Modern Wisdom - 21 Harsh Truths About Why You’re Still Lost - Mark Manson - #1096

Episode Date: May 11, 2026

Mark Manson is a writer, entrepreneur, and a New York Times best-selling author. Mark is one of my favorite thinkers. His blog, books, and X account are packed with timeless lessons I come back to again and again. Today, we get to go through some of his best lessons on life, love, and everything that makes us human. Expect to learn why it's important to do hard things, why it’s important to live your happiest life, why choosing a partner is also choosing their average Tuesday, why learning is the smart man’s procrastination, why you need to stop caving to the needs of others, 10 years of therapy in 1 minute, questions to ask yourself before you die and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠⁠ Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get up to 20% off Timeline powered by Mitopure (now at a lower price) at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom Timestamps: (0:00) Why We Should Be Comfortable With Uncertainty (7:59) Is Friction the Key to Growth? (20:55) The Truth Behind Choosing a Partner (30:14) Why Self-Optimisation Isn’t For Everyone (39:18) Life Doesn’t Hand Out Pity Passes (54:48) Choose Someone Who Chooses You (01:10:57) Is Learning Just a Form of Procrastination? (01:21:01) Should We Prioritise Starting a Family? (01:24:57) Why Neediness is Pushes People Away (01:32:53) Does Hate Make People Dig Their Heels in? (01:44:14) Why Everything Worth Having Requires Sacrifice (01:50:13) 10 Years of Therapy Summarised into 1 Minute (02:10:42) How to Make Your Life Count (02:14:21) Stop Waiting For Permission (02:21:41) Find Out More About Mark 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: ⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠⁠ - 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

The most important skill in the 21st century is the ability to live happily with uncertainty. Yeah, I mean, do you know what's going on? Almost never. I mean, you, millions of people like tune in to listen to you to try to figure out what's going on, and you still don't know what's going on. So it's if you and I can't figure it out, like, I think we're all pretty, it is interesting that like as access to information scales, the certainty and the confidence around that information

like dissipates. I feel like everybody feels less moored to reality than ever before, despite the fact that we have access to everything 24-7, which is like a very weird paradox. But I think it's, it's, there's a deep human instinct to seek out certainty to find a certain set of beliefs and assumptions

that you can kind of like, hang your hat on and build your life around. And I think it's becoming harder than it's ever been before. And I think as a result, developing kind of the cognitive flexibility to live in ambiguity is probably more important than it's ever been. What happens if you can't deal with uncertainty? Then you will over-index on one single belief, right?

So you'll become radical about one idea. You'll basically put all of your kind of emotional well-being into a single concept or a single worldview. And the danger of that is just that like every worldview is going to get blown up at a certain point. Like nothing survives contact with reality. So when you are forced, you know, when that worldview gets contradicted, you're either going to suffer immensely or you're going to have to double down the delusion to maintain the certainty. Anxiety is all about uncertainty. It's about trying to compress uncertainty down.

I don't know what's going to happen in future. If I can imagine all of the different ways that the future might unfold, especially the really bad ones, I'll be able to plan and war game. And that means that when it happens, I'll be ready. It's a really strange comment on how humans' brains work that we would rather imagine a catastrophe than deal with uncertainty. Yes.

You think about his thinking in super positions, people would rather collapse the superposition down into something that maybe even breaks the laws of physics. Your dead grandma comes back from the grave to tell you off for this thing that you do. There's entire supernatural shits going on. That's what you would rather have in your mind than I don't know what's going to happen.

Right. It's interesting to, like, what you described about anxiety, that kind of, that treadmill that you get on, right, of like, trying to predict future outcomes, in the process of trying to predict those outcomes, trying to become certain about what's going to happen. You actually just inadvertently build more surface area for more uncertainty because every everything you try to project into the future, you just create more opportunities for that to be wrong. Yes. And so it's interesting because I think I think actually like the antidote to this is it's more of like an aperture issue, right? It's I think instead of trying to be certain about very specific small narrow things, it's better to try to zoom out until you find a place of confidence. Right. So like just take like AI for instance, right? Everybody's freaking out about it. Everybody's got, you know, some people think the world's going to end. Some people think everybody's going to lose their jobs. Some people think like China's going to take over everything. I have no idea of any of those things are true, but like if I zoom out broadly enough and you just look at every major technological revolution throughout human history, there is disruption, there is some displacement, but like society adapts and moves on. And so if I zoom out to that wide of an aperture, suddenly I feel some degree of certainty that we're going to be okay in the macro.

But in the micro, right, of like, are you? and I can have jobs in two years. Like, I, some less certainty about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a kind of fragility to need a lot of certainty. Because what you're saying is, I can't deal with something that I can't anticipate.

I don't have enough robustness in my system. If something happens that I haven't planned for, the only way that I can survive the future is if I've already prepared for it. Yeah. And that's the opposite of robustness. or, you know, the best anti-fragility. Look at COVID. Now, COVID, everybody's lives during COVID basically forked into one of two directions.

People either went way off the rails or people's lives got stupendously better. Right. But that's it. There wasn't really anyone that was like, yeah, you know, COVID was okay. It was fine. Yeah, it ticked over and stuff really didn't show. You know, my trajectory stayed the same. That that was like a lifestyle raw shock test that everybody took.

Everybody looked at it and some people went in one direction and some people went in the other. And a lot of it is, you just got dealt a fucking shitty hand, dude. Yeah. You know, like that. That hospitality job that you were just about to take that was going to change your life. I'm really sorry. That fucking that blue. Or that SaaS company that you were about to start.

Like, yeah, I mean, you timed the shit out of the market. Well done for incorporating in 2019 and having everything ready to work from home remotely. Yeah, yeah. it's interesting like so one of my fans recently asked me a question um about confidence and about like people who seem self-assured in kind of every situation and it's interesting because i think you know when you hear a lot of confidence advice you hear you know you need to fail at something a certain amount of times and you need to build evidence right that you're capable of handling setbacks and obstacles and all these things and it's interesting

because I think it kind of like confidence actually operates on two different dimensions. There's like state confidence and trait confidence, right? And so you can put yourself in situations where you feel some degree of certainty. Like you've done a thousand podcast, right? So it's like if a fucking light blows up right here, like you're probably going to figure it out and be fine. And you're not going to worry about it. But there's there is an interesting aspect of like kind of a broader trait confidence of just living enough of. of your life in that uncertainty, being in enough situations where you felt out of control, but things turned out fine, that I don't think you can plan or predict for it. It's like almost by definition, you have to live through things not going as planned to build that like deeper level, trait level confidence.

Yeah, that's the dark night of the soul thing. The worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you. It's like difficulty exposure therapy. Oh, I've been here before and I didn't die. That means I can probably be there again. Yeah. Things will go okay.

But if you haven't been there before and it happens, if a pandemic comes along again, everybody, apart from five-year-olds, are prepared. Yeah. Way more. Okay, I understand what's going to happen here. Like, I lock myself in the house. I'll probably invest in some companies that have these, you know, like distributed stuff. Buy Zoom stock.

Yeah, exactly. Buy Zoom stock again. You know that when COVID happened, there was another company called Zoom, whose ticker is very close to the proper one. and their share price went up by like 400%. It's some Chinese company. Like just by fortune of being called the same thing. All right, next one.

Yeah. Do hard shit, not because it's fun, but because the win actually means something. You bled for it. You broke for it. You earned it. Easy wins are forgettable. Hard ones change you.

That's the point. I've been thinking a lot about this concept recently of like how there's an inverse relationship between convenience and significance. Like, I think we tend to only appreciate things that require some degree of friction or sacrifice. And I mean, look, there's the classic reason that do hard things, which is kind of what we just, you know, it's like you build resilience and you, you know, you build up your endurance and self-belief and confidence and all these things. But I've been thinking a lot about this more from like kind of an existential meaning lens of that when things. are just handed to you you take them for granted it's human nature and so if there are a lot of

results in your life if if we are all kind of accumulating more and more results and outputs in our life that are kind of just handed to us by technology you know fucking burrito taxis coming any time we want like it's it's in in one way it's kind of robbing us for opportunities of significance and I'm, maybe it's because I'm 40 now, but I'm like, I'm like starting, I'm starting to develop this like interest in intentionally introducing friction back into my life in certain ways. I actually had a conversation with my wife last night where like she was telling me, she said that one of her childhood friends sent her some voice notes. And it's like she was going through all this shit.

Like her kid was having problems. Her business partner was like, you know, just completely checked out. Huge fight with like her ex-husband, all this stuff. And my wife was like, do you want to talk? And her friend was like, I never even considered like, I didn't want to bother you or, you know, you're busy or whatever. And then, of course, they got on the phone. They talked for like an hour and a half. And it was like this great kind of reconnection in this moment.

But my wife and I were talking last night. I felt like how just that reluctance to even like actually call somebody without permission, without like establishing, okay, I sent a text and then I asked if I can call. It's we're also like hung up on it's an, the phone is annoying. It's annoying. Like when the phone rings, it's annoying to like have to deal with calls that we've like robbed ourselves of the friction that actually builds like the, the connective tissue. of our relationships, right? Because you can't reproduce that intimacy

through like voice notes or text messages or anything. So like that's a very superficial example, but like we're surrounded by those superficial examples 24-7. Is this making any sense? Absolutely. I didn't know where you were going at the start, but you really brought it back in Atlanta.

The inconvenience of a friendship is exactly where it grows from. Yeah. It's the definition of safety, the best definition of safety that's been formally given to me is we can go through something hard and come out the other side okay.

The best definition of personal safety and sovereignty is I'm okay no matter what happens. Which is something similar. It's a relationship with yourself, a relationship with somebody else. But you have to... How do you know that you're safe if you haven't gone through something difficult with somebody?

It's the same thing as Jordan Peterson's idea about you're not being noble if you're unable to be harmful, you're just being harmless. A rabbit doesn't choose, actually rabbits can be bastards, but a rabbit doesn't choose to be harmless, right? It just doesn't have very many weapons.

Sure. But that line between significance and convenience, I think is so fucking right. And I've been thinking about this a lot. I'm sure that you write a lot of things, you need to produce stuff. Everybody in one way or another is probably using AI to assist them with their workflow,

and what I've noticed is that there's certain things that it's robbed me of the enjoyment of in completion, even as it's made completing it easier and maybe better. Right. And then you start to ask yourself a deep question, which is, what am I doing it for? Right. Am I doing it for the outcome? Because I can speed run the outcome. Right.

Well, kind of, but also kind of not. What I'm doing is I'm doing this thing for the way that I feel, when I have finished it. That's really what I'm doing it for. Because let's say that you could create some prompt in chat GPT. Thank you to our partner, chat GPT. And that would create videos on your channel. Let's say they're even derivative of your work.

It's not using anybody else's work, but it was able to get a new channel of yours to a million subscribers in four weeks. Yeah. And you just put it in, and you're like, oh, amazing. It's my work, right? So it's still you, but the process of getting there wasn't that challenging. Right. I don't think that you would feel that satisfied.

Think about how satisfied you were when your book actually gets completed by you, by hand, in the before times. Yeah. And it's like I struggle with this too because I'm generally like a very technology, pro technology person who owns an AI company. Yeah. So it's, but I think of it like when you were talking, the thing that came to mind is it's kind of like playing a video game with cheat codes, right? It's fun

for a minute. You're like, I'm like crushing everything. This is awesome. But then when you beat it, it's not satisfying. And it's almost like most of the technological innovation of, say, the last 20 years has just been adding little cheat codes to all these areas of our lives. And

it has made everything more seamless, frictionless, convenient, faster, more efficient. But it's, like robbing the satisfaction of like doing. Which is the reason that you do it. You do it for the emotional state of having done it.

Now, hopefully having done it well, hopefully having done it in a way that makes other people's lives better and is popular, maybe gets you some money too. But all of those things only matter in as much as you can link your effort to that outcome. Yes. And I think part of it too is that it's causing us to mistake the convenience and efficiency for why we're doing it, right? I think, for example, like, I think this dating

is probably the most egregious example of this, right? If you look at just the state of the dating apps, they're completely optimized for convenience of introduction. And on the surface, if you're a single person, like that sounds like a great deal. But in the process of, like,

mass matching people out of convenience, you are losing that friction and that the struggle, which is essentially the filtration system for who's actually going to be a good partner for you. Which also creates the significance in the connection too. And that's that bottom line. Easy wins are forgettable. Yes.

And that's the thing. You look back on your life and you say, wow, I don't actually know how I got here. I mean, it's great and I look at all of the things I have. Isn't that wonderful? I think about this. People that became millionaires, Decker, centa millionaires,

through crypto. How deranging must that be? Completely deranging. The same way as somebody who's poor winning the lottery, in many ways, that could be one of the worst days of their life.

