race going. And if that's the case, it means, well, I can probably be. pretty reliably assured that what I'm saying is actually like pretty aligned with what I'm

mean to say and what I feel. Yeah. And yeah, when you spend so long refining two in the morning, you're looking at this fucking kick drum for the thousandth time, like going like, fuck, should I put more cutoff on it? I don't know if I do. I don't know if I like the sound of it. Maybe I should just sack this entire thing off.

But the opportunity for you to obsess. I've never even realized that before, but that's a real blessing, I think, of this. It really is one and done, and we don't edit anything. We never cut anything. Beautiful. Which means that the tightrope walk of

if you fucked it or if there was a long pause or if you forget a thing, like that's in because it was part of the vibe. Yeah. You're not supposed to... It's a difference between a track which is supposed to be as perfect as possible.

You can have just played like one note like, bing, okay, we'll add that in and then bing, and then we'll add that in. and that over time will construct a fucking riff. The opposite would be one take, all instruments, single mic. A lot of my best shit is accidents. Because I don't believe in accidents in the studio. A lot of times I accidentally fill in this pattern of a hi-hat

or I'll accidentally like, I meant to click on that piano sound, but I clicked on this plucked fucking sound from... Mandolin. Yeah. And I went to do the melody. and I was like, oh shit, that's crazy. You know, so it's so many times,

that's where you kind of have to start exercising your ability to surrender. You know, surrender to the moment, surrender to the idea that, surrender to faith, really. That's been a big challenge of mine, faith in general. I've had to do that at my shows, you know, because doing the show sober, right before I go on stage, the last thing I have to do, the obligation that I have, is to commit to surrendering.

it's going to be out of my control once I'm up there. You know? I don't know if this is a good crowd, bad crowd. They're going to, if the mic's going to fucking go out, my ears are going to go out. But I got to surrender because when I start feeling like what's about to be out there, like, now I'm in my head. I got to get in my body. But to get in my body, my thoughts and my brain has to surrender to the concept of faith. But faith is difficult for me because I don't trust anyone more than I trust myself.

You know? And that's real tough because I micromanage fucking everything Because I would rather be the reason Why something fucks up than you Because at least, you know what? I took the last shot. You know?

But that's, it's not collaborative, you know, it doesn't curate or foster any trust with coworkers, you know, because it just makes them feel incompetent. So you don't trust that I can do my job. No, I do. I just do it better.

But like that used to be the mentality. That's the any solopreneur that's ripped a project off the launch pad themselves. Yeah. You did do everything. And it's still that delusional self-belief that I can do that. Because again, it also comes from knowing I was not the most talented out the gate. That I had to work and bust my ass and spend so much time in the studio

to just even get my shit to a level where it could be enjoyed by a shit ton of people. So I look at any other endeavor the same. I'm like, if I spend enough time, I do think I could get good at that. I just do because I, this didn't come easy. Now, if this came easy to me, I think I would,

I would just not understand the grind of getting good at something, of developing the skill. I know that I have what it takes to commit to something and build a skill. But sometimes, again, it's like you're, and my friends have told me this, like you're downplaying how talented you were, though. You did have talent. You know?

It sounds more romantic to say that you had nothing. But then when I look at it from a logical POV, I'm like, if you go play, if 15-year-old me played his beats for 33-year-old me now, I would genuinely think he's not going to make it. That's why when people play me their music, I'm like, what do you want me to say? Because I should have no authority or control or influence on your decision to keep going or not going. Because I would tell my selfish shit sucked.

I would have told me to stop, you know? So I don't know. I think that's what's kind of given me the audacity to think I could write a book. where I could act or I could go play basketball in Vietnam because why not I fucking became an artist and I was trash you know

Russ ladies and gentlemen dude you're awesome thank you man where should people go what can they expect next what do I have next more music to combat the anxiety I have of being forgotten yeah yeah

yeah um music I got a movie coming out and um hopefully like in the spring of next year which is exciting congratulations yeah Yeah, just catch me spiraling on social media. Fuck, yeah.

Appreciate you. Thanks, man. This was incredible. I appreciate you having me. Seriously. If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom Reading List. It is 100 books that you should read before you die.

The most interesting, life-changing, and impactful books I've ever read with descriptions about why I liked them and links to go and buy them. And you can get it right now for free by going to Chriswillex.com slash books. That's Chris WillX. com slash books.