Modern Wisdom - #535 - James Smith - How Do You Develop Real Confidence?

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

James Smith is an author, podcaster, online trainer and not a life coach. Many people say that their number one personal development goal is to be more confident. But what if you don't have anything to be confident about? Is competence a required prerequisite to becoming confident or can you fake it until you make it? Expect to learn why most entrepreneurs are miserable, how leaving unasked questions can eat up your mental energy, the relationship between anxiety and confidence, how to deal with fear and failures, the heritability of confidence, whether women are actually more confident than men, the simplest way to build genuine confidence and much more... Sponsors: Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get £150 discount on Eight Sleep products at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy How To Be Confident - https://amzn.to/3C0gBfe  Check out James' Academy - https://www.jamessmithacademy.com/  Follow James on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jamessmithpt  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 friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is James Smith. He's an author, podcaster, online trainer and not a life coach. Many people say that their number one personal development goal is to be more confident, but what if you don't have anything to be confident about? Is competence a required prerequisite to becoming confident, or can you fake it until you make it? Expect to learn why most entrepreneurs are miserable, how leaving unasked questions can

eat up your mental energy, the relationship between anxiety and confidence, how to deal with fear and failures, the heritability of confidence, whether women are actually more confident than men, the simplest way to build a genuine confidence. And much more. Don't forget, you might be listening but not subscribed and that means you will miss episodes when they go up which is bad. It is TREZ bad. So go to Spotify and press the follow button in the middle of the page or there is a plus button in the top right hand corner on Apple podcasts. It supports the show. It makes me very happy and it means you won't miss episodes

when they go up. Thank you. and it means you won't miss episodes when they go up. Thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome... James Smith. I'm very, very happy for the last couple of months for you, some big wins. Another Sunday time bestseller, congrats on you. Mate, thank you very much and the same goes for your camp. I mean, watching your trajectory over the last few months has been really good.

Probably saw it before, like probably six months ago, when you went to Austin, I was like, this guy's serious. This guy's going to start moving in some big circles and then some of the guests you've had on, I think have just bolstered your credibility like to that next level. Like, yeah, you could see it from your first few years of effort where you were going.

And it's been a pleasure to watch you kill it as well. It's awesome to have a little community of people that are crushing it from the UK now, really, really cool. And people that are all supporting each other, whether it's the trigonometry boys or yourself, they're in starting to step things up. People are moving away to different countries, places that they know they can get more growth in. And it's really positive.

Every time that you win, it makes me feel good which is not necessarily something that I can say is a common culture in the UK so I think setting that example is probably pretty good as well. Yeah I am I hired like my first proper employee to help me with my socials like pretty much like a social digital manager and one of the things like YouTube I was like Chris Williamson we need to be more like him. Your end cards, your content, the way things all connect together, and interesting paradox that I've kind of created the other day. I call it the Hater Inspiration Paradox. And in essence, most of the people that probably hate on you or hate on me, if I use myself as an example, often personal trainers or black belts in Jiu-Jitsu. And the reason for that is they came to a fork in the roads where they could have been inspired by what I did

or hate me for what I've done. And it's quite ironic that the majority of people that will criticize you could have all too easily taken the same path as you to get to success. It's very weird that they're not the people that hate you the most aren't strangers. They're very similar to these kind of like two-lock forks and that I'm sure that a lot of people back in the day would have seen what you've done and could have had negative things to say. But for me, I was like, what he's doing,

success leaves clues. I was like, I need to step my game up, even if I could just, you know, follow the spearhead, even if I could just get in your path of least resistance behind you, like a bird flying information. And yeah, it's good when we kind of put up strengths, weaknesses of real basic, who in the industry is killing it in these different social industries and your YouTube stuff is top level. We've avoided it. And that's something that's good that it comes across. And the same thing for you, you know, you specialize. I wonder how much of the swimmer body illusion thing comes through here with regards to socials as well though, how many people are moving toward a platform which suits them.

Me being short and pithy the way that you do your stuff on Instagram wouldn't really work for me very well, but the longer form, more waffle-y, the both stuff seems to align. So yeah, there's there's a lot to learn there. Before we get into talking about your new book, which is on confidence, there is a food standards video that the LA school district has just been slammed for. LA school district is slammed for posting woke video that calls junk food bad is wrong and promotes new concept of food neutrality that claims diet culture is based on oppression. The LA USD posted a video on Instagram condemning negative attitudes towards junk food and claiming diet culture is based

on oppression. In the video, nutritionist Kira Niembe Diopp, who works with one of the world's largest snack companies, urges people to eat food without guilt. She also asks the audience to avoid thinking of foods as good or bad and instead promote a concept of food neutrality. Many took to social media to call out the lessons in the video and the fact that it was shared by one of the school's district's departments. What do you think about this? Well, some of the things they said, I've said before, but because I'm a straight white male, you know, people are very disregarded that.

Oh, it's okay for you, I'm privileged, you know, all of these things. So, to see it wokenified and then to have the finger pointed, you know, I've heard that dieting is racist, it's oppressive, you know, it's capitalistic. And people are getting very sidetracked with all of this, but watching the kind of woke version of it was a bit, yeah, a bit unsettling to see it really. It felt like your content from 2018 was being repurposed by the progressives. Yeah, and I don't understand why they couldn't have just said, hey guys, there's no such thing as a bad food, just a bad diet. There's no such thing as a good food, just a good diet, which I've got

old videos from 2017 saying that. And to make it all about, you know, oppression and is quite annoying to see something as simple as basic diet advice being put into a political pathway, where ultimately, you know, if we are going to solve childhood obesity and improve things in school, that needs to be a collective effort. And even if you're your extreme left or extreme right, surely everyone or at least the majority of people want their family household of young children to be brought up into the best world, eat in the best food and be in the best composition for sport, health, social activities, whatever. I don't understand why it'd be a political thing. Yeah, there's a couple of sentences in here that people might not have seen if they haven't watched the video. You're judging my food choices based on a false standard of health again, aren't you? Diet culture, fat

phobia and systems of oppression have created false hierarchies of food and it shows up everywhere. The nutritionist is then joined by Maya Finno, a black feminist and advocate against fat shaming who suggests that junk food is not bad for you. We are all incorrectly taught from a young age that our size and therefore the food we eat are markers of our self-worth. No, I don't think that anyone says it is, it's marker of your health, in your health's worth though, perhaps the only foods that are bad for you are foods that contain allergens, poisons, and contaminants of foods that are spoiled

or otherwise inedible. I think that this seems to me to be a way of using anything that you can get your hands on as a political football. What can you align a particular group with? How can you rally someone behind your cause? And saying this is oppressing insert marginalized group one and insert marginalized group two. Like, you know, it honestly wouldn't surprise me if somehow they'd managed to inject sexuality into this as well. But my point being that anybody that thinks that there are

not better ways to eat over the long term and worse ways to eat over the long term, what job does she have being a nutritionist? Also, she might have a little bit of a, how do you say, perverse incentive given that she works for one of the world's biggest confectionery manufacturers. Like, could it be that she perhaps wants people to continue paying her wage? Maybe. There's one of the most powerful lessons I've learned from you, and there's quite a few that I'll explain in this podcast, but the inner citadel is rife within this kind of, you know, there's fat phobia, which again is used as a political tool, there's body positivity.

Some of the objective things she's saying, some people go to more with e-numbers and they say, if you can't pronounce the makeup of that ingredient, then you shouldn't eat it, but they've never looked at the makeup of a banana and a strawberry, broken down to that level. And the whole, I do agree with some of the elements of health at every size. If someone is obese, there are more than one ways we can make that person healthier. We don't have to just look at fat loss as a single metric for improving that person's health. We can improve their cardio, you know, cardio ability. We could get them into a team sport. We could look at

their sleep. We could look at all these things, but we can't just say to people being overweight is fine. That's definitely an overcompensation. And I mean, again, there's lots of examples of overcompensation here. We can even look at it. There's almost a duality here with the feminism kind of side of things. The original course for feminism is a fantastic course, but there is an overcompensation that goes into the realm of man hating. And yeah, well, is it a misundry or misundry? Misundry. Yeah, misundry.

So they move into those realms of overcompensation. And it is kind of sad to see because that NSS $1 effect is, it hasn't worked for me. And I'm not surprised with the current state of diet advice and, you know, some of the other things that promoted in America, but you shouldn't go on to then award against people trying to give healthy, can advice and calling them fat phobic in the meantime. I was in Rome this week with my mum and one of the things that I noticed while I was there was the difference in portion sizes. Frankly, I was still hungry after I finished some meals, but I was satisfied. Now, that's because I'm used to, my satiated level is starter,

main, side, and big dessert. And I was getting an all-right-sized main, but it wasn't that big, and then maybe some gelato on the way past, and I was still hungry. But I was thinking to myself as I looked around the centre of Rome, which is a cosmopolitan city with people of all backgrounds and ethnicities, and probably a big chunk of people in different classes as well. The difference in BMI between that city and a lot of the ones in America is pretty stark. And that I think can probably almost exclusively be laid at the feet of portion sizes. Yeah, Joe. I was in Italy a few months ago and it's so funny, the Italian culture, I've gotten like an easy jet flight, the 7 AM easy jet flight, so in traveling around Europe

seems so appealing until you do the maths off if you paid for it. Okay, that needs to be at the airport for five. Shit, that means I've got a gap of four over the four in it. Anytime we can up with a four, so I was pretty grumpy on my way there. And the way the Italians don't queue, or they have a very different way of queuing to us. So I'm tired, I'm at the airport, and people just walk into the front, and I'm like, messaging my manager, manager, I'm like, man, Italian's rude, he's like, that's what they're like. And I was like, oh, God, I've got to get used to this. And the food is incredible in Italy, like it's incredible, but it is crazy. You go to like the Mediterranean or some of that and

that you say people are slimmer, they're in better shape. They seem to be drinking all the time as well. I'm there. How do you guys do this? There's a new system I want to sell. Is it having a cigarette with a bit of coffee at breakfast? Then is it having wine with every meal? Maybe we're missing out on something that we need to take

over to America and so. I think it's just make the portion size is smaller man. Honestly, make the portion size is smaller man, honestly, make the portion size is smaller seems to be the biggest difference I can find. But yeah, to run that off, I think that any opportunity for people to use intersectionality and or oppression as the vehicle with which to it latch itself onto something that is a common talking point,

like diet, fat phobia, body image, body shaming. It's pretty dangerous because you're talking about things that impact people's health genuinely impact people's health. This isn't just a fashion choice, this isn't about whether guys should be allowed to paint their nails or something. Like this is one of the fundamental elements that's going to contribute to your health long term. Moving on to confidence. What do you think given all of the research

that you did for your book, what do you think that most people misbelieve about confidence? It's interesting that there are several kinds of lines of thought and I'll say that half of what I wrote in the book I knew before, half I didn't. And, you know, John, I'm still not solid. The whole book doesn't say this is exactly what it is. I go through many theories where I see confidence on low-despectrums, you know, confidence and anxiety, confidence, predict and outcome of success, anxiety, predict and

outcome of failure. Then we could look at confidence alongside failure. is confidence being okay with failure or is confidence something tied to winning. One of my favorite elements that I'll credit you for was when we were in Austin together thinking a few beers you told me about the Zygonic effect and you started telling me about how you can open enclosed loops in your lives and if you don't do anything it's going to take on mental drain on you and something do anything it's going to take on mental drain on you. And something that now that's something you can leave with someone they can never forget. So I say to people, is confidence bullshit in some respects that

the majority of people use it as a reason to pick a path of inaction. So you hit a fork in the road, you can either take action or take an action. If you go through life always take in the path of inaction, always opening these loops, wondering whether or not the girl on the tube was single, whether or not your boss would have given you a pair of eyes, whether or not you could have got more responsibility at work, whether or not you could have told your partner how you really felt, is it all a guise?