When they look back, they go, wow, that was completely unmoored, untethered to my existing perspective of reality. I'm never going to have a day that's that good again. It's like having never done cocaine and then deciding one day

to complete, like a Charlie Sheen-sized dose of it. And you go, well, I'm not conditioned. I wasn't right. I didn't build up my tolerance for this. And I don't have the story and the narrative. And that's what we live in. Humans live in these narratives.

Yeah. Yeah. There's also like there's a skill aspect of this too, right? Like, especially with around money and relationships. Like, I think part of the issue with the app driven dating culture is that there's a lot of just simple, basic. dating skills that you build and optimize through like actually speaking face to face with lots and lots of people, especially people who are not very interested in you. And I imagine you have

a lot of experience. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. The, and the interesting thing, you know, there's this stature around lottery winners where like the majority of them end up broke, lots of them end up depressed. A number of them commit suicide. And I think a lot of it too is that there's this There's a skill set around money, right? Which is like, okay, you have a lot of money. There's a lot of bad ways to manage that money. There are a lot of bad decisions. There's a lot of bad habits around money that you've like never developed

because you never climbed the mountain steadily over a long period of time. You were just like airdrop to the peak. And so clearly you just fall off. Well, the stupid thing is we don't know what technology we have now that had it have not been there, we would have preferred our lives in the past. There was a, I think the typewriter came in partway through Nietzsche's life and his writing changed. Interesting. When he, the typewriter came along.

Previously, he was writing by hand. Yeah. Then after that, his sentences got shorter. His writing style changed. And I wonder how many people when the typewriter came along said, well, I mean, without the quill, it's going to change all of these things. Now, that's not to say that some technologies can't unlock creativity and unlock your access to difficulty. It's like there's unnecessary challenge, but it certainly feels to me like if there's a bell curve of where the optimal point is or the area under the curb, we are way overshooting it now that a single prompt can basically spit out a passable piece of work. All that being said, I do think that the advent of AI opens up for everybody.

AI basically regresses you back to the mean. That's what it is. It's optimizing for the mean. So if you're worse than, if you're in the bottom 50% of anything, AI will make you better. It's a great deal. If you're in the top 50% of anything, AI makes you worse. And if you're trying to do anything, you shouldn't be doing it if you're in the bottom 50%. So presumably, it's actually dragging you back.

Yeah. Yeah. I think the tricky thing with all of this whole concept, all these technologies, is what happens is that it becomes incumbent upon us individually to go find the new difficulty. Choose hard. Exactly. right? So it's like using AI but also pushing yourself to still do something original or unique or have original ideas. And it's and the problem is it's just like it's really against our, you know, our nature is to always choose the last, the path of least resistance. And so it's like very hard to develop that muscle. And I think a lot of people just don't have that muscle.

Choose hard, dude. All right. Next one. Yeah. A quick aside, there is a stat that genuinely surprised me when I first heard it. 95% of people don't get enough fiber. Not because they're being careless, but because hitting your daily fiber target through food alone is actually quite hard. But that's why Momentus built fiber plus. See, fiber isn't just a digestion thing. It's the foundation of your gut health, which drives how well you absorb nutrients, how stable your energy is, and how quickly you recover.

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So if you're not sure, you can buy Fiber Plus, try it for 29 days. If you don't love it, they'll just give you your money back. And they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription. that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to live momentous.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-M-O-U-S.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. When you select a partner, whether you realize it or not, you're choosing a whole lifestyle and not just the person. You're choosing their sleep schedule.

You're choosing their money habits. You're choosing their stress levels, their family drama, their levels of cleanliness, their work ethic, their coping mechanisms. All of these things will be a baseline of your daily life. If their normal is doom scrolling till 2 a.m., avoiding all conflict, impulse spending and never exercising, guess what? You're signing up to live in that ecosystem. Love does not cancel out people's flaws. In fact, love just makes you tolerate them for longer. Most people obsess over, do we have romantic chemistry? And they completely skip, can I live with this person's version of a Tuesday for the next 10 years? The hard truth is, You don't fix somebody's lifestyle from the inside.

You either accept the package as they are or you walk. I've been having this conversation with a lot of single friends recently of what I'm, what I am noticing is that people tend seem to have kind of this laundry list of requirements. And as soon as they, and there's this also this false perception of infinite options. And so as soon as the person that. that they're seeing or that they're on a date with, like fails one of the qualifications. They're like, oh, next, I'm going to move on.

And then, of course, they're, you know, 45 and still single and wondering why they never found anybody. And have you ever heard that story that I think it was Warren Buffett where he said that he was like, you know, you write out a list of 20 things that you want in your life, put them in order from the thing that's most important and least important, and then cross out everything but the time. top three, I've essentially started giving that exercise to my single friends. Because I'm like, you're not going to find all of these.

And it's, you've been brainwashed. You have this like false perception that there's a lot of these people out there that tick every single box. And there's not. And you're probably, even if there is, you're probably not going to meet them. And if you do meet them, they're going to have so many options that it's going to be like very unlikely that you end up with them. So it's find your three.

non-negotiables and then negotiate on the rest. And that's like fucking sacrilege these days to tell people because they're like, I don't want to settle. Sounds like settling. Yeah, I don't want to settle. It's like, dude, everybody settles on something. I mean, you're settling in that you can't fly at the moment. Yeah.

You know, you're settling in that you need to go to bed every night. Yeah. I mean, dude, there's things that I've been with my wife for 14 years. There's things about her that still drive me fucking crazy. And but I, I, she's like Latina, right? Well, yeah. Yeah. So that kind of comes, that's part of the course.

It's part for every course But it's the Latino versions Are just much more dramatic Very loud With lots of tears It's a spicy It's a spicy version It's the foiego version

Exactly It's foiego dating Exactly But there's things about me That she can't stand But it's like you just Accept at a certain point You're like okay

The good vastly outweighs the bad And you go with it And I think I think the reason That post did so well is, you know, when you are meeting people, when you are dating people, there's this whole kind of like iceberg under the water of traits and characteristics and personality and connections and relationships that you're not really aware of that they're there,

but that's actually going to be the majority of the relationship. Correct. And really, most people are kind of just going on vibes. you know, when they're dating somebody. And so I just think it's helpful to be like explicitly conscious about it and understand like, okay, if her mother's crazy, like, and you want to marry her, like, you're going to have a crazy mother-in-law for 40 years. Lock in for some crazy.

Exactly. Like, it's just put it on the plate because it's part of the course. You can't only, it's not a buffet. You don't just take the items you want. You got to take, it's the whole prefix menu. You know what the original name for this podcast? was going to be. What's that? Crushing a Tuesday. The reason for that, glad that I didn't do it. Another one was mind and matter and another one was brain and brawn and it was, they were horrible.

Modern wisdom was divine inspiration that came to me at three in the morning. Yeah, much better. And thank you. Crushing Tuesday is not bad. Crushing a Tuesday was taken from a Tim Ferriss podcast. Okay. And what he said was most people try to optimize their lives around peak experiences. Mm-hmm. But your life is made up of average Tuesdays. And your goal should be to make your average Tuesday as enjoyable as possible. And that's what you're talking about here, that what people look at is the amazing sex or the fascinating conversation. They don't realize what is this person like normally?

What is the middle of their bell curve of just how they operate? What do they do? With the most frequent interaction between them and reality, what do they? do with their diet? That's pretty important. What do they do with their sleep pattern? That's pretty important. These are structural things. How do they deal with discomfort? How do they deal with things when they're hot? How do they deal when they're disregulated? It's their family like. Yeah. What are their timelines like? You know, are your timelines in the same, moving in the same direction? And that is, what's the relationship with money like? That is what you

are signing up for. Right. And that line, love does not cancel out people's flaws. In fact, it just makes you tolerate it for longer, which is what's deranging to a lot of people that they get into a relationship with somebody who isn't right for them or isn't good for them, and the capacity of their love, the intensity of their love, just allows them to stay in something

which isn't right for even longer. And I think that people often feel guilty about having optimized for romantic chemistry when what they should have been optimizing for is is to say evening with this person enjoyable. Right. And it's easy to optimize for that romantic chemistry because that's what you're flooded with

when you meet somebody you really like. So that's what you're going to be biased towards. And I should add, so it's funny, because I think I've posted a couple variations of this post over the years. And every time there's always like a couple of angry people in the comments who are like,

this is unrealistic, you shouldn't expect somebody to satisfy all these things for you. And the point of this isn't that you have to go find somebody who has a mother that you like and who's like good with money. It's the opposite of that. Yeah, no, it's like it's you have to find somebody that you're willing to tolerate all of those things, right? So it's, it's not, they're not trying to hit a ceiling. Like you're just trying to make, find somebody who's like nothing falls below your floor. And it's also, I think a lot of it, there are a couple other facets of this. I think one is. understanding that what you what what are you particularly well equipped to handle so for example my wife's Brazilian she has a lot of feelings and I'm just like very even keeled pretty much all the time it it really takes a lot for me to get worked up about anything like I'm I'm the guy who doesn't give a fuck so it actually works extremely well like I can handle a lot of emotions it doesn't really freak me out

I don't like get sucked in the drama easily. So there's like a certain amount of self-knowledge of understanding this is the type of partner that I'm probably well suited for because my strength kind of resonates well with their weakness or vice versa. Whereas like my, you know, I have a very, very like strong need for intellectual stimulation. I get bored extremely easily. And back when I was single, I dated a lot of really cool girls, but who just, like, weren't super smart or curious. And I was bored within minutes.

And some of them were smoking hot, some of them were awesome in bed. And I remember sitting there being like, I can't believe I'm going to break up with this girl. Like, she's, what am I doing? But I was bored. Got nothing to talk to you about. Yeah, I was bored out of my mind.

Your first date with your now wife was, you met in a nightclub, and within 30 minutes, we're talking about Russian literature? Russian grammar. Russian grammar. That's it. You know?

Yes. I told you about this last time that my best piece of advice for sort of the intellectual bros, the intellectually inclined bros when they're single, is to speed run sending weird psychology articles to the girls that you're talking to and to just see who comes back. It's like an intellectual shit test. And you're not looking for the smart ones. You're looking for the ones that engage. Right.

Oh, that's cool. Never heard of that before. Let's talk about that the next time we get on the phone. time we go for dinner. Yeah. Even if they don't know anything about it. That's not what it's about. Okay, can I, is this person interested?

Are they going to engage with me? So, yeah, I think it's funny. Rory Sutherland's got this idea. He says you should have an air frie a girlfriend, not a Fiat 500 girlfriend. And what he means by that is you want to find somebody who only you can see the value in in a way that other people can't. And who have disadvantages that only you can tell you. tolerate in a way that other people can't. So if you have an air fry, for instance, it's going to stank up the kitchen. If you're sensitive to smells, it's going to be a bad thing to have in

your house or else you're going to have to put it out on the balcony or in the garage or something like that, and that's a bit of a nightmare to you. Not that bothered about smells. You can have your entire life's calories go through one machine. He uses the example that he doesn't mind noise when he goes to sleep. He's a fan of trains and he likes beer. So he lived in a house that was next to a pub

with a garden that backs onto a railway line because he quite likes the trains. They're actually actively sort of enjoyable for him to see going by. He doesn't mind that much about the noise from them

or from the beer garden and he's made good friends to the landlord of the pub and it means that he can order a beer by leaning over his fence and asking for it and he can sort of enjoy the atmosphere of the pub

from the comfort of his own home. What he's done is he's being able to get a house, I think it's his cottage that's somewhere in the British countryside, he's being able to get that at a price that most other people would still think was too much despite the fact that it's discounted because there are certain inconveniences and challenges that he is particularly well equipped to put up with that other people would struggle with. And the same thing is true when it comes to choosing a partner. Can we dig into this a little bit because I feel like... Air fry a girlfriend.

Well, I'll let you know how that goes over with my wife. I'm going to go home after this. Darling, darling. You're my air friar. You're my air friar. You're my air friar. I can cook everything in you. Well, you know, that's, I mean, she is Brazilian, so they're highly fertile.

Yes. But it's, and especially, like, you come more from this optimization world than I do. But the person, like, the personalization of optimization of optimizations. Like, this is the thing that always bugged me about a lot of the optimization content out there, because everybody's so different in terms of what they want and who they are and, like, what they're predisposed to. And I think the same way, like, some people are more predisposed to certain athletic activities or certain physical activities than others, were all predisposed to, like, certain psychological environments and certain types of relationships than other people. And I just, it drives me

crazy that there's like no accounting for that often like there's no discussion of how it's yeah living next to a train track where you can order a beer over a fence is like that might actually be optimal for one person's life whereas you would never see that like broadcast on you know health and fitness this is the optimal way that you should get your house look at all of the advantages well we know that those advantages are so niche yeah that it only addresses a very small cohort of people. Right. But the assumption here is all optimization advice is optimizing for...

