Modern Wisdom - #1063 - Charlie Houpert - How to Survive the Death of Your Old Self

Episode Date: February 23, 2026

Charlie Houpert is an entrepreneur and YouTuber. Why does life tend to teach its hardest lessons just as we think we’ve arrived? We chase the goals, build the lifestyle, tick the boxes, only to discover that emptiness and insecurity still follow us. Ancient philosophers and writers wrestled with this long before we did, encoding the problem into myths that have endured for thousands of years. So what were they trying to show us? And how can those old stories help us reclaim a sense of identity when we feel most lost? Expect to learn what Charlie’s personal growth journey has been over the past few years, why people feel so disconnected to success when they achieve it, how to balance societal and spiritual fulfillment, what the lessons of history and the power of mythology can teach us about modern problems, how charisma led Charlie to a spiritual breakthrough, what the future of Charisma on Command will look like and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ 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 Get up to $350 off the Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.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're in a very different place now to when you started doing your thing online. What's the unifying thread? Is there one between sort of all of this stuff? Or do you see it as different Charlie's? How do you come to sort of construct the narrative of what your interests have been and your personal growth over the last decade and a bit? Sure. The terror was in not having a thread.

So there was a time about three years ago where I could not form a story that connected who I had been in my 20s. to who I was becoming in my 30s. I was thinking about this. I've heard you talk about the lonely chapter where you go from, I'm just blending in to I'm going to take control of my life and I'm going to dial in these optimizing things.

I'm going to start my business, get in shape, eat the right food, et cetera. I discovered a second lonely chapter, which is when you bottom out on the optimizing thing and your friends are still very much in that optimized zone. And I did not know where to go, but I just knew that it wasn't working. Wow. So the common thread for me was that,

there was this problem in my life that started with, I'm too shy, nobody wants to talk to me, and you start off in victim consciousness, which is, this is just who I am, and I will just deal with this for the rest of my life. You read the game, which is what I did, you have this breakthrough, read Dale Carnegie, read all these other guys, and go, oh my gosh, I can change my behavior, get different results. But then once I had all the different results, which was I was 30 years old, had this business that I dreamed of, the girlfriend that I'd imagined myself dating, a bunch of friends, money was coming in. The most cliche thing happened, which is there was an emptiness that I could not pinpoint

or explain and things, I started unconsciously breaking things because I didn't know where to go from there. So to answer your question, the threat has been I try to attend to the greatest problem in my life and figure out who I can learn from to someone. of it. What does breaking things look like? It looks like I'm in the business that I love that I dreamed of. There was a one day, it was like, if I could just make $2,000 a month, live in Latin America, and do work that I found meaningful, that's the dream. And I hit that, and then I move the goalpost, and I move the goalpost, and all of a sudden I'm complaining, and I go, I have to make one video

a week. Three years prior was, I get to do this. And it became, oh, so annoying, these people are me and I have to hit all these targets that I'd set for myself to surpass views and all sorts of things. I started having issues in my friendships. I started having issues in different kinds of relationships. And I did not know that what was happening, I would say, is like, my soul was waking up. I had no concept of a soul. I wasn't a religious person. But the lack of emotional and spiritual nourishment that I'd allowed myself to experience for the last decade plus had caught up with me is what happened. Was the success and the pursuit materially antithetical to spiritual connection?

No. That's the tragedy. I didn't need to sacrifice one to get the other. I had it. It was, I think the temptation is when you have unresolved emotional issues, which I think we all do from childhood. And you've spoken to people about trauma, I know, and the ways in which we have these events in our past that happen and we make vows to ourselves that I will never experience that again. And then our entire life bends around not having that particular experience again.

And so we all have these unconsciously in our lives. And I started off with this business that was it was just it. It was I was learning in every video. I made this Donald Trump video. I learned so much in doing it and people liked it. I had both. I was filling myself up and helping the world and making it. making money. And then that people pleaser kicks in and then that you could be doing better kicks in and it became I have to top the last thing that I did, which was never the early motivation. The early motivation was always how can I solve my own problem and help people that are like me? But it devolved into can I have another video that is better than the one before? Can I make more money this month than I did the prior month? And that endless loop became deeply,

depressing to exist. Yeah, well, you know, when you are at the start of your journey, you have all of the hope that somewhere on the path from the bottom of the mountain to the top of it, you will find a thing that fills the void that you're trying to fix. But when you get to the top of the mountain, you've achieved all of the stuff and the void's still there. You go, oh, fuck. And this is, have you heard me do my untoward? teachable lessons essay? I may have, but please.

Okay, so this is the most robust. I chat a lot of shit, right? I come up with lots and lots of ideas and insights and stuff like that. Some of them are more scalable and like replicable than others. This is maybe like the most robust of any of them and it just keeps coming up. And I think it's because of my age and where I'm at and where my friends are at, people like you or, you know, Dr. Kay or whoever it is, this is unteachable lessons.

Hit me. No matter how arduous or costly or effortful it is going to be for us to find out for ourselves, we prefer to disregard the mountains of warnings from our elders, songs, literature, historical catastrophes, public scandals, and instead think some version of, yeah, that might be true for them, but not for me. We decide to learn the hard lessons the hard way over and over again. Unfortunately, they all seem to be the big things, too. It's never insights about how to put up level shelves

or charmingly introduce yourself at cocktail party. Instead, we spend most of our lives learning firsthand the most important lessons that the previous generation already warned us about. Things like, money won't make you happy. Fame won't fix yourself worth. You don't love that pretty girl, she's just hot and difficult to get. Nothing is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it. You will regret working too much.

Worrying is not improving your performance. All your fears are a waste of time. you should see your parents more, you'll be fine after the breakup and be grateful that you did it. It's perfectly okay to cut toxic people out of your life. Even reading this list back, I'm rolling my eyes at how fucking trite it is. These are all basic, bitch, obvious insights that everybody has heard before. But if they're so basic, why does everyone so reliably fall prey to them throughout our lives? And if they're so obvious, why do people who have recently become wealthy or famous or lost a parent or gone through a breakup, start to proclaim these facts with the renewed, grandiose ceremony

of someone who's just gone through religious revelation. It's also a very contentious point to say on the internet, if you interview a billionaire who says that all his money didn't make him happy or a movie star who said her fame felt like a prison, the internet will tear them apart for being ungrateful and out of touch. So, not only do we refuse to learn these lessons, we even refuse to hear the message from those warning us about them. Even more than the than that, for every one of these, if I think a bit deeper, I can recall a time, including right now where I convinced myself that I'm the exception to the rule, that my particular mental makeup or life situation or historical wounds or dreams for the future render me immune to

these lessons being applicable. No, no, no, my unique inner landscape would be fixed by skirting around the most well-known wisdom of the ages. No, no, no, I can thread this needle properly Watch me dance through the minefield, avoid all the trip wires that everybody else kicks. And then you kick one. And you share a knowing look with somebody else, the kind that can only occur between two people who have been hurt in exactly the same way.

And a voice in the back of your mind will say, I told you so. Mm. Mm. Mm. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.

The... So I've wrestled with this because you close with, I told you so, and I actually think that is a part of the trap, which is you're not supposed to make the same mistakes that everybody else makes. You're supposed to listen to your elders. And what I've seen is that it's kind of like grades. Like you're not supposed to skip counting on your fingers to jump to mental math. You are supposed to bump your head. You are not supposed to listen to other people tell you that it hurts to bump your head or burn your hand on the stove.

As much as it hurts to have done, I think there's something beautiful about the process. And part of the most difficult thing for me was that I kept beating myself up for exactly the reason that you were talking about. Everyone told me this was going to happen, right? Why didn't I catch it? Such an idiot. So there's a model that is, it's not uniquely mine, but it helps me understand it that I think of as a pyramid that I think is appropriate here and is somewhat related, which is we start if this is a pyramid at the very top thing, which is with our attention on results. And this is sort of victim mindset, which is to say we're in junior high, high school, wherever, and we go, man, I wish I had that girlfriend or I wish people liked me. And we talk with our friends and we pontificate about what we would do if we had $100 million. But we do nothing to make it happen, right? When you leap from that to the lower level, which is foundational to it, which is behavior, you don't get to bring all your friends with you, right? Because some of them want to just stay there. And this is what I think you were talking about with this lonely chapter idea. As you shift into, I'm going to take action. I'm going to start going to the gym. I'm going to start counting calories. I'm going to start making sure that I do

enough work every day. And I'm not just going to go, did I get the result that I want? I'm going to go, how are my inputs, my behavioral inputs? You lose people, but you gain something, which is, as you focus on this, this stuff just, it occurs. It's secondary to that. But then the journey that I think I started probably 10-ish years ago was you have everything you want, and the whole is still there. So you start paying attention to the emotional layer, which is underneath that. Because at the action level, it's all about discipline. Don't want to go to the gym, just do it. Feeling sad, turn it into rage and propel yourself forward, right?

But you start to realize that those corrosive emotions are a type of fuel that just hurts. And you can get all of the actions in place and all of the results can flow, but you will feel crappy. So you start tending to your emotions. Joe Hudson shows up in your life, right? Yeah. The student is ready teacher up here. And you start sitting with shame and you start sitting with helplessness and grief and grief. Oh, grief.

Rage instead of just anger, right? And so as you get in touch with all of these, your emotional fuel starts to shift. You're taking not exactly the same actions, but you're still taking effective actions. And then over time, your results come back. But there's a dip in between every one of these levels. When you switch from results to actions, you're the loser who's going to the gym and is still skinny. When you switch from actions to emotions, you're the guy whose business is shrinking while everyone else is kicking butt and why are you lagging? They're having so much fun conquering the world.

And denying how they feel. And yes. And the problem that I did and everybody else does is you try to drag people who don't want to take that journey. So I realize now at each stage I have been very aggressive with the people closest to me in trying to incentivize and pull them to the level of development that I feel called to. and it's not appropriate. There are people waiting as you achieve these levels, even though it feels like there's not. And I say achieve, that's even a different mentality.

But what I'm seeing, and there may be many more beneath this, is I spent years now on the emotional place. And the unlock for that is obviously you have more joy and you can operate from that. But the thing that I have not said before that scares me to, I'm afraid to say it, is that there's a level beneath that, which is spiritual religious.

And it's terrifying to acknowledge that the deepest wound that I've been able to find inside of myself is there. It is a separation from life, a separation from God, a separation from all of these things. And we don't, everyone has their own story in the West of how that came to be. But culturally, if you look at us, we are all recent immigrants in America, you especially self, right? There was something going on with our family and our homeland. where it was like, it's kind of crappy or it's not working here. We're going to cut ties with our ancestral lands. We're going to cut ties with our extended family.

We're going to cut ties with this sense of belonging to a larger community to try to form a better life for ourselves. And so a lot of people, particularly in America, I have found our ancestrally disconnected, spiritually disconnected, disconnected from the land. They found convenient ways to get everything from food to friends to whatever they need. and they can't myself included identify the location of the pain the location of the whole because you would need to have a soul in order to feel that pain and if you don't have a soul you just need more stuff or you just need better behavior or even you just need to feel better but as I've dropped into this layer it's like oh like the the relief the gift the joy the beauty is I don't even want to sell it too much it's staggering and um

humbling and beautiful. And so that's, that's been my arc lately. Well, Huberman was sat there yesterday. He basically said the same thing. So you're in good company. This God pivot. The God pivot. You can call it.

Yeah. It seems to be reliably happening to people who get to a certain place. So I'm interesting. in, there's a bunch of ideas that are being mapped here. So I love what you said about the unteachable lessons thing, that it's kind of your job to burn your hand. And the reason that I like the term unteachable lessons, and one bit that's probably missing from that essay is to reassure people that the voice in the back of your head that tells you, I told you so, that's a prick. And you shouldn't be listening to that. The reason that these lessons are unteachable

is that nobody learns them. So the fact that you supposedly know that it's going to happen, you disregard it, it happens, that is the lesson. The lesson is that everybody doesn't learn the lessons, if that makes sense. And that should hopefully rid you of at least a little bit of that I told you, I should have told you so shame. You should have known that this thing was going to happen. Okay, that's the first thing, which is great. I love your hierarchy of results, actions, emotions, spirituality, and that at each level, as you try and pull somebody through, there is a lonely chapter that comes along for the ride, and there is a pullback in terms of real world results, because you have moved ever out of outcomes and ever more

inward, right? Ever more from the world, from the material, to something that's a little bit deeper, a little bit closer to self, a little bit more central, right? It's increasingly sort of turning you inside out. And at each level of this that you move through is interesting. For me, a few things come up. First off, the first Loney chapter, which I think is accurate, your friends are going to leave you behind because of that pivot. There's another side to the Loney Chapter two, which is your actions throw into harsh spotlight other people. So the looking glass self, right, that you are observing yourself through the influence and the expectation and the perspective of other people and they have an incentive for you to not change because it's effortful for me

to update my opinion of Charlie's the charisma guy. You know, he's like Russell Brand videos and Donald Trump and like, you know, fucking Robert Downey. Like that's, I know Charlie, Charlie's the opinion, the charisma guy. Oh, fuck, Charlie's changed. I don't like that. First off, it means that if he can change, I can change. And his change throws my lack of change into harsh spotlight. Also, that's effortful. Can you not be, because I already, I had to do a bit of work to work out who you were. Stop fucking changing, right? Another part is, well, if I really care about Charlie, especially if I'm in a relationship

with him and he keeps changing, well, maybe what if one of the bits of change that he does means that I'm, he sees something in me that's, that can't come along for the ride. Yeah. What if, what if his evolution results in a discarding of me as his friend? or is his partner or whatever. Well, that's not bad. So the people around you have a lot of incentives to keep you where you are.

