Modern Wisdom - #420 - Charlie Houpert - How To Build Genuine Charisma And Confidence

Episode Date: January 10, 2022

Charlie Houpert is the Founder of Charisma on Command, a podcaster and a YouTuber. Most people wish that they were better communicators. More engaging, more confident, and more charming. Charlie runs the biggest charisma channel on YouTube, Charisma on Command, with more than 5 million subscribers and has taught thousands of people how to be more attractive and compelling in their communication. Expect to learn the 5 archetypes of charismatic communication, how to greet someone with genuine energy, how to overcome being shy, the principles of communicating attractively to women, how to be better at small talk, how to add more humour into your conversations, why Charlie got his entire family to take MDMA, who Charlie thinks is the most charming communicator on the planet and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Join Charisma University - https://www.charismaoncommand.com/coc-charisma-university/ Subscribe to Charisma On Command - https://www.youtube.com/charismaoncommand  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - 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

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, my guest today is Charlie Hooper. He's a founder of Charisma on Command, a podcaster and a YouTuber. Most people wish that they were better communicators, more engaging, more confident and more charming. Charlie runs the biggest charisma channel on YouTube. Charisma on Command with more than 5 million subscribers and has taught thousands of people how to be more attractive and compelling in their communication. Today I expect to learn the five archetypes of charismatic communication, how to greet

someone with genuine energy, how to overcome being shy, the principles of communicating attractively to women, how to be better at small talk, how to add more humour into your conversations, why Charlie got his entire family to take MDMA, who Charlie thinks is the most charming communicator on the planet and much more. This conversation is awesome. Charlie is a kindred spirit despite the fact that he's across the pond and I'm so glad that I connected with him. You feel our burgeoning romance, blossom, bromance.

I meant to say bromance. You feel our burgeoning bromance blossom, romance. I meant to say romance. You feel our burgeoning romance, blossom throughout this entire episode. It sounds like I'm going to go out and see him and spend some time with him in LA later this year. So, yeah, enjoy this. There's so much, so much to take away from this about communication. And what it means to live a good life, success. And what it means to live a good life, success, yeah, it's fantastic. Sit back and enjoy. But now it is time for the wise and wonderful Charlie Hooper. Charlie Hooper in the building. How are you doing, man? Excellent. In my own building on the other side of the ocean, but happy to be here nonetheless. Yeah, man. Me too. Me too. What does a morning, what does a Charlie Hooper morning routine look like?

So there's no routine. I wake up around 11. I let my dog outside. Sometimes he's gone inside. So I try to do that for him. And then I have some calls related to charisma on command, exercise around 1.32 p.m. sauna. I have like a barrel sauna in the backyard, which is fucking awesome. Best, best for figure purchase. I've ever made in my life. I love that thing. And then in the evening, I'll play League of Legends and scream at the computer with my friends. It's the most toxic, it is the most toxic hobby.

And that's definitely the one thing I don't recommend for my schedule for anyone else. Do not pick up League of Legends if you've avoided it thus far. Why? So I am medium competitive in normal life, but League of Legends brings out my most vicious, cruel, whiny, complaining, it's your fault side.

This is the concoction side. I truly believe that there is something in the game and of course something inside of me, but there is something in the structure of the game where one person can just destroy and melt down for 15 to 30 minutes of hard work and me feeling like I'm better than the person I'm playing against. And I just walk in loose my mind every time I play.

But it's the worst addiction that I have, but I like every addiction. I just derive some sense of satisfaction from it, so I don't stop. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've just got back from doing a walk. This is my equivalent of getting mad at League of Legends things. I just got back from a walk and there is a running club that does a run on my walk route. And sometimes the people that are running, they're just getting my way. So that's like my equivalent that I'm there on my walk. I'm moving slower

than them. But sometimes, dude, I saw a woman, if you have this, this is definitely an LA thing. People that have a special sort of belt that they attach a dog lead to so that the dog can run with the person. And I'm, I'm watching this thing and the dog sniffing along a wall, looking for somewhere to do a wee. I'm thinking, if you, if you don't keep your eye on that dog, you're going to end up being yanked like this to one side, this big fucking outstation thing. I'm like, you're annihilated. That's you. Your dog's going to be

flat on its side and you're going to fall over on this icy road. Yeah. In LA, the dogs are like eight to ten pounds max, but it's the same sort of thing that we have out here, which is we often have these women who push their dogs in strollers. And two... You are kidding. ...two-dog. It's this white fluffy little thing I swear to God and they are the worst behave dogs you've ever seen. They scream and bark at everybody.

That's what a lot of LA is, like very poorly trained animals that are just peeing and pooping in the wrong places and barking at everybody. It's like you on League of Legends. Yes, exactly. Exactly like me in League of Legends. So yeah, I should be less judgmental of those poor dogs because we have a lot in common.

Yeah. So you've been coaching people on how to be more charismatic and better communicators for a very, very long time. And that's the fundamentals of your channel as well. Charisma on Command, which is fucking dope. And congratulations on creating something, which is managed to be both popular and actually add value, which I think is a difficult,

a very difficult sort of balance to strike. How do you, after all of this time thinking about it, how do you break down charisma into its component parts? Like how do you see it now after all of this time thinking about it? Well, there's a lot of different frameworks that I've used over the years. One of them is that there is not simply one style of charisma frameworks that I've used over the years.

One of them is that there is not simply one style of charisma. I guess I'll even step back. Generally, I think of charisma as the ability to influence other people. And I take out of that, things that obviously influence other people like beauty and talent, because while, you know, there's other channels for that. If you want to learn how to be super hot and sexy, you can be very influential on that. I'll leave you up to that. Yeah, exactly. Go to all the other top. He's got everything you need for your beauty tips. And if Elon Musk, I was just listening to him on Lex Friedman, he's stuttering, stumbling

over what he says very often, takes a long time, which isn't necessarily bad in itself, to communicate a point. But you don't want to emulate his speaking style. What you might want to emulate is perhaps his work ethic and his first principles thinking. So I take all of that stuff out of the realm of influence. And what you're left with is basically personality and character driven influence. And there's different types of it. One type, you could think of like a Conomer Greger type person, super high conviction, a Steve Jobs who gets other people to want to be near them, around them, participate in their things

because we love people that seem like they can know the future. Like we want to be around people that have deep, deep beliefs in what they're doing and why they're doing it, because so many of us lack that in ourselves. So you've got the high conviction types, you've got authentic types, your Joe Rogans, who you implicitly trust because they say things that

put themselves at social disadvantage sometimes. They'll say the unpopular opinion or say, hey, I don't agree with this mainstream take on things. And that slowly over time builds a deep sense of trust in those who have spent the most time around them. You've got your comedians, your Kevin Hartz, all those type of people who are just funny and they make you smile and laugh anytime you're around them. Energetic types like Will Smith, who they come who are just funny and they make you smile and laugh anytime you're around them. Energetic types like Will Smith, who they come under the talk show and they're big and loud and whenever you're around them, you just, you want to participate in the vibe that they're bringing.

And then lastly, you have your empathetic types like Oprah Winfrey who will sit down, look you in the eye and ask, you know, you know, what would your mother say about that and bring it to your eye and make you cry? So there's not necessarily one style to do it. Those are the, generally the five types that I see most commonly in the breakdowns that we do. And then it's just a matter of picking and choosing the things that feel closest to where you are

while being willing to change, but not losing the thing about you that you might want to keep. And that's often a question we get. How do you be charismatic while retaining the essence of who you are? Is there a tension that between those? I think so, yeah, for sure.

And when you're starting to learn, I think one of the biggest obstacles to people changing anything in their life is that this feels like who they are. And what I often tell them is that the personality that you're showcasing today is not intrinsic to who you are. It's not how you were born.

It is often the traumas and successes of 13-year-old you have shaped the way that you are. And sometimes you have that guy who was the stud at age 13 and for the rest of his life, he just acts like a little prince. And you can have this another 45 years old, but still Christian because he was the hottest kid in school at 13. Yes, exactly. And then you have the flip side of that, which was more me, was much more reserved, quiet,

didn't feel that I had the right to take up any space. And that needs to be unlearned. And the thing that gets in the ways, thinking, oh no, this is me. I am just introverted shy. And any movement away from this would be a self-patrial. So that's oftentimes the first obstacle that we have to overcome when anyone is learning is,

there is a you in there, we just wanna be the best version of yourself, not necessarily who you were conditioned to be in middle school. Yeah, that self-patrial is an interesting way to frame it. That there's something like sacred about the natural way that you have got yourself to this point, but I don't know, maybe it's my exposure to the personal development world that most of that feels like bollocks to me. Most of

that just feels like you rationalizing random chance as opposed to intentional effort. Look, you've had a ton of influences on your charisma and your ex-reversion and your introversion and your speech patterns and so on and so forth. The fact that you didn't get to choose them doesn't make them any more a part of you than the ones that you did get to choose. Absolutely. Yeah, no, we deal with this question often times at the beginning. And I'll say some version of what you just said, which is you didn't choose these influences

on you, yet you treat them as if you could not possibly change them without cutting off one of your own arms. And that I think the reason that this is such a sticky belief is because it's self-serving. In some ways, it's easier to get crappy social results, crappy professional results than it is to take on the effort of, oh no, this is my responsibility. I can change it without being immoral or unethical,

but it might be challenging. And it might make me do things that scare me and require a lot of courage. Therefore, my brain is going to do me the favor of you're saying, oh no, that wouldn't be me. That's a self-attrial. I don't even have to worry about that and I can just complain instead about some of the results that I'm getting. So that can be a trap early on for a lot of people. But I think once people get into our channel, hopefully the philosophy of how to evolve is implicit in a lot of what we teach. And it's not destroy everything about you, who you were. It is, it is improve things, try these different patterns and these different habits on, like a style of clothing, doesn't have to become who you are, but these might get you better results

in your social endeavors. Who were your main influences when you were learning this stuff, charisma and communication and confidence and stuff? Yeah, it was so there were sometimes guys you'll never know were the friends that were in my friend group that would literally just repeat jokes that I said quietly and get a big laugh. It drove me nuts. There's one guy Austin who was just like a hurricane of charisma. And he was a friend of a friend. Whenever I hung around him, I felt special whenever he was nice to me. Literally, he would repeat things that I said. And the group would follow him. I'd be like, Hey, guys, is it time to go out to get lunch? No response. Five minutes later. You all feel I'm pretty hungry. Yeah. So that type of thing, everybody, all the people

around me who were getting different results actually had a much larger influence on me than any celebrity or any talk show host or anything like that. What about books? Books, yeah, when I was starting, a lot of it was books that told me that I could change. So Tony Robbins was a big influence early on trying to think with the other ones where six pillars of self-esteem by Nathaniel Brandon was huge, the idea that self-esteem, we have this idea, I think, increasingly.