Is not being confident a guise to excuse yourself constantly picking the source of inaction? And if we can call bullshit on this concept of low confidence, can we start looking things more pragmatically as an ability to close loops and not even for confidence as part of that to the side for anxiety, mental drain, insomnia. You know, everyone's had it probably where you've had a big night out. It's the easiest way to explain it and you wake up and straight away you think you've lost your phone And you know you haven't lost your phone. You know you were texting or firing flares when you got in, you up a heap or whatever it was, but you have to close the loop by getting up and

holding the phone and going, it's here. And so one of the first things that I kind of learned, I speak about in the book and the talk is, I'll we using low confidence as an excuse to get away with not picking a path of action continually in life? And that really is a really hard point for people to think about, because once you planted that seed in my mind, it couldn't go away. And that was kind of liberating.

And then I was quite excited to plant that seed until everyone else is mind afterwards. It's a dangerous thing to know, to think about the fact that maybe I use, I'm not very confident as an excuse to not put myself into situations where I can potentially face failure, because by inoculating myself from making action in the real world, I ensure that failure never comes up against me by never actually stepping onto the arena floor. And I think that that's a concern for a lot of people, man. The open loops thing, I'd never thought about applying it to confidence and to the fact

that people cause in action to occur in their life. And you're right, the number of times that you think, I wonder what if, how many what if, so you're going to have, what if I'd spoken to the girl on the metro, what if I decided to ask my boss for a pay rise, what if I decided to move to another country? What if I'd left that toxic relationship? I didn't want to. What if I stepped in and told my dad on my mum that their health habits were terrible and they shouldn't listen to that LA school district lady? All of these different things are continuing to open something in the back of your mind.

And even if you're not consciously keeping track of them, I do believe that the subconscious is. I do believe that every time that you decide to lean out as opposed to lean in, you are making yourself into the sort of person who is going to continue to lean out in future when difficulty arises, when you are faced with an opportunity or a challenge that you need to try and overcome. Okay, every single decision that you make now is going to engender a type of person that will make that same kind of decision in future. So it's not just about what are you doing now, how much do you want to speak to that girl? It's, do you want to be the sort of person in five years time that would speak to the girl or not?

It's objectively known as well in psychology that when you question people on their deathbed, especially old people, and you ask them about their life, people regret the things they didn't do, not the things they did do that didn't work out. And we need to instill and kind of haunt people a little bit to fully appreciate that. When you are 50 years older than you are now, if you're lucky, you are going to regret all of these open loops, these what-ifs, you're going to regret them, and they're all going to cause them a lot of mental carnage in your mind. And there's something so beautiful about getting closure on something and realizing it wasn't that bad.

And another thing, I'm sure you've read quite a bit of Tim Ferriss' work as well. One of his most famous tasks was about asking for a 10% discount on a coffee. And I just wanted to insert that in the book. I just wanted to take that beautiful idea of asking for 10% and put it in but what I realized is by putting it in the book I opened my own loop and then I had to go do the task that I never wanted to do. I just wanted to put it in there and I thought no one will know and I thought I'll know. This is going to haunt me. I'm not even going to be able to release the book. And I remind people that asking for 10% off a coffee isn't to get the 10% off. It's to look like a complete imbecile or buffoon, is to embarrass yourself. It's to completely disintegrate any

comfort that you have. But it's only past that point you can appreciate how valuable it was putting yourself out there and how it wasn't that scary. And when you can occur enough of these little victories, whether it's the number, asking someone to single, even if that girl says no thanks, I've got a boyfriend, even if she's lying, there is a euphoria after not because of the outcome, because of the action that you perceived, so scarily big that you do it and you realize it wasn't that bad at all. Did you come across when you were looking at the Ask for Tempsent of a Coffee? Did you come across rejection therapy and their 100 days of rejection program? No, tell me more.

Okay, so rejectiontherapy.com and there is 100 days of rejection principle here and you're supposed to do this one per day for 100 days and it's basically the same as what you're talking about, right? It's expose your therapy for people that don't like to do awkward things. borrow $100 from a stranger, request a burger refill, ask for an Olympic symbol donut, deliver pizza for dominoes, have a tour in a grocery store warehouse, play soccer in someone else's backyard, speak over Costco's intercom, get number one spot in Best Buies Thanksgiving line, send stuff to phantaclos, Santa Claus through FedEx, listen to a happy birthday song when it's not your

birthday, learn sales from the number two car salesmen in the country, like these are all different things that you can do. There's a TEDx talk of the same the same name that people can go and have a look at, but lots of people have done it and I think it is just exposure therapy about learning how unscary and undistructive receiving a know is. A lot of people I think have this tantamount to complete annihilation fear, that if they go up to someone and they don't get the response that they're expecting, that I don't know. Just on the other side of that is obliteration.

They think it's Piric, which is another thing I think you might have mentioned, Piric victories is from your email that you sent out before, is this victory tantamount to defeat? And in many cases, no. And do you know what, I've kind of tripped up into this because it's through being poor.

So when I was a student, I had no money, I would, you know, would take anything for work. I worked in a pub on a, on a, like a, pretty much like a caravan site when I was a student, I had no money, I would, you know, would take anything for work. I worked in a pub on a, on a, like a, pretty much like a caravan site when I was 16, when it was my 18th birthday, the guy who hired me was like, how would you ask that? 18, he's like, you kidding me.

You've been working in this pub for two years. He's like, four, you were 18 before. So I used to work up there, we used to have like, you know, builders in all the time, whatever it was. And then I got off of the job working in shop incentives stopping people to sell to them. So this is 10, 15 years

ago. Do you remember when Blockbuster started facing its demise, Love Film came out where you get posted your DVDs. So I worked as a contractor for Love Film and for every person I stopped and signed up to a membership I got £7 which you get you two coffees from Costa nowadays. So I used to do that in shopping centers. So the majority of things I experienced for the nose, then I got a job in Dortador sales, working for N Power and Gloucester, knocking on doors trying to convert people from the big giant British gas over to N Power. In some cases I could save people four pounds a month and then I had to be like, hey look 40 £50 a year that's a good saving. So I got rejected so much that I didn't realise how brilliant that was for me, you know, having things doors shut in your face, people telling you to fuck off, people get an angry that you're there trying to save the money or whatever.

And I kind of went through that rejection therapy as part of work and is weird because at the time, I was like, I didn't enjoy it, but looking back now, it's one of the things I'm most grateful for. How much did that cross over into other areas of rejection, fear and confidence, though? Because I know that you've spoken about how you drink or drank a lot before going on first dates because of anxiety about going up and speaking to a girl for the first time, even one that you've organized to go on a date with, or if you were given the choice between going and giving a presentation in front of a thousand people unprepared or asking for a girl's number in a bar, you would happily go and give the presentation.

So it does seem like there's different buckets or domains that confidence doesn't necessarily always cross over into. Oh, 100%. And again, the public speaking thing, for some reason it relaxes me to know what's really weird and this is gonna sound like such an artistic thing. The bigger the crowd the more I can relax because the less I can actually appreciate how many people are in the room. So if there's 20 or no 25 30 people I can actually lock eyes and you know, actually appreciate that there. When you get past a thousand people, it's beautiful because you can't lock into anyone that's there. But I think the rejection thing

you're completely right. And I speak about this in the talk saying that in essence, I'm an insecurity machine because I became a PT through working on my insecurities. I wanted to be less insecure and feel less inferior to other men. So then I did that and then when I became PT, be less insecure and feel less inferior to other men. So then I did that and then when I became PT, it was, you know, inadequacies and inferiorities that didn't really make prospecting a good thing because someone might not be able to afford PT, they might not want PT, they might be doing another plan,

but it's very difficult to not take that personally, especially when you do appreciate, I never really appreciated love film, I never really appreciated end power, but I appreciated myself as a trainer, I was like, a work hard, I'm good, I'm worth the money. So when I got rejected there, I was like, oh, that kind of hurts. So then, I'm through being insecure there. That's what led me down the path of making social media content. So I made content. So people would organically come to me. They were a warm lead. It would make the whole idea of prospecting on

conversion a lot easier. But then I became insecure about my content being right. So now at a fear of judgment and fear of, you know, all of this, then I started going out and searching and educating myself on evidence-based courses. In essence, a lot of the success I've had in my life has come through working on mine securities, which then I only really clocked that this is one of the main lessons of Jordan Peterson, where if you're in an existential crisis, you're not sure what to do with your life, take stock of your insecurities and work on them. And I was like, I look back and I'm like, wow, I didn't even know that and I was doing it. There are a lot of places that people can look, I mean Peterson said this on the second episode

that I did with him earlier this year, if you don't think that you have anything that you need to work on in your life, look inward, you know, you're not telling your truth sufficiently, you are not living up to your highest ideals, you're making promises to yourself and other people that you're not keeping, just this endless list of inadequacies, small things, the tiny little things. I promised that I would wash up tonight, to myself, I promised that I would wash the dish and the glass that I had dinner in and I didn't do it. Well, that's a thing, that's a thing that you can work on. A lot of people will have probably thought when it comes to confidence, especially looking at you, what's the chicken and egg

scenario here? Does confidence come first or does competence come first? Can you fake it until you make it? What's your thoughts on it? So I don't like the fake it to you make it thing. I think it's kind of a bit of a check out the conversation. That's a chicken and egg thing itself, but you're completely right. What I don't like, and I'll bring this into a context that you'll be familiar with, is when people see success straight away, they like to connect their own dots, it's like a heuristic where suddenly they're like, boom, boom, okay, cool. And some of the ways that I don't like they do it is they go,

oh, Chris Williamson, he's a confident guy. He's got a podcast. And you're like, okay, was he confident that he started a podcast, would he start a podcast that built his confidence? You know, the fact that you can jump into a podcast for three hours without show notes, is that confidence or confidence exactly like you said?