Exactly. Yeah. You know that study about they tried to engineer fighter pilot seats inside of U.S. fighter jets and new U.S. fighter jet. They took all of the fighter pilots and averaged their body dimensions so that they could design the seat that was the average of them all. And it fitted zero pilot. There's no such thing as average.

Right. There is no such thing. the average person literally doesn't exist. They're an aggregate of everything. But I mean, let's say, for instance, that you had a distribution of people on a graph that looked like a pair of boobs. So you have sort of two there.

Where's the average? It's actually at a point where maybe nobody is. You know? This is the problem with doing it. And I understand, sweeping generalizations about advice is something that I've always steered away from when I can. And it's been massively to the detriment

of my credibility. because I don't know the things that are massively to the detriment of my credibility as well. But one of the reasons is people love certainty. They love absolutes, they love certainty, and this goes back to the fact that uncertainty is very difficult to deal with. If I listen to someone who says, well, we know, we know that this is the kid. We know what Israel is doing.

We know how much protein you should have a day. We know what the best sleep formula is. You go, well, fucking hell. don't need to worry anymore. All the chaos of the world, all of the different directions that things could have gone in. I don't need to wrangle with that. And it's way less sexy to say, well, it's directionally correct that. It seems to be the case that in most circumstances, I would estimate that it is good to,

it's way less sexy, but it's much more accurate for people. If you're the sort of person, and this is why for the whole podcast, and I see this all the time, when people get pissy about some piece of advice that's been put forward, especially when it's being caveated. Well, the outlier, actually, I think you'll find. It's like, hey, dude, if this is not for you, that's fine. But your ability to discern doesn't mean, what you should say is, that's not for me.

Huh. I wonder if it is for anybody else. Can you imagine if that piece of advice is for somebody else? And if so, then, like, shut the fuck up. Right. Yeah. This piece of content that isn't for you found you or this piece of advice that isn't for you found you, your first port of call should be, wow, I wonder if that actually exists for anybody. Fuck, I actually can imagine somebody that it would be good for that's in my life or how varied are we as humans that that's the case. Isn't that interesting?

The flip side of that, there's a flip side version of that that I see a lot that actually concerns me even more, which is that people will hear a piece of a general piece of advice. they will try it on themselves. It won't work. And instead of coming to the conclusion of like, oh, there's just something different about me and I need to adjust accordingly, they assume that there's something wrong. And the advice? No, with them. Oh, okay. They're like, the advice is the gold standard, right? Because it came from, you know, Mr. Guru or Mr. Super Ph.D. And, but it's not working for them. So therefore, they must be doing something wrong. They must be, something's wrong with them. And so they need to like go find an even more detailed protocol and implement it even more strictly. And you see them kind of get into this like OCD spiral. Over optimization spiral.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The pain of trying to be perfect will kill you more quickly than your imperfections well. Yeah. The one thing that I remind my listeners on my show of all the time is that like the best, most credible piece of advice in psychology, like if you look at all the literature in terms of every intervention imaginable, every intervention imaginable and like what its hit rate is, it's like maybe 50%. You know, like the very best forms of therapy with a really good therapist, it's like maybe cracks over 50%. So it's none of this stuff is going to work for everybody all the time. And in fact, you should expect that roughly half of it is not going to work for you. At best. At best. And so it is it is your responsibility to,

try everything, track what's working, what's not, be honest with yourself about what's working, what's not, and then like move forward accordingly. Before we continue, most people in their 30s are still training hard, their protein is dialed in, they sleep better than they did in their 20s. Discipline is not the issue, but recovery feels somewhat different. Strength gains take a little longer. The margin for error starts to shrink. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of timeline. You see, mitochondria at the produces inside of your muscle cells. As they weaken with age, your ability to generate power and recover effectively changes, even if your habits stay strong. Miter pure from timeline contains the

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modern wisdom at checkout. That's timeline.com slash modern wisdom at checkout. Nobody owes you patience just because you've had a rough upbringing or a hard day. Life doesn't hand out pity passes. Use your pain as fuel, not a crutch. You don't build psychological resilience by feeling good all the time. You build psychological resilience by getting better at feeling bad. That is definitely, that was definitely posted in 2025 or 2026, because that's the sort of thing that you could not post between like 2016 and 2022.

would have gotten me canceled all sorts of proclamations about white male privilege or whatnot. I mean, it's difficult because there are genuine victims in the world and there are people who have genuinely suffered lots of shit that is not fair and not their fault. And those people deserve sympathy

but they don't deserve, they don't necessarily deserve anything more than that. And I think we're kind of coming out of this period, but we went through a very intense period where there was a lot of entitlement associated with, like I think in one of my books I called it the victimhood Olympics, right? It's like, and you see this now with like a lot of like super lefty groups. You know, it's like, well, I am an abused indigenous person of color

who grew up with three legs. And then it's like the next person is like, well, as a person who grew up with one leg and is a abused transsexual indigenous person, like my voice actually carries more weight than yours. And I've got gluten intolerance. Yeah, yeah. And it's like at a certain point, it's like, who fucking care?

Like, what are you going to do? Correct. Right? Like, what, you can't, you can't like just sit around measuring your pain every day as if it's like, you know, it earns you merit badges. I've had to pull this up.

This is one of the best take. So Alex Homozi got in trouble for saying this. The same thing. Nobody owes you patience just because you've had a rough day or a hard upbringing. Yeah. And he wrote a response. This is fucking money by him.

If you had disadvantages, I agree with you. You are right. It's harder to be successful if X happened to you. Replace X with gender, race, birth deformity, different language, different country, abuse, etc.

The main point of the longer conversation is that despite the disadvantage, you only have one choice. What are you going to do about it? Number one, take action anyway and become proof to other people like you, your people, also born into this abused tragedy

that you too can overcome it and they can as well. Number two, blame and complain. And to be clear, do whatever you want. I support your choice. But only one of those decisions will make you better. And I wish I could say this without getting attacked, but you know who wins by you not being successful,

whoever and whatever you blame. Fuck that and fuck them. You can lead a rebellion of one and blame the one thing you can control, which is you. In your mind, redefined the word blame as give power to. And when you do that, there's only one person you're going to want to give more power to,

and that's you. For everyone who had shit. circumstances, I'm on your side, your long-term side, the side that wants you to win. So do it anyway, with all the disadvantages, and still tell them to shove it and win. I want to be clear, again, if you had tough shit happen to you, it sucks, and that's not your fault. But now what? Where do we go?

Isn't it crazy how many caveats and, like, you know. Throat clearing land acknowledgments? Yeah, yeah. Yes. Dude, I continue to fucking get in trouble by saying things that to some people doesn't land right and to other people becomes a mantra that they live by. And yeah, I understand because creating any goal to aim for and degree of obligation can make people who feel like that's out of reach for a reason that isn't their fault feel like they are being. made to pay twice for something that hurt them. And that fucking blows.

But it also makes communication really clunky, and I hate it. Yeah. It's so over and over. And it's such a shallow form of empathy as well. Yes. To assume that the only way that you can be caring is if you think about the middle 90% minus the two fives on the end that are obviously unrealistic for you to have thought about that you have to include all of these people as opposed to, hey, I'm speaking to a very

specific cohort of people now. Yeah, I would argue the empathy is actually completely disingenuous because it's, right, like if I'm empathizing with somebody strictly because of their, the color of their skin and their gender and their sexual orientation, like, that's exactly what they don't want to be empathized for. Correct. So it's, it's, it's backfiring. Like the whole strategy is backfiring in the first place. We were talking before I did my show in Australian to the people who came to the Sydney show. You will remember that James came out swinging when he did his warm-up set before me. And he made a comment partway through, which was, I hate to say it, but I'm racist.

And I'm racist against a very unique group of people. And it's Italians. He says, I know that I'm racist against Italians because I love the food, but I still don't like the people. and there was a lady a lady far away through the show who piped up and said

I was made to basically do the apology for James she fived up and said I really think that you need to be more careful about some of the sort of judgments that are being made in the show I'd make a joke and James had made a joke

and she's like you know this is sort of make people uncomfortable and it's exclusionary and all the rest of it and it was one of those moments where I'm like fuck there's like 2,49 other people in here looking at me to see if I can handle this situation. And I realized that true equality is when you have to put up with the same level of shit that everybody else does.

If you want to be properly, properly included, the most inclusive society, to not be treated with kid gloves. Yeah. If you told me that somebody was treating me differently because they thought that I couldn't handle it or something, that is a kind of bigotry and patronizing cotton wool gentleness that would make me feel so fucking icky. You're like, oh my God, you are not my friend. You are not my friend. Yet does that mean that you push the person who's only just started training at the same level that you push the person that's a professional athlete? Obviously not. But when it comes to

including people in discourse, I think that, yeah, true equality is when you put up with the same. same level of shit that everybody else does. That's funny in Australia, man. I'm just remembering, I did a show a couple years ago in Brisbane, and I had this bit in the show, I was talking about Freud. You know, do they do this in your shows out there? So Australia has this thing where they have like the sign language person on stage. No.

Signing for everything. Did they have one for you? Yeah. Okay. Like all of my... Do you have many deaf fans in Australia, Brisbane? I don't know. I never hear.

from was fuck me you walked right in yeah so every show yeah I had a there was a guy on stage on the corner of the stage like doing all the

science or everything so I implemented a segment of the show when I had a whole section about Freud and some of Freud's like wackier theories and I had a segment where I talked about how Freud had an obsession with dicks, moms, moms with

Dix, fucking moms with dicks. And I just like went on and on and then like I would like make the person sign everything. Unbelievable. What does what does Freud's obsession with fucking moms with dicks in sign language look like? I don't know, but it was it was just so funny to like watch the signer just get so uncomfortable. Wonderful. Yeah, it was a great crowd moment. But there was one there was one time in Brisbane where in the Q&A afterward, a woman got up and basically sort of chastising me for transphobia. And, um, lecturing me about how I had like a moral responsibility and as of the mums with dicks thing. Yeah. Okay. Right. Because I have a platform and all this stuff. And it was interesting because the crowd just instantly started booing her. And, um, but it was funny because like I, I tried to use it as kind of a teaching moment.

And I said something very similar to you, which is like, look, if you, you're, it's not a quality if we can't laugh about it. right like if if as long as something is so like can't even be spoken of because it is needs to be protect it's so fragile and it needs to be protected to like such an extreme extent um that's that's not a quality that's actually kind of the opposite of equality um in a lot of ways I don't know if if I convinced anybody of anything but uh it was it was a fun moment well certainly the deaf people got convinced. Jimmy Carr's got a line where he says, telling me that there is a problem too serious to joke about is like saying there's a disease too bad to create medicine for.

Yeah. You go like, this is the salve that helps people to see this problem with less seriousness. It's not being callous. It's not being flippant with it. But it's helping them. If anybody has ever had a problem that's felt really important to them, have they wanted to take it more seriously, or would they like to be able to find a way to actually inject some, yeah, like that is, isn't that funny?

Humor, it's therapeutic. It's funny, actually, the Jimmy Car quote, it reminds me. So my grandmother, she died of a brain tumor when I was probably 14, 15. And it was one of these, like, awful cancers. Like, she died very slowly. Oh, slow. Slow. Yeah, over the course of, like, you know,

probably eight or 12 months, and we just watched her deteriorate, like week after week after week. And it was awful. Like, we would spend every weekend with her, and we'd go see her. And my grandmother had a great sense of humor. And so she started cracking jokes about,

she named her tumor, and she was, like, cracking jokes about her tumor all the time. And when it got really bad, like, it started to get awkward, you know? So she's like, she can't walk anymore. She's, like, her, she's having memory problems, but she's still cracking jokes about the fuck tumor.

And at a certain point, like, my aunt got really upset. And she was like, you know, she was like, Maureen, like, you can't joke about this. Like, this is, this is really, like, it's upsetting. And I remember my grandmother said, she was like, there's nothing so serious in this life that you can't laugh about it. And she was like, it's my tumor. I'm going to, I'm going to laugh at it if I want. She's like, I'll make any joke I want about it.

But that always stuck with me. And it's something that, like, I believe very. deeply as well. Yeah, it's a strange one that there's a recent bit of research in the new statesman that just came out about the attitudes of young women specifically in Britain. And white women are significantly more likely than women of color to say that the country is racist. So it's like, how, how? Because there is this. I mean, I know how, but it's just like, how did we get here? I know. Well, it goes back to, it goes back to the desire to be seen as empathetic yes if you can show yourself as some kind of savior some sort of

white night that's going to steam in but again in that is so much it's such a patronizing perspective to say oh you poor you poor people of color you poor deaf people you're not able to you're so unresilient that you can't deal with this yourself allow me allow me to come in and tell these people exactly what you want you got Hang in a second. Notice that the person that piped up about the joke James made about Italians wasn't Italian. Of course. Of course she wasn't. I mean, I don't know, Chris. I think you're kind of minimizing the epidemic of transphobic deaf people in Australia. With a good intolerance. It is a real problem and you're not taking it seriously.