And he talks about it probably when he wrote in the 70s or 80s, that self-esteem is one's birth, right? That you ought to just feel really good about yourself because you exist. And he takes a very different approach, which is self-esteem is your reputation with yourself. And if you're the type of person who lies all the time, doesn't keep your word, doesn't go to the gym when you set your New Year's resolution, your reputation with yourself is going to be a lousy one. That of somebody who is unreliable lies all these

sorts of things. And by changing your behavior, you can change the way that you perceive yourself. And that has a profound effect on how you present yourself to other people and then how they perceive you. So that book was instrumental for giving me not just platitudes about self-esteem, like you deserve it, you can do it affirmative type things. But here's what you need to do in your life. And in fact, he has these sentence completions exercises

that'll be like, if I was 5% more integrist today, I would. And you fill these things out. And I would often write, I wouldn't have fibbed about that thing that I lot about in conversation. I probably would have talked to that girl that I had to crush on and not pretended to, you know, not have noticed her at all. And so, you write these out, and over time they weigh on you, and you start to do the things that would make you have more integrity

And then you feel better about yourself and it's got this whole positive feedback look So I love love love Six pillars of self-esteem. That's the Navarra thing right confidence isn't given it's earned and it makes sense Why wouldn't it be why wouldn't it be this sort of thing that you need to prove to yourself? It's a reputation that you have with yourself and you're always keeping score, even if you don't think you are. Yes, yes.

And I'm sure we'll talk about it. The, where I came from, I think, where a lot of people come from is, you are your patterns, right? That's what we learned. You are who you were at 13 years old in middle school. And the big shift was here is you can become your habits, right? You can shift these habits. You can change the way that you feel about yourself. And I'd

say recently I've gone back a little bit and recovered the sense that there, I thought that I wasn't an introvert throughout my 20s because I built these extroverted habits. And I've recently realized that no, I definitely still have this introverted streak in me that doesn't seem to go away despite any sort of habituation. And so I do think that there is an essence to our personality, but we probably overestimate what that is when we're in our young 20s and haven't done any sort of self-development work. And it's only now that I'm in my 30s that I can be like, this was me, this is what got laid on top of me. I want to take out what got laid on top of me,

choose other things, but also respect that there are these parts of me that do not, that seem so resistant to change, that I'm just gonna embrace them and love them and accept them, even if they're not ideal for social scenarios. Like, I'm an introvert, and you know, I'm pissed at League of Legends, which probably isn't core to my behavior. I'm just joking about that one.

How do you define introverts and extroverts? I think the way that I've heard most commonly to find is not, well, here's the trick. Is some people think if I like social situations, therefore I'm an extrovert, and if I don't like them and I'm an introvert, and I think a trap there is that you cannot like social situations because you don't know

how to manage them. And therefore, any sort of social situation that you're in is gonna suck. And you can compare it to like, do you like basketball or don't you? Well, you would like it if you were a dominant center that was scoring all the time, and you'd probably hate it if you got blocked every single time.

So it's tough to evaluate if you like social situations or not before you have the skill, talent, personality to succeed and enjoy them at the highest level. So what I saw is that at first, I was like, no, I'm an introvert. Then I learned how to succeed in social situations and I was elated, had a great time in bars, clubs, networking events, all those sorts of things.

But in reflecting on it, I still see that those situations drained me, even at the end. And I really oftentimes enjoy staying home, reading a book, being left alone, and I get some of my best thinking and most, some of my happiest moments are alone. And I think there's something very introverted about that when I could be out on a Friday night and I am just so happy to not be.

Not because I couldn't do the things that I might want to do on that Friday night socially, but because I just love being alone. So that's why I say that I'm an introvert. Yeah, the best definition that I've, you're the most useful definition that I've heard for it is, where do you get your energy from? Do you get your energy from being on your own

or do you get your energy from being around other people? If you're around other people are low, do you need to think, oh fuck me, right, I gotta spend a couple of evenings in the house on my own. Or if you do that, do you start climbing the walls and needing to go out? There's another relating to this tension

between inner essence and sort of truth and then ability to make yourself and become and being and stuff like that. I had Robert Plowman, the fourth most cited psychologist of the 20th century on the show. So he's a genes behavioral geneticist guy and he said, our nature does not predetermine, but it does predispose. That was how he put it across. For instance, you could have the genes and the predisposition to be an alcoholic, but if

you're born on an island that doesn't have any alcohol, it's not going to happen. So there is this, there's always this tension, right? There's always this tension between your conditioning and your predisposition. Yeah, and of course the environment, which is what you just described there, which is, maybe you're predisposed to be an introvert, but you get this early positive feedback in social situations, that's going to be very differentvert, but you get this early positive feedback in social situations that's gonna be very different for how you wind up in life. So my goal was to know that I could succeed

in social situations and then to make that free choice knowing, I could go out and have it be really fun and not terrifying, or I could stay in and have it be whatever that's gonna be. Now I wanna make the choice. And I find myself increasingly making the choice to stay in, not out of fear, which is what it was for the first, I don't know, 18, 20 years of my life, but out of a genuine free decision where I could find enjoyment in either scenario. I think Derek from More Plates More Date says the same thing. He has the same approach. Like,

he was terrified of approaching girls and was always, I think he's, he felt a little bit when he's talking about it kind of like having a gun to his head in a relationship girls and was always, I think he felt a little bit when he's talking about it kind of like having a gun to his head in a relationship because he was always terrified the relationship would end because he had nothing in the locker to be able to get a new one if it did, which put him in a needy state. And anyone that's read Mark Manson's models knows that's not a very powerful position to be in. Being needy is going to turn the other party off, especially as a guy. So I think that was his solution as well.

Look, I want to give myself more sovereignty and the more degrees of freedom that I have access to, even if I choose to not use the extra version or the going out or any of that, the more that I can do, the more comfortable that I'm going to feel in myself. Yeah, 100%. You know, I'm curious if you had this

because I know you, you, the nightclub stuff that have been in promotion for a while. When I first moved to California, I had been so, throughout my 20s, I had trained myself, you know, on Friday and Saturday nights, you go out, you have to have a good time. I had actually instilled in myself a sense of social fomo, where if I wasn't participating in the event,

I felt a tremendous amount of anxiety, and I didn't realize it until my first week in in California when I didn't have any friends in the area and it was a Friday night. And by all accounts, I should have just moved my stuff in unpacked, but I was like, I have to go, I have to find the bar, I got to be on the out, I got to go for whatever, I'm going to be by myself, that's what I have to do. And I recognized that while it was a fantastic journey and I learned a lot in becoming more outgoing and charismatic and confident that I had created some new neuroses

and some new anxieties around needing to do that instead of being able to do that. So that's sort of what I've been unwinding in the last couple of years is truly trying to have the choice because I recognize in my 20s, I felt like I had a choice, but really I just went to the flip side of the coin and demanded that of myself constantly. Yeah, fuck.

Well, so I never had that with partying, and that's the difference between being the party and running the party. I went out and partied, but we had a, kind of like an unwritten rule that you just didn't get fucked at your own event. Like you can go and cause complete havoc. Six nights a week, just on a Saturday when armony's on the line and you've got to cash the till at the end of the night and if there's any problems with the police

or the council or the management, you need to deal with it, just hang fire. And there'll be enough to party and you can sniff your head off until 2 p.m. on a Sunday or whatever and it's sweet. But you're, it's so, the, how would you say, the malignant side effects that you create by doing a thing downstream, what that, like the after ripples that that causes. So you wanted to create an ability to go out and be extroverted and be charismatic. That meant that you had to go out frequently. That meant that you had to fall in love. you had to actually generate a degree of love for going out or else the willpower to do it would have been completely unbelievable.

And then after a while, you realize, oh, hang on, I'm like being dragged along by the creature that I created here. So the thing that happened with me was with regards to business. I ran a business, I wanted the business to be successful, I needed to start to generate that engine and to start to get that moving, and then I couldn't slow the momentum down when I wanted to take time away from work. I had FOMO and fear around delegating responsibility, around starting to move myself out and giving other people different tasks that they could do so that my workload would be reduced

and that's still now, man, that's one of the main existential challenges that I have. Look, like, work less, work less, be less neurotic about the things that you need to do. So this, people need during those years, like 18 to 25, be careful of the things that you dedicate yourself to because those are the things that you're going to try and D program when you're 35. Yeah, you had a D program later. That's funny. I think that it is almost a natural law that the advantages of one phase of your life will be the obstacles in the subsequent one. And the thing that you're trying to unwind, delegating. You had to learn when you were starting your business

that you couldn't delegate. In fact, you probably would have loved to have delegated early on, but you needed to develop the skill of saying, I can't trust anybody to do this. It's nobody's gonna come help me. I gotta do it myself. So you build that muscle and it's absolutely necessary

until you get to a point in which you have to go, hey, that thing that got you here is be obstacle to getting to whatever comes after this. And so, I think that that is true in any sort of personal development. And all that I've come up with is when it's time, you're going to have to let go and it's going to be a bitch. It's going to be very uncomfortable to unwind what you've done before and seemingly go

backwards, but you're not. It's like a spiral, you know. You couldn't delegate down here, and then you're coming back around and now delegating is a good thing. Yeah, there's two things that come to mind. One, I watched a video today that was really well done about the problem

with the personal development world, just one of those YouTube videos, but the guy had a really good point. He had a problem with hustle culture because he said that it gets people to focus on working harder as opposed to working more effectively. So speed over direction. And this is the equivalent there that what got you here, the amount of hard work and

grafting grind and knows against the grindstone in late nights, you know, if you are, he uses the example of writing a fitness blog and just grinding it out three articles a day for five years when you don't realize that actually taking a step back and thinking, well, should I be doing YouTube? Should I spend a little bit time on there? Or maybe if I actually didn't do a blog, but I kind of did some live streams or I did whatever strategies that would that would be one of the things that would change. And um, yet to it's a real interesting one, man, like the challenges that people have around these things as they grow up

It's um, yeah, I wanted to ask I'm curious that this is just my circle I've noticed that the people around me at least that seem to struggle are some of the hustle culture people and the people that have now that I'm 34 And you know a lot of us started we were 23. It's been years. The people that have made businesses that have worked, they have worked hard, but they've never been Ryan set hustle. Most of them are not Ryan set hustle culture type people. And I'm curious if that's just a an accident of my friend circle, or if you've seen the same sort of thing

in the people that you know. Yeah, that's interesting. I think I've probably got good examples for both sides of the fence. So one of the guys that I got close with in Austin was Aubrey Marcus from Onnet and one of the things that I realized with him, I've never been around someone like him. He is so competitive about fucking everything, man. Like he is the quintessential founder CEO, startup, alpha male, aggressive type of guy.