And this isn't, sometimes it's malicious or, you know, sort of conscious, but for the most part, it's just someone going, please don't abandon me. Like, you're changing so much. And it's wonderful for you, but like I feel inferior. I feel insufficient.

I feel behind. I have this sort of sense of lack of not enoughness. And this fear of abandonment. Please, like, just keep. Can you not like just leaks out of us in all of these different ways. So I'll pause there. Yeah, no, I mean, it makes me, I'm not making me sad. I'm reminded of my grief over so many of these.

And I'm reminded of there's the people and the perspective they can often be talked about of people holding us back. But what I look at is the terror of being the one who is changing and recognizing, oh, my God, you're staying the same. I'm the one who is forcing our relationship into a new structure. And the shame and pain and grief of that. I see in you, person who isn't changing, the pain of watching me, person who is changing, change. I might stop changing in order to... And it's hard for me to be around you. So when you're in a liminal space, and I've seen this many times, when I was in this

in-between space of still really wanting material success in a way that just hooked me and also sensing that it was unsatisfying, I would have these days where I'd like start work and then like, oh, get away from me. And so when I sit down with someone who is firmly in that achiever phase and they're rock solid in it, it is, it's more congruent than I am. And I find myself frustrated and angry with their congruence. And so I think this is an interesting way to analyze someone, we don't have to go deep into this, but like a Donald Trump or an Andrew Tate, they are deeply congruent at the level of ego. Like they are fully on their own, and I don't mean this judgmentally on their own ego's side. There's not a waiver. There's not a flinch. There's not an

anything. When you enter into an in-between paradigm space, you're flinching all over the place. You're not sure. I'm not certain about this. I kind of think, what do you guys think? Your tests in the waters, will anyone come with me? And so it's very difficult to be around high conviction, highly congruent people in a different stage that is particularly a stage that you're coming from when you're in that thing. And so I look back and go, I had to internally and sometimes externally demonize people that I had been close to because they were external representations of the thing that I, the thing that I was growing out of. You were trying to shed this. Not even trying. I wish I was trying to stop. It was happening at this point. I couldn't undo it. That was the most frustrating part.

I was like, if I could go back, I would. A quick aside, if you have been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a huge role in your energy, your focus, and your performance, but most people have no idea where there's a or what to do if something's off, which is why I partnered with function because I wanted a smarter, more comprehensive way to understand what's happening inside of my body. Twice a year, they run lab tests that monitor over 100 biomarkers and their team of expert physicians analyze the data and give you actionable advice to improve your health and lifespan. Seeing your testosterone levels and tons of other biomarkers charted over the course of a year with actionable insights,

to improve them, gives you a clear path to making your life better. And unfortunately, getting your blood work drawn and analysed like this usually costs thousands, but with function, it's just $499, and you can get an additional $100 off, bring it down to $399 bucks. Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save $100 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. Yeah, I mean, the first time I ever saw Peterson,

live, 2018, and someone says, the depth of my consciousness causes me to suffer. Is it a blessing or a curse to feel everything so deeply? And he says, you take more of the thing that poisons you until you turn it into a tonic that girdles the world around you. Very apocalyptic from Jordan. But then he said, you can try and regress back into a sort of more animalistic state. You can try to sort of devolve. You can put Pandora's toys back into her box and try and pretend that you can.

you don't know what's on the other side. But it's too bloody late for that. It's too bloody late for that. And that's what you're talking about. You're like, I fuck. Like it was so much easier when I was just on my grind. I had congruence. I had conviction.

Yeah. And my conviction looked outwardly like confidence, even if it was ignorance. But it presented as certainty. And people really like that. And they seem to be attracted to me. because my aura was energizing and electric, and I had like shit happening, man, and I didn't doubt myself.

I didn't doubt. And it didn't tarnish the whole process. And now I'm like trying to evolve and my evolution is making me miserable because on the, I don't have the certainty that what I'm doing is what I'm supposed to be doing anymore. Yeah.

I mean, you said a couple words, like confidence comes from confide, trust, right? It's the ability to have trust within yourself. So you're in these stages of high conviction, high confidence and they're authentic to a particular time in your life where for me it was I know what's important. I'm in pursuit of what's important. When I look someone in the eye and I tell this is what I believe, it's congruent for me. And the terror that happens when your sense of self expands outside of that congruence where you no longer feel the ability to fully trust

this new piece of yourself that you're becoming aware of, perhaps not a new piece, but a piece that you're becoming aware of. And as someone who teaches charisma, I have long recognized the conviction is, if I had to say one thing, it is the backbone of charisma, is the ability to be congruent on your own side and internally aligned. But it's not the end-all-be-all because it doesn't allow for growth in that phase. So you look at like Connor McGregor, super high conviction has had some emotional issues that he doesn't seem to have been able to integrate well because that would require him to doubt, hey, maybe I haven't been behaving in the best way lately. But the conviction as what's taken him to where he is, so why trade it in?

Yeah. Right? Yeah. You're asking somebody to get rid of the thing that they have evidence is effective at getting them results in the real world and respect and admiration in order to do a thing which loses all of that and feels like shit and puts them back to before a white belt. Is it any surprise that people choose to not take that trade? It's no surprise to me at all.

It's shocking that anybody does otherwise. That's the bigger surprise. And it only, and if I've heard people talk, Joe Hudson says something similar, which is you enter into increasingly a state of choicelessness. Like, this is not what I would elect from a strategic choice. My mind does not see the value of this so clearly, but some other part of me. And we could talk as your sense of awareness moves from, I am my thoughts, I am thinking about things. I have strategies, plans, ways of engaging with the world. Like I locate myself up here to a bit more embodied.

I feel my butt on the ground, my feet on the floor. And really like the central column, the heart, this piece right here. This is the tender piece. This is the piece that can do vulnerability. This is the piece that can weep and cry and love and hug fully. And this is the piece that has wonderful strategies. And it's really cool and I don't want to throw it out. I think that's, that was something I also tried to do for a period of time, which was a mistake.

What did that look like? So this is where I think part of the reason that I think people, men in particular, have negative associations with sensitivity and vulnerability is because some of the early stages of arriving there where it's not more fully integrated can look like you're just a raw nerve. And anyone who touches you, you just cry and there's a lack of containment. There's not a full embodiment of the vulnerability. And so part of what helps you have some consistent thread of past future is your head. It's the part of you. Like you need it to strategize.

But I think the big shift, and again, I'm very much a student in this. I'm learning from people far ahead of me, is that this switches from the master to the tool, right? The mind, the strategy, all of that sort of stuff becomes something that you can deploy from time to time, but not something that when you sit and meditate chats the entire time. You can drop into a quieter felt place more often. And again, I'm a bit above my pay grade here because I don't live there. I'm talking about the thing. How many people have the choice with this? This is another thing that upsets me is I had the impression that there are so many guys that are like similar to you and I have hit achievement thresholds and moved goalposts so many times.

And I admire them and I look up to them and I've learned a ton about business from them. and I see so many of the influencers like you and at in the space. I feel like they're there. I have this conversation with a lot of people. And what I've heard before is like, oh, wow, the hair on my arms is standing up as you're talking about this stuff. I feel it. It's, yeah, there's some demons that I'm running away from, some stuff in my past that I thought that I could bury that I'm willing to verbally acknowledge, but not necessarily dive into. And so I do think that there is a choice.

at the edge of all of these thresholds, just like there's a choice at the edge of results, which is, hey, I've seen that people who take these actions start to get in shape, start to earn more money. Am I willing to let go of the safety and comfort of not trying in order to apply myself? I think similarly, there's a question of, am I willing to let go of the certainty and the control

that I have by completely managing all of my actions all the time and to enter into this irrational, feminine, emotional space where I am not totally in control. And I think that there's a lot of people have that choice today. I think we all have choices. Well, the raw nerve thing, I think, is an interesting analogy because almost all cross-cultural definitions of masculinity include emotional control or some variant of that.

You can shortcut it. So I think the depth of masculinity is to feel everything but to have a vessel that can contain it, right, so that it is not just immediate instinctual, you hurt me, I punch you, right? It's not, you hurt me, I just dump on you, I cry, I this, that you're still feeling intensely, but there's a system that can feel it,

tend to yourself, not abandon yourself, be vulnerable in front of the other person, which would be to show them that you're hurt without dumping it on them, and then choose how to behave. You can shortcut that, though, by just not feeling. You can just go, somebody insult me. I don't care. That's a hater. Like, you can get mental models and all sort of stuff to just cut everything beneath this off and just say,

well, it wouldn't be practical for me to listen to what the haters say. And you can, you can just lose all of the feeling. And what you gain from that is an incredible efficiency in terms of getting stuff done. I mean, if you look at the wealthiest people in the world, they are very good at disconnecting from their feelings most of the time. It's tough to make billions and billions and billions of dollars and stay in the game for that amount of time at that intensity level without abusing your own feelings. Right? Because you're permanently having to suppress. Yes. And you can make a lot of money.

But it gets in the way, right? This is one of the reasons why an interesting definition of vulnerability, Joe Hudson's definition of vulnerability, telling the truth even when it's scary. that is very much a lean-in definition of vulnerability. Yeah. But especially as you transition from results to action and then action to emotions, your outcomes in life are reliably going to get worse and you're going to feel worse

and people are going to treat you worse. So, well, why would I do that? Why would I, I'm going to sacrifice the only observable metric that anybody cares about and that I can flex on Instagram and in an increasingly meritocratic, rationalist, materialist society is the only one that people can judge me based on outwardly, right? No one knows the peace of mind I have when I go to bed at night.

And I can kind of forget that. It's like, yeah, sure enough. I haven't had a peaceful night of sleep in three years, but like, meh, you know, like fucking look at my car. So I think an interesting unifying thread that I see between at least some of the people trying to come up with Well, so there are ways of conceiving And I think you're raising a really good point here That is

You If you just To become a monk is not available To many people Technically you could fly to Nepal And wear a loin cloth And hold a cup But that's not a likely outcome

For a lot of people So there is this need to exist In consensus economic reality Where the opinions of other people affect you They matter They have a direct impact on your level of survivability and also just your ability to be social and happy in life.

So that's real, all the things that you're saying. But then there's also the unique spiritual calling that everyone has, which is that it's the little voice that you can learn to drown out. It's not a loud voice, but it is a persistent voice. And it's always there. Like, warned you at the beginning of the relationship, warned you midway through the relationship. It's there at the end of their relationship, right? It's just, it's just there. And I think, I know that what I'm trying to do is to find a marriage of those two things, where I am honoring the need to function and live in the world and produce stuff that other people want and like and having attention outwardly focused in order to do that. And to respect your own evolutionary programming, which is you're a social

creature. Of course. You need validation, recognition. You don't want to be abandoned by the tribe. You don't want to be so weird and fucking esoteric that nobody can relate to you because that's probably going to be pretty tough to handle. Yes. And I think a huge aspect of communication and empathy is the ability to go, where is this person at? Meet them whether or. And meet them where they are. And that requires external focus. Then there's the internal focus, which is can I shut it all out?

And if no matter what anybody says or does or thinks or cares, what's true about me? And this is hardest in the realm of like, why am I here for some? people it's what is my sexuality there's there's these very very challenging questions and there's always this tug well how are people going to respond to it what will they like ah that wouldn't work financially and i think to become able to hold or allow both of those currents to exist in you at the same time is the work and there's not like a checklist that i can give you in order to do it i'm still learning it myself but i'm waking up to the tension between those and i'm also waking up as you go, I think the cool thing is, you can follow either one and they will lead you to

one another eventually. Because if I had this period of, if I look at the beginning of charisma on command, it was very external focused. How are do people like what I'm doing? Does the girl at a bar happy with what I'm saying, right? All of that stuff. I'll make a video. But it actually took me this roundabout route to this beautiful, creative thing that I got to build, especially early on in the business. And so in pursuing this external, egoic dream of living. on the beach with my friends doing work that I wanted while doing yoga, I found myself. Like, I found this internal guy. And then I lost them.