I'm not helping. Check your privilege. That is true. That is true. I am British, which I do think means that I've kind of got, how do you say? I've got ancestral empire privilege but modern day embarrassment disadvantage you know I've just if you would invest it in the UK

if the UK was a stock it was like fucking Herbalife or something this thing's just absolutely nosedived you had to have seen that recent survey where they surveyed British people of economically

what if the UK was a state in the US where they would be and the Brits said they'd be like number six or number seven and it's like actually it's 51st. Yeah. Although we're like fifth in America in, like number one in America in heart health, number one in America in obesity,

number one in America in all of the health stats. That's a low bar. That's true. Across all of America, there's not even one state, you know? When it comes to health, like, yeah, we're completely fucked over here. All right, next one. A quick aside, most people think that they're dehydrated because they don't drink enough water.

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mNT.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. If you have to explain to somebody why you deserve respect, then you're already in the wrong relationship, full stop. People don't realize that you shouldn't have to ask someone to prioritize you. You shouldn't have to beg them to be proud of you. If their efforts have to be requested, then it's not really effort. It's like compliance and compliance fades the second you stop asking. So really, it's a lot of just a performance. They're just doing it to placate you and keep you satisfied and stop you from complaining. The right person will treat you well because that's who they are. They just fundamentally care about you regardless of how other things are going, not because you gave them a checklist or a

deadline, but because you are just somebody that they value. So, if you feel like you have to train someone to just be a decent partner for you, they've already kind of told you everything you need to know. You probably just don't want to hear it. I'm going to amend that because that works great. You know, that's that's probably one of my reels on Instagram or something. But I'm going to amend that. I'm going to say that that is true in the macro, not necessarily true in the micro. Like, let me, let me explain this. So if somebody is egregiously disrespectful, consistently like you are constantly fighting for them to even acknowledge you, pay attention to you, care about you, like do anything.

That in and of itself is unfixable to a certain degree. Because like if there are certain just base layer requirements for a healthy relationship, that the fact you have to request them means that it's, they are non-transactional. by nature. So as soon as you request them, it becomes a transaction. And so you kind of invalidate whatever is given. So if it is on a severity of scale that like there's just nothing present at all, the amendment, the nuance that I will add to that is that there are often cases within a relationship that is already well established on trust where somebody is just kind of dropping the ball and is not showing up in the way that even they would intend to show up.

Not acknowledging certain things. Maybe it has a blind spot around something. Maybe it's going through something, right? You know, has some difficulties going on in their lives. So it's one of those cases where it's like, it's, I think it is margin, like, on the margins, it is not only normal, but it's healthy to ask. like, say like, hey, I'm kind of feeling unacknowledged or unappreciated in our relationship right now. Like, can you, can we work on this? Can you help me out here? It'd be nice if you did this or did that or,

you know, showed up to my birthday party or whatever. But if it is on such a macro scale that, like, you are asking for it to exist in the first place, then it's, there's nothing there. And I think, I think the reason this resonated I think the reason this resonated so much is because there are so many people out there who are, they confuse that macro problem with the micro problem. Correct. Right. So they're in a relationship with somebody who's like

gives zero shits, is not showing up for anything, is not acknowledging anything. And in their head, it's actually just a marginal issue of like, hey, it'd be nice if you like answered my phone sometimes. Yeah, like, so anyway, that's, that's some nuance to apply to that. There's a difference between telling somebody that they should think of you and explaining what your love language is.

Exactly. Right? Like, there's a difference between asking somebody to show up and explaining how you would like them to show up. Correct. This person is applying effort. They're being thoughtful. They're considering me.

They're just maybe doing it in a, a different sort of a way than would maybe be optimal. Yeah. Versus this person just isn't considering me or the imbalance of consideration is so great. And also you said when there's been an established level of trust, right, that you kind of know what this relationship has in store typically. Right. What if it's never shown up?

What if this has never actually been there? And the only reason it is there is if you kind of constantly, you're constantly refueling this gas tank with requests and beratement and compulsion. I'm going to keep dragging you to do this thing, to think about me, to reply in a timely manner. I'm going to keep on reminding you that this is something that's important, full stop. And after a while, if you've done it a lot, either in the macro or to be honest, enough micros makes a macro in any case, you just have to admit to yourself, you go, this is just incompatibility. If you have to make so many bids and this person after a while is just going to feel like,

well, who are you in a relationship with? Because I'm showing up as me. You have to assume that people for the most part are showing up as themselves. And the goal should be to find somebody that you need to instruct and train as little as possible. Yes. Because some people have a big tank of growth. some people have a small tank of growth but regardless of how big or small the tank is

if you start really close to the destination you don't need to drive as far and then let's say that someone's able to grow a lot then you can both grow together and become better than you ever were before but if almost all of your time you want to go to bed at two in the morning because you love going out partying and your missis wants to go to bed at 9pm

because she likes an early night in order for that relationship to work both people are going to have to compromise on the thing that they want now maybe that would expose you to some really important routines that might make your health better. And maybe that would expose her to some really exciting nights that she wouldn't have had otherwise,

and it'll be really enjoyable. But also, maybe you might be better off with someone that you can party with until two in the morning and not have to compromise, and she would be better off with someone that wants to watch peekie blinders at 8 p.m. and then fall asleep. And that is kind of what you're looking for overall. How is this kind of compatibility?

And are our incompatibilities complementary, as opposed to competitive, friction-inducing. I think there's a component of intention here as well, where there is a compatibility dimension to it, right? Where it's like you're just two completely different people and you're not well-suited for each other. And then there's, and I think really what that post was like, I think what it was kind of poking at is that sometimes you just have a partner

who like is not prioritizing the relationship. And so if you go to them and you're like, hey, I need to be acknowledged, I need to feel special, I need like, it'd be nice if you cared more. The issue isn't that they're not returning your calls, that they're not, you know, showing up for your after work thing or whatever. The issues is that they don't care. It's not a priority for them.

And you can't change somebody's priorities. I would say too there's like it's there's a certain amount of like but if there is if there is kind of a bedrock of trust if there is kind of an overall compatibility there is still this like maintenance process that happens over the years um like a simple example for my life I'm I'm like a hopeless workaholic and I go through these cycles where boom and bust yes I kind of get like ramped up and my wife is super patient and supportive. But I'd say every three or four years, like we hit a breaking point where she's like, all right, dude, you've got to take a Sunday off or like we have to go on a vacancy. I want to hang out with you. Yeah, exactly. She's like, I feel like I feel like I never see you anymore.

I feel like you're working all the time. You're always tired. You come home. You don't want to talk because you've been shooting all day, like all this stuff. And she's 100% right. And so I'm like, oh, yeah, I should like back off. Because I'm like... But it's...

She's also not just doing it for herself. She's doing it because it's like, it's for my sake as well. She's like an external conscience for you. She's augmenting your life as opposed to working against it. Yes. Yeah, I mean, that's such a good point that if you're not being prioritized, Stan Tatkin's got this wonderful audio bug and he refuses to come on the podcast, which is very sad to me.

But he's still got the best relationship book. that I've ever consumed. And it's only available on audio. And it's called Your Brain on Love, Stan Tatkin. Fucking brilliant. In it, he says that all the relationship is is a set of agreements. Typically a set of agreements about how you'll behave. It says the first agreement that every relationship needs to have is

the relationship comes first before everything else. And I think if you are in a relationship, especially after a while, where that agreement is met by one party but not by the other, you just need to accept that this is going to be a high friction environment, specifically for the person who is more invested, but also for the one who isn't. They're going to feel like they're being pressured and pulled along. And if you want to be in a relationship with somebody

who prioritizes you at the same level that you prioritize that, like leave that person to go and be with someone for whom the relationship is their fourth priority. Yeah. And they may be happy or they may end up realizing that oh fuck i actually wanted to be in a relationship with someone the reason that this relationship was so good for me is that i felt prioritized and now that i no longer am because i wasn't doing it reciprocally that fucking sucks but yeah if you're not being thought of and here's the other thing

like some people aren't choosing to not do that some people simply don't have the time and their lifestyle and their current setup is not accommodating of the level of attention that you need. You go, also, fine, just because they're not choosing to do it of a variety of other options, because they're currently in med school, and this is just all they've got to do, or they're training for this big thing, and they can't spare any time because their ultramarathons coming up, and they need to make this happen because it's real important to them. That's also a choice. That's also a choice by them. Yeah. And you can go and choose someone who chooses you, as opposed to choose someone who's choosing something else. I would add emotional capacity to that.

And I think, so the agreement thing is great. I have not read that book. I should read that book. Fucking money. Just hold on that, right? The reason it's so good, and I wonder whether more people are going to do this. He's obviously a super wizard expert of his area of expertise. I don't think that he wrote it.

I think that he just had bullet points, and he reads it like a lecture. And he speaks like this. Yeah. One of the things that we need to realize when we're talking about, It's so listenable. And what it's made me realize is listening to most audiobooks that are scripted performances of what was meant to be written and meant to be read in written form are actually to be horribly unlistenable

compared with someone who is allowing themselves to just play with the language a little more. And what I would wonder is when people do audiobooks moving forward, I don't know how many authors already do this, I'm sure some do. But what if you allowed yourself to add a sentence in here or there? Authors seem to be almost prisoners of their own work when presenting it in a medium that that wasn't meant for. You go, hey, maybe add some stuff in. Allow yourself to have a pause. Is the goal to represent the book in its most sterile form?

It's the exact presentation of this thing. Because pretty soon, some company, chat GPT or whatever, open AI will just allow you to record five minutes of you speaking and then pitch perfect get you to say the book. So what's the reason for it? Hopefully it's so that you can add some emotion. You can ham it up, right? Dramaturgically, you can add a little bit in.

So I wonder whether I would appreciate that. As a listener of audiobooks, I would appreciate it. if authors, hey, you get an extra half paragraph here that's just me to stay a, you know, I really thought this is an important idea. Maybe your audiobook. I can break ground. Yeah, that's true. I mean, I'm going to be out of a job in a variety of different places, even in jobs that

I haven't yet started by AI currently. I want to come back to the agreement thing, because this actually ties into the friction and the sacrifice thing as well. It's like that agreement, because I think one thing I've seen a lot is that people think they have a partner who is in on that agreement, but it's actually not. And it can actually be difficult to accurately detect if you are being prioritized or not. And I would say the way to accurately perceive whether you're being prioritized or whether you're actually prioritizing the person is how much, how much is each. person in the relationship, putting the other person first when they have nothing to gain from it. I think where people get mixed up a lot is they have somebody who's really into them who's like love bombing them, giving them tons of attention and affection is like excited all the time to see them, but they're also getting something out of the situation. And so they falsely perceive it to be like,

oh, they're in on this agreement with me. And then a couple years go by, conditions on the ground change, and suddenly that person is withdrawing. Also, how are they behaving when they're busy? Maybe that person was just on a off period from work. They had a little bit of downtime, and they're showing you attention in a way that, or maybe they were going through a hard time, and they needed you, they needed that.

Or maybe you were particularly available at that moment, and it was easy. But when it gets hard, that person's unable to show up in the same way, because it was easy in the beginning. Which is why the friction is the filtration. is the filtration. Correct. Right.

Send them weird psychology articles. Yes. Telling you. Send them weird psychology articles. Yeah. In other news, I've been in the gym for nearly two decades now, and it wasn't until the past few years that I had the best training run of my entire life. And a huge part of that was the RP strength app.