So, not in a confrontational way, but he's forthcoming. So, fucking, we go into on it the gym and me and one of the female trainers that's there are going in and Aubrey and his Mrs, Vylaan, are going in. He's like, oh, why don't we have teams? Am I already a team son? I'm cool.

I see you in this. Team's gone. Team son, team son's fun. We haven't warmed up. We haven't touched a single piece of equipment, right? We've come in out of the warm-ost and weather, but we've got essentially cold. He's like, why don't we do a thousand meters on the ski-erg for time in teams of two, and that can be the warm up like all right

That's that's that's like a really disgusting workout That you're that's the warm up, but he wanted to he wanted to send it And I'm like all right fair enough, so we do it and it's Like pedal to the metal immediately hard and I just thought well, that's why that shows Somebody who has that real, just in everything. He says, I played pickleball. I went to his house and he played pickleball. And he wants to, I was on his team and he wants to fucking win. Like, it was me and him taking on a couple of other guys and he wants to, he wants to win. Hard. And I'm like, I am not surprised that your company

got sold to Unilever for a shit ton of money of money, because you are built to beat the other guy. But then I have buddies that are not like that at all, and I have just as successful businesses. I wonder, have you seen that that corresponds to satisfaction, film and her happiness in one direction or the other, or again, just a mixed bag? I would say on average,

the people that have the hustle culture thing are less happy. I think that that does correspond. Most of the motivation to really, really push it comes from a place of insufficiency. It comes from a place of trying to fill the hole with the work. What about you? What do you think? That was my inkling, but I can't tell if I'm just making myself feel good for not having sold my business to you in a leave.

It's because I don't have a big and avoid inside of me that's filled by League of Legends. Well, I can at least say with myself, I work the hardest, get the most fit, do all the things when I feel the worst. And that's just me and I don't wanna put that on anybody else. But when I am recognizing how wonderful life is, I tend to sit more and just look around more and I tend to, oh, there goes my dog. You're here, bud. And I tend to work less.

So I don't know what's going on with other people. And I know that Aubrey, I don't know the guy, but he's clearly deep in the spirituality and all that other kind of stuff. Yeah, no, I think he's got, for me outside looking in, he's got a balance, but it's on average, I would say that most of the people that I know that are incredibly driven are also unhappy

or they have higher rates of unhappiness, which is, all right, it's the price that you want to pay for your success to be unhappy and fucking miserable. Well, if success is supposed to be in the service of happiness, and by making yourself into the person that can be successful, you make yourself miserable,

what, like just short-cut it, just be happy. And don't worry about that. It seems to me that the work is actually in service of preventing inner reflection. And that's actually why stay so busy, work so hard is because it actually, it does you the favor of making you not have to look at any of the other sorts of things, which is, it's doing you a solid at that point. I've interacted with those types of people and we don't become close friends.

I just had a great conversation with you the other day and it seemed like we're similar in that regard, which is we want a level of material success, but also these questions of, for what? Why? What got me into this and what keeps me in this? Did I already achieve the thing that brought me here? If I did, am I just going am I just gonna set more moving goal posts and convince myself that that's the game

while living in a constant state of, I'm not there. Or is there ever an arrival? And there's a lot of disagreement over this. But to me, I've been meditating, not meditating, but thinking a lot about what is enough in my life. And if I look back 10 years, my life today, I would have said would have been enough forever. So if it's not, then my mental scheme is screwed up. Something is going wrong. And I need to reevaluate what started this drive in the first place.

Hedonic adaptations, the hell of a drug man. Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. It is, it is, oh my god. We had a sales day for our course yesterday that was near record highs. And the dopamine spike that I got from it was instantaneous and now a new baseline has been set. And I can watch these sorts of processes unfold, unfold in me. And it's so frustrating. I just want to want the things that make me fulfilled, but I want the things that don't. So what I've started trying to do, how to deal with this is to control my environment. Don't spend time on Instagram. Get off

of the things that drive FOMO in you. It's almost, and maybe this isn't healthy, putting blinders on the things that trigger that sense of lack or of missing out. Well, that's a very interesting way to challenge yourself, right? Because you have, you can decide to hide away from the things that cause that. And I always get conflicted about whether or not that's a less virtuous path than simply overcoming them myself. Yeah. Should you feel this? A hundred percent.

I think that any time you repressed and I avoid you have cheated yourself in a degree of the most fundamental solution to the problem. So if like, if Instagram triggers me and makes me want to go out or be single or do any stuff like that, that is almost like the leaf of a plant that has a much deeper root. And so what I can do is I can, you know, section off that leaf and not look at that leaf, but I haven't addressed whatever it is that was causing that to be a frustration or temptation in my life.

And so yeah, I have a mix. My approach is definitely mixed. It's on one hand, avoid the things that trigger me, but also I'm trying to do MDMA therapy and all these kinds of stuff where you do go in and you touch the root and it has nothing to do with Instagram. And everything to do with you and your own feelings about yourself and oftentimes early childhood experiences and all that fun stuff. All right, so getting back to charisma, talk me to you.

Let's go back. Let's get the main thrust. What are the basic principles that people should grasp if they want to come across well when they're communicating? I don't know that we've actually boiled it down to the basic. What the way that we structure our teaching is that we have within our course we have 30 days and we start with first impressions, talk about confidence, conversation and go down the line. Some of the first things that we talk about, which I presume are, I guess the most basic, is that when you're first interacting with someone, a great way to be a conversational leader is to set the vibe a level higher than you need to. So people often say, how are you doing? And people often

respond fine. And I'm guilty of this as well. But if you want to practice being charismatic, find a way to amp yourself up to be fantastic or great or amazing. That immediately sets the conversation off on a stronger foot. You also get these very, very common questions. They're almost these social niceties that we ask one another when we're getting to know one another. What do you do for a living? Where are you from? And people take these gimme questions and just submarine the conversation.

I'm from Philadelphia. I'm a consultant. And so in just teaching people, look, you already have habits. These aren't who you are. Can we just make these start the conversation off on a much stronger foot? So we have worksheets within the course

and we kind of talk about some of the stuff on the YouTube channel. Instead of saying that you're a consultant, realize that the question the person is asking you is, please tell me anything interesting about yourself with which I can connect. That's what they're saying. When they say where you're from, they're going, please tell me anything interesting about yourself with which I can connect. That's what they're saying.

When they say where you're from, they're going, please say a city that I've been to. So I can say, oh my god, like the weather is so great. And do the favor of sticking out some Velcro for them to attach onto. So instead of saying Philadelphia, I might say, you know, I grew up on the East Coast, but I was always a little bit of a crazy person.

So into college, I moved to Brazil and did all this crazy entrepreneurial stuff with a bunch of friends. But now I've realized that I much prefer summer sports and surfing and I live in California. Within that answer, there's surfing, there's sports, there's entrepreneurism, there's adventure, there's traveling internationally, there's all these different directions

that the person that you're speaking to can listen to and decide to hook into. And what happens is when you give them five, six, seven options in a three sentence answer, you're going to naturally go down conversations that both people are more interested in. So you might find yourself with one person talking about extreme sports

and you're super fascinated on that. On the other hand, you're talking about something else. When we started talking, you had in your bio club promoter, something like that. And the first hand, you're talking about something else. When we started talking, you had in your bio Club promoter something like that. The first question I asked you was like, yeah, tell me about club promoting because that was something that I did when I was in New York And so when you give people more about you to hook into early on a conversation that helps tremendously Another big thing in conversation is that we often take in conversation is that we often take questions to literally. Again, what people are trying to do when they're meeting one another is just suss out a vibe. And so if you're answering every question very literally, the vibe that you're giving is this is an interview. And

I'm just going to, you know, and sometimes that's great when you're diving down into the values that you have and that they have and you can really connect over that. But oftentimes just answering one of the questions in a non literal fashion sets the vibe of, I'm here to have fun. And this is especially important if you're out at a nightclub or something like that. So when someone asks you where you're from

at a nightclub, you don't have to give them the whole Philadelphia spiel, you can say, you know, and you tell that I'm from the Congo or something ridiculous that can't possibly be true given your skin tone. And that sets the tone of the conversation to go down a much more fun, interesting vibe. So that's, there's a lot that we talk about,

but really starting an interaction in the direction you'd like it to head, and being cognizant of that is a large part of the beginnings of what we teach, because then the conversation can kind of just take care of itself. Yeah, I see comedians a lot, I'm good buddies with Daniel Sloss. So he's a fucking perfect example, right? Michael Malis, who's been on Rogan a turn,

he's a really good buddy of mine. And I had it in my head about Blair White, who is a trans YouTuber, and I brought her up on an episode a couple of weeks ago, and I became good friends with her while I was in Austin, and I messaged Malis and I said, Hey man, I've been fucking debating about this for ages because Blair looks so much like a girl,

but biologically she isn't. If she went to prison, what prison would you send her to? And he just responded and said, Alcatraz. And I was like, you motherfucker. Because it completely dispels, it completely dispels like my serious philosophical inquiry,

but also is quite amicable. I think that, and I'm a philosophy major, I'm much more likely to answer questions literally, but I have those friends in my life, and they're always appreciated. Now, you don't want to go 100%, I can't answer any questions seriously, and I don't think that's Michael Malice.

He'll talk seriously about topics, but people want to have much more fun than they're having. And so if you could be the person that breaks them out of the serious moment, whether it's via text or in conversation, they're going to appreciate you, want you around more. And it seems like a superpower,

but all you're doing is not taking questions literally. If that's all you did, you would see that, and people are afraid to do it in the corporate world, that's the other thing. This is one of the things that got me ahead in work, was just not buying into the implicit social norms of the workplace, so that when you came in, you were supposed to be very serious.

Being able to have fun in that sort of an environment is what ingratiated me to the bosses, made them much more amenable when I left. They wound up paying me a lot of money to work as an at-home consultant. It just, it worked out fantastically and it was not because I was the best consultant. It was because we built a human relationship

instead of a corporate relationship. So again, those are the types of things that just work in almost any sort of environment, dating, professional, whatever. It's crazy how much this sort of stuff feels like it would make someone stand out. They're relatively easy principles to follow. And yeah, you know that if somebody was to do this and deliver effectively on a regular

basis, that they would be in probably the top 5% of communicators, top 5% of funny people that you know. Yeah, yeah. And again, within this, it's funny that you say this, because there still is what I talk about the authentic type. And Joe Rogan happens to be a comedian as well. But there are people that don't have to do this thing. This is one tip amongst many.