And then in the last couple years, you can also lean to the internal side, which is you go deeply internal. And for a while, I mean, I know we don't want to do too much personal stuff. But I was like, I'm going to do these weird projects. I'm going to make a Dungeons and Dragons show. And I'm going to make. I loved it. I'm going to make stuff that nobody wants to watch, right?

And I don't care. I don't care. This is me, me, me, me, me. And then you go, oh, this isn't a satisfying. Like, I want to serve. I actually do want to give of myself, but in a way that is meaningful to other people. And so I think if I look at the arc of what charisma meant to me, there was this, who do I have to be in order to get what I need from the world? This is a foundational question, I think, of every child, every adolescent.

And I think entering into maturity is about recognizing oneself as capable, still interdependent, but the love comes from me. The love is who I am and I radiate that. It's not how can I get love? It's how can I return to the love that I am. And when you do that, a different kind of economic activity comes online, which is service. And I feel like I'm at the precipice of this. Like for the first time, the energy of the questions that I'm asking isn't merely, how can I people please and serve? And yes, I'll get some money from that.

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which is how do I serve myself? Yeah. Like how do I learn about me and do the, inner work thing. And I think I get the sense that that's the last seven, six, five years or whatever it is for you. So is that, is that right to say that there is a kind of a middle. I, I think that serving oneself is a wonderful point at any stage, anywhere, because they eventually become the same. On your journey, though, with this, I want the outcomes I want in the world, got some, fuck that didn't get it. Yeah. You don't go straight from there to service.

Correct. Correct. Yeah, yeah. So they're all levels of self-surface at the level that you're capable of doing it. So self-service looks like at that level of awareness, if you will, I need something, they have it. Who do I have to become and be to get it? That's me serving myself. Now, it's an interactive way of doing it. Then service becomes, I'm tired of doing that. I want to be more honest about my emotion. So self-service is taking a break, slowing down, withdrawing for a period of time, going inward. There's this dark night of the soul. If you look at the hero's journey, you know, if you look at it like a clock, there's the lower half of the clock, which is the trials and tribulations. We can talk more about that, but that, those mythic stories have this period of time,

as Jordan Peterson would say, the belly of the whale, where you are compelled to acknowledge the darkness, the pain inside of yourself. And so that is what self-surface looks like. Something keeps tapping me on the shoulder, telling me that I got to pay attention. I'm going to go attend to that. And we could talk about specifically what that might look like, but I know you're talking to Joe Hudson, he's wonderful for this sort of thing. I want to get your perspective on both of those things. How do you say, the 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. Yeah, 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. So first off, I love mythology these days. I think Carl Jung is perhaps the most brilliant man of the 20th century, and I think deeply underrated even his thing. I look at Jordan Peterson and the impact that he had on

society, and like there must be a Jungian giving us some lessons somewhere. Like we, we, we crave it as a country in the West because I think it is the synthesis of the analytical mind thing that is so popular in the West materialism with the Eastern spiritual side. I think Carl Jung is that bridge for many people. So then you have Joseph Campbell who comes and creates this hero's journey arc. I'll talk broadly about it, but what I've seen is that these occur in 12-year cycles roughly. I'm not saying this, but I've noticed the first 12-year cycle for me was starting charisma on command. And the entire idea of the hero's journey is that you enter into a part of yourself that you didn't know existed. You come out with a treasure and you bring it back

to the world. And so the entering into the hard part, the first time around was I have to dig deeper, work harder, take finance or risks, all that kind of stuff. And what I bring back is this way of being with courage, I would say. That was like the gift that I had to share, which is you too can go to Brazil and start your own business and talk to that person that you're attracted to. And it was this, it's a spiritual gift that you're giving and it can come through the medium of YouTube or whatever. Descending into it this time, I would say the gift that I'm finding is through reconnecting with all the split off parts of myself. If one connects with as many of the split off parts of their self, which means going into the times that someone was cruel to you, that you were cruel to others, the pain in your life, the grief that you haven't processed. all those sorts of things.

As you bring more of those together, you find an abiding love that is there. And that's, for me, was the turn from the emotional inquiry, which is like, really it's tough to sometimes describe the value of it

because you're like, this is really challenging. But I would say the other side is, it's like, oh, I know peace. I know I cried listening to a song on the way over here twice because music is beautiful.

I watered flowers the other day and they came more back to life than I cried because it was so beautiful to participate in something so lovely. And the world is just more stunning. And it's not like, oh, that's stunning

if I get a 10 million followers or stunning if I win the prize or if the girl likes me. It's like, no, no, like, it's all stunning. I told you, sitting here with you today, watching your growth path. It's fucking... The word that comes to mind is like wholeness or enoughness.

Thank you for speaking it more clearly than I did. That's exactly it. Yeah, it's wholeness. It's if we fragment ourselves in order to effectively fit in as children, right? So we've got this eclectic, weird interest or we have a sexuality that doesn't fit in with our, so we go, that's not me. That's other people. And you see it come through in all kinds of projections. So often in some of the most strict religious communities, they have, as we know, these pastors or these priests,

and I'm not saying all priests, but are some of whom who are most likely to be vocally anti-gay, but have secret dalliances on the side because they've split off that piece of themselves because they believe that their community and God does not approve of who they are, right? So we all do this in different ways. Our community doesn't improve of our sadness. It doesn't approve of our sensitivity, of our artistry, whatever it is. And so in recovering all of that wholeness, you get back more of yourself. And what that looks like is more creativity, more connection, more joy.

You stop trying to impress the people that you've been so caught up on for the last 10 years and actually start hanging out with the people that have loved you all along and are there. You become aware that there are more people like that all around you. I know that I spent a lot of time focused on the person who was just out of reach, as you described in your... Zone of proximal development socially. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Or relationally. Yes. Yes. Yes. So the question that I have, and I think is kind of an important one, is to try and get people to think about what their definition of success is. Like, what does getting the outcome that you want look like? And at each level of resolution or depth,

or the outcome that I want is to be financially secure, the outcome that I want is for the people that I admire to admire me, The outcome that I want is to be attuned with my emotions and be able to feel things. The outcome that I want is to truly know God, whatever it might be. And the conflict that I see comes between people who have differing definitions of the outcome that they want for their life. So the person that's action-oriented is saying, well, you are trading the thing that I want, which is outcomes, for the thing that you want, which is emotional presence,

connectedness, sense of peace. And I think the reason that we have this bit of self-doubt in the back of our minds, as you're the person that's moving through it, is you turn around and look at the person who is congruent, who has the thing, plus the confidence and conviction that you used to have, I'm like, I've lost all of those.

I've had to let go of all of those My real world results are fucking falling backward And I no longer appear as certain And I don't have the certainty myself to carry myself through Yeah, yeah, exactly So they don't respect me as much And I'm less effective in the world And I also have self-doubt

About whether or not the thing that I'm doing Is the thing I'm supposed to be doing You go, well, where in there is the reward And at each level, the same as You're telling me that I'm not going to sleep in which is something that's comfortable for me to do in order to get up and do my meditation and I'll go to the gym on time

and I'm going to be ostracized by my friends because I can't go out my drinking buddies, not my drinking buddies because I'm not drinking no more and I don't have my gym buddies yet because I haven't gone to the gym enough to get respect from the people that go to the gym and I haven't worked out how to speak to them

and what their culture is. So at each different fucking level, you're becoming less effective in the paradigm that you know on this sort of plane of existence that you're aware of to go through Dark Night of the Soul to then come back out the other side.

And do you remember when Jordan talked about King Arthur and the Knight to the Round Table? I don't know this one. Oh, dude. So they have to go, King Arthur and the Night to the Round Table, they need to go and get treasure from the dragon. They all set off on a journey. In order to get to the dragon, they have to go through the forest.

Each man enters the forest at the point that looks darkest to him. I fucking love that visual. I think it's so sick. It's so cool. Okay, what is your particular pathology? What is your particular fear? Because that's the thing that you're going to face. People pleasing is it the inability to sit with silence.

Is it the fact that you desperately need the validation of other people? You pick your mental malady of choice. That's the thing that you end up facing. And yeah, I just, I really want to like plainly call out what the pain is. For every level there's a devil. Yes. And what is the devil that you're to try as best as we can to be like, okay, I think this is probably what it's going to feel like to go through each one.

So for someone moving from action to emotion. I mean, you just nailed it, which is I am at every level you are giving up success in that thing to get something that. that you have no promises. Brian Whetton has an interesting framing, not just around this, but he says, a travesty is when you give up the higher for the lower. So travesty is when you trade your inner piece for money.

Yeah. Sacrifice is when you give up the lower for the higher. And so you give up the utter freedom of being a bachelor to start a family or something like that. And so I think this is, this is, it's, you know, to pull on another myth, this is Abraham, this is the sacrifice, This is the willingness to give up the lower for the hire.

And that story is pretty horrifying in a lot of ways because he ties up his son and it's about to kill him. But the underlying idea is that there is a hire. There is a command inside of me that I'm not going to deny. I'm terrified of it. I don't want to do it. Sorin Kierkegaard wrote Fear and Trembling, which is exactly what you're expected to feel when you have that divine call tell you, leave your job. Exit this relationship. Get, marry her.

That's the terrifying one. have a baby like when that call from this place as you get familiar with it calls it asks you to trade in your identity of who you were and it is an ego death every time every single time that little identity must die and something else is born and there's not like the guarantee even though we can rationally go i'm still going to be alive and all these things but that's the feeling is ego death what yeah dig into the fear and trembling so i think a lot of people The sort of people that have made it this far into this episode. I assume either going, what the fucking?

Or they say, oh, there's something here. Like, I'm resonating in the something here. Newtarnic. Thank you. There is something here. There is something here. It's fucking evidence-based, very tasty, zero-calorie energy drink. That fear and trembling, that peering over the precipice,

that sort of like existential vertigo. where you go like, yeah, yeah. You're like, holy fuck. Like, that's, what more is it to say about that sensation and about stepping into it and about the first steps and the biggest steps? You don't have to force yourself, it will call.

It will call you. And if you're going, sitting here, and you probably haven't made it this far, but if you're going, I don't know, I kind of just, I really encourage and love people being where they're at. So I think a mistake that I had made, which is everybody needs to move as,

quickly as possible through these phases. That's all the optimizer idea. Your time will come. If what I am saying is true, this is not something you have to do. Like your ego is not going to be the one doing this. It's going to do in many ways you have to participate and say yes at some point. You have your choice, as we talked about earlier. But the call will come. And you can ignore it about 10 million times. It will keep ringing for you. And the consequences will get more and more dire. You ignore it once, you know, you go out, it's a little bit of a difficult relationship. Ignore it for 20 years. You're in a loveless relationship and, you know, you've got kids in a divorce on your hands, like all of that sort of stuff. The consequences of not listening begin to

erode the actions, the results, the emotions anyway. So the good news is you don't have to do anything. Yeah, one way or another, this realization is going to arrive. What do you think is going on there is that do you come to think about it in material terms? Do you come to think about it Is the universe having to ramp up the volume of the lesson until you go like, hey, Charlie, now, please. If all of this is right, fundamentally you are so much more than you are aware of. And we all recognize this implicitly, which is if I were to say, you know, what's your blood pressure right now? What's happening in your liver? Obviously, there are pieces of you of which you are unaware and do not need to be in charge of.

When you go to sleep, they just keep humming along, keeping you going. there are massive psychological pieces of us spiritual pieces of us that exist that we're unaware of you just don't have to be aware of it's taken care of for you but it's still you so the idea is that this always has been the case it always will be the case you're just waking up to it and becoming more aware of it as you can swallow it because if you were to be dumped into it as some people do with intense psychedelic experiences you can crack you can break yourself if you go a little bit a little bit if you go too fast into these sorts of things and so actually rather than speeding through these it's like enjoy enjoy the ride i remember believing that optimization and getting everything on be like 25 26 27 was the end all be all some of the happiest and most joyous times of my life was was doing that stuff me too you just can't go back you can't step in the same river twice right and so the where where i want to help people and who's there. It's when you're like, I remember it was so good. Like, why can't I make it go back to that? It's

you can't go back. You know too much. You have learned too much. You have come too far. It's too bloody late for that. You've got to move forward. And so what I hope to do with the rest of my career, and I'm learning in this conversation and others, is to really help people at those paradigm shift points, those lonely chapter moments to move gracefully into the next phase because it is a bear for all the that you said, it's not fun to do. Nobody is really encouraging you to do it in your current sphere. I would just love, love, love to hold space for people to make those leaps. It's such a privilege to watch somebody.