Then they'll sprinkle that with some ideology that's right at the moment. They'll go, I use a straight white male as well, you know, I got everything in one it in school, we got picked for sports teams, all of these things, which makes it a lot more of a complex debate. But with me, I think that it's only in retrospect that people now go, I he's confident. I'm like, pardon me, but I want to say, fuck you, I was frightened at the beginning, I was petrified, I was, you know, scared alone, I was scared alone. I was a PT on my own, even though it doesn't seem like a scary kind of job. It was. I left the corporate world. I moved back in my parents. I could have all too easily ended up skinned, broken,

going back to door to door sales. So even that industry is quite siloed off because although you have banned other PT's, you're competitors, you're not colleagues, you're in their fightin' for the same thing. And then it's just through consistent being okay with failing, turnin' up, and you know, I'm coming up to 10 years now. If you've got anyone to do anything for 10 years, they'd appear fucking confident. You know, that's some my mate, Cam is a carpenter. I watch him do stuff. I'm like, mate, you're a wizard. And he's like, mate, I've been doing this since I was 15. And I'm okay, that makes sense. So it does kind of annoy me that people

look at 10 years hard work and they can almost use the select series of confidence as a reason to not fully appreciate what you've done. I mean, what episode of podcasts were this be? What life 130, 540? So when you look at that times, the hours, sometimes I'm not saying fuck you to the people. I'm saying fuck you to their heuristics, their mental tendency to just take the reality and squish it and pull it apart to make it seem like it's trivial. Because that completely undermines the cheap code to success. What people need to be doing is to stop that tendency to just make a snapshot decision of how it happened and look into it. I've someone to go, fuck in hell, 500 podcasts. How many hours is that?

Oh, two hours, a fucking podcast, a thousand hours. This guy is, you know, on his way to mastery, not to mention everything else you've done outside of it. So, yeah, the competency thing is big and one of my favorite kind of lessons is about saying to people, stop avoiding failure because there is a massive utility to failing. Failing is brilliant because it brings you closer to competency. It also shows you the path to not do things. So even if we go back to my door to door sales, if I was too cheeky, too crass, too provocative, too facetious, too, you know, nonchalant, it didn't work. So, and again, my YouTube strategy at the moment

is to put out 100 videos and take stock of what works and what doesn't. Ultimately, the algorithm wants people to watch my videos. If a video doesn't do well, it's on me. And I need to double down on what does work. If I didn't or are so fearful of putting out a video that underperform that, I didn't put it out, I wouldn't be able to take that utility of it, not performing. So, you know, if people don't look at failure that way, you know, having a girl just go, oh no, gross, that was a horrible chat up. Although that is devastating to your ego and your confidence and your morale, that could be a lesson in which you can take upon yourself to then improve. And if people don't look at failure as having this incredible utility, they're going to really struggle to ever develop

their competence. And I say to people, if you become competent, something, two years time, someone's going to say to you, you're confident. It's not, it's almost like a byproduct of seeking competency that we get this magical super power of being confident. It seems like your expectations around what you can do and the challenges that the world is going to put up against you are one of the fundamental elements that this is. The first time that you do a live or a podcast or write a sub-stack or pitch to someone on the front door of their house on a cold December evening or something, you don't know what your capacities are and you don't know the challenges that you're up against. And then even after you do know what your capacities

are, sometimes the challenge can be so much further beyond anything that you've done before that you think, oh god, like this is really, really scary to me. But if you can get yourself into the mindset that on the edge of your zone of development is exactly where you're going to find out just how good you are. And if you're not that good, then fantastic, because it's going to give you feedback. I think I've heard you say that winning can cause you to become weak. Too much winning can cause weakness. And I mean, anyone that's been through a difficult breakup, like not one of the ones that completely destroyed your life, but one where you felt a little bit bitter

and resentful afterward. Your gym discipline, your diet discipline, your personal development, at least for me and a lot of my friends, for the next three to six months was unbelievable, turbo powered by that. Well, why? You've just come out the back of a failure. You've come out the back of something that shouldn't have happened or you get scorned or someone takes the piss out of you or a person that you respected

rebuts your efforts or something like that. That is motivation for a lot of people as well. And there definitely is a case of comfortable complacency that comes along with too many wins, or at least too many wins that are within a domain that you are never going to be challenged. If you keep on winning and you're always beating new records and always pushing yourself, I'm not sure that that would cause you to lose the edge. But certainly, the opportunity to use failure as fuel

is a pretty big blessing for people. I think this is why I love Jiu Jitsu so much because I had a period 2020, came out the pandemic, I trained a bit during the pandemic, you know, did some sneaky privates with the local black belts, and I went to compete and I was like, this is my opportunity to shine. And I even, this is the only time I've truly been overconfident with Jitsu, this is exactly the humbling I needed. And I said to my housemates, I'll be pretty annoyed if I don't get gold. And I lost all my matches, like embarrassingly so.

My first match I tried too hard and I guessed out. And the most horrible feeling was no, and I'd lost. I'm tying my belt three minutes into the match. And I was like, I'm done. And the only time I'd competed and said, I don't want to be here. And he kind of finished me. I'm a whole team with her in the corner. And I couldn't look at them. They were like, well done.

I'm like, don't say well done to me. I didn't deserve it. Then the next match, my mates were like, relax, relax. You'd be fine. This guy just took my back and choked me out. And they were like, you didn't even try. They weren't even trying to coach me. They were like, why didn't you try it? I was like, my head had gone.

And the next day it was probably the only day that I felt like depressed about something in years. And nothing to do with business work, whatever. And then there was a little switch in my mind where I just started taking things so much more seriously. I started in private super people, I started studying, I started looking into positions a bit more. And like the next six months, I was a monster at training. I was like, I didn't matter who you were, I was like, I need to start

scalping the higher belts, whatever it was. And then when I get through a period of being really comfortable with my training, I sit there and I go, fuck, I'm going to have to compete again. And when I compete, I can't, I hate losing, but I welcome it. If I lose, I'm going to get that kind of beast trainee person back who eats more vegetables, hits their protein, goes to sleep early, I says no to the beers. And the last time I competed, it was a really weird emotion. I wanted to win with everything I had, but I kind of wanted to get beaten as well. And I won on my matches, it's the hardest I've ever worked in comp. And at the end of it, I couldn't believe how hard I'd worked for someone who kind of wanted to get beaten.

And it was beautiful. It was euphoric. It was amazing. And then I came to the conclusion I've got to compete at a bigger tournament now. And obviously, Jiu Jitsu isn't my life. I don't get paid to do Jiu Jitsu. I teach class for free on a Friday, like whatever it is. That, to instill the values and the lessons that I needed to take into everything else is it's such a beautiful thing. I think that's why so many people love Gidetsu because even Rogan, Lex Friedman, Jocco, Willink, all these people, if they ever feel like they're winning too much in their life, they can put themselves in a room where they get humbled and they realize they're not that great and yeah your podcast might be doing well, yeah you might

have made a hundred million last year, yeah, you might have got this big deal. But come to this room and get, get truly scorned, get beaten, get scalped, get humiliated in some respects. And it's such a beautiful feeling because if you remain in this echo chamber, the room of winning and you're the best or the greatest, which is all too easy with success. You have too many yes men and I think they can really diminish your full potential. It's always good once in a while, just put yourself in that room and be terrified when I trained in Austin. I relished the fact. I was probably, if you put everyone in competency order, I was in the bottom three. And the other two guys that were in that bottom three with me, I was like, we're in it. we're in this together guys.

How heritable is confidence. Did you look at that? Yes, heritability and confidence is an interesting one. I actually found an interesting study about adopted children. And so, me, myself being adopted, I was like, is there, am I, as some of my personality traits, you know, in my genes? And it was saying that adoptive kids resemble the traits of their parents up until they got teenage years and then they start moving into more of their genetic sequence and code.

Then I started getting into this debate of gender and confidence, but I stayed clear of some of the debates because I was like, are men genuinely more competent or are they more dissolutioned? Are they more programmed through evolution to be more competitive things? And I was like, you know, why I probably don't know enough about gender to delve into this? But what I kind of came to the conclusion was, if you want to be a woman that's taller than a man, you've got it up against you. If you want to be a woman who's stronger than a man, okay, things are more in your control. You could be, you know, start working towards a higher echelon. That's something that you could rework towards. But I was like, if you want to be more confident

than the majority of people, that's something you can actually do. And I could point at anyone. No matter what disadvantages they had from a genetic standpoint, a upbringing standpoint, a trauma standpoint, give me that person for a year and get them to do enough practice. You can make something incredibly confident. Whereas you can't make people taller. You can't make them more symmetrical in the face. You can't give them whatever it is that people say you like when you're looking at social content. And I think there's a beauty to even if you've got it against you from a hereditary standpoint or a genetic standpoint, you can do the fucking work and get over it. If you want to play in the NBA and you're five foot two, you know, that's something where I'm

like, oh, maybe, maybe you need a better goal. It's interesting to think how low the bar is set for most people. This is one of the things that I think the black pill in-sell sort of discussion really gets wrong when it comes to men that aren't in the top 20% of men aren't being looked at by almost any women and blah blah blah. Do you realize how little almost every guy works on himself? Almost when you step outside of the world of internet personalities and look at the normal humans on the street. Almost no one is doing pretty much anything to develop themselves and make themselves better. The people that are listening to this podcast simply by being interested in longer form conversations about personal

development are in the top probably percentile, if not maybe 5% globally, right? All of the grandmothers that don't know that podcasts exist, all of that, okay, and then we'll reduce it down to men only, and all of the grandfathers that don't know that it exists, and all of the people that are too young, and all of the people that are too busy working, and all of the people that don't have an interest or an intellectual pursuit, The bar is set so low because the selection effect is unbelievably low as well. And I think that if more people understood that the competition is minute and all of the challenges that people come up against, the boredom, the repetition, the loss of faith, the fear of rejection.