What you can do is when asked a serious question, give tough answers that are honest. And over time, you will establish your reputation as somebody that is very authentic, that people trust and like for different reasons. And if you're out there listening, you can think of somebody right now that probably fits the bill. So you don't have to do any one of these things. It's about finding the one that when you try it on feels good for you and that you can lean into more and good things tend to happen. How much do you think that people can change their charisma level? So if someone feels shy or introverted, how much of you found that people can change this?

Are people infinitely malleable when it comes to their charisma level? No, no. I don't think you're likely to get a Mark Zuckerberg to a Will Smith. I don't think that's going to happen with all the media training in the world. But Mark Zuckerberg has gotten better. And I actually think if he really cared to could become a much stronger communicator than he is. So anybody can get considerably better.

They can, I think dramatically in most cases, improve their dating life, their friendship circles, the confidence and happiness that they feel in a social environment, but it's not infinitely maleable. There are some people that I look at, like Russell Brand is a conversational genius. I try to break down what people do, and with so many people,

I can put their responses into buckets. Like Tom Holland is gonna respond with a funny story. You know, RDJ is gonna make a quip. Like, and you can emulate those styles and get them. Russell's spontaneity and his almost the fact that he's got so many different jokes and references that he leans into, I gush over him all the time, but I wish I could do what he could do

and I can't capture it in a simple model like I can with some other people. So there's definitely levels and I can't do what he does under any circumstances. He's like a lexical jujitsu black belt. Yes. Yes. And he's capable of going from hilarious commentary to very value driven, you know, what is the purpose of life within the span of two senses, which is super attractive.

Because that's, I think, where a lot of us live. We want to have fun, but we're also interested in in the deeper meaning of things. How would you characterize some of the trends given the fact that you've broken down Russell Brand a bunch of times? I've enjoyed some of the videos that you've done on him. What are some of the principles that we can learn from Russell Brando? What some of the characteristics that he relies on? Oh, man.

He's so there's a lot. So there's, there's the flirtatious pre-enlightenment Russell brand, which is, if you look at what he does, he treats everyone, men and women flirtatiously, which is a general principle for dating. If you want to be a better flirt, you have to flirt with everybody. You have to flirt with men and compliment them.

You have to flirt with the older woman who you're definitely not attracted to. And then of course he flirts with the beautiful women who he's sometimes interviewing and they're giggling about it. So that's one of the things that he does is flirts with the entire world. And what that means is he's cheeky, he's playful, he does this, we have a breakdown, a push pull where he oftentimes will give you a heartfelt compliment, but then relieve the tension at the end of it by just saying some sort of a joke that relieves the tension. And you can see what we're talking about in the video.

I can't think of what he actually does right now. So that's one of the big things that he does. Also, and I guess I have never been able to figure out how and why he makes these decisions, depending on the question that you ask him, you could get a totally ridiculous joke answer or the most sincere, valued, driven, heartfelt connection that you would ever expect. I can't figure out how and why he makes that decision, but he does, and it makes him very fascinating to listen to, because you don't know

what's going to come up from him. Well, that unpredictability suggests authenticity. It suggests that there isn't an agenda behind this, because you can't predict, oh, Russell's got asked a question about God. Here we go again with the story from when he was five years old or whatever. Yeah, and, you know, there's people that I love Tony Robbins, but he is so predictable. If you listen to a Tony Robbins interview, like I have, I've listened to all of them. He's got 30 or 40 stories,

and depending on what you ask, you're going to hear one of those stories told in the same way with the same punchline, because as an educator and teacher, he knows that it has an intended effect, but it definitely does leave me as someone who has watched a lot of him wondering if I've ever seen the real him, if I've ever seen behind that performative social curtain. Still love the guy, but yeah, you're right. It totally suggests authenticity when it seems as if he's genuinely

doesn't know what he's going to say before he says it. It's whatever is searching inside him in that moment. What about the new Russell brand post DMT post enlightenment? Yeah, so he's, I think still has a lot of it. He's not as flirtatious as he used to be. I think what he does a fantastic job of is being authentic in his positions. Like you know where he stands politically, but he can sit down with a Candace Owens and be non-judgmental, not assume that she is an evil person

trying to destroy the world and maintain a playfulness and curiosity in the face of ideas that are bitterly opposed to his ideals. And I think that that is incredibly rare when you see Candace Owens talk to anyone else who disagrees with her because it's going to fall apart quickly on both sides. They're both going to accuse each other of bad faith.

He's genuinely able to, or generally able to maintain a good faith vibe in any sort of political or spiritual disagreement, which I think is comes from a place of actually not thinking that he has all the answers, which you can't fake. Dude, that's exactly what I had in my head. The fact that he's got strong opinions held loosely, not loose opinions held strongly.

Yeah, yeah. So I could gush about him over and over. Yeah, all right, so good. I feel like a little fanboy. Let's get a little bit shyness. Away from Russell Branden is turbo penis. What about if someone is feeling shy, they don't have a lot of fanboy. Let's get away from Russell Branden, his turbo penis. What about if someone is feeling shy, they don't have a lot of social confidence,

how can someone overcome that? How can they develop more? So I think that we talk often about how courage is a muscle. And it's not the answer that a lot of people want to get, but I think progressive exposure therapy is really is the way. And so again, in the course, we start very easy. If you're shy, you're probably biting your tongue often, not saying that you think, and you're probably mistaking that for I don't have anything to say. Nothing comes to mind. The truth is the filter in your

head is so high that nothing breaks through that as being worthy of being said. And so when we're talking to shy people, what we often tell them to do is with, say, that you're in a situation with a taxi driver or someone else who's working for you, a waiter, a cashier, say one extra sentence, right? So the normal thing is, that'll be 592, you give me your thing. But something is in your head. There's a magazine cover there. The weather is hot. They have a nice earring or something. Say one extra thing. But something is in your head. There's a magazine cover there. The weather is hot.

They have a nice earring or something. Say one extra thing. And what we're trying to teach them to do is to lower that filter of what would be acceptable to say to someone. Now, there are people that have the reverse problem where they blabber on and on and on and we need to teach them to be a bit more selective. But when you're shy, I think that's oftentimes the biggest problem is that you think that the things that you have to say are such crap that you communicate that with every fiber of your being. And so once you're saying them, then we have to teach you, okay, say it with your chest.

You say it like you mean it. Don't trail off at the end of sentences. If you're in a group conversation, do not let someone cut you off until you hit a period. So if you're mid-conversation with someone and you're finishing your thought and they jump in, you have to get to the end of it like now. And then they can take over. So it's not about being a conversational bully.

It's about learning to take up conversational space in a way that is assertive. So that's a very common thing that we see with shy people is that they're reluctant to do that, but just a handful of models like those goes a long way. And all of a sudden, they didn't put me off the second time. They realized that I wasn't gonna just disappear

and they feel very happy about it. What about the tailing off at the end of sentences thing? That's definitely something that I notice people do with that uncomfortable in a social situation or a little bit shy. How can people overcome that? What the general rule is you have to finish it with the same decibel level that you started it with.

You've got to find a way. And the way that we teach people is like, look, these are new habits. When you're learning them, they might not feel like you. It's going to feel uncomfortable. You're going to go, this charisma thing isn't for me. So just focus on one thing per day. Our videos are in part entertainment.

They've got five, six things. You try to do that all. You are going to live in your head. You want you to be in the conversation, reacting, listening. But also, I do want you thinking of one thing that you're going to do differently that day. And so what we do in the course is we structure it differently so you have one thing for each day. But if you're a shy person and you're out there, the thing that you might think of for today

is, if I'm in a group setting this evening, make sure that I finish any sentence before I yield the floor. And that's it. And then you could do whatever you want. You could be awkward with your body language. You could make crappy eye contact. You could say dumb things, but you just focus on that. And over time, you're stacking these habits on top of each other such that when you get

5, 6, 7, eight of these together, you really do have a much more powerful personality. Talk to me about the tension between needing to learn a skill in communication and needing to be sufficiently in the conversation to be able to flow through things because you have this system one, system two dynamic going on here, right?

We need to be very deliberate, system two, I'm thinking about it, oh fuck, I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking about it so much that I realize I haven't moved my body for the last three minutes of being constantly thinking about finishing my sentences at the same fucking decibel level because of that Charlie guy. Yeah, yeah.

So this is attention. And I have the ways that I hear people say to relieve it, just be yourself. I find art do not actually lead to growth. They might lead to evolution over time as things go back, but if you want to deliberately grow, I think you have to deal with this tension. The way that we've done it is just by having one thing that you're focusing on per day, and it would be one small thing.

And sometimes it's literally just a thing that occurs at the beginning of an interaction, like I'm going to say my answer to where are you from, like the one that I practiced and built, as opposed to the one that is reflexive. And so that's how we do it. So that there definitely is some time where I'm taking you out of the flow of conversation. And I recognize that. But I do, I have not found a better way to learn a skill. I think it requires deliberate, I don't know, with System 1 or 2.

It requires that deliberate removing yourself from the flow of how things have always been a little bit for a period of time. But awesome story about Tiger Woods when he was early in his career and he realized that he had some, how do you say, perversions in his swing? He had some perversions.

He's a perversions, yeah, yeah. He had some perversions elsewhere as well. He had some perversions in his swing that was causing him to be less accurate and less consistent than he needed to be. And the decision was, look, if you want to be the best in the world, we need to rebuild your swing from scratch. And this meant that he had to take a bunch of steps back.

He'd stop being system one. He could have gone on being the perfectly adequate type version of Tiger Woods for the rest of his career without having to do this. So he purposefully had to get worse before he could get better because he was going to have to re-learn all of the different things. And I kind of feel like there's an analogy to draw here between this and purposeful conversationalizing. 100%. And I don't know like there's an analogy to draw here between this and purposeful conversationizing. 100%. And I don't know how Tiger went about that, and maybe there is a better way that I've yet to discover,

but it's the way that I did it, because I was getting overwhelmed when I was trying to do everything. I remember just being like, okay, and you stand like this, and you do this. And all of a sudden, I could be in his social interaction and not have been there literally at all. I was just totally in the realm of on their action and not have been there literally at all. I was just totally in the realm of thinking, planning, scheming in my head. And so that didn't work, which is why we went back to the, let's take one element of the swing at a time. Let's start with just doing what we do with a different grip. Let's now let's worry about the hips now. And that was how over time I was able to still be an interaction, still be in my head a little bit, but building towards what wound up becoming a very different way after months and years of doing this of being generally.

Yeah, and I'm guessing that reps, repetitions of this is... Oh gosh, yeah, and you nailed it. Yeah, I'm forgetting the most basic stuff, and I appreciate you bringing it up. It truly is just reps. The nice thing is that, you know, how there's beginner gains in the gym, because nobody focuses on this stuff, it comes so quickly. This is not like, it's easier than learning an instrument, it's easier than putting on muscle mass, and it's because it's like if you lived in a world where no one worked out, how quickly could you go to the gym before your body made you exceptional? Like it wouldn't take very long.