If you've ever seen someone, exit out of victim consciousness and start to go to the gym and start to dial in and because of something that you've said, it's like, oh my God, it feels so good. It just is true at every level. Well, the next one, the problem is the movement from action to emotion is so unsexy in a way that the movement from results to action is not. Like that every underdog movie ever in history has a montage of a guy sorting his life out by learning to be disciplined and upward aiming. Very few of them have a guy deeply learning to get in touch with the inner child. inside of him and crying at Christmas movies. Right. Very few. Very few. And if if it is,

it's wrapped in this sort of redemption of a person who was too far on one side in terms of their masculine. And this was this was a righteous correction that was like comically needed in order to rebalance the people around them. For the most part, a man specifically getting in touch with his emotions is not in service of him. It's in service of the people around him. In some ways that's beautiful. But the way that Hollywood portrays it is not. that. It's not this sort of existential gift to the world. It's like, no, his wife needed him to be more attuned when she was, like, he was on his phone and filling in Excel spreadsheets when they were at dinner. Like, yeah, okay, it's a pretty low resolution way to look at it. Yeah. I mean,

you're, you're very right. I think we live in an either childlike or adolescent culture in terms of most people's development. And even the term unsexy is like, that's really what adolescents care about. Adolescents are trying to be sexy. that's the thing and in your 20s 30 it's fine it's not to say that you can't have it but it's not sexy it's loving and there's a difference that like like you're not trying to be sexy is do other people find me attractive and want to more towards me loving is do it do i feel love and am i radiating it to myself and to other people so you're right it's not sexy it's it's loving and even i think those words are apt because the quality of romantic interactions that you choose

in this period shifts from what's sexy, who's cool, who's physically attractive, who can help me with my status, to who do I love and what do I love? And that changes the quality of your romantic relationships dramatically. Before we continue, if you think that all protein powders are basically the same, congratulations. That's exactly what they want you to think. Most brands never test their products after they leave the factory, while Momentus tests every single batch for purity and banned substances, which is why I partnered with them. They're literally the best on the planet. They're unparalleled when it comes to rigorous third-party testing. And this stuff tastes phenomenal. This way protein is sourced from grass-fed European cows, no hormones or antibiotics or GMOs,

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Let's say that there's someone who goes, I feel like the volume's like kind of loud already and the fleeting thoughts and the little whispers are kind of, I feel ready to pay attention to them. but I'm still scared of making that transition. You mentioned that you want to be kind of a careful shepherd. Who was the boatman that helped get Dante across the river? You know, Dante's Inferno. It's not Karen from mythology. Yes, yeah, yeah. So he's blind, I think.

Yeah. And I said, I've got my fucking mythology glossary with me. You want to be this like boatsman, shepherd thing. You're like, hey, you're going from this bit of land to this bit of land here. And let me make it at least a little bit less scary that this is a journey that you can do with grace, right? Graciously, I think was one of the ways that you said. Someone is like on the precipice. They're on the cusp of, I feel like this is a evolutionary step that I'm prepared to take and I'm kind of like ready.

without pushing and without going like wait for the volume to be turned up, what are some of the things that you would say to that sort of a person? Yeah. One, what I hope to convey for the first chunk of this is this is normal. This is, you're not broken that this is happening to you. In fact, if you want to take some spiritual pride in it, like you're advanced, you're moving quickly. And even though it's hard, nothing's broken. The second thing that I would offer would be you're going to enter.

into a stage probably if you're coming from the optimizer stage that is far more irrational and feminine and intuitive than you're familiar with. And those three words probably terrify you because they're associated with the victim stage, which is I just, I'm a tumbleweed and like just happens to me and I have no command of anything. It is evolution but feels like devolution. Correct. And that's, I totally get the optimizer, see somebody who is doing work intuitively and they're like, that's who I used to be 10 years ago and my life was miserable. No way am I leaning into that. But there's a difference between listening to craving and listening to intuition. So we're trying to turn up, experiment with and explore the feminine, irrational,

intuitive callings that you feel. So there's a number of ways to get closer to this. And there's degrees of safety and risk involved with all of them. So some of them are, go with the one intuitively, it seems interesting to you first would be what I would say. So you've got standard meditation practices. You have breathwork practices, Wim Hof and otherwise Stan Groff. You have therapy. You have men's groups. You have psychedelics. You have sound healings where they play the bowls and you just allow the vibration to wash over you. You've got long walks in nature. You've got strenuous physical activity that is not rigidly structured. I think that the gym where you're pushing yourself and you have to do it, but even you could still drop into you like a zenless zone state in that sort of thing. But I would say like more sports, recreational,

those sorts of things. Music, all of these sorts of things. Find the one that hits you. And I've done all of these singing, dance. All of these kinds of things are this intuitive flow, feminine, reconnect you with joy, feelings, emotions. And then from that, what you'll start to realize is if you do a breathwork or therapy, you're like, oh man, I need to have a conversation with my dad. And and so then... Came here to do breath work. Yeah, I came here to do breath work. And sometimes it's, I just need to call this person and tell them I love them.

I need to apologize. I need to say that that upset me and hurt me. You're going to start cleaning up the messes that you've left untended. Things that you pretended were okay that are not okay, actually. And be gentle with yourself. It's not like I did the breathwork. I got, okay, call them right now immediately after. it's this is going to be a time span of like I'll do breathwork again tomorrow in a day or two and

you know if I still feel that way I can call them and I'm a little bit less raw and I have a little bit more of that containment so I'm able to have this conversation in a way that is both emotionally vulnerable without emotionally exploding on this person yes yes yes yeah and so as you start to do these different intuitive feminine practices you're going to get little hits of I want to make a Dungeons and Dragon show I want to make this phone call I want to do this thing. I don't care how much it costs, you know, like that sort of stuff. And you want to experiment in little ways. And this was crazy, but I was playing a video game two weeks ago. I know, crazy. So I'm playing a video game. And after every little level, it's called Hades 2. It's got my

Greek mythology. I love it. After every minute or so, you have to make a choice between upgrades that you get. And as I'm playing this game, I'm like doing it. And I am optimizing my upgrades, because they have percentages associated with them. I'm doing the math in my head to see which one is going to output the most damage to do the thing. And for some reason, fine, thank God, it clicked to me. I was like, what am I doing? Like, I've turned this game into a test where I am every time picking the same upgrade. I'm not exploring.

I'm not having. So I went, I want the purple one. And it's like, that one's objectively worse. I want the purple one. So I start doing random things in this game, and there were a number of things that happened. One, I remember that I was meant to have fun. That, like, I was playing a game that I had made a job. somehow. And this is what I did with my business, but this is just another apocryphal story of,

yeah, I do it even in video games. So I started having fun. I unlocked, I escaped my local minimum. So what happens when we're optimizers is we optimize around the world that we understand and know, right? So if you're optimizing for muscles or for whatever, you've got an idea that this is what people like, that maybe women respond to it, and it's best for my health. But if you explore it a little bit further, maybe you'd find other modes of exercise that better served your deeper want and deeper need. There are longer levers that you're just not aware of. Exactly. But if you can't explore, because you're such a hyper-optimizer, you can't figure that out. So I actually got better in this game after a dip. I was like, oh, wow, I found these new build paths. And then third was, I started

looking at the artwork in the game, which is stunningly beautiful. And again, this is meant as a metaphor is, smell the roses. Look at the artwork in the game that you're playing, right? I had gone through life trying to get to the next end as fast as I could. And it had permeated even to my recreational video game playing. And so letting go of that, I was like, wow. And then I'm looking up myths of Aphrodite and Ares and all these things. And I realized, oh, I didn't want to play the video game to veg. I wanted to play the video game to get inspired about these myths

so that I could sit down later with chat GPT and just reflect on them. And I was like, oh, that's where my intuition was taking me. It was taking me to the game, to the artwork, to the deeper exploration of this myth. But you have to remain in contact with your intuition. One other thing on this that I think is worth mentioning is that a lot of people give their intuition a horrible reputation because at one point they knew they shouldn't have gotten into that relationship with the girl, but they said, no, I need to. Like, I feel it. It's calling me. Three years later, it explodes. She cheats on them. It all goes sideways. And they go, that was the part of me that didn't have a checklist because my intuition pulled me there, my instinct. What they don't realize is that, yes, it might have pulled you into the relationship. But then at month one, it was dingy saying, okay, something's off here. And it. Six months in, it was saying, time to get out. So the problem is we listen to intuition a tiny, tiny bit, and then we try to bail. But intuition doesn't work like analytics does.

Our mind sees the end that we're headed towards. I want a physique. And then it backwards breaks things into steps so that we can achieve the desired outcome. Intuition starts at the next step. It keeps you foggy as to the actual place that you're headed. You don't know, and it's greater than you. you could possibly imagine, but it only tells you play the video game. But if you want to use intuition fully, you've got to stick with it through these various

steps and let it take you to its desired end, which is terrifying for people who want control. Yes. Because you're playing a video game, this is a waste of time, and I don't know why I'm doing this, but my intuition is telling me to. Now I'm looking at artwork in this dumb video game, right? But if you stick with it, I have found this is a deeper layer of self-trust is, oh, I can trust my analytical mind and I can trust my intuitive flowing feeling thing now, which is a

really cool something to have come online. Well, the perennial over-optimiser, insecure, overachiever thing, walking anxiety disorder harness for productivity, like Andrew Wilkinson says, the reason the reason that people are hyper optimizers, at least in part, is if you know every different permutation of every different potential outcome and you have prepared for it, you have constrained the uncertainty of the future down. You've created order from chaos. Yeah. Right.

I don't need to worry about the potential branching futures because I have obsessed so much that 99.9% of potential future universe is the ones I've already predicted, accounted for, and been ready in order to be able to deal with. This leaves me with just, I'm ready. Yeah. I'm ready for this, right? Uncertainty. Anxiety is uncertainty. It's ambiguity about what is going to happen. Anxiety is expectation versus outcome.

I do not know what is going to happen. And this is how much our minds abhor uncertainty that we would rather create a nightmare in our mind than we would deal with a more preferable level of uncertainty. We would prefer to imagine the worst possible outcome because at least that collapses the choice architecture down to a single place. Now, the place is the worst,

it's significantly worse than maybe what even be physically capable by the universe. Like we imagine things that would break the laws of physics. That fucking someone comes back from the dead to torment us

in this version of something. But we prefer that to uncertainty. So when you've got this choice space, you think about thinking in super positions, right? You collapse the superposition down, you observe it and you're like,

okay, I'm going to make, this is exactly what's going to happen. the over-optimiser decides to have as many branches open in their mind as possible, prepare for each different one of them, and that is antithetical to, I trust myself, I'll be okay no matter what happens. I'm whole now and I'm enough. And whatever comes in the future, I will be okay and whole then too. Yeah. And if you have come from a situation where you go, Well, I happened to life. I had agency and intention and I took myself from a place that I didn't want to be to one that I did through intention and agency and action and leaning in and making a fucking dent in the world. Like, that's the, that's the, that's the strategy. And that was the big first, like this is literally every first level archetype movie underdog, rocky fucking cutscene.

thing ever. Like that's literally what that's the that is the hero's journey and it's like that gets you to like three o'clock. It's there's a masculine thread which is the one you're talking about, which is order out of chaos, analytical, structured. I happen to life initiating. And then there's the feminine thread, which is receptive, listening, what does life want for me feeling, flowing, etc. And so it's not to just be feminine. I think this is very, very, very, important. It's not merely because if you see people that don't have this masculine piece, this is almost like the L.A. Woo-woo. I'm a spiritual coach at age 23. I just follow my bliss and follow my intuition and I can't pay my bills. There's something that they have there, which is a

willingness to go with the flow, but they lack the ability to unify these two. And so Carl Jung talked about the Hyros Gamos, which is the sacred marriage of the divine masculine and the divine feminine principle. I think as a society, this is perhaps what's going on with men and women at some level. What we've done is say, okay, look, men, you're going to do the masculine piece. Women, you can do the feminine peace. The union is going to come at the level of both of you guys getting together. It works. It's been stable for a long time. There's problems with it, as we've sort of seen, which is women are encountering the problems that men have had. Now that they enter into the workplace, they're finding meaninglessness, which men have known for a long time, right? Just slaving a way

To take a party goes. Yeah, it's a slave in a way to take care of the family that you don't get to really participate in or be emotionally connected to. That's a, that's been hundreds of years of men in the West have known that and now all over the world. Men are experiencing the difficulties of women, which is, hey, when I get in touch with my emotions, it hurts. It hurts like hell. So now I'm realizing that I would like people to consider me and take care of me. And I'd like more systemic issues to make things a bit easier for me. And women are going, yeah, we've been saying that for a long time.

So I feel like there's been this initially painful but beautiful flip that is occurring culturally where women have entered into masculine roles and are getting the benefits of it, but also are beginning to see the costs and the things that the men in their lives have shouldered that they have not understood. And men are getting into the feminine realm of starting to get in touch with their emotions. They go, oh, wow, this is a lot harder than I had recognized. And my hope is in my personal relationship and more broadly, instead of having the primary unit of masculine and feminine togetherness be husband and wife, I think there's an increasing opportunity for more integrated individuals to be integrated inside of oneself and then to meet the other person and to form something greater. Because when you are dependent upon the other person for feminine access, meaning you have a wife, you are the breadwinner, you're the guy, but she's the one with all the positive emotions. feelings and she's connected to the kids. There's a sense of dependency and resentment and frustration and control. Why do you get that thing and I don't? Yeah. And because I'm doing all of this, I'm in charge. I get to tell you what to do. You see the woman's side of it, which is I'm completely

dependent on this man for survival. I need to people please him. I'm frustrated. I'm going to cheat with the pool boy. I want to escape this even though I need him to survive. I'm frustrated that I need attempt to survive. So the idea that we've talked about for a long time, that old, cliched advice, which is don't get into a relationship into you or whole in yourself, I think a really useful way to think of that is how are my masculine and my feminine threads integrated inside of myself? Am I capable of achievement, initiation, structure, analysis, and am I also capable of flow, receptivity, intuition, and feeling? So good, dude. It's so good. Uh, if you struggle to stay asleep because your body gets too hot or too cold, this is going to help.

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Like, what mad, it's cool to say attuned, connected, dropped in, aware, are transcending, including like Wilberian language type stuff as a guy. Like that still feels, it's the same as Joe's vulnerability definition, right? It still feels like kind of strong. But to say, oh, I need to embrace my feminine energy. Like, go fuck yourself. My irrationality. Yeah.

Irrational. Yeah. I mean, this is the critique that men have of their wives and girlfriends. She's so irrational. We are irrational. I think this is one of the big tricks that men play on themselves. they pretend that the women in their lives and they project all of the irrationality onto them. How irrational is it to try to get more and more and more and more status past a certain point?

That is hyper irrational. Like to what end are you? You have proved to yourself that the thing that you are attaining is not the thing that makes you happy and yet you're still trying to attain more of it. Deeply irrational. Well done, dude. Yeah. Super, super fucking clever. So those pieces, feminine, irrational, singing, dancing, flowing, flowing, enjoying one's body.

I think even for what I hear and have experienced with myself, part of what men get out of their sexual relationships is many times they're able to be with someone that is more capable of pleasure than they are. And they're able to vicariously participate in the pleasure and they're making it happen. And that's good enough for them. Now, they're not experiencing it at the same full body level

that their partner is perhaps capable, but they're close to it. Well, think about that, if you want to really fucking point the finger at guys, how many guys during sex treat sex as another business that they need to successfully exit? Well, if I can go through this particular sequence of steps, and in the past, I've managed to build and exit a similar business in this particular way. So I've got a blueprint and I got a few tricks up my sleeve that I can deploy in this way. It's like, oh, not only did you turn your video game Hades 2 into a business that you had to optimize, but you turn.

this thing which is supposed to be like loving presence into a business that you're supposed to build and exit. And what I've seen in myself that I believe could be a pattern at least with some men is the part of what drove early charisma on command and early Charlie was deep people pleasing that was particularly directed at women. Like I was okay if some of the guys didn't like me, but I desperately desperately wanted women to like me and was willing to shape my habits. my exercise routine, everything, to like bring in as much female attention as I could. And I know that experience, insects of like trying to make it good for the other person at a high level, which I didn't realize.

You do that for long enough. You just want to get out of there. Like, I'm tired of just trying to make this other person happy. And it can create, you don't realize it, or I didn't realize it, shadow frustrations, shadowedments, shadow things, because you don't know, and I've heard you talk about, this you're so obsessed with meaning that you don't know how to access pleasure mm-hmm mm-hmm yeah that's I mean the uh Frankl's inverse law yeah I think is so fucking prevalent dude that's another one that's robust it's a little bit harder

for people to grasp and and took a real long time for me to look at but yeah if uh pleasure doesn't come easily to you say that pleasure is basically for suckers and you focus on meaning it's like I will grind set my way through life yeah Because the slow accumulation of progress towards something which is supposed to be a well-meaning goal is kind of more reliable, actually, I think, to a lot of men. It's like, it's more objective. It's like, ha, I see where I was on graph yesterday versus today.

It's masculine. It's forward-projected. The outcome is the meaning in many ways. Like, I'm fighting for the freedom of my country. It's this, I know what I'm doing. I'm going to break it into smaller steps. We're going to have these little battles on the way. This is persistent and clean and I'm directed at that thing.

Limited chaos, limited uncertainty. Pleasure is right now. It's right now. Right now I could be left. Right now it could be right. I'm going to follow this flow. And it doesn't provide any long term guarantees, context or anything. It's gone the next moment.

And so it's this obsession with the masculine thread, I think, in many ways, of future orientation and driving in towards something rather than can I just be present and understand that I can't control it, it's going to leave, and that's okay. Two examples from my life of your Hades II thing. George Max's 30th birthday in Miami last year, we were playing foot tennis over a net, and we were playing this game, and I realized that it was competitive, but not very beautiful. And I said, okay, well, why don't we change it to be, even though we're on opposite side of the net will be part of a team and the goal is to have like the fanciest tricks like two of the

guys are ex champion freestyle footballers but neither of them were using their skills both of them were trying to win the game I'm like I don't want to see who can do this I want to hand the ball off to the guy that can do three round the worlds in a row and like watch him do something and go fucking sick dude yeah yeah and then and then watch him pass it across the net so he did that and as soon as I said it one of the guys was like yeah yeah yeah yeah and then we can like count how many we do and that can be i'm like no i can even doing the thing again you're reverse engineering it and uh the second time it seems to happen around uh nets i suppose the second time i was playing pickleball a co-ed game with this uh girl who was 21 and uh austin texas me and her

versus another guy and girl and it's uh one-one on games going into best of the final game and we're like we've done the little thing where you tap paddles over the top of the net and we turn around and we're walking back to the baseline and I'm like okay so you need to remember that like when he comes up to the net he's really bad on his back hand so he can force that in but we need to play into the kitchen the dinks need to be a little bit wider and we got to do this and like look I'm loving yourself but we can go with being a little bit deeper in this she turns to me and she goes yeah let's not forget to have fun I was like yeah yeah ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha very good and that moment of I can just enjoy what's happening right now.

Sure, there are times, if you're a neurosurgeon, probably the in-moment enjoyment of what you're doing, that's not the time for it. And this is where I think the definition of success that I mentioned earlier on is a really important piece. You can go through life trying to optimize for maximum outcomes, maximum objective success. Like other people can see it, I can touch it, feel it,

put it in a photo album or a bank account or a follower number or whatever online. But you will peer over the present moment's shoulder a lot looking for what's coming next. The hypervigilance will cause you to never really have your mind rest where your feet are. I'm seeing this with my live shows. I'm on tour at the moment, playing Regent Theatre

this Saturday in L.A. and I can go out on stage and do my show at like as close to perfect as I can get and never be there. I'm not there. I'm not at the show. And in some ways maybe that's part of a flow state. But I think even within like the flow stateness, like when you lose yourself in it, you're not fully like this rules. Like this fucking rules. So you have to, I found for me, there are moments where in the set I can pause and be like,

for just like two seconds. I'm like, fuck, I'm there. And when I look back, this is how I kind of know that it's working at least a little bit. This is super white belt, like fresh clay shit. But that's what I remember. I don't remember delivering the lines. I don't necessarily even remember the laughs. I remember incidents where that break the pattern.

So the sound went out in New York. and I was working with just the stage where she's pointing at me, bouncing them off the back wall to 1,500 people while they tried to fix the sound. So I had to like freestyle some bullshit on stage. And I remember that and that was cool. But the only other bits that I remember are where I've gone like, and seen inside of my own mind and gone, here I am. I'm walking back to the baseline and we're about to have fun.

We're playing foot tennis and we're going to try and make it beautiful. And I get the sense, this is where the success. best thing comes in, that I don't know if this is true. Maybe it gets you from 100% of performance to 150 or 101, or maybe it gets you to 95 or even 90. But regardless of that plane of success, outcome-based stuff, it's like how much more presence and how much more joy and awareness have you got of what's going on? And ultimately, why are you doing these things? Presumably, you're trying to achieve success to create some sort of an emotional state that is sufficiently enjoyable for it to be worthwhile or else why would you be doing it? Like even if you ask the why

question enough times it ends up being like because it feels good. It's like why do you need money to get the house to get the car to get the girl to get the because it makes me feel nice and enough? And you're like well what if you could access that more directly by just going, fuck. I'm here. Yeah. I'm here. I'm fucking here. Like, holy shit, we're alive. Yeah. That fucking rules.

Like, you know what I mean? That's it. That's it. Yeah. How, I'm so curious. You've asked me without trying to say it for this conversation. Like, where are you in your, using maybe some of the models that we've talked about? Like, where does success honestly lie for you these days? Yeah. It depends how juvenile. I'm being and how brave I feel.

Yeah. So for me, a lot of it is around courage. It's the courage to step into listening to that intuition, those fleeting thoughts and those whispers in the back of my mind. It's the courage to let go of patterns that I know have given me things that I desperately wanted in the past. Validation from people, recognition, a sense of mastery, admiration from people I admired, respect.

No, it's crazy. Sorry to interrupt. The feminine threat is so important here because it's the feminine thread that is capable of receiving. So there's part of the reason that we keep pursuing validation and money is because we haven't been able to receive

what has already been heaped upon us because we haven't well-developed that ability to just go. And yeah, without forcing it on you, man, I mean, I come in here. Dude, you called me. I'll just, you call me four years ago, five years ago. I had three million.

You had less than a million. Oh, it's less than 100,000, yeah. Yeah. And you were way too confident for your size and like really precarious and friendly. You're like, let's get on the phone. We did it. Assumed a bunch of familiarity with you that like finessed you went to being my friend. And you were, I think you probably had your computer on a bureau.

Yeah, yeah. Just like, my God, like you have made, you. You've manifested. But if this isn't arriving, dude, what is? And it's strange because the line between high standards and satisfaction or enoughness is delicate. Because you go, I want to further refine my art. I want to become better at the things that I do. I want to continue seeing creativity and finding opportunities and ways to progress and deliver things that are cool and different.

Like filming in a fucking garage in the middle of L.A. For no reason other than it's pretty. That's the feminine thread. and so you do have it because you actually can't get this far without some of it and I've been all or nothing people I mean even like all of these people have this intuitive hits you can't get very far

without it but your guys attention to detail the unnecessary nature completely unnecessary that is why do we need a big rock honey I don't want to get that's a lot of money it's like that is to see beauty in the unnecessary and to be energized

to participate in create, cultivate that sort of beauty that maybe no one else recognizes, that's like for you. That's a beautiful intuition to lean into in your business. And I think it has, it has paid you dividends, but not in the immediate sense that a lot of ROI options that you might have chosen. Well, I mean, we just put out this, the first tour diary, which was tracking the trip to New York and then Toronto and then back home over that. Honestly, I think it might be one of the most beautiful things we've ever put out. It was so fucking cool. And I watch it back and it's just this gorgeously shot, very slow pacing on the edit. The cuts take fucking ages. There's payops that

don't occur until like the end of this over hour long vlog. There's entire scenes that are just left untouched for like seven and a half minutes. And I'm like, this is so fucking cool. I'm so proud of it in ways that I'm not of the best performing TikTok that we've got. So, okay, you asked about what the current stage of evolution is that I'm at. And I mentioned that on the days where I feel the bravest, on the days where I feel the most in tune, on the days where I've picked my phone up the latest, and gone for a walk and done my meditation and done my breath work and stuff, not from a place if I need to over-optimized, but from a place of this makes me feel good. And I just like doing it. Like, that's how, that's my preferable morning.

I would say I kind of took the emotion red pill probably about a year, just under a year and a half ago, like summer of last year. And getting ill and like eating shit with that was probably partly needed. Maybe this is my like. No, no, that's very common. It has to break. It has to stop working. It was a market correction on a stock that had had a fucking serious bowl run. You know, I moved to America, nearly four years ago now.