Everybody else faces that as well. So you have to presume that if you're facing it and you just get an inch past it, you have selected yourself out from what everybody feels into what only a tiny, tiny sliver of what is already a tiny subsection of everybody feels. To become an extraordinary individual to me doesn't seem like a particularly difficult pursuit. It just requires a little bit of movement. This is something that going through your book I kind of realized which is the Matthew principle, are you familiar with this? Okay. So this... It will be in my next book. I'm sure it will. In the Bible, they talk about it in Matthew, which is what it's called, the Matthew principle, and they say, from those who have everything more will be given,

from those who have nothing more will be taken. And it describes, or we call it, what you want, the Pareto principle or power laws, right? These are ways that people who are winning a crew more wins and wins a crew to the people that already have them, people that are losing a crew more losses and losses continue to push down. And it seems to me that confidence works like this as well, that people who have even a tiny amount, they've decided to take that first step,

that inertia that they've got passed, and then they get a little bit of positive feedback from the world. So they have a bit of self-belief, and then they decide to go a little bit further and again, a bit more self-belief. That is how look at a a Rogan or a Dave Chappelle or a Del Beckham Jr. or whoever you hold in high esteem as somebody that's incredibly confident They have drilled this Matthew principal where confidence breeds competence breed confidence breeds competence and after a while they look superhuman read competence. And after a while, they look superhuman. I can't believe the capability that this person has. And then especially perhaps Rogan might be a good example for this, where you have someone that has crossed that confidence into multiple domains. So it's somebody that's not just prepared to do the podcasting, but then the live shows, but

then the jujitsu, but then the commentary, but then all that stuff, right? Douglas Murray is not only a speaker, but he's a writer, but he's just a journalism thing. Like someone that has gone through all of these, you think that person is so unbelievably willing to do things to the point where I can't recognize them as someone that is from the same species as me. And then you look at the people at the bottom,

and it's brutal because if you don't have the confidence to develop competence, you are going to reinforce that same cycle. And I think that this Matthew principle from those who have everything more will be given, from those who have nothing more will be taken, just continues to diverge people. And this isn't some cis heteronormative patriarchal

superstructure, right? This is simply the reinforcement mechanism. Peterson spoke about this on the podcast. He said, almost all of the rivers, almost all of the water in rivers are held by only the biggest ones, almost all of the mass that's held by star are only held in the biggest ones. This is the way that things work in the world.

This isn't due to some cultural artifact. This is simply due to the fact that people who do things and objects that have capability continue to do it more and more and more. Someone said to me, it's impressive, you wrote a book and I said, no, and I went in and I said, fuck you, I was like, no, I was like, you've annoyed me with the waves thought about this and I said to them, I sit you down on a Monday, I give you a laptop, I give you unlimited coffee, I give you the internet, and I put a pistol to the back of your head, and I say, here's your topic,

I'll need to research for 15 minutes, and write for 15 minutes. We're gonna meet at the same time every day. We're gonna do this for 30 minutes every day. There's gonna be a gun in the back of your head every day. If you don't do it, I'll shoot you. And in a year's time, we're gonna to assimilate all your work and we're going to look to see whether or not you put something together worth 10 pounds. Cool. Suddenly, you realize

it's not impressive to write a book. It's not impressive to write a good book. All it takes is work and consistency. The hardest barrier to write a good book is the belief that you can do it. The belief that you can turn up every day and put this together book is the belief that you can do it, the belief that you can turn up every day and put this together. Then the belief that you're willing to do the work and preparation required to sell it, promote it, go to the book signings, whatever it is. It's not an impressive feat to write a book, it's an impressive feat to believe you can do all of it together. And it's interesting what you say about, I've really been thinking about this whole status and men thing and it is a really, really interesting thing.

There are some things that men can't do. And again, something I'm not sure if I'm a pulled, disgusted, offended or what about it by the six sixes? You heard of this in men. So women over the years, whether or not it's made up by women or this was made up by men, I'm not sure, but it says women want the six sixes over six foot over the years, whether or not it's made up by women or this was made up by men, I'm not sure, but it says women want the six sixes. Over six foot, over six figure salary, over 600 brake horsepower car, six months since next girlfriend, six perk and six inches below the waist. Now, the majority of women, not probably publicly on camera, are looking for that.

And the statistics on dating apps, 80% of women, a man over six foot, which is 15% of the population. So there are unrealistic expectations from women, especially when it comes to dating. I didn't even know on Hinge, you can actually take off the height requirements, so they even get blind swiped. A friend of mine, I won't name him. He had to change his ethnicity because he was getting no swipes. So to the point that you know, I was saying to me, your account is broken or even shut it bound or whatever it was and he had to lie about his ethnicity to white just to get matches. What was his original?

Well, he's from Morocco. So I'm not sure what he put in. Is that what he's Arab? I feel like it might be. Maybe, maybe something like that, but for him to lie about his ethnicity and he definitely lied about his height. I was like, five left. He's short. And I was like, wow, we're trying to jump through all of these hoops. But if we were to look as a statistic of how many men are actually within the six, six years, you're talking a fraction of a percentage. And if the majority of women are after that, not only is that fucked, but I've often thought about how could I help men with the things that are obtainable. And I would love to put together a program where you can mix a good mindset, an entrepreneurial brain, and a martial art.

And, you know, the competency, confidence thing. Once you have mastered or got your blue belt in martial arts, or you've got to the gym and you've sorted yourself out, once you can get someone to deadlift their body weight, do a chin up, strangle out someone at the same belt level, you know, run a 5K without having a heart attack, have an online business where they put their laptop out for a few hours at night and they can create money or whatever.

Something, only do you create a lifestyle that's congruent to happiness in a lot of people, not only to improve their self-worth, their competency and the gym, whatever it is, you start to build their status from the inside up. And there are so many tools like you say that are just uncomfortable for people. People don't want to sell a product, I'm going to put themselves out there. People that want to, you know, lift in the gym, don't want to be in baris store to get in the front of someone else. People that go to martial arts are worried about sucking for the first two years, although that is the only way you can get better. And I do often think that, you know, if a man out there wanted the six sixes, he's looking at the wrong things.

Because I don't even think that those six elements are backed up by literature, the height thing, especially, I believe you said it was, it's not a predictor in a successful relationship. No, so there's an issue that we have here that the desired preferences from both men and women on the front end are not the things that predict relationship happiness long term, but there is an argument to be made that those are the things that get you past the front door. However, if you get past the front door regularly and the relationships aren't effective, you go, well, what's the point of doing this in the first place? This is just like transactional sex. I'm just masturbating with someone

else's body here. So I've heard that. I've heard that. I love it. All right, so talk to me about, it seems like anxiety in this sort of fear of failure is one of the key elements of confidence or a lack of it. What did you discover as the relationship between confidence and anxiety?

So we need to have, it ties into expectations as well, similar to what you said, because if we see anxieties predicting an outcome of failure, that is also governed by a lot of mental biases we have. We have loss of version, negativity bias. We've got all of these kind of things, pretty much, you know, like when you go to,

I've just thought of this as an analogy, roll the ball and it always is tilted to one way. So it usually curves in the direction of the weighted ball. If you had pessimism on the left and optimism on the right, the way the human brain works is if you roll it down the middle, it's going to curve off towards the pessimism side. So we have that. So this tendency to predict things as a negative outcome is going to happen. So how is it that we predict an outcome of success? How is it we can bolster our expectations? It's not a simple exercise, but we do need to go into things, you know, being more optimistic about it. And if we're really crippled by this fear of anxiety or whatever,

can we redefine the metrics for success? So let's say you are a single man, you feel like you're a low-status, you feel like a petrified, can you just say hello to someone? Can you compliment them on what they're wearing? Can you ask them what they do? Not invasive, not creepy, be chivalrous, hold a door, open someone, hey, you know, my name is James, I haven't seen you around here before. Do you study here? Are you, you know, is this your local coffee shop? You know, I usually say hello to you, whatever. There's something within people's capability that they have the confidence to do, whether it's prospecting or talking to someone for their business. If you set the bar as too far, it's always going to be very daunting. And again, we can always relate this back to fitness.

Never as a trainer would get someone into the gym and get them to do something they can't do. That's going to diminish their confidence, their ego, the self-esteem, whatever. It's all about finding what they can do and working with them to decide what's the next logical step. And that's why we have little 2.5 kilogram discs, you know, that's why we have these things. So if people can just snap out this mentality of being pessimistic, expecting things to go badly, if I get someone to squat 50 kilograms, I'm now installed into them, they're strong enough to do it. You can then work along with them and say, look, I think 55 is within your reach, you can do 50 for five, you can do 52.5, fucking three, whatever it is.

And we need to install progress overload into people. We would never chuck 40 kilograms onto someone's back squat and expect them to do it. So when people do take stock of this appreciation that they're going to predict a negative outcome, okay, why is that? We set in the metrics for success too high. Can we break this down to, okay,

did you get to the scares the fuck out of you? Could you go to your local gym and say hello? Could you watch 10 minutes of a class? Okay, dating scares the shit out of you. Could you talk to a stranger? You know, okay, business scares the shit out of you. Okay, could you call one person a day to pitch for business? Whatever it is.

And yeah, in essence, the anxiety is sometimes caused by having a lack of evidence that you're good at it, but you can't accrue evidence without action. So it has to be your most action first, create evidence that you're competent to finish anxiety over time. But it is such a complex nuance debate that's case-specific. In essence, we kind of just need to get people and wrap them up and say, you need to take action. You're not going to know anything about yourself, your capabilities, until you start doing it. And it's so much about getting moving and correcting the course on the way. If you haven't noticed, you write brilliant email marketing emails. Sometimes you just got to start writing. And then you can always delete the first third.

And then you have a delete the first third. And then you have a beautiful brilliant email. The worst thing is being sat there with nothing on your screen, being crippled by this notion that you don't know what you're going to do. A lot of the time I'll just start typing, get in a flow, get realised that this isn't even the topic I want to write about. Go back to delete the first part and I'm suddenly there. Action proceeds, motivation, action proceeds, competence, action, you know confidence all of these things is about taking the step first and correct on the way,

I think that's right I think that, people being stuck in in action spinning the wheels with the anxiety cost of the open loops from the zygonic effect just playing rampant in the mind another thing to consider as well is that, playing rampant in their mind. Another thing to consider as well is that failure under conditions of optimism is very different to failure under conditions of pessimism because failure under pessimism confirms your fears failure under optimism feels like an aberration and this is something that I've been thinking about a little bit that having a single vehicle for developing your confidence seems like a good idea. Now, we mentioned earlier on that confidence in one area doesn't necessarily always cross over, just because you're great at rugby, doesn't mean that you're going to be able

to speak to girls in a bar. But I do think that having a primary vehicle that you build that confidence, competence, feedback loop, it's a really good idea. And the reason for it is you become ever more attuned to how your performance within that particular domain is going. And I think that maybe for you, it's Brazilian Giu-Jitsu and writing, perhaps, or Brazilian Giu-Jitsu and social media or something like that.