And that's the world that we live in with regards to charisma is nobody's working on it. So all you have to do is this very small amount before people are gonna start to notice that you're in an elite tier, which is awesome. And that's not anything to do with what we teach, but just the fact that there's almost no competition. The bar is set. Right, it's low. Bar is low, yeah. That's not anything to do with what we teach, but just the fact that there's almost no competition. The bar is set.

It's incredibly low. It's far as low, yeah. That's the truth. All right, so you guys started out one of the initial reasons that you wanted to get better at communicating was to be better with women, and there will be a lot of guys that want to improve their ability to talk to girls. What are the principles of men communicating attractively to women? So we have broken down the flirting process. Let's see if I can do this. It's been a long time since I've had to get out there and do this. The first piece is...

So the first piece of it is just interest that we think about. And let's pretend that you're in a bar or something. What we're trying to avoid in this stage is I have to go to the bathroom. I'm just bored of you. And so when we're talking about this, this is the playful stuff that we mentioned. It's a lot of the things with where do you, what do you do, where you're from, finding ways to be interesting. This isn't sexy necessarily. This isn't I want to hook up with you. It's just I want this interaction to continue. The second piece that I think a lot of guys skip out on is having genuine standards. When you receive a letter from Harvard University that you've been accepted, it feels wonderful. When you receive a letter from the community college, it takes 100% of the people.

It doesn't feel good. And the truth about dating, like it or not, is that we often date people to affirm things about ourselves. So when you have no standards for this other person and they feel like they could have been anyone, like truly it was their shape that attracted you to them, it doesn't generate any sort of interest in you. But if you're indicating through interaction, for instance, if you're out at a bar or a club and somebody is rude to a waiter or a rachress or bartender, you

go, oh my God, I can't stand people who do that. If I were, you know, I don't care how beautiful or fun or sexy you are. Like when I see that kind of behavior, it's a total turn off. Just as an aside in a conversation, that's communicating to the person that they care about my personality, right? And now the thing is, you want to have genuine standards. So this is easier for people who have dated and who have had perhaps dated some of them were very attracted to, who had personality traits that they didn't really like. If you can go through your history and ask yourself, what are the things that really do attract me to people that are not sexuality or shape-based things?

What are the things that make me repulsed? And list those out and find ways to incorporate those into conversation, for instance. I have most enjoyed my relationships with women who were incredibly affectionate. So when someone early in interaction says, I'm a hugger, I go, oh my God, I'm going to love you. I'm the same way I can't stand people that just want to touch

on the shoulder, say hello, we're like, hi, hi five every time. And that communicates to them that there are things that I am selecting for, and you actually are within that category. Now, it is crucial here to this is not a strategy to fake, right? If you're just saying these things and really it's like, no, it's you just have the shape and the look, it's not going to work nearly as well. And it's also just not good for you. You're going to wind up in the relationship that sucks. And then the last piece is sexual tension. And I think this is the part that is probably most uncomfortable for a lot of guys is being able to sit

in a sexually tense scenario, which might be lingering on eye contact with someone interaction, with a smirk on your face. It might be dancing close without having to crack a joke. Being able to manage that sexual tension while sometimes we're leaving it with that playful push pull stuff is, does not come natural to most people. They try to escape it as soon as they feel it. And therefore they're never, sitting with that discomfort. Oh yeah, and it is tense. It's this in between stage of, do you like me?

Do I like you? Are we going to kiss or are we just looking at each other's eyes? And being able to hold that and enjoy that is something that we talk about. It takes some time to develop, but there are some things that you can do. So for instance, most people, if they go on a date, say you match someone on Tinder or hinge, they'll go to a bar, they'll sit down on opposite sides of a booth, talk about work, you know, and then they'll, okay, at the end of the night,

well, hope you had a good time and there's been no sexual tension built. Versus, if you go to the bar, you say, hey, let's sit over here, you sit at the bar while you're communicating with them, you put your hand on their hand. When they make a joke, you say, I love that, you give them a hug, you know, you'll, you know,

hold their arm while you're telling a story to demonstrate what somebody did. You are building this sort of, this physical tension between the two of you that gets more and more comfortable and allows for those sort of close, is it happening, isn't it happening? Interactions. And you're not putting all the weight from going from zero to 60 with the good night kiss at the doorstep, which feels awful.

And it's just an amount of like discomfort that is not fun for anybody to experience. So those are the buckets that I think about at least when I'm talking about it, and what I try to ask guys specifically to do, because it's a different scenario with girls, is to think about where they are not going to the next level. And it's like, oh, they're just walking away from me as I start conversations. Like, okay, let's talk about being more interesting in conversation.

Or I've never actually, you know, I'm hitting on girls and I'm being fun and interesting, but they have a sense that I'm just a player and they don't want to talk to me. It's like, well, you've got no standards. And then, so going through those, using that as a diagnostic tool is something that we do. I think guys are probably quite faithful

about running out of stuff to say as well. Have you got strategies for small talk? Yeah, so one, there's a couple of different videos. In terms of women specifically in flirting scenarios, this is the hardest things. My brain is like this, and you've seen in this interaction. I'm a logistical person. When you ask me a question, I want to answer it literally.

The best thing for small talk is to recognize that especially on a date or in a bar or club, they just want to vibe. You don't have to have topics. It's not about, not for podcast. Work, yeah, it's a podcast. It's not supposed to be that.

It's supposed to be fun, playful world building. So, if she says, oh my God, like you went to Jamaica, I studied abroad there, but like, oh my God, fantastic. After this bar, we're going to the airport, we're gonna get on a plane, we're gonna go scuba diving, we'll be there tomorrow morning.

We're gonna have to fund this. So somehow, I don't know, I'm gonna have to take up a job selling Lucy cigarettes on the street, whatever. You're just like, just this playful world building is a way that men tend not to instinctively communicate. What do you mean by world building? What I just created was almost

an improvisational comedy scenario. Like we're going to go here, here's what's going to happen. Obviously none of this is real. This is, I'm definitely not gonna sell Lucy cigarettes to fund a plane ride for tomorrow. But when you can build these fake, fun, obviously not real fantasy scenarios that people participate in and sometimes men do this with their good friends when they're all on a group of people, that would be like if, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Oh my God, when you do that with women in fun ways, that tends to set the vibe to be this fun, flirty thing that she can contribute to and say, well, we're not gonna stay in the same room. Tonight be like, perfect, I'm gonna have the penthouse and you could sleep in the water closet. And then, no, I don't wanna sleep in the water closet. So these are the types of things that are ridiculous, that most men would never think about doing in conversation,

but that are genuinely fun once you try on this new style of conversing. Now, of course, there's still going to be time for what do you do, where you from, what's your work, but especially in a bar nightclub scenario, which I think what I'm tending towards more. If you lead with, here's my cool job, I work at Goldman Sachs, that's incredibly boring. I can't tell you the number of guys in New York, I saw who started by handing out business cards. Instead of doing this fun stuff first,

and then they'll be like, who are you? Tell me about yourself, and then at that point, you go to the Goldman Sachs thing, actually comes in as a patent interrupt, and you're like, oh holy fuck, like he's actually funny, and interesting, and he's prepared to sell loose cigarettes, and he's got a job at investment bank.

Yes, exactly. And the best way, then, when you're talking about, you and he's got a job at investment bank. Yes, exactly. And the best way, then, when you're talking about, okay, I work in investment bank, is to speak to your values. Again, people want to know your vibe and your values, not just the logistics of what you do. So if you say I work at Goldman Sachs, a much stronger way is to think,

well, what drove me? Hopefully, it's not just a sensitive greed, but I grew up poor, and I always wanted to be able to take care of my mom and family. So I, you know, I don't want to be an investment banker for the rest of my life, but it's helping me to one day buy a house for my mom. Like that, if true, so attractive, so, so much more engaging than I'm a banker at Goldman Sacks. So if you're setting a vibe or sharing your values, those are two very strong modes of conversation to be and compared to just answering questions logistically, honestly.

Yeah, that's an interesting one, man. I'm interested to find out what you think most men go wrong when approaching women. And if there's girls that are watching, they can put some of their nightmares scenarios down in the comments below as well. Women have a very different understanding of this because there, when they think what goes wrong with men, they're selecting for the men that have approached them, right? Women have a very different understanding of this because when they think what goes wrong with men, they're selecting for the men that have approached them, right? And so they're going, oh, they were way too pushy, way too forward.

They said this goofy thing. They did some R nice guys stuff where they told me like, they could be my boyfriend and I'd never have to go cold. The truth is most guys are not in that category. They're not walking up to you. They're thinking about it, but not doing it, right? So that's by far. That's 99.9% is not engaging in conversation.

So that's definitely the thing that most of them do wrong. Though when women think about what a most men do wrong, they're gonna go to the horror stories of the 0.1% that just come in like complete arrogant asses. So yeah, it's not, it's disqualifying yourself before, before you've spoken to someone. And there's a hundred different ways to speak to someone, mentalities that can help,

but going in with a vibe of curiosity and again, flirt with the world, I think one of the things that men do wrong is that they try to be these snipers, which is like these boring people who walk through life, not talking to anyone, not engaging with the cashier. And then they're gonna see the most beautiful woman at the bar who is surrounded by people who wanna speak to her.

And they're gonna go, now I'm gonna turn it on. That's by the power of gray school, they decide to pick up a fucking school. Right, it's time to turn it on. It's time to do it. Yeah, and then they hook out and just do it. That's not how it's ever been with me. I haven't seen it done that way.

It's by flirting with the world. It's by recognizing that the person that you should flirt with is the next person you interact with and whether that's someone in your apartment building as you're taking the elevator who is an older gentleman, like being that outgoing, fun, friendly person, setting a vibe, goofing off,

and then just happening to be near the person that you're interested in is going to be much, much more powerful because it's not something that you've got to like year up for. It's something that is going to be habituated into the way that you're used to speaking with people. It won't feel like such a stretch. So generally, other than the, how do you say, misinterpreting purposefully, misinterpreting

the question and giving us silly answer, are there some other easy ways that people can add humor into conversations? Yeah. Okay, so how do we add humor into conversations? What I, I'm coming back to a lot of the same things, which is your initial conversational tracks are going to be totally similar. And they already are totally similar. People say the same things.

If you're in college, they want to know what major you have. If you're in the workforce, they want to know what you do for a living. So having both an answer that is true and reveals your values and a playful answer to a lot of these different things, and you can answer one of the three questions that you could ask the most, I literally went out and split tested these different things, and would just just answer different stuff at different times in the night club or something like that. So that is one that you can do because those are just going to be free gimmies. It's kind of like Uncle jokes. The thing, the uncle's just prepared for you to say something.

And you have, you have a ready made response. In terms of more spontaneous conversational stuff, there's a lot of different types of humor. One of the Russell Brand is very fast, clever, callback, witty, that's tougher to implement. An easy one is to say the opposite. And it sounds dumb, but if it's a super hot day and everyone's bitching about how hot it is,

and you go out, you're like, shhh, man, it's cold out here. I swear to God, you will get a chuckle from people because what humor is in many cases is just when the unexpected occurs. It causes a chuckle. So it's not the funniest way to be funny. You can be witty and clever and have interesting callbacks,

but saying the opposite is a very easy way to just to get laughs and chuckles and an insert humor if you're not. The other thing that I recommend people do, because I do think that it's our brains, I guess this is more system one, just automatic, is you can prime yourself. So what, rather than thinking of humor, if I think how I did it, it wasn't by purposely working in saying the opposite necessarily. It was by watching a lot of Chris Pratt

before I would go out. I just like watched 10 minutes and I'd watched some step brothers best of clips and put myself in that mode of ridiculous non-sequitur statement. And I would just talk about prestige worldwide and investors, possibly you, and pointed people, and just lift these lines straight out of movies into context

that it didn't make any sense. And that actually worked really well because I was enjoying it. I was referencing movies that I had fun with. And I was not taking all of the words that Chris Pratt would say, but his general demeanor was coming through. So yeah, trying to make like your fifth best friend,

the comedian that you most enjoy in the vibe that you wanna have and just watching them for 10, 15 minutes before going into a social interaction was actually the way that I did it. That's a really cool way to use, like, Reasonsy bias to influence, because we can't all be Tim Dillon. Yeah, that ability to be, who I think actually now, Tim is,

as far as I can see, one of the quickest guys that's doing sort of conversations on this circuit, like Tim's the gay Russell brand at the moment, if you hear him on Rogan, his ability, his ability to be unbelievably rapid. Do you see the most recent Rogan where he said, do you think that there's other Epstein Islands? And he's like, yeah, better ones. Hilton's building them now. There's just slides where the kids go immediately down and they're straight into a furnace. And he like, holy fuck, that was off the cuff. That's disgusting. So there is, if you're serious about humor, and again, you don't, with this charisma stuff,

storytelling, humor, you don't need to be excellent. You truly, the bar is so low. You could say the opposite, and you'll be the funniest person in a group of most people. But if you really want to go deep in humor, improv comedy classes are awesome. I used to take these classes at the pit in New York and there was one on the west side in Los Angeles. They train you to, we talked about world building for flirting, like how to structure a thing, create a scene, all that kind of stuff. But the specificity that Tim Dylan is driving into is not, and the tags that he adds to that, right? It's not just, oh yeah, there's better islands.

He's got the slide into the furnace. Those are, there's principles of comedy that guide that and it takes a long time to be able to do it that quickly, but you can develop that skill through practice and they will teach you almost everything you need to know about that in an improv comedy class if it's if it's any good. So that's another thing like if you really want to be funnier improv comedy is is where I would start. So other than Russell brand who are some of your favorite communicators. Tony Robbins is excellent and it's it's the criticism I have is also his strength is that he has

a story for every situation and it's the type of story that has been split test over 40 years to elicit the most powerful reaction from you. So he's a fantastic communicator if you probably the best person that I can think of for inspiring someone to change in a 20 minute conversation like he can get in there, move your motivators around and leave you and you'll be on a different path. Oprah Winfrey is amazing. She's before my time, but having watched some of her interviews, she just gets people to cry and open up and can do it in front of a studio audience, which is incredible.

The fact that she can create this bubble of safety around her and the chair, even when people are watching, I think speaks to the power of her communication style. There was it to, I mean, Bill Clinton was incredible back in the day, the stories that you read about Bill Clinton and the way that he would make you feel like the only person in the room, even if you were just in a line of people with whom he was shaking hands.

I don't know if you've ever read any of those, but there's several accounts. No, what were the principles that people attested that to be? So people don't know. They were just convinced that he wanted to be their friend. They were just totally, like he said, when he shook their hand,

they knew that they had a moment with him and that they were the most important person there. And so everybody thought that. Yes, I can't find footage of this. I've seen some, but there's not a ton of footage that I've been able to dig up. I've been trying to go, what is that? But from what I can see, it's that he's from the south. He's slow.

He's a little bit more deliberate and he will spend more time with people and also made it a point every day to study people's names. Would remember the name of every single person such that if he shook your hand at the more time with people and also made it a point every day to study people's names would remember the name of every single person such that if he shook your hand at the beginning of a fundraiser and learned two things about you, he had trained his memory at the end to be like, and by the way, I hope your son gets into UT and you know, would would say the two things that you spoke about back to you. And that is again, extremely powerful. Takes practice. Like he literally

would work on the names of people apparently in the Oval Office that he had met and refresh himself on that kind of stuff. There's a story about Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United's manager for a very long time. And he had a period when he first joined the club. And he needed to get the players on side. I feel like he joined in turmoil or something. There was, it was a little bit of a high pressure situation and he really, really needed to get all of the players on side really, really quickly. And he went round and was talking to one particular player and said, look, you are the most important player on the pitch today.

It is all about you. And then it only took until the end of the season for the lads to start talking to each other and find out that he'd said that to every single fucking one of them. Yeah, and I think that was the power of Bill Clinton. Is he never had to say it so they could never check it with anyone else? It was just a sense that, and you know, that's the hack, is you just lot of people. But he really did take the time to make people feel special,

which is impressive. And then one more that comes to mind is Kevin Hart. He, I think Kevin Hart is five foot two and he hangs out with basketball players that are seven foot two. And you can watch, there is, in a neat power differential when you're standing like this to speak to someone that cannot be avoided. But he so quickly takes control of these groups of like, boisterous basketball players, such that he has them listening to what he's saying and

they're reacting to his topics of conversation and his jokes. He is incredible. I'm whenever people point to like, I'm too short for this. I always pointed back to Kevin Hart. Like, look, I don't know how many people in your life are two feet taller than you, but this guy is capable of hanging with Shaq and making Shaq and all of his friends love him. So he's got something special as well.

Did you see that video of Shapiro doing a debate and this guy comes up and asks a question and says, why is it that you say on your Wikipedia that you're five foot ten when you're five foot four and Shapiro immediately goes, how tall are you? And he goes, 5 foot 10, he goes, okay, come up here, comes up and stands up and bends taller than him. Dude, it's so fucking funny. That shit's so fucking funny. You need to check it out, it's so good.

Oh God, that's like, that's like, I mean, that's a bold move by Chupiro because he didn't know that that guy was going to say in response and that guy just Flubbed it just tell the truth man and just say how tall you are. So fucking I mean on the topic Shapiro's phenomenal. That he's one of the quickest guy genuinely is like listening to something at one and a half time speed. But yeah, I can't I can can't normal time speed. On YouTube. No, it's possible.

Most people I can do with two. One and a half, one and a half. One and a half, one and a half. One and a half, one and a half. One and a half, one and a half. But he is quick. Yeah, yeah. No, I haven't, so I've looked at his communication style

and I do think he is obviously very smart. I watch him and I did a video on his debate tactics. I think that because he is a public debater, he has been trained to go for the dunk. You know what I mean? Like that's a dunk. He didn't address the question. He didn't handle it logically.

He dunked and in discrediting the person who asked the question, won the social approval of the crowd. So when I watch him, I see a lot oftentimes more, not necessarily sound logic, which he may have as well at his disposal, but shortcut dunk tactics to discredit the other side, make them look foolish, etc. Was it you? Was it one of your videos that said, make them look foolish, et cetera. Was it you? Was it one of your videos that said,

were you being critical around modern debating and saying that one of the sad things or one of the interesting quirks about modern debates is that it's not necessarily the person that has the best position. It's the person that can get two or three laughs, big laughs during a debate. Everybody seems to come away thinking that they won.

Yes, yes. We've talked about that in several videos. I mean, that's Donald Trump, you know, when asked the question about his relationship to women, only Rosio Donald. He, he, you know, effectively, and but that's what it is. That is communication is the meta narrative that interaction is her saying, this is an important question. And he said, no, it isn't. And the audience said, I'm on his side. And rather than addressing, he just took the frame, spun it on its head and said, I win. And was able to do that throughout all of the campaign,

which is really interesting. But I do think that there's something to be said for taking the opponents in good faith and assuming the frames that they give to you and saying, maybe I's maybe I will play within your frame and try to deal with it. Now, there are times when the frame, which is presented to you, is on its face, ludicrous, and you need to disrupt it in the way that Donald Trump did and Ben Shapiro did because that question is...

To what he did in the past in Yemen. Exactly. And that's the question that Ben Shapiro was asking. That's kind of what he said. It's, it wasn't a sincere, good faith said. It wasn't a sincere good faith question. It doesn't sound like why do you say this? And he said you're a dick and then the audience agreed with him. You know, he said you're a hypocritical dick. That was the actual communication. And sometimes that's very useful to do is to ask yourself, not what are they saying?

What is the frame of what they're saying back and forth to one another? And that gives you some indication of if the conversation is happening in good faith, or if it's just two people rejecting the form that the other one is throwing back at them. I suppose it must be useful in a debate to have a little bit of humor or a pressure release valve. You know, like you were saying, some people during sexual tension will make a joke or do a thing or look away or laugh or whatever because they can't deal with that tension, but sometimes in a debate, using that humor can actually, or in a difficult conversation, I imagine as well, like a disagreement or something's getting a bit heated, you can use that to just

little bit off. Yeah, I think it was Stephen Frye, maybe at the monk debates, who was just fantastic. And it, especially. He was the only funny person on stage. Yes. With two pitch sides that are sometimes thrown barbs at one another, I thought that he, I was like, regardless of who you came here liking, you probably left thinking that you

could listen to that guy and that he wasn't a monster. And that, that is impressive. And I think you're totally right, which is when things get super heated, there's a time to go, okay, tension off. And that's the same thing with sexual tension. Like there is a time to go and we need to crack a joke now. But most people just, their threshold for that is as soon as they start making eye contact. Like, uh, run away.

All right. I want to change tack a little bit now. I told her that is as soon as they start making eye contact. Like, eh, run away. All right, I want to change tack a little bit now. Can you tell me this story about getting your entire family to take MDMA? Oh, gosh, yeah. So a couple of years ago, I took Ayahuasca for the first time after a breakup. And it was very impactful. The breakup is what drove me there.

And what I took from it was much, much more than that. So I continued down this path of psychedelic therapy, having never done any sort of drugs and having been off alcohol for eight years at that point. So this was like a big deal for me. And after experimenting with ayahuasca, five MEO DMT, psilocybin, and then MDMA. I found that MDMA was the one that was easiest to recommend to newbies. And that's because MDMA, unlike ayahuasca, is oftentimes gonna give you a historical view of your life. Versus ayahuasca, you might see shapes in the elves

and DMT and it's like, what the hell? MDMA is like a warm blanket being wrapped around you that gives you the courage to dive into your traumas and what you made of them. And oftentimes the things that come up are the things that you think, I dealt with that, that's totally fine and out of the way. So I got a lot of awesome stuff

which would take a long time to talk about from my experiences. And one by one went to my family and said I really want you to do this. And what ultimately I think got them to agree was the changes that they saw in me. Particularly my dad was, didn't want to go, but a lot of what was coming for me in these experiences was wanting more of a connection with him. And it was tough for me even to say to him that like I started telling him like a charismatic person like I you know this

would be good for you and I think it would be good for your life. And you know you would enjoy this. And what ultimately I think moved him was the authentic truth which is I need you to do this. So I can feel close to you you. And that was like very fucking hard for me to say with the quaver in my voice near tears. And I think that was what ultimately got him to do it. In any event last August, we all did it together. And it was fucking wild, man. It was wild.

Talk me through the morning of waking up. And when you look at your calendar for the day You have Take MDMA with my entire family like what does that feel like? So we were we were in big bear and we we got a little cabin with therapists to help coach us through the experience I was so nervous man I barely needed to take MDMA. I was on the verge, I was shaking and on the verge,

like I was ready to crack already. So within minutes of taking it, I was like, you know, crying and talking about stuff. And you know, what I felt was, I'm the oldest son and what I felt was terror at the failings of my younger siblings, cause I was in the position of having to have, you know, of care not of caretaker but of like I should have known better and

Terror at, you know, telling my parents the disappointments and that I that I had with them because they were to me were in the position of that So I was scared on both sides mostly scared of getting it from my younger brother and sister for the letdowns that that I've had over the years But yeah, it was a scary, exhilarating experience. And it was one that I was, there's a lot that I could say about it, but I think what the good that came of it briefly is that I assumed the correct role in the family of oldest sibling. And I think what I had done was assume a triangulated role in between my mom and my dad as like,

referee of their interactions. I was like a third parent, judgemental of the brother and sister, separate from them. And what I expressed to everybody is like, I wanna be a brother and a son, not a guru. That is what I am, yeah, which is what I am on YouTube. You know, everybody listens to me and that's kind of the dynamic that has been set up in the families. I don't want this. I did this as a coping mechanism for what was happening, like,

that I needed to take this place. And so I want to learn from the wisdom of my mom and dad and not have a separate power differential between my brother and my sister and fit in that. So there was a lot that happened, but it was awesome. And I got a lot of what I needed and honest to God after world, I felt like a life's purpose was lifted off my shoulders. I was like, I fucking did it.

If I just died today, I did what I had to do. And so it was awesome and it was a culmination of a lot of different things. And I highly recommend exploring the idea of psychedelic therapy. I don't recommend it for everyone. And it's not, there's definite contraindicators, but it has been the most powerful thing of the last five to 10 years. And the only thing comparable to it is the realization that I could consciously change myself. And now I'm getting to the realization that my unconscious is most of me. So that's what I kind of have to address is not all the things that I think about, but

the things that just are the case about me. Man, that's so beautiful. I'm really, really happy to hear the progress that you made for you and for your family. It's like really gorgeous. And puts into perspective the work that can be done, you know? Does this strange situation that occurs, maybe it may have been early for you, it sounds like it might have been a little bit early for you, but there's a strange situation that everybody goes through at some point. When they stop being the one who is not at the mercy of their parents, but with their

parents being the wisdom givers, and that power dynamic flips. And it's now the parents that are coming to them for help with technology, for concerns that they have around, what's going to happen next for I've left my job, for I want to change my career, for when am I going to retire, for whatever it might be. And that navigating that change of polarity, because it just happens, just one day you're having a conversation with your parents and you go, I'm steering the ship of this interaction, mostly now. And only five or 10 years ago,

I was completely behest to your wins. And I was basically just this blob, it's like useless blob that you would give a lift to sport practice or whatever. And it's so bizarre bizarre that dynamic changing is so strange and odd to navigate. Yeah, I mean, there's so many reactions that I have to that. Generally, I think that people underestimate the, it's cliché. You know, Freud made it so stupidly cliché that we throw out

the influence of early childhood interactions. But in the same way that we all have accents that we picked up when we were very, very young, that no matter what happens of life, we will not use. We have accents in what love means to us. We have accents in what power means to us. And you can be told over and over again, but you will speak with that accent when it comes to love and power and

all these other things. So revisiting it one is very important. And then more specifically to what you said, what for me, and I think every family is different, is to recognize and have enough faith in my parents that just because they don't know the technological stuff that there isn't still wisdom there and I think very early on I said because it was difficult or frustrating or I was angry. I said you don't know shit I'm gonna do it and it served me well, you know my dad wanted me to stay at a consultant I fucked off and started charisma and command it worked for you know There was there was merit to going you don't know what the hell you're talking about but

In going back and saying, I threw some baby out with the bathwater. And there is wisdom here. And the world, at least for me and my family, the world is not a place that I have to discover entirely on my own. And I have the trust in you that some of your wisdom can help guide me through it

is what I needed to recognize. Because I was too fiercely my own guru, my own independent thing. Well, think about what we were talking about earlier on, that you have this period of making yourself, of becoming, and then it kind of swings across into being, and then you realize that maybe some of the things that served you when you were 21, now your terrorizes when you're 31, and okay, now I've got rid of these, but oh shit, what does this leave me as now? This kind of vassalation, kind of like a pirate ship at a theme park, right?

That it just swings backwards and forwards, swings backwards and forwards, and what you hope to try and do is to get it to sit somewhere close to where plum would be. And a lot of the time, it's just working out when you're veering off course. So, for instance, with your parents, you know, you go through this period, you're totally correct. You're totally correct that you could see, look, inevitably everyone who is a millennial or sort of a gen Z at the moment is teaching their parents about technology. And you can use that as a crowbar to not only have power over your parents but also to kind of throw out all of the other shit that they tell

you to do. It's like you can't even work the fucking iPad, what are you going to teach? And learning that again and re-learning, okay, fuck, I thought that I was the person that was in control and I was able to help and be useful and now I need to deprogram that shit as well and I need to now reintegrate the thing that I learned when I was two which is listen to parents, parents often know best. It's just, it's spirals, right? Ever tighter and tighter circles is just why Josh Waitschkin calls it. Yes, I love that. Yeah, it's been, I guess when I think about the ship, it's almost the question is what pushed the ship to the other side? And in many cases it was like, it was pain.

It was like, I was listening to you guys and it hurt. And so I went never again. And I think that idea of never again causes people to overcompensate in so many areas of their life. So like they get rejected by a girl and they go never again, will I feel that pain? And then all of a sudden they train themselves become these super players who would never in relationships

and never have to suffer. And somebody said, you know, one of the most powerful things that you can do is be willing to experience the thing that you made a vow to never experience and to say, I am willing to be heartbroken again. I'm willing to have my mom and dad give me advice that is heartbreaking again. Where that allows you to come back to, it does allow you to get hurt again, but it allows you to land in that middle instead of just having to stay in this crazy, reactive refusal to get hurt by the way that you got hurt before.

All Bre told me this story about the first time, I think he was 21 and he'd just gone away from home and he went to Vegas on his own And he went to go and see something like the Cirque du Soleil or some other sort of show. Apparently, he was sat in one of the front rows watching these women perform, these beautiful acrobat women perform. And apparently, he was there gripping the arms of the chair and looking at them and saying, like halfway between

a mantra and a prayer to himself, I will become the sort of man that these girls will never say no to. And this is this is my purpose on this life. And he talks about how most of his 20s and his 30s was spent worshipping the divine feminine, which is all very speak for trying to try to tell. Trying to fill a void inside himself with a lot of women. Yeah, worshipping the divine feminine and now he's married and I asked him about this question on the show and I was like look man you know you spend 20 years building a 10 years building a business which

just got sold to Unilever for a huge undisclosed amount and you spend 20 years worshipping the divine feminine and you just got married. Where does this leave you now? Are you concerned that you're going to lose your edge? Or a fuck man? So, be honest, I think that you're probably not far off the money. I need to rediscover what it is to be me. That's somebody who has now faced down some of those demons. He's had to face down his demons around insufficiency and aromenonomy to get married. He's leaned into that discomfort. But from that, okay, so what about all of the presumptions and the armor and the protection strategies that I developed from being polyamorous,

from being able to anesthetize myself from paying within one relationship with another and be able to move people and swap them around. And the same with money, the fact that the dopamine spikes, as you guys had with your sales yesterday, if you got a huge payout for charisma on command tomorrow, unbelievable dopamine spike, but they're not coming again.

Now what? You're not utilitarian rational beings. It's not about the fact that, well, if I got, you know, 50 million today, then that's me for the disanant of time. And actually, the utility is better for me to have it right now, then it would be for me to have it in the future. You don't think like that. In three weeks time, you'd go, come on, come on. Mr. Reptilian Brain is hungry, feed me.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, with money, it seems that the only thing that yeah, people just want more. And I think I was lucky with money to realize this very early on that nobody cares about the amount in their bank. They just want it to be more than it was. And even if they have a 50 million bank that is slowly decreasing, that person will likely feel less rich than somebody who has 50,000, but you know, was going to have 55,000 in the next period of time. So I find myself, I think, I'm younger than Aubrey,

but at a similar phase of asking, I was doing a lot of open relationship stuff and I figuring out what was driving that, is I still haven't gotten to the core of it. But as I have slowed down and been now monogamous for a while several months, which feels like a while. Congratulations. It's a victory. Yeah. Well, I'm becoming aware of the strategy. And there's, you know, it's interesting what

it does for you. It's, it does a couple things. One, I never had to worry about cheating on anyone because I took that off the table. Like, I can't cheat on you. We're in an open relationship. So all of a sudden, my ability to self-control, discipline, et cetera, never needs to be explored. Number two, I never had to ask myself, why do I want this? I was like, oh, I'm interested in this, I can go and do it, which is a nice feeling to have, as opposed to what is driving this. And as I look into what is driving this, it's I'm interested in this. I can go and do it, which is a nice feeling to have as opposed to what is Driving this and as I look into what is driving this, it's not what most people would think in open relationships, which is, you know, sex and and all that kind of stuff as I get deep into it.

It's like, I feel like I want to be the type of guy that that type of girl likes. And so it is you realize the Some of and I'm not saying all open relationships are this and I'm saying not not that all of my drives are this, but there is an element of it which is narcissistic. I want you to reflect on me. The you know ways that I would like to feel about myself. The opposite. He his argument was I didn't feel like the void was filled with one woman, but maybe tool to it. Oh, two hasn't hit it.

What about three? I need to take, take, take, take, take. Yeah, and I don't think that, and I guess what you find is that there is no amount, and that doesn't imply. Is it not 10? I always thought it was 10. Yeah. Has he tried? Does he try 20? No, that's, and that's how imply. Is it not 10? I always thought it was 10. Yeah.

Has he tried? Does he try 20? No, that's, and that's how I see people with money. He's like, you know, 100,000 didn't do it, but maybe a million, or subscribers. I've seen this over and over again, and I guess the question is, how stubborn of a learner am I going to be? I really hope not that stubborn because I have been given a lot of the things that I've aimed for.

Jim Carrey has a fantastic quote, like I hope you all get every one of your dreams and hopes met so that you can realize that none of those are going to fulfill you. And I've been very lucky to have achieved what I, what was a financial goal or a dating goal or a charisma, fame level that I wanted to achieve. And I just hope that my subconscious picks up that that ain't the game anymore. And it's starting to is what I is what I can say. It's I'm starting to get the message after a long time. It's like a deluxe and MDMA have been a big help. I've just thought of something. So I have I've had an insight for a little while that there's only so long that imposter syndrome can stick around while you disprove it in reality, before

you admit to yourself that this imposter syndrome has nothing to do with your competence and everything to do with your thought patterns and your addiction to the imposter syndrome itself. But I think that there's an equivalent to do with, I will be happy when. There is only so much success and so many milestones that you can reach. And you watch yourself move the goalposts further away from yourself again before you admit to yourself that it is not about the number and it is everything to do with the mindset that is leading you toward that interaction. Yeah, and interestingly, when I speak to people about this and even myself and they'll say,

I totally get what you're saying, but I still feel like I need to do it. Oftentimes my advice to them is, yeah, then you're not done. You have to go get more money and have to do more stuff because if you're trying to do the enlightened thing because that's what an enlightened person would do, you're still just stuck in that game of trying to be the best,

do the rightest thing and become enlightened to the fastest. So just bottom out, bottom out on hedonism, try not to hurt people, obviously. Like be considerate of other people's feelings, be honest, but keep your eyes open. I find it the most common advice that I'm giving to people. Pay attention to how you feel on that second date, that third date. Pay attention to the excitement that you have when you think that you have a date and how you actually feel when you're on the date and how

you feel after that date. Notice if and how you feel after that date. And notice if and when you feel excitement and fulfillment throughout that process. And what I have seen as I as I have kept my eyes more open is that I feel anxiety when I don't have the triggers that I think I need excitement before those triggers are fulfilled. And then as they're being, I shouldn't say fulfilled, as they're being, I like, you know, I'll just use a concrete example. When I was dating multiple people, I would feel anxiety if it had been a long time before, since I had done that,

I would feel excitement when a date was planned. And I would feel fine, regular, not even amazing on the date. And then sometimes there would come a point where I was like, I don't even want to be doing this right now. Like I'd rather just be home like I was last night wishing I was here. And so when you realize the crazy cyclical nature of that,

at some, I like, I want out. Is that how I feel? People need to fucking keep doing that. They need to understand how teleologically wired humans are. So there was a study done, this is really, really interesting. Study done on the most enjoyable parts of a night out. And this was quite important. For me, I was like, I'm going to pay for this after I left uni as well.

So I couldn't even access the journal articles. I had to download it. And they had people do self-reports, right? And self-reports for a bunch of different people, like a relatively representative sample size, pretty big study. And they had people do it from the middle of the afternoon until 12 midday the next day, right? So self-report, what is your current level of excitement. Peat level of excitement for pretty much everybody was about 8 p.m. when they were getting ready before they'd gone on the night out.

They've got maybe opened the first bottle of wine or first couple of beers, they're getting ready with their bros, they're shouting at each other because somebody's in the shower, they're talking about where they're going to go and who they're going to go out with and who's DJing and what the night's going to be like. That was it.

We are anticipatory beings. That's what we're here for. We're here to anticipate the thing that arrives. And dissatisfaction is not a bug. It is a feature. It is a part of being a human. Unsatisfactoriness is just built in to human nature. because if the way that you imagined having sex or eating a meal or chasing down a gorilla or a cheetah or whatever it is that you're chasing down, you'd probably be dead if you chased those two down. Whatever it is, an antelope.

If it was as satisfying as you imagined it to be, you would never do it again. It is built into your programming for everything to just be a bit shitter than you thought it was. Like, I hoped it would be 10 and it was like 7 and a quarter. Yeah, yeah. Because maybe next time, like, you need to get it into your head.

But that is not because the situation didn't meet your standards. It's because your brain is wired for you to never be able to meet those standards. It will always pitch potential reality higher than actual reality can go. And as soon as you see that code, you realize, okay, there's this example that I always love to use. People that are going away on holiday, right? You imagine the holiday you plant it with your partner or your friend. Yeah, yeah, oh my gosh, I believe this. And you think about the hotel that you're going to stay in. You think about the restaurant. You maybe research the restaurant beforehand

and you look at the menu and you look at the cocktail list and you think, oh God, I'm gonna have this amazing trip. And you get there and it's the first night and the sun's going down and you sat in the restaurant on the exact table, the one that you spotted on the Facebook page and you sent to your partner and you said, right, and you sit down and you're at the table. But then you notice that there's a bit of sand between your toes. And it's sort of a bit irritating.

And you got this drink, but you got the blended one as opposed to the iced one. And maybe it would have been nicer. And there's like the foods, it's nice, but it's a bit more spicy than you thought. And the sun's kind of burning my eyes a little bit. Like that is life. There is no situation where that doesn't happen. Your ability to be idealistic is always going to outstrips reality's ability to deliver that to you. And as soon as you realize that, that is the shortcut. I'm adamant that that's one of the most important lessons

that everybody installs. Yeah, I mean, and again, there's so many, so many angles on that insight. What I'm trying to learn, which is the thing that I cognitively know, but like you described, you know, emotionally don't have this. Yes, emotionally don't,

and I'm still an anticipatory being, is that I want to be a person more interested in reality than my idea of reality. Like because I have seen through some of the psychedelic stuff that that is where the joy is. The joy is the sand in your toes and the crappy shit. And you know, it's this conversation right here and my ass on the couch. And I'm trying and I haven't figured it out,

and perhaps trying is what takes me away from it. You know, there's just layers and layers of traps in these sorts of enlighten me things, but that is increasingly where I'm headed. And it's why you ask me a lot of the charisma questions today. And I genuinely had to think back because I have learned that making, I still think charisma is a worthy pursuit. Like I think finances are a worthy pursuit. Like still think charisma is a worthy pursuit.

Like I think finances are a worthy pursuit. Like I think dating is a worthy pursuit and all those sorts of things. But where I'm at is that I no longer can dilute myself into believing that the more people that like me enjoy my stories laugh at my jokes is going to improve my subjective experience of life at all. I just, I cannot believe that given my life experience at this point, I've had too much of it. And so, personally, I've moved away from charisma

and towards enlightenment, whatever you want to call it, spirituality, and I'm still just very, very beginner, novice in these stages. That said, if you haven't taken the time to feel like you've locked down your finances and are satisfied with your or not satisfied have worked on your dating life and your social scenario and have a career that you thought would be pretty, you know, really fulfilling. I think that you need to have that first hand experience of wanting and then being disappointed

to have that lesson really sink in. You can't listen to someone else tell you that it's not going to be worth it when you get to the top of a mountain. You got to get to the top of the mountain and go, is this it? You just have to do it for yourself in my experience in what I've seen from friends and family. You need to close that loop. There's a Naval quote which I fucking adore and he says, it is far easier to achieve your material desires than to renounce them. Yeah. And that is. I love it. That is the same for pick status desires,

notoriety desires, sexual desires, whatever. I have a buddy who was big into pick a partistry and was like prolific, like just a fucking weapon, an absolute weapon, every single night that we went out, there would be one or two girls that you would go, you would leave a night out at 10 p.m. to take a girl home, have a shower, and come back out to get another girl and take her home.

And I was like, fuck man, like you are committed to this thing. Like what is it? And he's like, yeah man, my future wife, she really better appreciate all of this effort I'm putting in. You're gonna have to explain to me about how the hundreds of girls that you're betting

is in tribute to your future unknown wife. He's like, well, when I'm walking down the street with my two and a half kids and my dogs and my wife and I'm pushing the pram, I don't want to look at a Brazilian girl and think, I wonder what it's to look at a Brazilian girl and think, I wonder what it's like to fuck a Brazilian girl. I want to have every single one of my sexual quirks

ticked off the list. And that's the same. You know, it's a, I do feel like he probably over-delivered on that. Like that's not achieving your sexual desires. That's indulging it. That's swimming in them. But it's the same thing.

Yeah, and I think it's, in my limited experience, I've got to go in just a minute, but it's hard. It, yeah, I don't know that that's exactly how it's going to work out for me, as I guess my, my reaction. It's, at least for me, it has been, my reaction. It's at least for me, it has been a journey of disappointment and frustration, and not one of like, got it, good, I'm ready to move on to the next thing. And I actually think that there's something important about that, because when I was more in the phase and still have it in me, I wonder, I wonder, I wonder, that doesn't go away.

It just, it just comes back after some time. Different flavors. Different hats. Different faces. But, you know, and, and, and, and the time for another conversation. But I still, I also think that, you know, what we're saying is, you know, two, three, four, of 10 girls isn't going to do it. I'm not sure that one does either, you know, and there is something to be said for the

fact that the monks, they've renounced sexuality entirely. So I don't want to say that the answer to all of this, because it's not open in relationships, is a committed monogamous relationship. I think that would be a little bit too convenient of logic. I'm open to that possibility, but I'm still exploring that in my life right now

and I do not know the answer. Funny story, OBS tried cel exploring that in my life right now and I don't, I do not know the answer. Funny story, OBS tried celibacy in elastid four days. So, so maybe it is, you know, who knows, we'll find out. Charlie, man, I'm really, really glad that we connected, like we've spoken to Tony's week and I'm very, very glad that we've got each other in our lives now. I think I'm going to come on your show at some point, we'll talk some shit. Yeah, please.

No, I've had a great time, man, chatting with you. You are fantastic at listening. Like truly, I can see the way that you engage with things that are being said, I'm jealous. If I was interested in charisma still, that is what I would be working on. Well, that's a very, very pleasant compliment. People want to join Carisma University, and they want to check out your channel. Where should they go? It's Carisma on Command on YouTube, and just about any of our videos at the top of the

description link, Carisma University, you can Google it as well. It'll take you to the page. Nope. Man, I'm looking forward to speaking again soon. Beautiful. Take care care everybody.