And the channel was at like 200,000 subs and we're going to hit 4 million this month. There was me, Dean, in a moment, in a Facebook Messenger group chat that was like the whole team. And you've walked in and you can't even remember the names of everyone that's here today. not that any of those things are like markers of validation or like even efficiency but what they do show is that growth has happened in like a relatively short space of time and the slowing down of momentum like the curtailing of that inertia like that forward momentum thing stops you from hiding a lot of patterns and whispers and fleeting thoughts in bravado and you know this is how the rock star that just continues to release fucking slammer after slammer after slammer the album after the album after the tour after and they end up developing all of these patterns that they've never had to reflect on because the world is just the volume of success from the world is so great

that the fleeting thoughts and the whispers in the back of their mind just can't compete at all and yeah it takes you getting to the stage where the world turns up the volume of that of the repercussions and the consequences. So that was a big part of it. And then I kind of made this, I think if people went back and looked at the podcast at the back end of last year, I said something to the effect of like,

I'm really interested in emotions. I'm really interested in trying to be less emotionally decapitated, like feel things below the neck. Okay, well, I'm going to work on that and I'm going to, you know, ask a bunch of questions. I would go as far as to say that you're, I would say that that video, the first video that you did Theovon, Sean Strickland,

was probably 20% of, to maybe a little bit more, maybe even a third of like, oh, there's some there there. Like I see something in what Charlie has uncovered in the way that he's speaking about this, in the patterns that he is sort of unearthed. Oh, that's like a, that. That is nourishing to me in a way that reading atomic habits for the first time was nourishing to me or listening to Peterson-Tay-tell, the truth was nourishing to me and stand up straight with your shoulders back and clean your room. I'm like, okay, so that was moving from like results to action and then this is moving from action to emotions.

I'm like, okay, there's another level to this. And the fact that it was at the time where you go, you know, things are going pretty well. but like, huh, there is something here that is not whole. I have learned unteachable lesson number fucking 54. And then this year has been me trying to increase the bravery to step into that stuff. It is a challenge when you have planted a flag in the ground. And I love this analogy of planting a flag, especially if you've got expectations from people around you because you say,

this is me and this is what I stand for and this is who I am, especially if you've got a public platform, because what you thought was a flag you'd planted in the ground on a piece of territory is a tether that you're attached to. It's a stake that you've driven in and you're like, oh, this wasn't a flagpole, this is something with a fucking leash attached to it. And I'm on the end of the leash and I can't really run away that much without upending it all. And people going, well, who the fuck is this guy?

You said this thing previously and now you don't believe in it. Like, spending the first three years of this podcast doing life hacks, optimizer episodes about the best note-taking, like space repetition, ebbinghouse, forgetting curve flashcards there. Five steps to talk to a girl. Yeah, yeah. It's the same fucking arc. And then this sense of, well, people came for that. And then also the potential of, I...

The thing that I previously thought was the solution I've realized is maybe the problem. And you go, well, I'm going to have to like undo not only my own thinking, but I'm going to have to publicly state. I thought that if I was able to remember everything, I learned that that would be the answer. I've managed to do pretty much that. Ha. It's not the answer. Ha. Fuck.

That's well seen in yourself. Really well seen. So, yeah, now at this stage. where it's quite precipicey for me. Doing the retreat with Joe was challenging in a way that I've not been challenged and beautiful in a way that I've never really seen before. So that was like a sober, but psychedelic dose.

Yeah, that's another thing I had listed, which is with the right person, those sorts of weekend or week-long retreat things, very powerful for this kind of stuff. Yeah, so that kind of, that was the equivalent. They say that, you know, like whatever, meditation or the level zero consciousness altering stuff, taking psychedelics, heavy dose of psychedelics is basically taking the stair lift to the top of the mountain briefly and then you come back down and you're like,

okay, I kind of got an idea about where it is that I'm going. That was a way of seeing that soberly, I think. There were a few experiences there, which I, again, hadn't taken anything. I have no explanation for what the fuck happened. I literally have no explanation for what. In the Theo Vaughn video, one of the things that I hadn't realized when I did that that I reflect on now is that, you know what made Sean cry in that Theo Vaughn video?

For those of you who haven't watched, Theo Vaughn is interviewing Sean Strickland, and Sean breaks down in tears talking about his abuse, and Theo beautifully is just with him and his big, strong UFC guy. Do you remember the sentence that he says? before? It's okay, buddy.

We don't need to talk. Sorry, sorry. Sean's what made Sean cry. Oh, no. Okay. He says, I stop believing in God. That's the wound. Like, he was talking about the abuse that had happened to him and hiding under his dad's bed and yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he goes, stop believing in God. That's it, man. Like, that's, yes, the abuse is horrible and terrible and is enough. but the wound wound is there. And it's there for everybody. And I just, to get my atheist bona fide is in, I had the chapters of a book that I was going to release, before Christopher Hitchens released, God is Not Great,

that was my atheist book. I was going to go in line of Chris and Sam and deeply admiring. And Alex, too, like love what Alex is up to. And, yeah, man, ripped, I didn't want my skull, off either. I wasn't hoping that that would happen with me, but it did. And I, yeah, I, I, I, you have those mountaintop experiences. They're beautiful. And then the question is that I, it will take me still years, I'm sure, like, how do I live like this? Like, how do I function and live and with this integrated into how I treat people and how I treat myself and how I conduct my business?

The first time that we left the farm that we were on, so we'd been there for seven days, pretty much 12 hours a day of unrelenting, very deep emotional work with this one group of people, 11 other people plus four facilitators. The first day that we left, we were advised to go and do, the actual first day we left, we went to the beach. I went to the beach and I cried at the sun, cried at the moon, cried at a dog and then cried to the seagull. It's a super moon tonight. It's going to be rad. There was something happening last night. It was pretty big last night. Yeah. Tonight's the full moon. Okay. We'll be, we'll be ready. We'll be ready. But you know, but just sorry to interrupt. The separation from the stars and the moon is a profound nationwide, mostly citywide, travesty. Like the inability to locate yourself in something that eternal, which isn't eternal, but it's like that in. durable. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. I was watching. That's actually another, I look at me just my, this is my crying

diary. The blood red super moon that happened in 2021 or 2022. I remember where I was. I was in the Airbnb that I lived in for three months when I first moved to America and I was watching Piki Blinders on my own. So I could not be more engaged in this historic period drama thing. And someone texted me and was like, have you seen the moon? And I go outside onto the balcony of this Airbnb that I'm staying in. And I love it. I love. up and it's this huge bright pink moon and just immediately I'm like floods like floods of like sobbing floods of tear like what the fuck this is a while ago now so I don't think I've necessarily had the language what is going on like why why is this happening like shame around like

why am I crying at the fucking moon like am I broken is there something up with me this is this weird am I feeble is this like weak what is this like I don't I'm glad that there's nobody here to see it and then when we finished the retreat, cried everything. And then the next day, one of the pieces of advice was you should go and get some bodywork done. Like, it might be nice. Like some gentle body work would be like a good way to kind of reintegrate. Me, one of the guys that was there, we were like, right, okay, nobody wanted to drive. Nobody wanted to get into their car.

So, like, I don't feel particularly human. What did they call it? Not karma sick. Fuck. Not dope sick. It was something sick for like emotion sick or something which was basically like an emotional hangover that you'd had from that week where everything was a little spacey.

It felt very psychedelic. No one wanted to drive. One of the people did and drove us into the local town. we went into this Thai massage parlour place and the front desk was the classic little running waterfall and like very gently playing music and one woman behind the counter we had to fill this form in and mean the guy that were there

who were like we need, we're going to wait outside, is that okay? Being inside of this very calm, very normal, one other person reception area to a massage place that we were going to go in and enjoy was like too much. It was too much stimulus. People didn't want to drive.

People, we didn't want to talk to people. Someone went into Whole Foods and left without having bought anything. They were like, I don't, I can't, I don't know what to buy, I don't know where to go. Like, there's people in there. It was just too stimulating and overwhelming. And the main thing that I realized coming out of that was how many of the patterns I have in life that are compensatory mechanisms for a world that is not very gentle with somebody that is an open vessel. Yeah.

I think this is this okay. So now we can get into the final, my, my, my, uh, intuitive crackpot theories. Okay. Here we go. I think that as I watched love on the spectrum and I've been going through this stuff myself and I see the, the stimming that these autistic people are doing as they're dating and they're rocking and they have, the noises are too loud.

I'm like, oh, this is someone that doesn't have the coping mechanism to deal with the world with the volume is turned up way too loud. And. the gifts that are often connected with autistic people, which is like, that guy can just like play music like nothing. He's just in it. The way that that person is obsessed with buttons, like they see something that the rest of us don't see. They struggle to fit into a world where that is just not sensitive, right? And so I think what you're experiencing and you'd asked at the beginning and one of the questions that you'd sent to me was sensitivity. I think what happened as you take your arm, off, you're like, oh, this is me, I'm sensitive as hell. And in order to function effectively in a world that is too loud, too brush, bumps into me, all these kind of things, I've got, I've learned effective armoring coping mechanisms to make me function well, but at cost of the beauty, at cost of some of my deepest gifts. Can I, I need to interject, sorry. Yeah, please. So I don't

break the fourth wall around like the way that the business operates basically ever, but I think this is a particularly revealing conversation. It probably makes sense. And it's also related to something that happened today. So as a perfect example of being sensitive, open and sort of transparent, being a transparent vessel for this sort of stuff is antithetical to operating in the world somehow, or at least it requires a degree of openness that you're not typically rewarded for in the past, which means it's hard to do in the present. So this morning, I took it. you maybe one of the most beautiful things and I've like got all excited about this and we've got this edit and like used some of my favorite tracks and we did all of this stuff and then during

the episode that I recorded this morning there was an error on the upload. I didn't meant that after 10 minutes of it being up it that got taken down we had to re-upload it and so your notifications and everyone's pinged it they've tried to watch it it's taken down like I'm like we've flubbed the release for this thing that was really beautiful and during the break of the episode with Matthew, when I go to the bathroom to have a pee, like, the episode go up and someone's like, that thing happens. And instead of me saying, like, what I felt was like, fuck, why did this happen? We need to find a solution. This is the objective metric and they should have said. What I should have said is like, ow. Yeah. Look, I'm sure nobody meant for this to happen, but like, oh, that

hurts. Like, I really loved that thing. And I felt so proud of it. And I wanted other people to feel, feel the way that I feel about it and now I'm worried that not as many people are going to see it. I didn't do that. I didn't say that. My initial response was like, what we need to do, we need to come up with the solution.

We've got to have a five-step process to get through the thing as opposed to me just sitting people down and going like, ow, that hurt. And I hope it doesn't happen again. Whatever. Like maybe not even that. And that pattern that I realized, like this armoring that you have of yourself

because if you're always this open, like you're getting owed a lot. You're getting ouched a lot. There are lots of owls out there. Yes. Yes. Credit to Joe. A fantastic developmental thing to deepen into this is to say out loud when you are hurt by someone.

That's where I took the owl from. I was saying, out, the entire ride over based on a phone call that I had this morning. Ouch, out. And I got to, it was this, anything, I could have powered through it. I behaved totally, you know, it would have been simple to just, this was not a big deal. But as it did the ouches I got to, oh my God, I didn't feel love from this person. And that hurts. It just hurts. They don't have to give you love. It just, it hurts anyway. And we have a choice. We can feel the pain and not cut off that aspect of ourselves that. And what you described, like, the sacrifice and not feeling the pain is that you lose that I really wanted people to feel the way that I felt about this. And then that has downstream effects of maybe the way that you treat the next blog is more efficient and less beautiful. And you lose the essence. And you lose the essence. And you lose the essence. And of the thing to avoid experiencing pain around its fragility. And that is just, yeah, that's everywhere.

Keep going through your developmental, kooky world theory. My kooky world? Where were we with? You'd said. Oh, autism. Yes. Autism is related to, I really think is people entering the world with an intense sensitivity. And I think we can look to people, autists, autists, savants for not how we will become

at all, but like, for some of the pains of sensitivity and some of the gifts that are associated with sensitivity. And what we can still do is we can still have our armor that we can put on when necessary. We can have our containment for our board meeting and all this that and the other thing. But the ability to just go, oh my God, it's so loud. It is so loud. Even right now, you know, there's planes in this and our attention is able to dial in and tune everything out. But when you tune everything out, you miss the beauty of the flowers and the cars and the cicada that is making noise.

and how awesome everything is. So that's one piece. This is a hard tangent, but whatever. We've been all over the place today. So we talked about mythology. Mythology is a beautiful connection between emotions and that like God thing. And because mythology often deals with gods, but it deals with this archetypal realm that is,

I find more understandable, approachable, and this is what I said. Carl Jung is like so great because he bridges that emotional level with the divine. And so a beautiful bridge is mythology. And I already hear that some of them you've talked about Cassandra and that sort of thing. These myths, I mean, I don't know which one is. Let me see if there's one that is particularly relevant to you. There's not one that comes to mind immediately, but using ChatGBT to just be like,

hey, what's the myth of so-and-so if it pops up? Really, really powerful thing that I have experienced. What do you think about sort of mythology? Is it a, it's not the full dose of religion with some of its sort of stodginess and inaccessibility? So here's my broad view of religion, spirituality, et cetera. There are these mystics all around the world, Jesus, Muhammad, Rumi, you know, they get it at various levels. It's tough to translate. It's like, how do you say it?

First off, how does it come out of your mouth in a way that is unlawful? honest to your experience, extremely challenging. And for somebody who hasn't had that experience, they're going to write it down now in a book and codify how everyone else needs to be. So I think that's what's going on with a lot of the big books is that there is a mystical insight from somebody who got it at a very, very, very deep level. Difficult for them to speak, difficult for other people to write down 60 years later. And then we're a lot of people that aren't directly connected with that experience projecting their mother and their father onto the creator of the universe that he's upset with me and he wants to punish me. And a lot of that made it into the text,

you know? So I don't treat the Bible as literally every word is true. But I treat it as a repository that has been mistranslated some of the time of a brilliant mystic. Like somebody who got it. And I treat other texts like that. Like there's some level of understanding integration that the person who came up with his hat. That's why it survived so long. That's why it was so meaningful to people, even if they couldn't describe why it was so meaningful to them. So, Greek, Egyptian, these pantheon gods are really useful for relating to you the archetypal emotional patterns of life. So for instance, the story of Ares, Aphrodite, and Hephaestus. Hephstus is the craftsman god. He's got a land.

leg, he's a craftsman. You might call him a brainiac. He's not a physical powerhouse. He's the only god that is crippled. He is betrothed and wedded to Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, but she cheats on him all the time with the Alphamachad, Aries. So they have a bunch of kids. But the story of Hephaestus and Aphrodite and Ares is that Hephaestus learns that he's being cuckled in. He creates a cage above the bed. Aries and Aphrodite go at it. He drops the cage on them, and then brings in all the other gods to laugh at them. And it's like an archetypal exploration of the pain of the academically inclined guy who is hurt by the aggressive masculine man,

who takes something that he loves, and then moves into his zone of power, which is intellectual and shames him. And you see this play out. I've heard Brennan Lee Mulligan, who you might be familiar with, He was a Dungeons of Dragons guy very smart. Tell his very personal story of he was a smart kid.

The tough kids pushed him around, made fun of him. But he got really good at insulting them so he could just cut them to the core because he was smart enough to do it. And so there's these patterns that if you look at these archetypes almost like Roershack tests, which is which one is calling to me. I don't know. There's something about, I'm curious about Ares. I'm curious about this. You look up the story, you read it. What do I make of it is a beautiful way to start to recognize some.

of these archetypal patterns in your life because they have existed for thousands of years before you. And I could go on and on and on and about all the different ones that have been valuable to me. So symbolic, the story is more than just the story. It's less literal. Is that kind of the, what's the key? So the key that Jung, Peterson, et cetera would say is that these are like metaphysically real in a way that is not just metaphorical or symbolic, that there are. how can I describe this, that there are near universal structures in human psychology, for instance, for father and for mother, that we do not come in utterly blank slate. And there are recurring

patterns based on, you could call it evolution, or if you're spiritually based, just like, this is what it is to be human, that by relating to these archetypes, seeing how they strike us, we can learn the pieces of ourselves that are missing. So maybe we didn't have the world's greatest mother or greatest father. But if we relate to an archetypal story of a good mother or of the wise father or something, we can get, we can re come into contact with the piece of us that we felt should have been there when we were kids, but we couldn't pit our finger on. We couldn't describe. And so we can't explain the pain that we're experiencing of the loss. These stories help us reconnect with that. In the same way that the hero's journey inspires young men to go out, be heroes,

understand that there's a sacrifice and a rocky montage that they have to go through. These stories give you steps and relationship with, oh, that's what was missing, or, oh, that's what's up next for me. I'll give you one small example of this is I was, Joseph Campbell has this hero's journey that he charts out and it's basically a clock where you start up here. Three o'clock, you meet the mentor, you descend into the underworld, it's the belly of the beast, it's the garden of Gethsemini at the bottom. You come back up, you get the divine revelation, you come back to the.

the community. I had been charting where I was and he's got like basically I think 12 to 17 different stages and I found myself. I was like oh this is belly of the beast. I am lost, utterly lost. And shortly after that, I was like, what's up next? Temptation of the woman. So in the story of the Odyssey and stop me of him. No, dude, I want more, more myth. Okay, more myth. In the story of the Odyssey that Odysseus has gone through everything. He had 600 men. They're all dead. He's washed up on this island, he still hasn't arrived home after nearly like 13 years after the, after the Trojan War. He still can't get back to Ithaca. And he's defeated and he lands on this island. Every island he's gotten to has been torturous. And there is a beautiful nymph named

Calypso, a goddess who just wants to marry him, have sex with him and keep him there. That's it. Just stay. And so he gets to the end of the journey and he's offered, just stay with me. He's with a goddess. And he stays for a while, but he ultimately makes the decision. He's like, no, I have to go back. I know it's going to be hard. I know it's been brutal to get here, but I have to continue. And this is what Campbell calls the temptation of the feminine, temptation of the woman. And I found myself here, went through the bottom of this arc, and a buy offer comes in for Corrisman Command. And it's, dude, you just ride off in the sunset. You could just put it away. You're frustrated with it. It's not working. You could take the money. I'm dividing it up in my

head, how many years, how much this. And I knew where I was in the journey. And I was able to go, I know this and this isn't what I want. Even though it's going to be hard, I want the struggle. There's something, there's a home that is calling me. And so I was able to navigate that with a bit more understanding. And then I knew after that comes atonement with the father, right? And so there's this other stage that I had to go through and I could go on and on and on. And then I knew after that comes apotheosis, which is the connection with the divine and then the ultimate boon. And right now I sit at the return, which is the refusal to return, is basically where I'm at right now.

So after you get the grail, the lamp, the thing, and you've done all that work, oftentimes the hero's like, well, that was really hard. I don't think I want to go home. I finally made myself comfortable in this other secluded inner world. I don't think I want to bring this back to the community.

And sometimes there's a chase. Sometimes someone has to pull them out of it. But I was like, oh, maybe that's what this podcast is for me. This is Chris inviting me back to you. I have a question. How the fuck do you talk about charisma anymore? So it was really hard and I said at the beginning, I'm sorry that this has been so disjointed.

One day I'll have this smooth. I had understood charisma to be what do people like about me and I still will make videos like. How do they, what steps do I do say, think, eta, yada, yada, yada, to get someone to like me. It was all based on if I was behaving in a way that was approved of. That was my understanding of it. But as I get deeper into myth, charisma is a Greek word.

The etymology of charisma is from the same word as charity and the charities, which are the goddesses. But charisma is a divinely given gift, often associated with speech, but associated with someone from that God moves through. And so you can speak charizmatically, but you can dance charitematically. You can paint charizmatically. You can like love and hug and you can live charizmatically. So as I go, oh, wow, I picked the perfect word. I picked the perfect name for this company for me to grow into. I just didn't know it at the time.

And so I am learning now how to serve the core audience that wants tips, tricks, all this kind of stuff. But I need to expand it into how does God move through you? And for me, that looks less like here is the phrase, here is the thing to do, but finding the intersection of radiance and authenticity. I think in the past I had been like, look, I want to be authentic, but I'll just give you an example. The first day of the course, Charisma University that we have, I think a lot of this stuff could be used, but is when somebody asks you how you're doing, don't say I'm fine, don't say busy, don't say good, be better than that, be phenomenal, be wonderful, be, you know. And you can treat that at any level of the pyramid. You can go to the results level, which is no matter what I'm feeling, I am going to say I'm phenomenal and I can betray my emotions. I can take actions to start to take steps in my life that I've worked out that day and I've gotten something done so I'm more likely to actually feel phenomenal when someone asks me.

I can treat the underlying emotional level, which is have I been with my shame, my grief, my, et cetera. So no matter what I say, I'm like, dude, it's kind of a rough day. There's still something emanating from me. Or I can do it at the spiritual level. It's like, oh my God, I remember God. I feel fucking incredible. And I can radiate it that way. So for me, it's more about just like I had to grow out of the shell that I was in.

It's yes, the same piece stays, but it's also more than that. And so that's how I have come around to being like, oh, I did want charisma on command. I wanted to grow it into much more than it was and have it means something significantly more than it did. And there's a challenge of bringing the audience with me and leaving some of them behind. and I'm a weirdo and all that kind of stuff is a stress. How many subs you got? Six million, seven million?

Six, six point nine or something. Right, seven million subs. Yeah. The market for I want to say cool things to get girls to be attracted to me and the market for I want to get in touch with my feminine and be able to dance without shame

to music in my bedroom. Uh-huh. Not quite the same. Yes, and look at Jordan Peterson. Look, core, core. He is a union psychologist who the first thing, yes, he came on the scene for politics, but it was Genesis.

It was all of this unsexy Pinocchio, Genesis, Lion King. I truly believe that the public needs a Jungian, a speaker for Carl Jung to be present. Like, we need myths. Is this a pivot that you're potentially, a burden you would potentially carry yourself? Yeah. I would deeply be honored, love to pray for that opportunity.

And I am trying to learn how to gracefully make that transition. And I have put out videos where I'm more experimental. They don't do as well. But I'm still in this zone of sorting through how to talk about this stuff. And perhaps I should have come in here and just been like, I got my list of myths and I'm going to talk to me. No, no, no, no, no, no. This is, I mean, this has been one of the most intimate conversations I think I've ever had on the show.

You've got something. You're there with something. and Dr. K is there? Mm-hmm. There's, well, let me ask. I think you're, you're there too. I'm edging. You're edging.

I've been edging for a few months now. So let me ask. Yeah. If you were able to take that steak out of the ground and didn't have that tether, and the cameras could disappear for a moment, do you, and it's okay if the answer is no, because I know I didn't for a long time. Do you have any direction of where you would head walk? do without the expectation.

There's a few. I'm pulled toward fun, at least in part, at the moment. And that... I love that for you, by the way. Me too. I love things that integrate ancient past, which for you is being a club promoter. Like, I love them things. The way that that will come through is multi-guessed episodes.

So me, George Mack, Zach, and another person are going to do a sort of regular probably monthly, something like that. Hang, style episode. Working title is smoke break or office hours or whatever, drop in or some shit. Close. I like the idea of that because it is part of a releasing of a lot of the control. Like, what is the outcome that we get from this? Well, I'm not too sure.

And what is it we're going to talk about? Well, I'm also not too sure. But it doesn't need to be, you know, fucking last 24-hour news slop. Tucker Carlson's in a beef with Nick Fuentes and Ben Shapiro, and we need to, How much is this? So that will be a little bit of relinquishing of control. That's part of it. Cool.

And that gives me an opportunity to put more personality across, as opposed to this thing that I've done for so long, which is be a vessel and a pedestal for people who have great ideas. People I'm interested in about things I'm interested in. Like, what is it that I can distill from you and then make you look as amazing as possible? And that's been great, but I've subjugated myself a lot throughout that. I see this. And it's like, okay, if not now, then when?

Like, and it's the same for the success thing. If not now, when have you arrived? If not after a thousand episodes and a quarter of a million words written in five years on my newsletter, like when do you feel like your ideas have sufficient veracity or legitimacy or authenticity or whatever the fuck to be able to go, I think maybe I can contribute a bit. Maybe I can make it a little bit about me. And I never wanted to make it about me. And part of that was a defensive tactic.

because I found in my past, especially when I was getting bullied as a kid, that if I made myself small, if I didn't make it about me, if I didn't make myself too loud or too big, that the eye of Sauron sort of didn't get pointed at me. One of the things that I'd learned, I think, as a child, was if I'm too smart in class, I put my hand up and get the answer right, or perform too well in whatever,

sometimes the bullies would notice me more. Whereas if I do something, like, people can mistake smallness, for a lack of a, people can mistake like humbleness, smallness, self-deprecation for a lack of a threat. And the internet is the same with regards to this. So one thing, more fun making it a little bit more about me. Here's some ideas that I've got. I'm going to actually move toward that. Something Patrick Pat David mentioned to me a long time ago, actually.

Is there a core idea in there that is around which you're... There will be, so this is the next bit, I guess. the problem that I'm having at the moment is I only just arrived at accepting that emotions are an important thing to work on and now I've got this like, it feels like I took psychedelics and saw something I wasn't supposed to see.

I'm like, I was like ready to map this next bit of the journey or a better example. I love this. I've been thinking about this a lot, maybe it's because Elon's kind of crushing it with space exploration. It's an old style of rocket, right? Remember the old school like Apollo Star rocket?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you're on the launch pad, there's a particular fuel source and a particular engine that gets used. And then after that... I've tried this. Goes in. And then after that, it's booster rockets. And they, like, kick in. So at a particular altitude, there is a particular fuel source and type of propulsion that's used.