Certainly for me, looking, and I've reflected a lot reading the book on sort of my journey from pretty unconfident person to now, at least within certain domains, feeling fine to go on Rogan or to speak to George. Very, very fucking composed on that. I messaged you, I was like, how's he doing this? How's he doing this? Because any person that's got any digital persona or presence, always imagines what it'd be like to get a message from Rogan. And you got it, you went on and it was like, it was your third episode.

It was like, you were one of his mates. And I read our message to you, I was like, fuck it, now, how are you doing this? Oh no, how many ice baths have you been on? Yeah, maybe that contributed. Well, it's interesting with that, people brought that up about, the Rogan thing, it's a big deal, but it would have been a bigger deal for me to go through

this entire journey of making 500 podcasts and speaking to all of these people, and then to get a message and feel like it was a shock. It's like, no, this is what you were working towards. This is what you meant to happen. Like, yeah, maybe you've jumped ahead a few moves that you were pleasantly surprised by, but this is literally the goal of what you didn't mean for this to not happen, therefore congratulations. But, yeah, the journey and having a single pursuit

that you can focus on, like, this is my vehicle for me developing my confidence. And I think that it's so interesting reflecting on the person that I was maybe four or five years ago, especially starting the show, or the way that I would have framed things, because it was very, very anxious centric. It was very much loss of version. I would be playing

not to lose rather than to win. That would have been my approach. I would have always been trying to take a very easy, no-failure potential route. That would have been how I would have gone about stuff. And now, if I have a bad episode on the show, one that I consider to be bad when my performance isn't quite right, rather than saying, this is some moral judgment on my worth as a person, this is because I am useless, bad, inconsistent, and disciplined, whatever, whatever, I can just look at it as what it is. I'm a lot more detached from my performance on my self-worth,

because I can say, well, look, what's the reason for why you performed the way you performed? Maybe you were under-slapped, maybe you hadn't hydrated enough, maybe you were too hungry, maybe you hadn't prepared enough for the guest, perhaps the guest was having a bad day, maybe it's not your fault, maybe it's them that what else can you do? And that's what I mean when failure and deconditions of pessimism versus failure and deconditions of optimism are very, very different experiences. It's that John Carvina thing, you win or you learn. Whereas in reverse, it's either, I don't know, you fail and your preconceived ideas about what you were going to do are confirmed or your surprise.

Like, that's the alternative, right? That's pessimism versus optimism. Yeah, and it's interesting. I joke there about ice baths. I'm not, I'm not a fan of ice baths. It doesn't mean I don't rate what they do for people. I just don't like cold water. And I think there is, with confidence as well, if you can do things that really disturb you, like not from trauma, but like competing for me, I hate it because I put so much pressure on myself to, to win. And I also just put so much pressure on myself, unlike this is my density, this is why I love this, what I want to do. That is frightening, it's terrifying.

And especially when you can get injured. So in training, people won't try and injure you in competition. It's about making your opponent submit. If a leg breaks, if a knee pops, anything, it's kind of fair game. You put yourself in the competition bracket, you don't know anything about your opponent, you don't know what they're like, I joke, can I go, maybe he's been to jail, maybe you know whatever it is. So everything's on the line, my miniscus, my ACLs, my retetic off, I saw like a spiral fracture in someone's humerus from someone not tapping.

So shit can get pretty gnarly, but by putting myself in there, and when I'm competing, I hate competing, I hate it. When I'm stood there on the map, my feet are sliding around and sweating inside my flip flops, I'm stood there, and for the moment for a step on, I go, why am I here? Why have I ruined my weekend by doing this? But the second is all over, suddenly everything else isn't so bad,, the podcast, the FaceTime, the talking on stage, whatever. And I think that's why a lot of people get, you know, such benefit of ice paths, because when they're sat there,

they're mind-saying stay, they're body-same, what you're doing, we're gonna die. And if you can harness the monster of that discomfort, suddenly get a nice bath and go, oh, I'm single, I'm lonely, that's a pain point. I'd like to address it. There's a loop here I could close. I'm gonna take bath and go, oh, I'm single, I'm lonely. That's a pain point. I'd like to address it. There's a loop here I could close.

I'm gonna take my headphones out. Hey, look, never seen you in the Starbucks before. You know, I think you're really pretty. If you haven't got a boyfriend, his my number. If you do have a boyfriend or you want to lie to me, that's completely fine. Great day. You know what I mean?

Suddenly, if someone wants to go, I sparse for five minutes or ask the guy, oh, ask 10 birds out, you know, ask ten of them. So that's why you need to do it, man, I think. And this is something I realize living with Zach, because we've got an ice bath now at the back of the house, which you'll be forced into when you come back to Austin. And for me, I find it, it's difficult, but it's not that hard.

Forty degree water for three, five minutes, we've worked ourselves up to now. And it's just not that hard for me. So, although it's, I can almost kid myself into convincing me that I've done something hard, because for Zach, it is, Zach was getting in and out, talking to himself. He'd be in for 20 seconds. He'd get out, call himself a bitch, get back in,

get back out for 10 seconds, get back in, and he'd be shouting at himself. I've watched that boy get in and out of cold tubs, in reps, he's done reps of cold tubs, not sets. And it's easy to kid yourself that the thing that you're doing is difficult. A lot of the time I think that's people playing within their own inner citadel, perhaps, or just like their zone of competence. And another thing that I was considering as well is how rarely driven people celebrate their wins. You're very, very quickly looking past whatever it is that you've just done, peering

over its shoulder, even as it's only just finished to then think about what's next. And this is a real delicate balance I think that people need to be able to be grateful, thankful and celebrity of their own victories whilst not letting themselves lose that edge. It's a very, very hard balance to strike. This is something I'm struggling with. If you were to say, what's your biggest mental downfall at the moment, it would be the ability to celebrate victories. I I'm the one that says you know we need to be sat in the metrics. And I think that anyone that's in my position is very easy to be here for correct. It's very easy. Something advice I give I can't take myself. And one of it is about celebrating

small wins and I've been good at it before but I've also been terrible. This weekend event in the Apollo we've got three and a half thousand people sold out of them. And in my mind like like people like, you must be buzzing, I'm like, I don't think I am, because to me, one, I want to make sure it goes well, I can't be happy until it's gone well. And even if it goes well and afterwards people come up to me and go, that's the best you've ever spoken, in my head, I'm like, well, what next? And I'm really, I did it with a million followers on Insta, you know, had a beer, then a million on TikTok.

These were things I looked forward to for years. Then third time, Barcelona, my publisher, a hop Collins, he goes, you and Luke have just done the exact same thing. He goes, what, he goes, you should have celebrated, but instead you were relieved, because the idea of failing to you was such a big thing you wanted to avoid that you shouldn't feel a sense of relief when you conquer things that you wanted to conquer. He's

like, you should be happy. And I think about this quite a lot, because I don't take stock of any achievements or accomplishments. And where it's, what you always want to do is have someone slightly above you, similar to the humility thing in Jiu-Jitsu, they're always high about snooing when you're up lap belt, they're someone who's higher than you as black belt. And the gradings of black belt go on time. So if someone's a black belt now, I can never overtake him. So that's impossible.

But like, I did a really cool show, did Manchester Apollo, and then also our pizza and sold it out to Knights of the World. And then I got the event in Apollo and then our pizza and did that and he added Wembley. And I'm like, fuck, I'm not doing Wembley. And you know, if I could only go back to 2018 James and knock him on the fucking face and be like, hey mate, you're doing 50 people at a venue now, you're going to be doing three and a half thousand soon. 2018 James about fucking hell, or you can have a million followers. Shut the fuck up. You have three best slums.

Fuck. Oh my god, I can't wait to be 33. But now at 33, I'm kind of like, oh, you know, it is a difficult thing. Where this happened a few after Rogan. A little, but not much. A little bit not much. Mostly because it was, it's like a step change, I think, in how you're perceived or whatever within the industry, that you've

got the stamp of approval of the guy that's currently the leader. But I learned about a term called championship ring or it's gold medal syndrome, which is... Depression in gold medal athletes? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What do you do after you've done one? But I did mention one of the guys from trigonometry, I took them out the week before I went on and they were going on Roug in the next day and we did the ice bath in Colterb and went

for barbecue at Terry Blacks and they were going through, vacillating through the same emotions that I was about to the next week. So it's kind of funny to see them six days ahead of me doing the thing that I was about to go and do. And one of the guys mentioned, I'm concerned about this sort of gold medal depression thing. And I was like, well, yeah, but there's a reason that you've got 10 fingers and a championship ring only fits on one. So the goal of going on and doing it is to go and do it again. Like, you know, if you're Gordon Ryan, right, and you've got a couple more challenges for this year, maybe two more challenges, I think. And then if he does those, there is no way that anybody could say he's not the greatest

grappler that's ever lived. Okay, well, if you've won this title for the first time of Great Disc Rappler, how long can you hold on to it? Can you do it for two years? Can you do it for three years? Can you sustain it without any injuries? Can you do it flawlessly? Can you beat everybody in under a minute?

There is always a next level, I think, to get yourself to. But it's interesting. I think it's important for people to hear the challenges that you would have that they will face as well. You know, the guy that sold all of the tickets at the live shows and does the thing, for some reason, despite the fact that he literally wrote a book on trying to be as grateful as possible and celebrating small victories and he's got this big academy of people and he's saying, you lost, you lost a pound this week, you've lost 10 pounds so far this year.

Congratulations. This is something that you should is struggling to imbibe his own advice. And this is why the insights that people that are genuinely writing content and creating stuff from the heart, that's why they're valuable. This is the big difference, I think, between somebody like yourself and somebody like Brian Rose, let's say, who I think is completely creating content exclusively to try and get an effect. I don't think that he's personally invested and I watched one video from him a few years ago and I've been very public of my distaste for Brian online and I know that you've been on his podcast so you don't need to comment, but I saw a video from him talking about his alcohol addiction and he'd space the camera and he's walking around near

Bethnal Green or something like that and he is genuinely opening up about the fact that he's struggled with alcohol daily for Decade maybe maybe multiple decades and I was like if this was what this guy's content was like all the time Not only would I not be a hater I would be a genuine fan. This feels like him opening up. This is evidently something which not only is valuable But is something that is super super personal to him. This is this is a different version of this man So my point being when people do things. I think it's very important for those that have got

positions of success on the come-up to continue to remind people that the challenges that everybody else is facing are still the ones that the people that are leading the space are as well. I think that the and it sounds really privileged to say this there becomes a numbing effect the higher actual ones you go to because you become conditioned to it. Like, I even flew first class about a month ago. When I sat there, I wasn't buzzing like I used to. And I was like, James, you fucking piece of shit. Like, you were fucking emotional the first time that you sat in business class. You had a glass of wine, you sat there, you were like, oh my god, this is amazing.