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and adjusts my workout on the fly. So I know that I'm going to maximize how much time I've got available. For me, following a proper evidence-based plan has been. made a huge difference. And if you're serious about training and the gains that you want to make, I'm pretty sure that it'll do the same for you. Right now, you can follow the exact same training plan that I use and get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below. We're heading to RPstrength.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's RPstrength.com slash modern wisdom and a modern wisdom. A checkout. Beware, learning more is a smart person's favorite form of procrastination.

guilty so fucking guilty I think I think this is you know learning is safe to a smart person it's something they know they're good at it's something it feels like progress

and it's relatively easy to convince yourself that it is going to help you do the thing when it finally comes time to do the thing but you and I know that's like not always the it's often not the case and in there is such a thing as cramming too much information into your brain because then you start you know creating obsession perfectionism um you actually generate anxiety where there were there was less before so yeah i i mean the learning as procrastination that i mean that's just that's like fucking bread and butter for this industry. It's, it's everybody struggles with that. Like, you know,

we, we all like to think, well, let me, you know, let me just buy a couple more books on this. And then, then I'll start. Then I'll figure it out. Then I'll know what to do. And it's, the truth is, is you need both simultaneously. You need to learn, but you need to practice. You need to do things. Yeah. I think about this with, um, people who constantly go back to couples counseling. you know if your relationship is held together on a biweekly co-journaling session to work through the difficulties of the last three days and regular therapy and CBT you know after a while like this is just you putting off the fact that this thing isn't working and the same thing goes for learning more as a smart person's favorite form of procrastination if if you keep on learning you never actually actually have to engage with the fact that this thing might be too difficult for you to achieve, that you might not be good enough, or that you could be good enough, but it's going to take an awful lot of work. You're insulating yourself, right? You're inoculating yourself from the

pain of potentially failing publicly by postponing your stepping onto the stadium floor privately. Yeah. I don't need to do it. And I guess, well, it, you bring up an interesting thing with the marriage counseling, because I would say in the, in the personal division, development world, the self-help world, you could easily replace learning with insight. Insight. Gaining more insight can also be a smart person's way of procrastinating. And you see this a lot of people who sign up for a million seminars and they need what I was thinking about. They need three. We need the Hoffman process and IFS and time coaches and I'm going to go do this like meditation retreat and ayahuasca and like, you know, over and over and over again.

And at a certain point, you need to digest all of that. of the insight that you've gained, and the only way you digest is by living and doing other things. I'm curious, like, where have you procrastinated by learning more? Because, I mean, clearly you like learning. Where have I procrastinated by learning more?

Well, before I started the show, just one example. I knew I wanted to do a podcast at the start of, the middle of 2017, but it took me until the February of 2018 to launch. because I was working on what's the perfect name going to be. That took like two months to come up with modern.

Crushing and Tuesday. Crushing and Tuesday. It was brains and brawn, actually. That was a huge part of it. Then the artwork needed to be perfect. Then I needed to listen to Tim Ferriss's How to Start a Podcast podcast and game my way to the top of the Apple charts, which actually worked. So thanks, Tim.

And then, what's the, I'm going to start the channel. The YouTube's going to launch it the exact same time as the Apple Podcasts going to And in some ways, I actually think that feels very justified, given that that would turn into a project that was 1,100 episodes. And the URL that I registered at the very beginning of that is the same one that we use now. All of those things are locked in. So it's just as well that I got it right.

But also, you need to be able to pick your battles because you can't spend six months or many years doing that. So that's one part of it. Certainly when I was at university, I did four years on my bachelor's, which included a placement year, and then I did a master's. I already, while I was thinking about doing the master's at the end of my bachelor's, I couldn't remember half of my bachelor's. I couldn't remember the stuff I was learning as I was learning it.

And I just assumed that the next thing, because I'm like, I don't really know what to do. More business. My choice of degree. That's a perfect one. My choice of degree. I'm really interested in psychology. I'm really interested in philosophy. But what? I'm going to get a job as a psychologist or a philosopher. Obviously those degrees are useless. I can't imagine how what is the most applicable degree to making money. Well, business, because business makes money. So if I do business, that means that I'll understand what I'm doing. I'm like, dude, it's that one of the biggest regrets of my early life is doing something that I thought would be transactionally useful. instead of just doing something that I was interested in.

Because the thing that I was interested, it just took me a decade and a half to, I guess, six years from leaving uni or 12 years from starting it, to make my own amateur version of that by speaking to the world experts on whatever subject I wanted, most of which are about fucking psychology and philosophy. So I'm like, you know,

had I have gone and done degree, modern wisdom wouldn't have existed, but I wouldn't have had to wait 12 years to get started, you know? I don't know. Yeah, what about you? What stands up for you? Health was the big one for me. I, dude, I read every, I was, I was the fat guy who could tell you everything about like,

metabolic dysfunction, insulin resistance. Oh, you're an expert. Yeah. You did. It used to be fat. Which, which, looking at you now as a fucking slim, trim 40-year-old, people can't believe. Yeah, I mean, I mean, I'm in the best health of my life. which is crazy because I spent years

I mean I read all the blogs I understood all the different workout protocols I did a bunch of different workout protocols I didn't stick to any of them hadn't stopped drinking no oh dude didn't change a fucking thing pizza every day you know whiskey every night

going to bed at three in the morning waking up at 11 and reading books about you know health you know yeah yeah this this specific type of you know, calorie is going to cause inflammation and fuck up your gains,

you know, as if any of it, any of it mattered. And yeah, eventually it just took, I just had to hire a coach and who was like, dude,

just go to the gym. And I was that obnoxious client who would try to kind of debate him. I'd be like, well, you know, I heard that like this rep scheme wasn't as effective as like, and he'd just look at me and just be like, dude, just go to the gym.

Like, why are we? Fat as fuck. Yeah, why are we talking about this? Stop it. Why are we talking about this? Like, just go to... A resilient girlfriend can outlift you. Yeah, like, stop it.

You're hungover. You ever, you've been, you ate a pizza last night. Like, just go to the gym. You're a mess. You're a mess. And I think this sort of... The over-optimization thing, I think, is really falling away. If I was to, me and my friends play a game of bear or bowl pretty frequently,

which is just anything. pick anything, a trend in the world, an individual, a type of fashion, a product, whatever you want, country, a culture, what do you bullish on and what do you bearish on? What would you invest in and what would you bet against? And I think that over-optimization, I'm heavily, heavily against at the moment. I think people are drowning in information, they're drowning in advice, and what they want is a degree of simplicity. And more than anything, they want connection. is the thing. I'm talking about the relationship stuff. I kind of tracked my journey of learning about relationships, and it broke down into a few different epochs. So I guess I became

interested in what was happening with mating and dating. You see these stats around sexlessness and stuff like that. You think, oh, wow, that's interesting. I should do some research. You know, look at Pew. You start to look at the Institute for Family Studies, and you go, oh, my gosh, that isn't this strange? And then you go, well, I wonder what's going on. So you start to learn evolutionary psychology. You think, okay, well, I'm going to learn about the physics of the system, the principles that are maybe guiding some of these decisions. But that's still not enough, right? And then you combine them. And that's where you get to something akin to red pill or a more sanitized version of red pill, right? Or, you know, feminism tries to do the same thing. And

I'm going to look at mismatch and I'm going to work out why the current situation and ancestral programming, how they're coming together, right? What that's causing. But that's still. But that's still, not actually what a relationship is. Right. A relationship is your nervous system interacting with someone else's. Like, relating has nothing to do with any of these. This is, it's totally the midwit meme of like the idiots, like, just go talk to girls. And like the Jedi is like, just go talk to girls.

Exactly. It's like, she makes me feel good, bro. Yeah. She makes me feel good bro. Yeah. I must ensure that my mate value was matched with hers with an optimal fertility window so that we can ensure that our children. Like, no, no. Like, eat protein lift weights.

Eat protein lift weights. Yeah. My intra-windor, workout window must be predigested and ensure that the... No, no, no, no. Can I put you on the spot? Yeah. So, I think it was maybe two years ago. Maybe a year?

No, maybe two years. There was a point, like, a couple years ago I saw you, and you said that you, or maybe it was one of your Q&As, you said that you were going to make finding a wife starting a family, like a big priority. Mm-hmm. do you think you're doing this with that, like finding more insight, or do you feel like you're making headway?

Trying my best. One of the challenges there is that you can't do is solo, right? You can put all of the time in that you want, but inherently what you have to do is have another person to dance with. So certainly to a degree, I think I wanted to bring this up about a talking point that both you and the Scott Galloway push, and I think that it's done in real good faith,

but speaking as somebody that is the child of that, the progeny of that philosophy, I think contributes to it. And this is the single most important decision that you make in your life will be the person that you choose to spend it with. Right. And this may be an important piece of advice for many people, maybe even most people,

who don't think about that, who fall backward into a relationship with someone they met when they were 24. And then before they know it, they're kind of living together, but they didn't really choose it, and they've kind of got a dog, and then I guess we're engaged,

and fuck, we've got a kid. Do I like this person? Are we actually good for each other? And they were too unintentional about it. Yeah. But on the flip side, especially as people are dating older and older now, that advice, I think, can create an awful lot of anxiety.

And it's meant to say, treat this decision with appropriate care because it's very influential. Yeah. But I do think that, and I've said this too, right, because I believe it. Right. But that when that rubber meets the road, like, functionally, what that ends up being is, well, I mean, I really should spend an awful lot more time scrutinizing this person, which is the opposite.

Of the other one, just what's the good Tuesday look like. Marrying those two. And that's certainly being a challenge. There is a curse of knowledge when it comes to dating. And yeah, I've definitely decided to jump in at the deep end with that. Yeah, I could see that. It's interesting because I think it's one of those things, it's one of those talking points,

the importance of like choosing your partner. It's, I think it is objectively true in a vacuum. I don't know how helpful it is when you're sitting across from somebody, right? Like, because ultimately the majority of whoever you do end up marrying, the majority of that marriage is not, going to be found, it's going to be built over the course of the relationship. And so it's almost like, it's almost like, and this is going to sound really trite, but it's almost like finding a business partner. Like you're not, you're not looking for somebody who has it figured out or has you

figured out. It's almost just like, this is somebody I can work with. Like, can you build with this person? I can build something with this person. Yeah. We, we get along well, we fight well, which is equally as important. They're high integrity, good character. We have some things in common. Awesome. Challenges make us strong enough weak. Let's see how far we can go.

And at a certain point, you just opt in, right? It's like the, let's incorporate this business. Yeah. And it's a one-way door. And it's the fact that it is a one-way door is what keeps you guys, keeps both people fully invested. Yeah.

To keep working on. it. Which is why situation ships are so damaging. Yes. To people, because it's a halfway door. Yes. And typically a situation ship is a one-way door for one party and a revolving door for the other party. Yes, pretty much. Yeah. All right. Neediness occurs when you place a higher priority on what others think of you than what you think of yourself. Anytime you alter your words or behavior to fit someone else's needs rather than your own, that's needy. Anytime you lie about your interests, hobbies or background, that's needy. Anytime you pursue a goal. to impress others rather than fulfill yourself.

That's needy. Whereas most people focus on what behavior is attractive or unattractive. What determines neediness and therefore attractiveness is the why behind your behavior. You can say the coolest thing or do what everyone else does. But if you do it for the wrong reason, you will come off as needy and desperate and turn people off. Pulling out the classics. That's an old one. The old hits.

That's from models. Just going to be 15 years old this year. Unreal. Everyone needs to go and read it, dude. Anyone that needs a new book, go and read an old book. And that is now an old book. It is. That and mate by Jeffrey Miller and Tucker Max are the two-car garage of dating books for men. That's it. And it's still relevant now. It's mad that like, hey, a t-shirt that fits and jeans that don't have stains on them is still probably revolutionary advice for a lot of guys. But yeah, it's fucking, it's money. Yeah. But the whole thesis of that book, for the people that haven't read it, neediness is unattractive, basically. You could summarize the whole book for men as in dating, neediness is unattractive.

It's really funny because, so for people listening who don't know, like I started my career as a dating coach. And from like 2008 to 2013 models came out in 2011. But I was meeting dozens and dozens of guys in person. I was taking them out to bars and clubs and helping them meet girls online and giving them advice on dates, on relationships, everything. And it was so funny because at the time,

it was like the whole men's dating advice space, it was super fragmented. There was almost like different classes you had to take at a college, right? There was like texting game. And then there was like the first date that you had the master and then there was the opener that you had to like figure out.

And I just, I kind of wanted a, unified theory of men's attractiveness. Because what I noticed is that guys who were supremely attractive in one moment, in one phase of the early relationship, just seemed to not really have any problems in any other part. It's not like there were any men who are like amazing at meeting a girl in a bar and then went on a date and just embarrassed themselves. Like it just didn't really happen.