And then you get to another one, and another one kicks in. And then you get to another one and those fall away. Yeah. And then another one happens. And I'm like, I was just about accepting that the booster rockets had come on online. And now there's this, I'm like, am I... Where am I? So that's thrown a little bit of a spanner into the works for me, like, trying to map stuff,

which is why it's real useful to have this conversation. But the thing that I'm kind of prepared to, at the moment, like, really, really lean into is the pride of sensitivity, like trying to find strength in sensitivity and in emotionality and really asking questions around. how do you navigate the things that you feel and still get the outcomes that you want? Like balancing real world results with an inner sense of enoughness. Okay, what's that? How does that piece together?

I think that probably for the next 12 months is going to be a real core theme for me. Funny story on that. You know, Myron Gaines from Fresh and Fit? I don't know. I don't know. We went for like Shawama or like some Middle Eastney food thing in Miami, maybe two years ago, something like that or 18 months ago. This is before I'd started thinking about this,

but I was like tapped in a tiny, teeny, tiny, we need a little bit. And we sat down and he's, you know, like kind of gregarious guy, like sort of talking about all this stuff. And I was just interested to find out about him. And like, you know, where does this like particular firework like spiral around to? It's like ideas and stuff and a past and the future and all this. And he was talking about this stuff. And then he said, um, he was,

Telling me about this experience that he'd gone through and like, this thing happened, this thing happened and this thing happened. I just went, oh, how did that make you feel? And it stopped the conversation, totally stopped the conversation. And he, like, must have paused for maybe five seconds. Look, and you went, I've never really thought about that. Wow. Like, no one's ever, I've never really thought about it. No one's ever really asked me or something like that.

I was like, oh, that's cool. That's really cool. That's cool. Also credit to him. Yeah, for seeing it. Yeah. And I was like, huh. And there was a bit as well, like when everyone like that sort of like super forward

lean in dopamine energy thing, there is a little bit of like, how do I get through this? Like, got to be a bit more person than there. Like I want to excavate it. And like that, I'm interested in that. For the first five years of the show, I wasn't. I was interested in like the shell. I was interested in the outside, like the action. and the results. I'm like, okay, like, how do I, like, poke in, not because I want to see

cry, not because I want, like, some, like, overly unnecessary. I'm not Stephen Bartlett. Love his, Steve. Stephen's got a skill set, doing that. Steve, it's amazing. But I don't, I'm not sure, I think for him what he's wanting is, like, the expression of how that made somebody feel, whereas what I'm interested in is, like, what is the marriage between the outcome that happens and that feeling? How is that? I'm, like, fascinated by tension. So I'm like, okay, how does the tension between these two things happen? Also, sitting with somebody crying, and this is a failing of mind and a strength of Stevens, is, and I learned this during Groundbreakers with Joe, if somebody else cries, I cry a lot.

Like, if I see someone in pain or discomfort or I ask somebody a question, and it's either sadness or happiness, and like they go, I go. Me too. And I have shame around like that. So I'm like, okay, in order for me, the number of times that somebody's, he's cried on Stephen's show. And, like, I'm not sure how many times I've seen him cry. Certainly in response to somebody else, he seems to be able to hold space.

Yeah. Now, I don't know whether I'd love to, I should, we were talking this weekend, I should ask. What's going on inside? Yeah, I'd be so curious. Are you numbed to it? Are you insulated from this? Or are you so dropped in that you've like alchemized it? And you're like, I'm able to like fold Joe Hudson view framework, like,

Either my experience of it, I cried, was I felt his presence. Yeah. That's a fucking, I mean, that's like to be able to do it, to sit with somebody in that and to hold space in that and to not, I mean, some people I guess are just like less emotional in that way, like their emotional trigger, they don't present it in the same sort of a way. But if you're able to hold the space and not have like, this is the impartial. and the empathy thing, right? Like, I'm not going to try and change you

and I'm with you without being in your emotions. That's like black belt shit. That's like very, very, very impressive. I don't have that, whether it's a skill or whatever you want to call it, I don't have that trait. So for me, dude, there's like a super team that we can make, I think.

This is what I was about to say. You, Dr. Kay, Joe Hudson. Dr. K called me a year ago, credit to him. He's like, something's happening. He's like, something is happening around masculinity, and it's not time yet, but it's going to be time soon. And I just, and I think he said your name. And he was like, he spoke to me about this. Yeah, he's like, and he's just like, I don't have any takeaway, but keep your phone on.

He said something similar. He's like, look up for the fucking bat's sake, dude. Look, there is, here's a couple of frameworks. Here's a couple of frameworks that might be interesting for you. As far as I can see, we've had two waves at the manosphere so far. First wave of pickup artistry. It was Neil Strauss, the game, mystery. It was negging.

And like, have you seen the midget fight outside? Which was also, like, that was a switch from results to actions with regard to being attractive to women. Because prior to that, it was just you're as handsome and as wealthy as you are. And that is your outcome with women. And it was like, oh, you can behave in a certain way. Then second wave manosphere was post-me-2 because pickup artistry was never going to survive the wave of sort of calling to account men for using position to come. coerced people into sex. And then we got a kind of sanitized, slightly adjusted version of it.

And it was red pill, black pill, blue pill, soyboys, cucks. It was like simps and beaters and alphas. And it was like that whole world. Which interesting, and I'm kind of projecting, but is these guys started to feel upset about their things. They were getting bothered. And they said they took a almost more feminine approach. We're going to talk a lot about our problems.

Well, don't forget. And ask the world to be different. Don't forget. Don't forget the like in-cell black pill red pill community came out of PUA hate. Like PUA hate was the original Reddit and PUA hate was people who had done pickup and had found that the strategies had either not worked or worked and made them aware of their own shortcomings to look at how much I need to perform in order to get women to like me. That's really frustrating. Yeah. Yeah.

Like I am, I at core, I'm so far away from what women want that I need to construct. this elaborate fucking cathedral of bullshit in order to get them to like me, that is another comment on myself. And I do want to pause because I think these are huge spheres and I don't, I've spoken to people in it. And there are well-seen cultural commentaries that do come from the Red Pill community. I broadly, yeah, all of these. Yeah, all of these.

Yeah. And I broadly disagree with, I think the emotional undertone of it is pain. But yeah. Well, who was it that said? I think it was Dr. K. that was like, um, uh, everybody in the red pill is a hopeless romantic. Yeah. There's, it's, well seen.

It's like, cool. It's like pretty kind of nice. Anyway, and I'm like, okay, that was second wave. But one of the things that it denied was sensitivity, because sensitivity didn't show up front the dimension of masculinity that was supposed to look commanding. Yeah. And I'm writing a lot about vulnerability and about emotions at the moment.

And I think you're right, like, whether it's my current working title for the manopause, or the like third wave manosphere stuff, Mack and Murphy, William Costello, Rob Henderson, from like the academic sphere of this, Alexander Date Syke, like, they're kind of pointing at it from a more like academic lens, all postgrads or doctoral students or whatever the fuck. And then Dr. Kay, Joe Hudson, kind of marrying master coach Eastern Western. stuff, modality focused, you coming in with like psychedelic, a psychedelic sort of lens to it. And then I guess I'm ancillary to that in kind of like bro sphere type stuff. You're credible in a brosphere, which I think is really important, really, really important.

But there's something going on, dude, and I don't know what it is. And the conversation I had with Tucker Carlson, I think, correctly identifies a lot of the problems. One other thing, just to add in on the men piece, when I first, the, like, arc of me working through a lot of the mating stuff, which inevitably ends up just pointing back at yourself, like whatever it is at you entrat, it ends up coming back to you. You start off going, wow, there's some stats around sexlessness and like matinglessness that kind of are scary. I wonder what's going on.

So you go to evolutionary psychology. You say, what are the underpinnings of our motivations, proximate, ultimate reasons for behavior, mate guarding. jealousy, male parental uncertainty, resources, intracultural competition, intersexual competition. That's interesting, but that's not the whole picture. And then you move down to environment mismatch. And you say, okay, so how is modern environment

and ancestral programming coming together to create these odd mismatches? That's interesting. And that's currently where a lot of the red pill and a lot of the conversation from both men and women, mostly men, is at. But the next step down from that, which is kind of where I'm at currently, this is my model, is even if you know

what's happening in the world demographically in terms of stats, you know our ancestral programming in terms of what are the underlying motivations and incentives for how we work, you then marry those two together to get modern mismatch. At no point in anybody's

relationship ever has anyone directly interacted with their environmental mismatch. They interact relationally. Okay, so what is the emotion that I feel when my partner out earns me and I'm a man. Got it, got it, yeah. That's the vanguard.

Like the tip of the spear of how this shit works is... It's mediated by emotion, yeah. Emotion, bingo. So that's where I'm at. Oh, it's like, yeah, well, she makes more than me and that's a problem. It's a problem because of how I feel.

It's a problem because how she feels. It's a problem because, yeah. Yes. Got it. So the tip of the spear of this shit, and this is Gay Hendricks work, fucking awesome stuff. and in part

a no more Mr. Nice guy Robert Glover like he's sort of like looking at a part of this and a wing of this so yeah there's like some fucking autistic Avengers thing where

there's cool there's cool information and vibes that if combined correctly, I think could make for like a really fucking good holistic bit of development. Let me, let me ask because this is, I think, love my dad and I didn't feel like I had, I didn't want to be my dad in a lot of ways. And I look around and I see a lot of people that

as cheesy as it sounds did not have male role models. I don't know if they'd happened in your neighborhood, but I couldn't find a marriage that I wanted. I still struggle. It was a role model desert for me where I grew up. Yeah. I think it's a role model desert of a world for our thing. I don't know how many people are familiar with like male-female relationships in suburbia that work in a way that feels good. And the complete lack of that meant that my generation and my, we were like lost boys. I was the farthest ahead.

I was the old one. Right. And so I think there's a huge opportunity because we've decried the loss of ritual and the loss of male connection is for you, me, etc., to be. Both digital five, 10 years in front mentors, but I also think there's some possibility for a digital physical hybrid, which you experience with Joe where you were in person with people of, oh my God, the missing older brother, the missing younger uncle. Like that archetype is just, we're starving for it. But this is why the live shows, this is why the tour of that. Yeah. It's like just like.

Jordan. And that's what Jordan Peterson was. He was everyone's dad. He was the guy who said, I believe in you, but you can do better. You know, he filled that father role for people all over the world. And it's not ideal that he had to do it. But it was in tremendous service to those people. And I think that there's a, he was so much older.

I think there's an older brother, younger uncle thing that is like. Well, also there's an issue with sort of selling it that I don't know how many people want to be Joe Hudson. I want to be Jordan Peterson. I don't even know how many people want to be Joe Rogan. So you're like, fuck, if your main audience is 34, like, can they look at someone that's 20 years they're senior? And be like, oh, that's where I might want to be. But not right now.

So, yeah, bringing it the fucking distance a little bit closer. Jordan was able to talk at a high level about male-female dynamics in a way that was helpful. But he wasn't five, six, seven years out of the dating pool. He met his wife when he was like elementary school or something. Yeah, so how do I do it on Snapchat or TikTok? It's like that tactical level was not available with him. And so that's what I think is really, I hope that people can find my content at the level of what do I text her

and stick with me all the way through the things that I haven't gone to, which is like, how do I propose? How do I be with her? How do I be a good dad? I think there's a really potentially beautiful ladder of male development that is being broken down and reconstructed so that people can enter at various levels, but also see that, oh, there is another stage coming.

I may have to leave some people behind. It's not the end of the world. I see that my older digital brother, uncle, has gone through this before. And that, why do I want to do that? That's what I didn't have. Like, you know, reading Tim Ferriss. Even with, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Even with the people that we did have that our parents didn't have. Yeah. And it still wasn't enough. It wasn't enough. It wasn't enough. Yeah, it was with Tim, who I love and saved me. was here's how to do it. You know, here's how to do it.

But it wasn't like, I see you. I'm there for you. I get it. And this is what it's going to feel like. And this is what it's going to feel like. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you can stick me. Yeah.

Bro, this has been so much fun. I feel, I feel oddly exposed as well. I feel very like the tide's gone out and my pants are off. We have control over the edit. So you do whatever you want. That is true. We will see how much of it makes it in. Thank you for sharing with me.

I'm yeah. What can people expect from you over the not too distant future? What can they expect? Chaos. I don't know. I'm really excited. I won't even put my stake in the ground. I'm excited to find out myself.

Unreal. Charlie Hooput, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, I love you. Thank you. Thank you, man.