I don't even drink on them anymore. I'm like, oh no, I don't want to be tired when I get to the other end. I'm like, this is the fucking pinnacle of most business people's lives. So I kind of do have to remind myself, but weirdly, this numbness to success is making me broody, right, to have kids.

Because part of me is like, you get kind of above the power pit in a certain sense, my life's great or whatever. And I kind of think like in the next three to five years, what would be great would be the inclusion of kids as a project, as something to them, not to be constantly dissatisfied with the wins, but to have something completely,

I know I could be wrong by means, I could be on a podcast in a few years going to make, I don't have kids. But parme is like, I wanna take things away from venues, revenue, all this thing, and have like a little project that can sit by the side of it. So I have my humility and gizitsu, and my ultimate project being my kids, and then I have business as just like one leg of everything so that you can kind of like diversify your attention to different things.

But yeah, I think that, I don't know whether or not it's actually in there, but the last couple of years, I was like, oh, I'm kind of getting a bit broody for that because you kind of complete these fields in, you know, certain areas with podcasts and whatever it is, but it's almost not real. You know, I mean, it's not real. The money comes, you spend it, it's gone. Boom. The podcasts, they come, people listen, they go into like a library. And then sometimes you just want to make sure that you're winning the right races, because ultimately what you don't want to start this mega podcast, mega loads of money, but not have a family in the little start.

I want to share it with. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Dude, I think we're both in a similar situation here. I've been saying people have been asking, do you want to have kids? It's only been the last two years, probably, that I've genuinely been able to say that I can't wait to become a dad. Genuine, you cannot wait to become a dad, because all of this time that you've spent working on yourself and building yourself up and helping other people to upskill their world, and it's fantastic and fulfilling, but it doesn't feel as altruistic as funneling all of that toward some tiny little human that is your genetic heritage. And one of my friends, David Parallel, was talking to me. And he was someone that's very, very successful.

He does a right of passage, which is this cohort based online course. And it makes a terrifying amount of money. And he's very, very successful and helps people to enact their dream of becoming writers online, so it's fulfilling in all the rest of it. And we were out for dinner and he said something along the lines of, I think I spent most of my 20s preparing myself to become the father that I want to be. And that is a beautiful way to look at it, even though you weren't doing it at the time, even though that was your inefficiencies and fears of self-worth and your desire to chase

tale and get drunk and do whatever, all of those experiences created a person downstream from that that is going to be the sort of father that you want to be. And I think it's one of the justifications. You know, for all of the more 50.1% of women at the age of 30 and blah blah blah and all of this sort of stuff, there is a non small cohort of people for whom the kinds of parents they will be in their 30s are orders of magnitude greater than what they would have been in their 20s. And I think that me and you probably fall into that camp. Yeah, I think it's kind of sad, but not listening to... Sometimes when I listen to entrepreneurs,

talk sometimes or feel sorry for them, it's really weird thing. Like, people that are so caught up with money, I think you're never going to love anything as much as you love making money. And money, although it opens up experiences, whatever, I was like, I look at them and I go, I really hope I never have that relationship with money, because you're probably like that more than your

kids or whatever. But also when people say like, oh, how do I even know I like my kids? You know, I think it was Alex hormones, he, that guy, him and Derek, more place more days talking about, oh, why would you have kids that ruin your productivity? Why would you have kids that would do this? And part of me like, I said this to a wealthy person the other day, and I don't think I liked it. I said, I'm wealthier than you. You've just got more money. And I really didn't sit well with him.

And I was like, I don't feel sorry for people that are like that. Because ultimately, it's like the ultimate sacrifice. You know, back in the day, you could do that. Is that your dog? Can you go and strangle it? May, I'll take a free kick into its ass. It's the most happiest. You can tell it's a jack rostle, right? It's got dogs got anxiety. You know, like back in the day, you could be like a

Spartan warrior and you'd like the best thing we could do is die and battle. Like now, you can't even do that probably because, you know, you would just be sent off to some little conflict that's a political thing when you die and it would be a waste. Now I feel like the best way to fall in your sword is to be like a proper, good parent. I think that's not far off. Homosy and Layla, when they came on Modern Wisdom, they spoke with a little bit more nuance about the position and they said that a lot of what people are trying to do with kids,

there's Alex had read something about it and it was in a nice framework. Six areas, service, legacy, improvement, something else, something else, and he said, we feel like we already get that from the particular construct that we have to our life now. And that seems like a more balanced version than it's going to damage my productivity. But one of those may be the real one and the other one may be the public facing version. I don't know which ones which. But yeah, I think for me and you, from where we are now, which if you told me this, I guess if you told either of this what, five years ago, yeah man, you're going to feel

paternal broodiness. You're going to not actively hate kids or they're annoying or they're the thing that stops your business partner from being able to go out on the last with you or whatever that they were, but you're actively going to when you see one on holiday, go like, it's pretty cool isn't it? It's cool. You spend longer than you should grinning at them and then the parents see you and you're like, oh, the non-sradar is like, no, he's cute, he's cute, I'm not attracted to him. But yet another thing that you mentioned earlier on was alcohol, and I brought it up to do with Brian as well. Alcohol is bottle confidence is something that I've heard a lot of people talk about,

but I also know that your relationship with alcohol has changed a good bit recently, talking through that. Yeah, you know what, like it just makes me feel like shit more than ever. I'm not sure if that's physiological or psychological. And it's quite interesting because now if I go back through my rugby pictures, I've got to be in my hand all the time. I used to drink heavily every weekend. Part of me looks like now I kind of cringe looking at my younger self going, snapping your life and go, mate, why are you getting blackout drunk every one in every seven days? I still drink now, but for the right occasion, we finished the event the other day. I'd drawn a beer on like now, I'm cool. But then we had a full-gram hostess in Belfast with that big feed, and I was like, yeah, I'll have some lines here. But then

the dating, taking alcohol out of the equation, was another utility of deprivation. So I asked people with data apps, I'm not going to say I'm better than you because I didn't use one. Could removing data apps make you a more confident person? If the answer is yes, you should consider to do it. Cool. Now you're going on dates. Could removing alcohol from that situation make you more confident on dates. It's kind of a double edged sword this one because in essence it will make you have to do the practice you need rather than alcohol just masking it and covering it up. Cool, I also have a big bit about this in my live show where I talk about the effects

of drinking on dates. What do you mean? Someone in your eye that, that's not me. One drink, you're like, hey I'm being so sure. I'm being so sure. I'm being so sure. I'm enjoying myself. Then you have two drinks and you're like, I really should stop judging a boat by its

front cover. And then by six drinks, you're like, I really should stop judging a book by its front cover. And then by six drinks, you're like, wow, this is gonna work. Yeah. And then the next day, you're like, fuck, I shouldn't have done that. So like, I'll quite think there's a, there's definitely a utility of depriving it. Then JP's utility of depiration were porn.

So porn stops human ground on dates, because if you have a wink, there's no way you're dating anyone for the next six hours. I'll probably pull out more dates than I have women. And then when I ground on dates because if you have a wink there's no way you're dating anyone for the next six hours I'll probably pull out more dates than I have women and then when I go on dates I've got a utility or deprivation of drinking okay I don't drink blah blah so yeah there's definitely And alcohol should be used kind of sparingly. I know you've done stints as well of sobriety, but I think that I'm in a happy relationship now and that's a massive Kind of benefit to not wanting to drink.

So I'm kind of like, what's the point? And I know that Andrew Tate jokes, I remember just before he got cancer, he was like, clubs are for people to fuck. He's like, you go there, you get drunk, the dynamic is the men by the drinks for the women, women flock to the guys, cool. Men get pussy, girls get dick, whatever,

that's his way of his anger in it. And I was like, fuck, he's got a fair point. I was like, now that I have a misses, I wouldn't dream we're going to a club, I'd be like, what's the point? Then I'll be here drunk and dance. I'm like, what's the point? Yes. You know, I have other things that make me happy. So yeah, alcohol I think is sometimes nice relaxing, but it's also self-destructive. I think people do need to appreciate that. And if you've got goals and ambitions in your life that you want to accomplish, if one can date an apps and booze

and get in in the way of that, you need to eradicate them. And you can always reintroduce booze when you're in a happy relationship or a marriage. You can always reintroduce porn even when you're in that relationship. You can always reintroduce date an apps if you've got nothing in your pipeline,

but people do need to look into our calls, a crux that almost bypasses. A confidence is a lot like fitness. You do need to keep working and paying into it. Otherwise, it will go away and it will diminish. You lose anything. Skills are perishable. John Dana has said that, Gordon Myers coach. And you never really think about the things that define the skills, even whether it's playing darts or bowling or whatever, they perish over time. They will diminish over time. So I think that you don't want to come to rely on alcohol. Otherwise, everything will seem more daunting sober. Yeah. Alcohol is a buttress that a lot of people rely on because they're scared of being social sober. And a lot of the time,

I mean, I've spoken about this forever, right? This has been my thing for a very long time, the sobriety extent. It was one of the biggest, most important changes that I had made in my life, not because I had a problem with drinking, but because I needed more time and money and consistency and energy to spend on things that I truly cared about.

This is quote from a homozy, actually. I'm gonna make a prediction about one of the things that I think you may end up dialing back in future as well. I think that you'll end up being read-pilled about caffeine too. I think that you'll end up dialing that back as well. And this from a homozie is after I've done 500 days with that caffeine, this absolutely nailed why I did it. Cycle stimulants don't let them use you.

If you can't function without them, they've stopped conferring a benefit. Be able to stop and only use them when you really know you can crush. Off on, off on is typically good enough for most. I do love caffeine, I like it. I do, I think it's probably as well, because you know what?