It was you kind of either had. Witness and loses. Yeah, you either had the skills or you didn't. And there was nothing special about like a text message or, you know, a second date that like you couldn't figure out if you had the fundamentals in place. So I was like kind of searching for this unified theory of like men's attractiveness. And what I noticed, what I noticed about all of the men that I knew who were incredibly successful with women, regardless of their circumstances in life, you know, how old they were. their appearance, money, background, anything, was they just had this, they prioritized their perception of themselves over the perception of the girls. Like all the guys who were, who were terrible with women and who struggled with women, and even some of the ones who could kind of perform like a dancing monkey and maybe get a little, like a hookup here and there, but they would lose the girl inevitably within a few days. I noticed that everything,

that motivated what they said, what they did, how they dressed, how they presented themselves, it was, what is she going to like? And what does she want to hear? And so it kind of, it became this, what I realized around that time is that ultimately, and I think this is true for women as well, but I think it's more true of men, that your attractiveness is really dictated by your comfort with yourself and how deeply you have explored your own life, your own identity, and your willingness to share that with the world. And the result, neediness was kind of that glue that held everything together or the concept of non-neediness, right? It's like, don't do things for other people's approval. Don't change your lifestyle for other people's approval. Don't work out for other people's approval.

don't say some bullshit line in a bar for other people's approval. Like it's just, it's all the same thing. And it's all just being needy for validation and approval. And it's, I guess I'm fortunate, it's just a very timeless concept. Like it's, it's as true today as it was. Yeah. And it probably always will be because it's, I think it's, if I was to describe my career in like a simple phrase, it would be taking very abstract and tangible concepts

and like concretizing them in a single phrase or a single term in a way that like an average person on the street can understand and use them. Like that's entirely like that's essentially my entire job and like why I'm here and why I've done anything. And I think I think the non-neediness was like my first real success at that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Essentializing, distilling things down. on once, the two best

descriptions I've ever heard of modern wisdom, one was brains and bron. Yeah, it was crushing a Tuesday, actually. Dispelling, comforting myths was one. And another one was, it feels like spirulina

for my soul in an environment filled with fast food for my amygdala. And I was like, that's lovely. It's very poetic. But yeah, like, look, essentializing something, there's this big, fluffy concept. Like, what were we saying? over optimization, too much information. I'm feeling all, da, da, da, da, da,

I don't think that you're going to get, even with where LLMs are at the moment, I don't think you're going to be able to get the unwieldy world of human attraction distilled down to prioritize your approval of yourself over other people's approval of you. Don't be needy, right? That is a distillation that kind of requires a human in the loop.

Yeah. Because it's about language. It's about, okay, what does this mean, not what is it if you synthesize it, right? It's not a synthetic idea, it's still quite an organic one. But yeah, when I think about the problem with the neediness thing, it also explains why so many guys felt like, I mean, the Red Pill movement was born out of PUA hate. Do you remember that? Yeah, because that was your era, the PUA hate thing. So these are guys who had found success or found failure with pickup artistry. And I think that both of them were quite deranged.

The guys that had found failure with pickup artistry saw themselves as so broken that even the most evidence-based system to ensure that they could get laid couldn't help them. And I mean, that's pretty disparating. But then the guys who did find success with it also felt like they were disparated because they said, God, look at how much I have to contort myself in order to be remotely attractive to a woman. And this is an example of none of them stopped to consider that it's just maybe the system is wrong. Like the model is incorrect. And so they just assume, no, women are incorrect. Right? It's like, it's the problem isn't that like every woman on the planet is broken.

It's the problem is, is that your model of dating and human relationships is broken, but you're not willing to toss that out because you're so psychologically dependent on it. Fun thing. So I name checked you. I did, you know Jubilee's Surrounded? Yes. So I just shot an episode with them. What for?

What was the thing? One man versus the Manosphere. No fucking way. You went up against the Manosphere? Yeah. Who was in the room? Anyone that I'd know? I don't think so.

No big names. No huge names. There's been a couple of that just to, I'm fucking fascinated by this. A couple of them had people who were sort of moderately well known going in, but maybe you're not deep in the Manosphere enough to know who was that. Yeah. Maybe, who knows?

Maybe there was a guy there that he's kind of done. Fascinating that they chose you, especially somebody who came out of that world. That's a unique choice. That's cool. It's interesting because I told the producers, I was like in the pre-production. I'm proto-manusphere. Yeah, I told them. First of all, they were concerned.

They were like, are you ready for, I'm like, dude, the first five years of my career, I spent arguing with these fucking guys. So, like, yes, I'm more than prepared. I know all the evolutionary psych and all their, like, silly theories. But it was interesting because I told them, I was like, you realize that like half these guys are probably going to be fans of mine, and they're going to have read my book. And they were actually all for it.

So they were like, no, no, no, this is like, we kind of want this dynamic. So it was really interesting. It actually went really well. They were like way more respectful than I expected. And some of them were super smart, which I've been around enough of those guys to know that like a lot of them are super well read. But it was funny because afterwards a few of them were like, they said they're like, I can't believe we debated you. I thought I was going to be debating like some women's studies professor, you know, from UCSF or something.

But I name checked you because like one of the things that one of my talking points was like, I said it's it's the manosphere is the incorrect solution to the correct problem. The correct problem is young men are struggling. There's a real crisis going on and it's not talked about enough. and you and I both know that, but this is not what's going to work. Like, this is not helping. And so the issue isn't,

and then of course a lot of the guys came with like, well, there's this great advice and like, Andrew Tate got me to like get my life together. I'm like, that's great. But the problem isn't the advice, you know, the seed of advice embedded within the Manosphere content.

It's the problem is the packaging. Like, you can go find that advice anywhere. And it's great that that particular packaging reached you in that moment, but you need to be able to let it go. And so a couple of the guys, they're like, oh, well, what should we listen to instead? And anyway, I threw your name into it. It's fucking go, dude. I'm sufficiently sanitized. I've got the seal of approval.

I appreciate that. Hey, man, I think this is, I've said this to Mick. I know Jordan's in a bad way at the moment, but the timing of Jordan Peterson to get ill and also aggressively do the God pivot was highly fucking inconvenient for where the culture was moving. Because I think that a lot of what you're seeing with the more cantankerous sides of the Manosphere

would not have had the oxygen and the fuel to be able to get big had you have still had Jordan floating around. Yeah, it's almost like he was too early. He did. He timed the market. He was right but early. and then created the gap and then stopped supplying the demand.

He created the demand and then stopped servicing the market. Yeah. And I have to give him credit too because, I mean, I've always appreciated his work. But I remember back when he first kind of got big and he was kind of going on about a lot of this stuff. I was like, really? Like, is this really such a, like, do we really need to be talking about? I thought we solved this, right? Yep.

But it's been pretty eye-opening how just in terms of like correctly identifying a cultural catastrophe years before it happened. Yeah. Prescient as fuck. Like so prescient. And I go back and listen to, you know, Golden Era, JCP, of which, you know, I've got many episodes with him and I look forward to him coming back with a fully functioning brain. It gets more true.

It is big one of if you want a real adventure in life, tell the truth. Like, fuck me. Like, every single time that I think about there's a problem in my life, it's because I'm not telling the truth. Every single time. I'm like, Jesus Christ, it is, it was really, really good. And he got embroiled in things and became, in many ways, like he got deranged by the level of aggression that he was being attacked by.

This wonderful article from Ethan Strauss on Substack that people should go and read. It's called Christian. criticism capture is more deranging than audience capture. He basically says that it's the criticism is not the compliments that sway the way that we move. Yeah. And in my experience and watching a lot of people on the internet, that becomes so true. Look at anybody who is really, really militant and gregarious with the way that they sort of communicate about stuff. And you're like, wow, like, that's a, that's a firework of a world that's going to

going on there, are they very unforgiving, uncompromising in the way that they talk about things. Almost always people who have been very heavily attacked. Rightly or wrongly, you know, Trump became more Trump because of how much people were pushing back against him. Tate became more Tate because of how much people were pushing back against him. Hassan Pica became more Hassan Piker because of how many people were pushing back against him. This happens to everybody. I don't see the same thing being true for people.

that are just regularly complimented and don't get haters. So I do think that it causes people to react in a way where they dig their heels in and they become more spiky about their beliefs. Yeah, I could see that. I also, one of the things that I've grown to appreciate over the years is that, and I really learned this being around Will Smith when I was working on his book,

and kind of in his orbit, some of the other, like, very famous people in his orbit, like, there's a certain amount of skill or personality that is well-suited for fame. And I think it's some people's, some people just naturally respond very poorly to a lot of attention and a lot of fame. And some people naturally respond very well and they function very well with it. And it just, and this is not a knock on him. He just from a I don't know him very well. I've only met him a couple times. But like just as an outside observer,

he just strikes me as somebody who like, it was not, it did not do him any favors. And it was so much and it was so like intense and it was so critical that it's, I sympathize a lot for what he probably went through. I think about people who have the skill to become famous, but not the disposition to deal with the fame. Yes.

Lewis Capaldi is a phenomenal example of this. So writes his first album, billions of streams, global tour, needs to write a second one, gets put under so much pressure that he gives himself a Tourette-style tick where his anxiety has pushed his body beyond a limit that it was able to cope with. Then he steps out on stage at the O2 and Glastonbury, I think,

and is under so much internal pressure that he can't get the words out and he can't sing and then goes away, completely goes away and then comes back maybe a year or two years later main stage of Glastonbury again

and plays a new song which is all about his desire he says, I swear to God I'll survive even if it kills me this time and just like looking healthy, super regulated but there is a

world of people who are good enough to achieve fame, but just straight up don't have the disposition to be able to cope with it. And that's a ruthless position to be in because the thing that you want is in your hands. Yes. And kind of through no choice of your own, there's another thing, almost everybody wants to be successful but doesn't have the talent. Yeah. And there are a very small bucket of people that get to become successful. And of them, there's a proportion who can become successful, but for some reason just self-destruct. Detonate this thing that they've worked their entire lives to try and get. That's like, no one's going to give him sympathy, velvet, fucking prison, champagne

problem, but a unique kind of pain to get to the top of the mountain and find that you threw yourself off. Well, in that that throwing off, like, I mean, it can be catastrophic. I mean, if you look at what he's gone through the last few years, or if you just classic celebrity stories, right, you know, Kurt Cobain or Amy Winehouse or, like, who. He did he? Yeah, Pete, I got you.

Yes, yes, that is one way to self-destruct. But it's, you know, you can see it play out in a lot of different ways.

The other thing that, like, I really grew to appreciate being around Will. It's like, there's a systemization of fame. Like, you,

him and his team had, like, they had guardrails built around him. They had, you know, they had systems of, like, here's how you deal with unruly fans in a way that like doesn't upset anybody.

Here's how you like guarantee his privacy in certain places without like disturbing his weekend. You know, here's how you make sure he gets enough time to like rehearse and, you know, learn his scripts. Like they had they had protocols for all of this stuff that it was literally just protocols to maintain his ability to function. There's a middle area of fame. I haven't been exposed to, I've only ever been exposed to one or two people that have got that. becoming friends with someone right now who basically lives with a team of SAS guys 24 hours a day to keep him on the straight and narrow so that he can continue to produce the things that he needs to produce. But it's a very small number of people that have that.

And a very large number of people that would really benefit from that that I know of, who are in sort of the middling level of faith, where it can disrupt your life and get in the way of your relationships and hurt you and stuff. but no one's handed them the pamphlet or the playbook to be able to deal with it. And dude, it's introducing friction back into your life, right?

Because that's what happens when you achieve this insane level of success and fame is like it removes all the barriers and guardrails. Now you have all the money to do whatever you want. You have all the people who are going to say yes to whatever you want. And so the only way to like stay functional is to like intentionally reintroduce. Limitations.

Those limitations, the friction. and sexy. Yeah. Yeah. This is similar to one of yours. You only envy the lives of people whose sacrifices you can't see. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's easy to just want the benefits of something. Like, it's so, it's the default, right? Like, it's almost childish to just want the benefits of something. It's a very naive way of seeing the world. And I think it's not only is it important to want the costs of something, check and make sure you want the cost of something before you actually start pursuing it. But again, it comes back to like, that's the part that makes it meaningful. Right? If you just got the benefits of things, you would never appreciate those things.

It's the fact that you like struggled and sacrificed and crawled through shit. Isn't that a wonderful duality? You only envy the lives of people whose sacrifices you can't see. So if you could see the cost that somebody had to pay in order to get to where they are,

you probably wouldn't want the life. But if you were able to get to the place that they got to without the sacrifices... You wouldn't appreciate it. Bingo. It's the Elon quote you mentioned earlier, right? Like you don't want, you wouldn't like to be me. My mind's a storm.

People think they want to be me. They don't want to be me. Yeah. There's a line from James Collier that plays off this, which this is one of the best things that I read over the last few years. It doesn't make sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it. If you don't want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire to crave the result, but not the process, is to guarantee disappointment. Fucking money. It's such money.

because how many people want something, but George Max got this idea, the difference between call of duty and war. He says a lot of the time people think that they would love to play call of duty all the time, but that's not what war is. War is the smell of burnt gunpowder and your friend getting his leg blown off.

And you want to become a musician. You want to become a world-famous guitarist. You're okay, what does that look like? You're going to have to learn to play guitar for a decade to no one. And then if and when you say, start a band, you're going to be playing also to no one with no promise of whether or not this is going to work. Let me cut you off there because that was my life. I remember. So, no, the reality, that's it. That's an unfamously unsuccessful musician. Yes, as a failed musician, let me tell you that

that what you just described is that's still like the most fun 5% of it. Like the 95% of it is you're sitting in a room by yourself practicing. Yeah. And there's no applause. There's nobody watching. There's nobody. It's frustrating. and difficult. You're playing the same song literally hundreds of times. And it's the, the thing in music that they, they always say is, is that you're not practicing until you get it right. You're practicing until it's impossible to get wrong. So it is, you know, if it takes a hundred repetitions to get it right, you need to get to a thousand to never get it wrong. And it is so monotonous and tedious and just like absolutely soul destroying unless you love it unless you just genuinely

can't imagine living without it um so yeah well that's the your line about um what sort of pain do you want in your life yes every pursuit worth having comes with some degree of pain and struggle and sacrifice so choose what flavor of shit sandwich you want to Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's funny on the idea of the really unsexy stuff that becomes sexy when reflected in the glory of you standing on stage and doing something really cool. But if you don't want to do something, if you genuinely don't want to do something, it's almost impossible for you to get yourself to do it. And that's the, it doesn't make sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it. Not even willing to do, like want to do, ideally,

because you can be willing to do something, but the amount of willpower that it's going to take in order to get you through that is fucking insurmountable. And also, it's going to detract away from all of the other things that you should do in your life. Now, it's unfortunate that some people never get an obsession that's worth anything. I was thinking about this a lot,

that I would call myself, there's that term, serial monogamist, I would call myself a serial obsessive, that around about every seven years or so, I get a new obsession. And it was cricket from the age of 10 until 18. Then it was club promo from 18 until 25, 26, 27. And then it was personal development until early 30s.

And then it's been the podcast from then until now. And that's cool because all of those obsessions largely have not been that destructive and maybe have even been beneficial to me and the world. Except for the cricket. I will stand my ground with that. You're a fucking Philistine. You're an uncultured American Philistine. Okay.

And anything that is in America is derivative of something that happened in Britain. It's more boring baseball and considering how boring baseball is. I disagree. I disagree. It's a sport that's only played when the weather's good. Okay. It lasts for five days and sometimes ends in a draw. It's almost...

Jesus Christ. It's almost mandatory to drink. This sounds like a circle of hell. No, it's not. It's England. Okay. Which is a circle of hell. No, no, no, that's incorrect.

That's incorrect. I love it. That's highly offensive. I love England. Good, good, good, good. Here's 10 years of therapy summarized in one minute. Number one, no one is coming to save you. Being a functioning adult means realizing you are responsible for everything in your life, even if it wasn't your fault.

Number two, strong boundaries make for good relationships. Weak boundaries make drama. Number three, many of your problems don't get fixed. You just learn how to live despite them. Number four, your mind lies to you all the time. It will tell you that the world is ending when it's not, that a mistake is fatal when it's not, that everyone is thinking about you and laughing about you when they're not.

Learn how to tell your mind to shut the fuck up. Number five, stop trying to convince people to like you. The right people won't need to be convinced, and everyone else is just going to get very annoyed. Number six, sometimes the best thing you can do is let a dream die. No one likes to hear that, but it's true. And number seven, only a few people in your life are going to matter in the long run. When you find them, treat them right, make time for them, keep them close, and be grateful.

You know, sometimes when I put together stuff like that, I'm like hearing you read that back to me, like, the thought that comes to mind is like, how is this not taught in schools? Like, how are we just, how is this not just part of this at 34? Right. Like, why do people have to, like, why do people have to? listen to podcast all day to like hear some of this stuff. I, it just seems so fundamental. You know,

but it is interesting. One of the things, one of the things that my perspective has shifted, you know, I've been doing this for 17 years. Too long. Yeah, a long, yeah,

a long time. And when I look at things that I've, I've either changed my mind about or changed my perspective on, over the course of my career. I think one of the big ones is that, you know, early in my career, I really thought it was all about just like ideas, information, knowledge, right?

It's like finding, there's like a few pieces of key knowledge that if you can kind of figure it out, if you can dig through enough psych studies and find the application, like it's just going to be a key that unlocks all these areas of your life. And I think if you were a consumer of personal growth advice,

like that the experience you have, often feels that way. But I don't think that's true. I think actually what is true is that there are just certain concepts, ideas, principles that are pretty obvious and we all kind of already know them, but we lose, it's extremely difficult to keep them in front of our face through day-to-day life. And so we need rituals and reminders consistently. And, and I actually think that for most of human history, I think religion was that mechanism of those reminders to keep people like, hey, nobody's like,

you're responsible for this. Hey, treat people well. That person matters, you know? Like, let go of the small stuff. But I think in our modern world, you know, it's people, most people are losing that. And so you're almost seeing this like reinvention of those rituals online through like what you and I do

through podcasts and Instagram and YouTube and all this stuff of and I do it as well right it's like I've got my shows and I've got the channels I follow and the people I follow and it's like they it's it's not that any individual piece of information is like changing my life unlocking this whole area of my life it's just like oh yeah it's a good reminder that's so true I think because the modern world is filled with novelty anything that we've seen before,

we don't usually want to hear again. Do you think, well, I already know that, even if you don't, even if there's 10 things that you basically just need to hear over and over again, what you need to do, I think, is play the game of novelty whilst just re-delivering the same core message.

And that's going to be antimimetic and wholly unimpressive to people. This is the fucking clean your room thing again. This is the tell the truth thing again. Oh, neediness, is it? And you go, okay, well, I can lie to you and create this sort of Fugazi gaslight thing where I say, this new thing is the big unlock. Or I can just try to repackage stuff that is the existing concept.

So it satisfies your desire for novelty and my own desire for novelty whilst reinforcing the principle that is most accurate. And that's really, I think, what a lot of the game is now. And we were talking before we got started. I think that very, very dense information, consumption and over-optimization is kind of dead in the water. And the alternative is reminding people's stuff that they already know in a manner that just, you know how the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve works? It's space repetition.

It's why Enki flashcards and stuff work like that. Basically, you need that, but with novelty added in, so that people are just regularly reminded, oh, yeah, I just need to, like, go for a walk and sleep more. Yeah. Oh, right. Yeah, I just, I probably need to say how I feel to my partner when something upsets me.

I've started, one way I think about it sometimes is that a lot of this advice, it's almost like having a fire extinguisher in the room. You know, like, it's, you've probably had the experience where, you know, maybe you read something, five years ago and you're like yeah it's obvious i i know that and then something happens in your life right it's like you get dumped or like somebody dies or you move across the world and you're like suddenly you're like oh my god i need this so bad right now yeah well one of the most embarrassing

things is to realize that the problem you're facing was solved by something that you learned long ago yes but didn't appreciate and yeah and then have to now go and relearn yeah you're like fuck, or that you're now facing a problem that you faced in the past and that you not only learned something, but a specific type of pain that both me and you do, you go, oh, I wrote about this. I fucking wrote this thing. Tell me about it. I can tell me about it. Yeah.

So I had, speaking of like, you know, ascending the mountain and struggling to deal with fame, you know, when my book took off, you know, I went into a real identity crisis. I think I've talked to you about this before on the show. But, you know, I had that first year or two, when my book was number one everywhere, it was like just all these crazy things happening. I felt super disoriented and, like, very lost and kind of went through a little bit of a depression, became like... I got everything I ever wanted, and it made me depressed.

Yeah, pretty much. And, like, massive imposter syndrome for a period of time. And started saying yes to a bunch of things I didn't want to say yes to, right? And so then I ended up in. this situation where I'm like, I feel trapped in my own career. I'm like obligated to do all these things for these people that I don't really want to be doing. I'm like stress all the time. I'm anxious. My health's going to shit. And it's... And I'm fat on top of everything else. It's that insult to injury. Fucking fat. And it's so funny because I remember

I remember when I was doing my film, you know, it was that we were doing a film on The Sun of War and not giving a fuck. And I hadn't really read the book since I wrote it. And so I went back. I'm like, well, I should probably read my book again. So I went back and I read this like 2018, 2019. I went back and it was like all the shit I'd just, I'd been spending the last two years dealing with. It was like in my own book. And I'm like, I'm fucking all of this up. I'm like, I'm saying yes to things I don't care about. I'm like overloading my life with all these distractions. I'm like not standing up for myself.

I've like lost clarity on what I value. Like just like chapter by chapter by chapter. I'm choosing the wrong struggles. Yeah. And I just, I, it was rough. It was really rough. I like, I had to really have like a heart to heart with myself of like, dude, whoa. Get it together.

Yeah. It's like personal growth groundhog day. Yes. one thing that I think is kind of important I understand how you can say hey look there's a small bucket of principles

over optimization thinking about your life too much all of these things like you're majoring in the minors etc etc that is true once you've been through it yes

it is not true before you've been through it breaking the rules of the game before you've learned how to play the game is not breaking the rules of the game and being an innovator or being some essentialized distiller of cool stuff, it's playing a different game. And this is why I highly recommend

that people become totally obsessed with personal development and productivity and David Allen's getting things done and James Clear's Atomic Habits and Morgan Hells the Psychology Money and the Soutle Art of Not Giving a Fuck for like probably between three and six years. And then once you've done that, you can sort of get your black belt, put it on,

and go, okay, 95% of that was packaging. Here are the bits that really matter, and I'm now going to spend the rest of time trying to just maintain that momentum and not overcomplicate stuff. And maybe once a year there'll be a novel insight, which is genuinely principled and fundamental that I just didn't know yet. But you can't get to that level without having gone through the first bit. and maybe it's just the case that the world of everybody went through the same holy fuck like this is novel

but talking about like choosing your struggles appropriately or even neediness and stuff like that that was novel when it happened but that area of cognitive real estate that territory is now being you know when you play a video game and the map's all fogged out yeah and then after you've played it for a while the areas get opened up it's like well that area's opened up now so assuming that you've gone through this process, previously it was kind of like humans were moving at the same level that technology developed. But if you start doing personal development now, there's so much technology that you can speed run all the way up to the top. Whereas for us, it's like, wow, telling the truth is something. This is revolutionary. Not that I've just

discovered it, but it's just been said. Yeah. Right. This is groundbreaking research. But because there's so much to go through, and maybe it's just the case that the era of the were in had a formative hockey curve, like J-shaped thing where, wow, there's a fucking ton of insight that's repackaged ancient wisdom for a secular world that's distilled down into good language that's memorable. I should, I'm learning this as it goes and a new buck, in a new bucket, a new book. And now we're at the stage where much of that territory that's important has been captured. Yes. And now, because everybody kind of started the race, whether you were but 18 or 28 or 48,

everybody started it kind of at the same time and Peterson comes along with you and James and da-da-da-da. And you go, oh, wow, like that's now all being done. So everybody has a degree of personal development fatigue, but that's not true if you're starting your journey. If you're like, hey, I'm a fat piece of shit, and I'm 25 and I've never done any of this. It's like, lock in for the next six years.

Yes, absolutely. And then it is very much after that is it is just about maintaining the practice. Correct. It is interesting, like to nerd out a little bit on kind of the history of this, because I do think this is interesting, right? It's, it is, we do live in a very unique moment in the fact that this information is so diffuse, universally available, completely free. Like, it, when I was growing up, you had to go pay Tony Robbins $10,000 to hear any of this, right? You had to go, you had to join a graduate program at Cornell and like study psychology for three years to hear any of this, right? So there was like massive gatekeepers.

Not democratized. Not democratized at all, extremely like marketed extremely aggressively and like very, very predatory in some circumstances. Yeah, with another podcast for another day. But it, the internet is what opened up the opportunity for this kind of diffusion of all this information. across the entire population. And I think when I look at kind of my generation, you know, me, James, Ryan, and a bunch of others, like really what we were doing

is we were taking the stuff that used to only be available behind closed doors or in really exclusive seminars or, you know, deep in academic research. And then we were repackaging it for a wider internet audience. And I think through the 2010s, that was a pretty novel and,

important function that was being played within society. But now we're at the point where, like, you can literally just get on Instagram and see 800 pieces of the same advice any day of the week that you want. And it's all free and it's all, like, widely available, and it's all repeated to death. And so it does raise an interesting point of like, I do think that saturation of information for people is probably, like you said, It's being sped run, speed run. Yes.

Speed ran. Speed ran at this point. You know, whereas like 15 years ago, you would have to spend years and years, like, really digging deep into books and studies and research. Now you can probably get the gist of that within a year or two. And so it really does make the implementation aspect of it, I think, more important than ever before. But there's not, that's not generalizable. right? You know, so that's where the rub is now. So in many ways, I feel it's like a very weird time. It is. It is. It's certainly a transition. And it's this idea of something that's anti-mimetic, not just something that isn't mimetic, not something that won't spread, but something that is actively pushed back against and not spread or maybe even criticized to the point where it sort of shrinks.

and unfortunately telling people the new information isn't better necessarily or at least not at the speed that perhaps it used to be the market slowed down it might be a way to think about it doesn't sound very good because if you've got a problem you want to believe that there's a solution but if there's a solution that's already out there

the reason that you haven't fixed your problem is your fault as opposed to oh this new thing that's novel that's what we've got this massive recency buyers around it And yeah, it is. There's definitely a transition period going on. And that's why I think your solved podcast series is fucking great. That's different because it is so in depth,

whether you want to learn about fear or relationships or whatever, it is so in depth that that's not been done before. Some of the stuff that I've got coming up with different guests sat around a table is it's not been done before. Okay, that's unique and at least novel, genuinely novel and the insights that have come out of it novel. but for the most part, if it's, and this is going to get worse with AI, it's going to get significantly worse.

So much worse. However bad and repetitive and sloppy, you think that your least favorite optimization obsessed influencer of choice has been, imagine that powered by a fucking infinite robot army. Yeah. That's coming. Yeah. And not to mention a thousand copycats on TikTok and Instagram, right?

So it's just like anything that gets any traction is just going to be parroted thousands and thousands of times. It's already derivative, but now it's derivative at scale powered by AI. Yes. So I actually think we're going to reenter, speaking of being bullish and bearish, I actually think I'm bullish on authority and credibility over the next 10 years. I think there's going to be a mass return towards because I just think there's going to be so much slop out there and especially in this market.

Like there's just going to be so much crap being espoused by like random stick figures and shit on YouTube. Like that people are going to lose patience very quickly and they're going to crave like, please just show me somebody who like actually knows what they're talking about or has actually done something. And so it's actually

kind of ironic because it's I think the great explosion and the dissemination of this of this information to people 10, 15 years ago it was kind of the destruction, like credibility. Will be its downful. Right.

Credibility doesn't matter anymore, right? It's like if you've got a good idea, you can just write a blog post and everybody can read it, you know, and like that was great back then, but now it's, it's been taken to such an extreme that there's going to be like this incredible demand for authority and credibility. I think this is almost suddenly going to be a pedestalization of legacy media, mainstream media. I think that if you get placed on 60 minutes or the new Dr. Phil or whatever, whatever the next version of that is, because

anybody can do YouTube. What? What are you grin about? Dude, I got a crazy story for you. So yes, I agree. And like, this is already happening. So you mentioned it earlier. I started an AI company last year. It's an AI personal growth coach. It's called Purpose. Everybody should go. Check it out. Check it out. So when we launched in December and we hired a PR agency to go get a bunch of publicity in like conventional media, you know, put the logos on the website, all that shit. And dude, it was so funny.

So the publicists, they go, they get all these like, you know, interviews with big newspaper. I'm not going to call, I'm not going to name check anybody. Big newspapers, newspapers, everybody would refer. has heard of TV stations, radio stations, like all traditional stuff, very prestigious, you know, we're trying to get the logos. So I go and I do these interviews

with like, quote unquote, like prestigious journalists. And we talk about the app for like 10 minutes or whatever. And you can tell that like, they don't give two shits. Like it's just, you know, they've got some generic article

that they're doing about like AI products or whatever and they're just going to drop a quote for me in it and and and mention mention the product and so it very like half-assed 10-minute conversation and and we wrap up very quickly and I'm like okay well this was very fast and then the journalist would be like well wait while I've got you here so I'm working on a book right now and I was wondering if if I could run some ideas by you this happened three times three times. So basically what happened was the journalists understanding their position, which is prestige media. This guy needs a logo for his website, you know, because it's... I'm the logo. Right. I'm the logo.

I'm working on a book. This guy's a huge bestselling author. Prestige for expertise. Trade. Let's barter. Motherfuckus, dude. So most of those calls was me giving career of us. in exchange for a quote in their fucking newspaper. I would have just said to all of them once they've done it. It's like, I think your idea is shit. I'm sorry. I think your idea sucks. Nobody's going to read this.

Give up. I highly recommend that you don't do it and just leave them all dejected. Oh, man. It was crazy. It's a weird world, man. Sorry to interrupt your scrolling, but this is a friendly reminder that your time on this earth is extremely limited. and everyone you love is going to die one day.

So maybe you should put the fucking phone away and go and do something meaningful. Dude, the death salience thing is just, it's, it's magical, isn't it? Isn't it, like, momentum mori? Like, it's just so magical. And especially, like, I guess with, like, you know, the doom scrolling kids these days, like, it is, um, it, it's such an important practice.

I think to just like take that moment, not every day, but like periodically of like, is this, if I were to die soon, is this what I would want to be doing? You know, if when I'm 80, am I going to look back and be proud of what I'm doing? And it's that, that's one of those things. I'm glad how memetic that is. It's, because I remember I, I remember, so in subtle art, the last chapter is called, and then you die. And I remember my publisher was like, you know, this is kind of dark. Are you sure?

You know, publisher thing. Supposed to finish it on an up note. Yeah, exactly. You'd be all inspiring and everything. But I felt really strongly about it because it's just like the kind of being confronted with death had been like so impactful in my life. And it was a big part of Stoic philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, a bunch of different philosophies. that's one thing that I never expected to be memetic but it is incredibly memetic and it is

I'm like thrilled with how much traction that gets and that people do resonate with it and they do find value in it and they do respond to it and engage in it so yeah I just I just think it's a great practice I'm glad that people stop scrolling and think about it yeah a few questions that I think are useful

what do you regret from the last year what do you regret that you did too much of and not enough of typically that's the same stuff that you did for the last decade but you can't remember the last decade

so if you look at the last 12 months of your life what do you do too much of and what do you do too little of if you wanted to make 85 year old you as miserable as possible when they look back in their life oh that would be easy what would you do what would you do more of

what would you do less of you know I mean there's that famous five regrets of the dying which had allowed myself to be happy. I wish I kept in touch with my friends more. I wish I hadn't worked so much. We are maybe just about to breach the first wave of people who had a good chunk of their life spent on their smartphone and on devices who were about to die. It has to be number one. Yeah. It has to be number one. Yeah. There's no way that I wish I'd spent less time looking at

screen. It just has to jump to the top of the charts. As soon as that wave of people begin to die en masse, and it's still probably what, like smartphone's been around 20, just under 20 years now. So, I mean, 65, 70, like, it's still not, it's still not quite

there. A couple more decades. Yeah, yeah, one more decade and that's going to start, but within two, it's just going to be fucking... I don't know, man, I've seen some good memes. Some really good memes. That is true, but you've never been the subject of them. That's why. You have the, you have the optimal level of fame. You have the optimal level of fame, which is you can get a seat at a restaurant that's very busy, but for the most part, people aren't going to make a meme about you on the internet. Yeah, I think that's the way you should go. All right, last one. At some point,

you realize that the permission you've been waiting for all along was your own. Yeah. I think so often we seek advice when really all we want is somebody to just tell us it's okay. it's okay to want what we want it's okay to stop doing something to change our mind to be wrong about something I don't

I don't get it's interesting you know back in the day I used to get a lot of emails like fan emails and stuff people asking for questions for advice I still get some but it is amazing how many emails messages questions I get that

you could really just boil it down to, this person feels bad about something and just wants to be told it's okay, to feel bad about it. Or this person wants to do something, but they're afraid, and they just need somebody to say, no, no, you should do that. That's it. That's all they want. They don't need a fucking theory or a framework or, you know, a full, like, breakdown of their childhood trauma. They just need somebody to say, like, it's okay. You should do that. It seems important to you. Yeah, I think the world is kind of split into two groups of people,

people who don't know how to improve their lives and those who are too scared to start. And the first group doesn't care. They're going to do what they do. They're not going to overthink it. And then there's another group that's paralyzed by their capacity to think. Obviously, there's people that manage to overcome that. But almost anybody who is thoughtful and making shit happen in the world, has had to overcome their thoughtfulness.

Like, their thoughtfulness is the fuel, but it's also the barrier to getting there. Because, as we said right at the top, the degree of uncertainty that you have is paralyzing. It keeps you in place. So, yes, someone coming along and going, hey, man, like, it's okay to want that thing, or it's okay to not think that that thing's cool.

You should try and do that thing. You just should and close the loop, and that's fine. I describe myself as having a lifestyle-wide praise kink. I respond well to encouragement. I respond really fucking well to encouragement. And again, there's two types of British people. There's British people who thrive on mutual piss-taking. And there's British people that were meant to be American people.

And I'm in the latter camp. You're a very enthusiastic country, right? Yeah, we are. You basically have permanent first-line cocaine, energy. That's what it is. That's it. I want to make enthusiasm great again, and I want to re-export it back to the UK,

mega. And that was just something for me, that was a pathway for me. Hey, I'm happy to do the mutual piss taking, sat around a table with my boys. But when it comes to really going for stuff, I much prefer to be around people that are like, yeah, you got this, go and fucking crush it, as opposed to gay. The first one works for me. I've got tons of friends that are back home who they don't care. It just doesn't, in fact, Piers Morgan had this conversation with peers.

He's like, I like the piss taking. I'm like, peers, that's because you've got a galactic ego. You need someone to keep your feet on the ground. That's fine. And that's good for you. Those of us that are a little bit more permanently unsure, for me, it's good. The encouragement thing's good. And that's very cringy in the UK.

Yeah. So you export yourself to the U.S., where that's kind of, that runs much more in the pioneer spirit. And I'm like, huh, it's okay for me to want that. It's okay for me to say that that's something that I like. It's okay for me when I was 27, 28. I'm a club promoter who's going to stop drinking. That doesn't sound very revolutionary in the world of athletic, brewing co, N-A, beers, near beer, you know, Heineken double zero bullshit. But I mean, in British culture, As a club promoter in 2000 and fucking 16. Sounds insane.

That was me inventing fire. And sometimes people can do stuff without anybody telling them that it's okay. But a lot of the time, that's what people are looking for. I'm worried about this thing happening and I'm scared. And someone I go, it's all right, man, you got this. Or maybe you don't, but you'll be all right anyway. I'm okay no matter what happens. That too.

I tend to notice this. I mean, this is pretty proportional to age, right? Like it's young people, I feel like need this reassurance all the time. I feel like as you get older, you just start realizing you're like, nobody knows what the fuck they're doing. And no one was thinking about you anyway. Yeah, nobody. Yeah, exactly. Nobody really gives a shit what you decide.

It is, it is interesting. You know, the British culture thing, hearing you describe it, it just, it feels to me as an American, it feels like the epitome of the I'd rather be right than happy. Yeah. it's um or maybe it's like i'd rather be snarky than happy like it's i'd rather be snarky than cringy and cringy is being enthusiastic yeah because if you plant a flag in the ground and say this is my position you create a criteria for success which also means you create a criteria for failure yeah and that means that if someone can snipe away at it they can make you fail but also that if you succeed you leave them behind there's this wonderful difference between american people and

British people. American people hope that you succeed in case you take them with you. And British people hope that you fail in case you leave them behind. And I wish it wasn't true. And it's not for everyone. Yeah. But many of the people, like the UK had the second highest millionaire exits in 24 behind China. But China's got like 13 times the population or something. It's insane how much bigger it is. So per capita, we lost the most millionaires by multiples. Why? It's not. It's not. It's not a very welcoming environment for people that want to do different things, that want to be innovative, that don't want to sort of follow that path. It doesn't matter about whether you want to be a fucking millionaire or not. But if you want to make a change to your lifestyle, or the way

that you look, or the things that you think, or the culture that you're embedded in, or the way that you raise your kids or whatever, it's just not that welcoming. And that's why we have the same number of universities in the top 10 globally, but American universities produce five times more entrepreneurs than British universities do. And remember that we have an international fucking cohort. So people come, get contorted by the culture,

and then leave with this veneer, this sort of varnish that's got on top of them. But yeah, it's an interesting one, dude. Look, I appreciate the fuck out of you. It's fascinating to watch this,

whatever we're in, some Renaissance, I don't know whether it's a renaissance or a dark ages that's, that's happening. but there's something, there's something sort of twisting and changing in this world. Personal growth, personal development, and I really fucking appreciate that you're there helping to steward it in whatever way you can.

Yeah. It's really cool. Same, man. Same, same. Cool. Thank you. What's where people go? Markmanson.net, solve podcast and purpose.combe.

Purpose.com. Free seven-day trial. Check it out. Mark Manson in your pocket, but without the touchy-feely thing. Yeah, so it's an AI that's optimized to challenge you. So it's call you out on your bullshit, spot blind spots, challenge your assumptions. Basically, all the things like a good coach would do to help you grow instead of just, you know, kiss your ass, make you feel good. Unreal. Appreciate you, man. Until next time. Thanks.

If you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a bit. page without bowing out. And that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading List, a list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful and entertaining that I've ever found. Fiction and nonfiction, and there's real life stories, and there's a description about why I like it, and there's links to go and buy it. And it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to Chriswillex.com slash books. That's Chriswillex.com slash books.