It sounds great to say this. I've recreationally used drugs on my life. I went through a phase of when I came off, I'll call my early 20s to MD, when I took MD, I was like, wow, why have I drunk my whole life? I went through all these kind of cycles. And then, you know, that early phase

of coming into money and you're like, oh, you know, we'll get a bag in, go somewhere nice, whatever it is. But genuinely, when that caffeine hits me in the morning, it's like my favorite drug. Like, because my values are so leaning on productivity and work and servicing, like a good video, a good concept, a good live video, even going in the Facebook comments and let my group or whatever. So I'm getting a high from a drug and I'm being productive. I've got these two realms of happiness and dopamine

coming in through it. I'm like going out and racking lines and partying. I'm like, no, no, no, caffeine and productivity. Let's go. So yeah, I do appreciate that there's definitely independence on it, but I like the dependence. I don't want that natural because it's not what addicts say. Yeah, but you know what? Who was was it who said find what you love and let it kill you slowly? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's another one because that coffee in the morning, I love it. That and an almond croissant little dip in the sea. Quick poo.

You know, I'm in a better position than I was before. How long did it take you to fill the benefits? I would say about a month probably, which is quite a long time to put up with not having caffeine, but I realized, I'm going to do a video on it soon, I realized that I didn't have varying degrees of tiredness, I just had varying levels of caffeine concentration in my blood. If I was tired, I would have more caffeine. I wouldn't look at the underlying question of why you're tired.

And you spoke about this before, right? That alcohol is masking, it's filling in all of the holes that you're not developing within yourself. Okay, well, caffeine is filling in all of the holes that your sleep and your rest and your parasympathetic work isn't getting to. You're not restoring yourself. Like, you shouldn't be tired at 3pm, you shouldn't be tired at 11am. There is something, it shouldn't be the case, we managed to survive for hundreds of thousands of years with this makeup, not being injected

with caffeine in the middle of the day. Oh, maybe we had bifase sleep and we had a nap or something, fuck off. My point being, you shouldn't need to rely on it, and if you need it to perform, then it's stop conferring a benefit. I realized that I didn't have any understanding about what was good for me in terms of my energy balance and that maybe different for you because I think that you have a genuine love for the impact of caffeine and it's part of your daily writing ritual. But when I took it out and then reintroduced it after 500 days, if I do Around about three days a week now is sort of my limit So that's kind of easy for me to do, but dude if I have a training session with caffeine now It is I'm gonna blow the doors off. It's so good. It's unbelievably good

And it was never like that before. It was just it was just a training session You know in America and somewhere in some places in the UK they've got this can of engine called rain Yes 200 know, in America, and somewhere in some places in the UK, they've got this can of end drink, called rain. Yes, 200 milligrams. 350 in America. Oh, yeah. Like that's already again. So like the idea of having two, 300 milligrams of caffeine, and especially like a sparring session, I love it because that much caffeine, I start sweating quick, I become slippy. And like, I like the aggression, I'll catch like a knee in the temple and be like do it again. I love that energy I get from it. Sometimes I do like the crashes because the crashes I get on caffeine are the only times I can fully relax or justify it, but this is just the addiction talking. And the worst thing is when you get a modicum of intelligence, you can justify the addiction

better. So, yeah, the caffeine one is going to be a difficult one for me to think about, but you're right, it is completely masking the shortcomings in energy, which is ultimately one of the most valuable commodities. And for me to have that is one of my like wake up principles, I just love it. Like, have you spent much time in Australia? Never been. The coffee there.

I can't explain it to you. I was never a coffee stop. I was happy with my little pint of latte from Costa. When I went to Australia, I was like, my whole life was a life. So like the first time I done MD, I realized that drinking wasn't as much fun at a festival. When you draw Australian coffee, the bound movements,

the come up, the density, the taste, even the current attention they put into it, I'm definitely a dealer. Like I sound like someone proclaiming how good their dealer is, I may honestly be. He's got the fight, he's got the rocket this week. Yeah, he's got the absolute fire. So yeah, it's like Australian coffee culture. We'll have this, even if you have a D-Caf, probably enough to get your guts going. that with some proper proper needs to get you to Australia because you were in Dubai for a bit and I joke said Dubai is great for people that have never been to Australia. Yeah very nice. I am one of the things that I've kept on thinking about throughout thinking about confidence and reflecting on your book, is the asymmetry

of what we see in ourselves and what we see of others, and that being a cause for self-judgment. So it's one of the reasons that I think people who have achieved external success, it's important for them to open up about what their internal challenges are, because we see our own failures from a front row seat on a daily basis, right? The tiny, tiny little nuances of all of the indecision and the complete failure that you have to get upon time, but you hit snooze this morning.

No one, nobody is going to know about that, but you'll know, okay, let's add one to the lost column. And then you quickly checked your phone to see if somebody had texted you, oh, I said, I wasn't going to check my phone before 9am, but I know that I looked, but I didn't properly look and then you try to excuse it. And you know, all of the things, I just endless numbers of failures that you view from a front row seat. And yet, all that you see of everybody else, even the people that you're the closest to, the manifestation of their actions. You don't get

to see the vacillation that's going on inside of their brain, all of the flip-flopping backward and forward between what I could or what it should have done. And then take that one step further removed to the people that you see online that is most of the people that you see. You don't see that many people day to day. Okay, well, they're giving you the highlight reel

of only the stuff that they ended up doing, which is not all of the things that they thought about. And I think that just realizing, and it comes back to that, the bar is set unbelievably low because everybody feels the same just comfort that you do whenever they're faced with the same things. When it's warm and comfortable on a Thursday evening

and you're laid on the couch watching Netflix and you know that you're supposed to go to training in an hour's time, everybody has the same lack of desire to go there. Everybody does, and it is the bar is so low for you to be in the cohort of people that does the thing as opposed to not doing the thing. I think the best way to kind of like the saying that we have more in common than we do differences. The vast majority of everything humans have is in common. It's not differences and it's kind of annoying that even when we point

the finger at race, gender, you know, all of the things that are hot topics in the woke community, we have so much in common. Let's say we all want to lay in and bed, we all want to scroll and get dopamine hits on TikTok before we go to sleep, we all get horny. We all, even in loving relationships, it's gonna be sexually attracted to other people. We all then have that internal conversation of being like, you know, no, I shouldn't act on this. I need to be more long-sighted. We're self-destructive and we drink alcohol.

We, you know, like, that we have so much in common. And yeah, let you say, sharing these emotions and these ways that we think is such a big step in it because absolutely, yesterday I was quite openly, I was tired, I was grumpy, and with everything being shot for the Queen's funeral, it just kind of fucked my mood. I didn't have a reason to go out of bed. You know, depressed people don't get out of bed. I didn't have a reason to go out of bed, so it made me feel depressed. So then I was like, I was kind of like annoyed and people are like, oh, I'd you hate the Queen. I'm like, that's not what I said.

I've had my options taken away from me and it's made me feel like shit. So I was like of like annoyed and people like, oh, I'd you hate the queen. I'm like, that's not what I said. I've had my options taken away from me and it's made me feel like shit. So I was like, I'm just gonna be open about it. Someone was like, oh, why aren't you sad on my story questions? I was like, she lived in 96. I'm not gonna be sad about it. So I kind of ran it a bit and just let out this grumpy

inside part of me and someone message me going, I like the youth self on socials, I just bought your book and I was like, it was kind of liberating because I think that it is very easy for people to hide behind this guys of, hey, here's what the productive shit I did today. And you know what, one of the, strangely, I don't usually respect everything who says so much, but Gary Veeded a video where you're saying, some days I don't get out of bed and I was like, oh wow, the guy who I assume in my mind never stops saying that he has days where he doesn't do anything.

I was like, it's pretty nice to hear that. And I thought to myself, I need to be more sharing about that. So hey guys, it's 4pm. I just woke up, whatever it is. So you can kind of show people that you're normal as well. That's the same as the Brian Rose video, I think. It's someone dropping the veil that seems to be playing a character a lot of the time. And one of the problems that you have is

if you play that character too much, then any people talk about this. I mean, there's video compilations of Andrew Tate online saying four times that Andrew Tate broke character, Colby Covington's got the same thing. That these people are such personas that people can't believe that they're people inside of it. There is no person hiding under the persona,

there is only the persona now. But then there's the opportunity, because it's so unbelievable, they're trying to look for, oh, well, this is what he's actually like when he's at home with the dog or whatever. And yeah, I think that it's important, I think it's important for people to see

that the others that they look up to or whatever have got flaws, or even just people that they respect have got inadequacies that they've got those some same fears. Ali Abdahl gave this really great example on one of his courses. He does this part-time YouTuber academy thing. And he said, it's most important to teach people that are three steps behind where you are because when you're 10 steps ahead you're not going to be able to remember the challenges

of the people that are 10 steps behind you. And this is one of the important principles, I think, of continually, I mean, you've done it with the books, like you spent time learning about fitness and you do a book on fitness and you needed to work out values and you do a book on values and you needed to work out how to execute and you do a book on executing. Those are the challenges that you're learning about. And the audience presumably comes along for the ride and maybe in 10 years time there's a book on parenting or something like that, because these are the challenges. But if in 20 years time, you were to try and write a book

about the principles of losing weight and muscle gain and fat loss, that's gone. That's gone. You've ascended to bigger and better things. So other people have the opportunity to do this as well. This is why it's so important, I think, to have some sort of not apprentice, but the opportunity to teach people around you, whether it's at work or family members or friends or whatever. If they're developing something to learn from them and whatever

you're developing as well, do the same, because it gives you a purpose for the reason that you're actually pushing forward. Yeah, I obviously, I do think about that. It's interesting that I was, I joke to, well, Jimmy Joke, I was just hypothesizing what the next book would be about. I don't think it would be parenting for quite some years, but there's a, and that doctor who's on Rogan this week, have you started listening to this one? Gabo Mate. Is that a guy? Is he reference just for? Yes, it is. He's incredibly smart and very interesting, and I love some of his stuff because Brett Weinstein actually had a similar uh, view site. He had a book that came out in maybe October last year and he said a similar thing about

baby's crying and keeping them close and not letting them touch the ground. But I would love to do a project for men because my following has really changed in the last year. I've gone from majority female to majority men, the majority of young men. And it's not because I'm a sexist or a misogynist or the patriarchal tyranny. It's that I've seen a lot of young guys in the gym, book signings in this. And when I'm with them, I can sense within a snapshot of me and me that they want my opinion on something. And it's often about traveling, it's often about leaving a job they don't like. And it's often, I'll be trained in gym, young lad, 21, I'll come over. And I see a version of my younger self in them.

And I can't do that with women, because I don't know, the struggle squats so well. And I'm like, what'd you do? Oh, yeah, I work in insurance. I'm like, do you like it? And they're like, what would no one's asked them if they like their job for a while? And they're like, oh, yeah, it's okay. I'm like, what'd you want to do? They're like, I kind of want to do this. I'm like, why aren oh yeah, it's okay, I'm like, what do you want to do? They're like, I kind of want to do this. I'm like, I want you doing it. And then I'm like, you got misses. And then they're like, yeah,

and I'm like, you happy in your relationship and they're like, oh, they feel quite challenged. And then I don't tell them what to do, but I kind of answer their questions. I was like, it sounds like you've been with them because you went to college together. It sounds like you don't want to do the job you want to do. And you've spoken about Australia twice

since we started talking, so maybe you should go back before you two old. And then I'll nudge him and go, best of it soon. Or before you know it, you'll have two kids, and you'll be living around the corner with the message you don't want to be with. And they leave, and I can kind of see their shell shocked. And I'd love to do that as a project.

Because, let you say, it's very difficult. I can't speak on behalf of women as well. I want to talk to a, but it's quite difficult to navigate this world as a man at the moment. I think that it is like a political landscape that even having that agenda or saying that narrative is, you know, people assume bad things straight away. When I think the men, something I think the Jordan Peterson said,

again, if you create happy men, you're going to make women happy because every man has a woman around them whether it's a mother or partner, a sister or whatever it is. I'm like, yeah, I think that would be something I'd love to voyage into. I don't even know how it looked, I'd be honest. When's your bloody book coming out? It was on the phone to Luke earlier on today and he was, he's going to continue pushing me. I would maybe start on it next year. There's two options for it. There's one that's about the current mating crisis and there's one that would be lessons that I've learned, like a Broy 12 rules for life type thing, but more, I guess more me. Before you get distracted on that, we got pissed in a diner in Austin and you gave me three

principles that ended up being found in backbones of chapters in my new book. You got it in there, it's a belief thing. And it's not like you've got the fucking time. You can do 10 minutes a day. I don't see why you'd wait till next year. And like the people that listen to your podcast, what I've come to realize is getting people to listen to long format content is fucking difficult, but they're doing it for you. And there are different mediums that people like to absorb content. I found myself, I used to listen to audiobooks. Now I'm in a position where I actually love getting a physical book and taking it away from distractions. So I bought three books. I've got Adam Grant, think again, he read that? No. I think he might recommend it to me. There's one about distractions, a

common box called, and I've actually been recommended a book by a feminist. So I can't remember her name either. Not the case against the sexual revolution, is it? No, I'm okay. This is for me to very much get in bed with my opposing thoughts. So my editor, a hob colline, she goes, you're not going gonna like this, but you should fucking read it. I was like, okay, but I've born in physical form. I'm going to do buying about a month. I'm going to take these books away from my environment and just read them. And for people that watch your YouTube content or absorb your podcasts, or whatever,

you should give them the opportunity to take something physical away from this competitive online domain so that they can absorb these lessons and rules for life because I'm relatively well read. But even some of the conversations we had me and Zach changed the course of my life. So if you, it seems to me you could be pushing it off just to not have to deal with the emotions of is this going to work? Is it going to be successful? Are people going to buy it? You could just be the way you challenge me with caffeine. I'm going to challenge you with the book. I think you're right, man. I mean, I was definitely a fear of who the fuck am I to write a book and you and Luke have pushed back against that a hell of a lot. Yeah, I certainly

seeing you write yours has been a good inspiration. I think for me, you know, as someone that's equally unqualified to write books, I think makes me feel more empowered to go and do it. And the most critical thing here is that you don't need to embody a persona of anything. You just need to stand on the shoulders of giants. And no one wants any more than that. Even sometimes I feel guilty for using people's concepts for my own advantage, but I'm like, they didn't fucking make that up. They read that in a book that was older than them, or it was something from a study, or from whatever it is.

And even Gordon Ryan, right, looking at him right now, best grapple in the world, hands down. He's beating every doubt, I don't think he's lost a match in five years. He is only the best because he stood on the shoulders of John Dunnehowe. John Dunnehowe has won the best coaches, stood on the shoulders of Handsome Gracie. So this is always going to go back. You've just got to decide whether or not you're going to stand on the shoulders of all the guests you've had him before, or whether you're not because it's very difficult to get people to go back and listen to our episodes because they don't want to hear you talking about the beginning of the pandemic and the beginning of the pandemic. So, you know, if you can take the best bits

and bring them together, worst case scenario, it doesn't work out. You've learned something about your offering and your client base and the people that are essential podcasts, which are, so there's a utility to this even if it goes wrong. You are doing Luke's work for him, mate. So yeah, I think that you're right. And I also agree with your point about the men conversation. It's very difficult online at the moment, generally, for me, especially because of the gender dynamics and the evolutionary psychology stuff.

And it's on the edge of Red Pill, but it's also not quite, it doesn't quite align with the worldview that those people have. So it gets weaponized when it's useful, and then it gets people complain about it when it doesn't quite align with the worldview that those people have. So it gets weaponized when it's useful and then it gets people complain about it when it doesn't agree with the worldview. I'm like, look, I'm not part of the fucking manosphere. I'm not part of this red pill thing. Can you explain red pill, blue pill, black pill? Yeah, sure. So red pill is seen as seeing the world for what it truly is. It's taken from the matrix.

That would be understanding the evolutionary psychology precept of mating dynamics. It would be hypergamy from women that date up and across. It's women want status resources, looks money that men functionally should be chasing after youth and fertility that men are supposed to have multiple partners, that there is the mate value and women drop off at the wall at the age of 30 and all of this sort of stuff. Now they took a bunch of stuff that I absolutely love in evolutionary psychology. My issue and concern with Redpill is that it doesn't think about women and it doesn't think about what they actually want.

It considers them to be completely mutable and men to be immutable. It's focused more on changing women's preferences than men's. The blue pill would be anybody that hasn't taken the red pill so it's people who have a romantic view of relationships. They're going to see true love as something that is possible, that you can have a partner that's going to be with you forever, that women aren't going to be luck to trade you in. If you lose status or lose money or do whatever, Blackpill are a group of men who see the entire pursuit as pointless. It would be tangential to MIGTA, which is men going their own way. Dating is pointless.

I am a genetic dead end basically, and any effort on my part is going to be wasted. So those are, I guess, no one would identify as bluepill, but Redpill and Blackpill are the two main areas I suppose of the manosphere, but I just I don't think that either of them are particularly useful. Yes, interesting. You think, oh, you could probably have a red and blue together down the hatch, find your benefit balance.

I had a, so one of my friends, Coleman Hughes, who you may have seen, he was on Rogan, he's been on, I think he's been on San Harris as well as this dude from New York, crazy smart, but also a rapper, and a really, really good rapper as well. Also plays classic trumpet, awesome shit. It's just like super, it's way too clever and way too competent. And he did a recreation of the scene from the Matrix where Neo takes the Red Pill, but instead of it being Morpheus, it was Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Neil deGrasse Tyson offers him the red and the blue pill, and Coleman takes both of them and

washes them down together, and then the music video starts. It's really funny. That is a pretty good way of seeing it, because I like to romanticize with the blue pill ideology whilst being mindful of the red pill ideology. I think that, you know, they're going to be trade-offs. I think that the biggest overarching concept is that we can't appreciate it's going to be easy, because Blue Pill is going to be magnetized by Red Pill and a lot of people's Red Pill ideologies be magnetized by Blue Pill. And I think that

we would all love for it to be Blue Pill, but then you have got valid points on both sides. I think actually, you know, the Blue Pill is more of an ideology. And when we can start looking to, like, even some Peterson's beliefs about how families should be structured, marriage, all of these things, because they are conducive and congruent to offspring.

I think Red Pill can sometimes negate the offspring in the judgment as well. And this, even though you could say family marriage is socially constructed, people don't ask themselves a question enough for what. And you're constructing it, not to create anarchy or chaos, you're doing it to provide a stable upbringing for kids. And I think that if some people want to be mindful of the kids they're going to have, you might just have the blue pearl. And it doesn't say it's going

to work forever, but I think I've got this thing that I'm working on. I might be live streaming. It may have happened by now. Have you heard of Sneakow? Do you know Sneakow is? Yeah. Yeah. So I might be live streaming with him at some point soon. And I want to put this idea across to him of third wave, manphere. So like you've got first wave feminism, second wave feminism. I think that we've seen the first and second wave of the manusphere come about. So first wave was pick a partistry in the 2000s. It was Neil Strauss. It was the game. It was mystery. It was pickup. It was neural linguistic programming. It was negging. It was that was the world. And then Me Too came around, right?

And that was just, it was not going to survive the Armageddon that Me Too washed it away with. And maybe it shouldn't have done in any case. Then the second version was a much more sterilized version of pickup. And it was started by some of the people that had maybe been in it. Some of the language was similar, but a lot of it was different. So instead of it being about pickup and game, it was Red Pill, Blue Pill, Alpha, Beta, it was Evolutionary Psychology, and that very interestingly to me has moved on, it's less whatever pickup was, which was fucking crazy, when you actually look back at some of the advice that was given in that, which is, I don't think,

particularly healthy, I still don't think particularly healthy. I still don't think that where we're at at the moment is very functional because it doesn't see men and women fundamentally as allies, it sees them as adversaries, it sees the relationship between men and women as being zero sum, that if a man beds a woman, it's literally her loss and his gain. Hang on a second, I thought you were trying to fix the instability that sex positive feminism and all of these boss bitches leaning in and trying to go their own way. I thought that that was what you're trying to fix. This isn't fair, like you're trying to fix very much to me. This seems like you're viewing the opposite sex as an enemy. That

doesn't seem like something that's very useful. So yeah, I'm pretty sure that there is a third wave manosphere to come about, which is more holistic, more well-rounded. It sees women as compatriots rather than as enemies. And the other thing to consider is, there's way more introspectual competition than intersexual competition, right? Competition is between people of their same gender not across genders.

But men and women don't compete all that much. They need each other to keep going, but they don't compete. They compete within their own gender. So yeah, there's a longer form discussion to be had and maybe it'll be with, maybe it'll be out before now. But um, look man, let's bring this one home. I appreciate the fuck out of you. Uh, what have you got coming up that people can go and see? Are there any tickets for anything left? Uh, extra in Dublin and then we've got Sydney Auckland Quest Church and Dubai.

So there's some stuff going on there. Just really keeping our socials. If you wanna come along, if you're a spiked your interest, come along. But if not, if they follow me on socials, they'll be in the honey trap. I love it. I love it.

James, I appreciate you. Thanks, man. Cheers. Thanks, I'm about. Offends, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah