Modern Wisdom - #900 - 11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill

Episode Date: February 8, 2025

To celebrate 900 episodes of Modern Wisdom, I broke down some of my favourite lessons, insights and quotes from the last hundred episodes. Expect to learn what unteachable lessons are, why we decide to learn lessons the hard way over and over again, why money won’t make you happy and fame won’t fix your self worth, why you might regret working too much, what it takes to choose a good partner, 5 questions to ask yourself if you’re unsure about any relationship you have, why men can be frustrating at times and how to understand them better, how to make marriage and easy yes for someone, and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a 20% discount & free shipping on Manscaped’s shavers at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM20) Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, what's happening people? Welcome back to the show. It is the 900th episode of Modern Wisdom. Big number. Didn't think that I would do 900 of anything. I don't know whether I ever have done 900 of anything, but today I'm going to go through some lessons I've learned over the last 100 episodes from life and from reading and from the show and from other stuff. So you're going to get to learn that. You're also going to get to indulge in this beautiful facial hair for a while. I don't know how long this mustache will last. So it's a limited time offer for you to be able to enjoy it. So bask in the reflective glory of my upper lip and let's get into it. So the first one, I was trying to put a name to this idea for a while and I came up with

unteachable lessons. It's a special category of lesson, one that you can't discover without experiencing it first hand. So there is a certain subset of advice that for some reason we all refuse to learn through instruction. No matter how arduous or costly or effortful it's going to be for us to find out for ourselves, we prefer to disregard the mountains of warnings that we get from our elders and songs and literature and historical catastrophes and public scandals, and instead we think some version of, And instead, we think some version of, yeah, that might be true for them, but not for me. We decide to learn the hard lessons, the hard way over and over again.

And unfortunately, they all seem to be the big things too. It's never insights about how to put a level shelves or charmingly introduce yourself at a cocktail party. Instead, we spend most of our lives learning first-hand the most important lessons that the previous generation already warned us about. Things like money won't make you happy, or fame won't fix your self-worth, or you don't love that pretty girl she's just hot and difficult to get, or nothing is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it. You will regret working

too much. Worrying isn't improving your performance. All of your fears are a waste of time. You should see your parents more. You'll be fine after the breakup and you'll be grateful that you did it. It's perfectly okay to cut toxic people out of your life. And even listening to that list back, I find myself sort of rolling my eyes at how fucking trite it is because they are all basic bitch obvious insights that everybody has heard before. But if they're so basic, why does everybody so reliably fall prey to them consistently throughout our lives? And if they're so obvious, why do people who have recently become famous or wealthy or lost a parent or gone through a breakup start to proclaim those facts with the sort of renewed grandiose ceremony of someone who's just gone through religious revelation. It's strange that stuff everybody kind of accepts as being true, we all are surprised

about when it happens to us. And the other thing is, it is a very contentious list of points to say on the internet. So if I have an interview with a billionaire who says that all of his money didn't make him happy or a movie star who says that her fame felt like a prison, the internet quite reliably will tear them apart for being ungrateful and out of touch. Don't you know that there's people that are struggling? Oh my God, how tone deaf could you be? So not only do we refuse to learn the lessons, we even refuse to hear the message from the

people warning us about them. And even more than that, for every single one of those lessons, if I think a little bit deeper, I can probably recall a time, including right now, where I convinced myself that I was the exception to the rule. That my particular mental makeup, or life situation, or historical wounds, or dreams for the future, render me immune to these lessons being applicable. No, no, no, no. My unique inner landscape would be fixed by skirting around some of the most well-known wisdom of the ages. It's like, no, no, no, no. I can thread this needle properly. Watch me dance through this minefield and avoid all of the tripwires that everyone else has kicked.

And then you kick one. And you then share a sort of knowing luck with someone else who also learned one of these unteachable lessons, and it's the kind of luck that can only occur between two people who have been hurt in the exact same way. And a little voice in the back of your mind will say, I told you so. And these unteachable lessons, I guess, play into a broader idea of the certain areas of life that you just can't expedite. I wonder whether it's because it's so alluring, you know, fame, sexiness, adoration, money, the distraction of doing something that isn't seeing your parents and forgetting how sort of time moves and that one day they're going to be gone. A lot of those lists, that list of questions and points all play on things that we really, really want.

Stuff that feels urgent, that gets in the way of things that are maybe more important. And you will reliably kick the tripwires of many of those throughout your life. And I get the sense that this is a unique category of lesson that just comes along for the ride as a byproduct of getting older, that trying to expedite it, trying to get there a bit quicker, maybe you can do it, but there's very few people I know who have been able to say, I don't want the pretty girl who's difficult to get. I don't want money, fame. I don't get distracted pretty girl who's difficult to get. I don't want money, fame.

I don't get distracted from seeing my parents. I don't work too much without burning myself out first. There's very few people who get to that realization without having been burned so painfully. And maybe that's it as well that the allure of the success of these things or the distraction away from stuff that's important is so strong that it takes a ridiculously painful event to actually drive the nail into the coffin of whatever this lesson is. But yeah, uh, unteachable lessons. I think it's sort of when you see it, you can't unsee it.

And, um, I'm, uh, watching them pop up everywhere. I do think as well, uh, the sort of audience that listens to modern wisdom is cool because the nuance and the ability to sit with this person who's rich is saying that being rich didn't fix their problems. That makes me who wants to be richer feel upset, which like everybody, right? Everybody wants to be richer than they are. And there's only a few people who have said I've reached like, fuck you money escape velocity post money life. But I don't see that so much on the channel anymore, which is good and makes me

feel proud of you. So hooray. Well done. Another lesson. This was one of my favorites. I've been trying to put a name to for ages as well. Um, I'd been trying to work out what sort of friends I wanted to spend the most time around and whether they were charismatic or sort of engaging or what it was about them that made them magnetic to me, and I came up with this idea called reverse charisma. So Jenny Jerome, who is Winston Churchill's mother, who was Winston Churchill's mother, dined with both Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and his rival, William Gladstone on consecutive nights back to back.

And she got asked about her impressions of the two different men. And she said, when I left the dining room after sitting next to Gladstone, I thought that he was the cleverest man in England, but when I sat next to Disraeli, I left feeling like I was the cleverest woman. And I think most people assume that they want to be charismatic. They want their energy to be compelling and their stories to be electric. They want to walk into a room and everybody be impressed, magnetized to them. But when I started to think about the friends I love and want to spend the most time with, they didn't necessarily have charisma. They had reverse charisma. And I guess the question is, why do certain people make us feel boring, but others don't?

certain people make us feel boring, but others don't. Why is it that we feel full of stories and inspiration around some people, but around others we've got nothing to say? And we try to assess other people based on how interesting they are. Because of that, we miss a much more important issue, which is how interesting they make us feel. Like, how engaged is this person? And how much of us can they tolerate? And how much of our reality can they handle without us having to edit ourselves? How encouraging and reassuring are they?

How much do they make us want to dig deeper and talk more? And how comfortably can we sit in silence without needing to fill it? Basically, how much of us do they get? And if it's not a lot, then we're inevitably going to be cautious. And a person feels interesting precisely to the extent that they have become familiar and at ease with the things that are extreme and sad and dark and agonizing and shameful and joyous and exciting. And if they are at home with their own strangeness, then they help us to feel at home with ours. Where they have gone, we can follow. What they have felt safe exploring in themselves,

we will be able to safely unpack around them. And this was the sort of realization that architecting your charisma is a nebulous and scrappy task that autistic pick-up artists gave themselves existential crises failing at, but building reverse charisma is something that anyone can do by being curious and patient and encouraging. Some people feel interesting, some people make us feel interesting, and there's a place for both, but on average our favorite people are the latter, not the former.

And it's way easier to be someone who makes people feel interesting than it is to be interesting. When you, that was the whole point with the pick apart this movement, that they had these flow charts and five step plans for if she's going to, I'm going to open and then I'm going to twist the lemon and neg neg the Kino escalation and dude, all of this to try and come across as somebody who's interesting. Uh, there was this study done where they asked a, uh, study participant to take a flight in a plane and somebody sat next to them. And that was one of the plants.

And the plant was told that they needed to keep the person talking for the entirety of the flight, but not disclose any information about themselves. When they'd come off the plane, they asked the person who had been sat next to the plant. How was the flight? And they said, Oh, brilliant, actually really lovely. And what were the other passengers like? We're just doing a little survey. So it's amazing. I had these great conversations. Guy was so interesting. Oh, okay. Can you tell us their name? Oh, no. Okay. Can you tell us where they were from or what they did or anything? They realized no, but some people feel

interesting. Some people make us feel interesting. And maybe it's just a byproduct of the fact that so few people want to have a collaborative conversation and that a lot of the time it's this game of tennis where you're waiting for the other person to hit the ball so that you get your chance to hit the ball so that they get that chance to hit the ball, as opposed to you trying to tee them up for the best shot that you can. We even tried to do this in a George Max 30th in Miami. So we had the pickleball court in the house that we were staying where everybody was at and a football and George used to do football freestyle. I'm aware it doesn't look like he used to do that, but I promise you he was world-class at doing it., I thought, well, this would be really cool because we can do sort of a

game of foot tennis type thing. And everyone was getting, we were all getting super competitive, but it wasn't a very nice, it wasn't a very beautiful game. So I was like, yeah, why don't we change the rules for a little bit? Why don't we just try and make the most beautiful game we can. So the whole point of the game was to keep the, put the ball into positions that yourself or the other team or the guy that was on your side could do something cool with.

So as opposed to trying to win, you were trying to make it interesting. And immediately George's response was, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we can count how many we do and we can see if we can get more. And I'm like, no, you're doing the dopamine thing again. That compulsion to sort of achieve or to win or to sort of drive things forward is really, really good, but it's not necessarily needed when you're sat around the dinner table with some friends. So just realizing that first off, realizing it's not necessarily

always your job to be the interesting one. It's other people's jobs to make you feel interesting by opening up questions to you that cause you to think more deeply. Another one is that point around why to certain people do we have lots to say and to others we don't have anything at all. Is that your fault? Because you're the same person between these two different people. The difference is the people.

So that suggests that there's something going on within them that is causing you to feel more or less comfortable with opening up about yourself. And on top of that, it means that the people who make you feel really comfortable are exciting and interesting, even though they don't actually need to be interesting. So anyway, I think reverse charisma don't actually need to be interesting. So anyway, I think reverse charisma, much easier way to be interesting. And we could all do with cultivating a bit more of it.

Jack Butcher, another lesson from him. He came on the show four years ago, something like that. He says, if more money wouldn't change how you spend your time, you're already rich. And a similar insight from James Clear to stop trading things that matter for ones that don't. So if you already live a comfortable life then choosing to make more money but live a worse daily life is a bad trade and yet we talk ourselves into it all the time. We take promotions that pay more but swallow our free time. We already

have a successful business, but we break ourselves trying to make it even more successful. There's too much focus on wealth and not enough focus on lifestyle. And those two lessons, if more money wouldn't change how you spend your time, you're already rich, brings richness of being wealthy way closer to you. Now, there's some people that have got high materialism set point. Maybe the way that their families showed love when they were young was through gifts, maybe they've got a sort of keeping up with the Jones's mentality. Maybe they're in a very high net worth neighborhood or something. Um, and if that's you, then, you know, if you can't deprogram it, you're going to have to earn a deep program it, you're

going to have to earn a lot of money because in order for you to feel worthy, you're going to have to have material possessions that sort of match that level. But if you're the sort of person who like me doesn't have particularly expensive tastes and really, if my net worth doubled, all I would do is maybe buy slightly nicer coffee machine. I don't know. Like there's, I don't, there's nothing that's sort of in my mind where I think, Oh my God, you know, I'd really love that thing. And that's been the case for probably a decade now.

And it's not as if I've been rich for a decade. Um, but basically if you don't have a lot of materialism in you, I think that's a competitive advantage. And I think that you can look at people who need lots of, uh, expensive material possessions as kind of having a weird sort of curse that they need. They're a very, very hungry animal and they need to keep on feeding this beast in a way that you don't, very hungry animal and they need to keep on feeding this beast in a way that you don't. Or basically their burn rate for happiness materially

is way higher than yours. And you can get away with it being 10% or 20% or whatever of this person because they need to have a new car that's never more than two years old and they need to have the design shoes and you've got to have the bag and they've got to have a new car that's never more than two years old and they need to have the design shoes and then you got to have the bag and they got to have to this. Um, and I think that realizing if making more money wouldn't change much about how you live your life, you are already rich, or if you can even see little glimmers of that, uh, it's a good starting point. So anyway, I love, I love those two and trading things that matter for ones that don't, living a comfortable life, losing time or sanity for additional,

even something that's super arbitrary and even more silly idea that James doesn't use, a promotion, getting a better job title, which has no material use unless you're then going to cash that in for a better position at some point at some other company in future. I think if you offer people a 5% pay rise or a promotion in terms of their job title, uh, on average, more people choose the promotion because status is one of these things that were just driven for, but you literally can't cash it in unless at some point in the future, you

manage to find a way to do it. Uh, so yes, be careful about the focus on wealth and not the focus on lifestyle. All right, next one, uh, deliberate deoptimization. How much should you try to optimize your life was a question that I asked myself. Sort of how much should you be thinking about ways to improve? How much should you care about things? And for many people, perhaps even most people, the answer to all of those questions is more.

The world largely belongs to the intense optimizers and not the laissez-faire guy chilling in a hammock who's hit snooze three times this morning. laissez faire guy chilling in a hammock who hit snooze three times this morning. So telling people to optimize harder is a reliable way to improve the lives of most people because most people need to be tightened up rather than loosened off and being more obsessive will tend to deliver better results in worldly success. Most advice is charitably given to people who need to think more carefully, be more deliberate and work harder. The problem is, when this message lands with the wrong audience, the perennial perma-optimizers, then it creates a world where overthinkers are convinced to think even more. And these people need loosening off, not tightening up. And given the fact

that you listen to this podcast or read my newsletter, I'm going to guess that you fall into this category. I'm not saying that you shouldn't be obsessive and pay attention to detail. The problem arises when you can no longer delineate between the very small number of things that matter enough to obsess over and everything else. Assume that you have a small bucket of pursuits which are important. You've probably learned that a very deliberate, effortful, optimized approach is a successful strategy. This obsession and addiction begins to bleed into all other areas of your life, and turning off the tap of optimization is hard, soon enough the entire map is flooded with the same desire to always push for perfect.

Your brain tells you, look at how effective your perfectionism has been in your professional life. Why don't we try and apply that to your sleep routine and your training plan, your love life and the house cleanliness and your toenails and it doesn't go well. One solution I learned about actually from the CTO of RP strength a guy called Andrew Zay who works with Mike Isretel is deliberate de-optimization. So you purposefully let areas which could be dialed in further fall by the wayside in order to give your brain capacity to focus on the ones that really matter.

Focusing on your pounds and not everyone else's pennies. Sure, you could have five credit cards with special cash back bonuses and capture all of the points for your air miles, but given that you're already close to capacity on the things to give a shit about list, is it wise to add yet another thing onto that? Sure, your intra-workout nutrition could probably be dialled in more with pre-digestedested grass-fed whey and dextrose. But what if this takes your energy away from the key area of just hitting the gym five times a week? In the same way, you could spend all day watching the stock market instead of just investing in an index fund. But how much damage will this new candle graph addiction do to your

relationship? Oliver Berkman inspired me with this thought recently which is how much should you care about things? Question, how much should you care about things? Answer, I'm unsure exactly but I know that it's not the absolute maximum amount all the time for everything. Basically not everything is a life or death situation and even if you know this cognitively, you still behave implicitly like it is. So deliberately letting go of certain areas is a good way to give overthinkers like you and me more space to regain a little bit of sanity. Basically, the stress of trying to be perfect

will kill you more quickly than your imperfections. And choosing the very small bucket of things that are unbelievably important to you and that you want to have your obsession focus on. And when that habit, that thought pattern, that framing starts to appear in other areas of your life, you just sort of notice it. You go, oh yeah, that's that thing that I really love at work and really don't want in my relationship or in my sleep routine or in the way that I keep my house or whatever.

So I'm just going to like thank you for. And I appreciate you. I see you there, but I don't really need to worry so much. And it's difficult because you're going to be hypertrophying this muscle in one very particular domain or a few particular domains, and you're going to be trying atrophy the same muscle in other domains. And it's really, really tough. This is a problem to be managed, not a paradox to be solved, perhaps that there is no point at which this is going to be stopped and just learning. Like being on one of those

balance board things where there's a sphere in the middle of it. At no point are you actually at stasis. You're always just making little adjustments. And I think maybe it's kind of like that. This episode is brought to you by the RP hypertrophy app. This app has made a massive impact on my gains and enjoyment in going to the gym over the last year. It's designed by Dr. Mike Isretel and comes with over 45 pre-made training programs and more than 250 technique videos.

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days. If you don't like it, they'll just give you your money back. Right now you can get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to rpstrength.com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's rpstrength.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. This next lesson, I think might be the best thing I've written in probably about a year. So I listened to a podcast from Joe Hudson and he just blew me away with this insight around productivity.

And it really concretized something that I've been thinking about for ages, which I love and hopefully will be useful to you as well. I realized there's a very painful transition that everybody eventually needs to make in their career and their productivity journey to go from operator guy to idea guy. At the beginning of your career the only advantage that you have is your work rate because you've got no experience to draw on and any natural talent you have is capped by the fact that you've

got no experience to unlock it so you just work hard to get ahead. You answer all of the emails, you take all of the would love to connect calls, you send the invoices, write the copy, hire the contractors, everything. It's all you. But eventually that stage of your journey expires and you need to let it go. Maybe you have staff to delegate to now. Maybe you've been given a promotion and need to be thinking at a more strategic high level. Previously your job is to work hard, but not so much anymore. And Joe Hudson says, your job isn't to work hard. Your job is to have great ideas.

But here's the problem. You've spent an entire career acclimatizing yourself to getting stuff done. You've built a monster inside of you, which sucks in difficult, tedious tasks and spits out completed efforts. You've created a link between being busy, doing things you don't want to do, and success.

The issue is, it's really hard to work out what you truly want and determine whether or not you're moving toward it, but it's really fucking easy to see the number of emails that you sent or how many hours you spent on calls today. Being busy is more satisfying than being effective. And it's very hard to work out if your productivity efforts are actually useful or if they're just a dopamine fix that allows you to check the done box and feel like you completed something. So ask yourself, is your job to press enter on emails or to actually move the mission forward?

And you can't confuse the first one for the second one. Another challenge is this level of busyness helps to make you feel important. A full calendar is a hedge against existential loneliness. You think to yourself, there's no way that I can be an unwanted piece of shit. Look at how many calls I have today. Look at all the people who need my time and attention. I have to be important. I have to. Look at all the people who need my time and attention. I have to be important. I have to be valuable. Please, please, please assuage my deep feelings of insufficiency. You are hooked on the dopamine of I got stuff done today because even if this wasn't a great

use of your day, at least you don't feel useless. And you didn't have any time to consider that you might not be fully actualizing your potential in any case because you're drowning in fucking emails. Another challenge is that conspicuous busyness is much more societally rewarded than quiet effectiveness. We want other people to see how hard we're working. Even if the best thing for your mission's outcome was for you to go and lie on the beach today and think, who's going to congratulate you for taking on that challenge?

Let's just think for a second. The best thing that you could do for your professional outcomes, your personal outcomes, your net worth, your mental health, your physical, everything, all of that would be going offline, lying on a beach and getting a bit of a tan. Maybe you grab an ice cream, there's a dog there for a little while, you play with the dog, it's somebody else's dog, but you play with the dog. And then you come back and you have an early night. And from every objective metric that makes your life and the lives of the people around you better. Who's giving you an award for that? Dude, well done today. Really, really well done. Well, if we assume that the reason that we do the work, the reason that we do any work is to move us toward

a goal that ultimately we want, why would we assume that sending useless emails that don't move the project forward should be more applauded than going to the beach, which does. It's because we still have this industrial age Puritan work-set mindset around what working hard looks like. Again, it's this conspicuous productivity or obvious busyness. Near burnout is worn like a badge of honor to show your fealty to the mission. Obvious productivity is more praised than private efficacy. And here's the thing.

Almost everyone's life goal is where they get to a point where they can say, I just don't want to have to do anything I don't want to do anymore. But what happens when you get there? Because so much of your self-worth is derived from overcoming hard things and pushing yourself through difficult tasks that you don't want to do. So imagine that you do reach your goal of not having to do things you don't want to do anymore. Where are you going to find your satisfaction from now?

This is why it's so difficult to let go of grunt work and to let go of being permanently busy even when your precise goal was to get here to the point where you don't need to do grunt work and you don't need to be permanently busy. I guess finally as well, there's a question of why is it so hard to take pleasure in our successes? And a big part of that is largely because you're constantly peering over the shoulder of the present moment to see what's coming next. You're always just sort of looking past what is in front of you or what's happening right now. So even during the act of attaining a goal, you're already looking past it a little bit,

getting ready to move the goalposts that you just this second kicked the ball into further away down the field. We are all chasing a sense of completion, but we never actually allow ourselves to savor any tastes of completion that we get along the way. We assume that one day we're going to arrive and that day never comes because we never give ourselves a break.

And then we realized that the path we were speed running through was actually the one to our grave. And how many people, I mean, what's that the five most common regrets, deathbed regrets, one of them, I wish that hadn't worked so much. I mean, if you're going to outsource it to people that are on the deathbed, they've got no reason to lie. I wish that I kept in touch with my friends. I wish I'd allowed myself to be happy.

I wish I'd lived my own life and not the one that others expected of me. I wish I'd kept it. I mean, look, I wish I'd kept it. I wish I'd kept it. I wish I'd allowed myself to be happy. I wish I'd lived my own life and not the one that others expected of me. I wish I'd kept it. I mean, look, this inside around. What is your productivity for? What are you working this hard for? What is it that you're trying to achieve?

Are you here to crank widgets and to keep your Slack at zero and to send emails? Are you here to move your life meaningfully toward the thing that you want? The problem is Slack and calls and emails are much easier and more obvious for you to judge than did I get myself toward a life that I want? That's really amorphous and tough, but I buried myself in work or I only slept four hours last night. We use the proxy thing that in the beginning of our journey, when we were doing grunt work,

was supposed to be predictive of where we were going to end up. We use that mindset for the rest of time. And look, if you're starting out on a career journey or you're at the bottom of a ladder of something new, this might sting a bit because you're hearing about a transition that you as of yet don't have to make and aren't going to get to make for quite a while, but you need to keep it in the back of your mind because if you don't like the grunt work in the beginning, the only thing worse than that is doing it when you no longer need to do it, when you've

managed to get somewhere closer up the top of the ladder. And refusing to let go of it is going to cap your progress and your happiness. And it's going to trap you in thought patterns that you really don't want. And it's a difficult transition. The existential loneliness that you have to deal with where it's like, I was, everybody needs me. Everybody wanted me. I was so busy all of the time. It's like, yeah, dude, you need to ask yourself sort of deeper questions now. And you need to genuinely consider whether a 30 minute walk is the best

thing that you can do for your business or your relationship or your family or whatever it might be. Um, and that's just, I don't know. Why is that less sexy? is the best thing that you can do for your business or your relationship or your family or whatever it might be. Um, and that's just, I don't know. Why is that less sexy than, you know, sitting down and grinding out whatever needs to be the house cleaning, the emails, the, you know, hardcore workout, whatever it might be. It's like, you need to learn to chill out a little bit more. And that'll actually in some weird roundabout way,

move you closer to your goals too. That's interesting. All right, next one. So this is from Justin LaMilla, who does a ton of really interesting sex research. Gay men see bisexual men as secretly gay, and lesbians see bisexual men as secretly gay and lesbians see bisexual women as secretly straight. Across two studies involving a total of 288 gay and lesbian participants,

researchers examined attitudes towards stereotypes of bisexuals and some of the findings were that both gay men and lesbians hold more negative views of bisexual persons of the same sex than they did of the other sex. It's kind of interesting. I wonder whether that is some sort of a sense that this person could be competing in a market that the individual wouldn't be threatened by, but they've chosen to step into their market and maybe they'll take their partner away. That might be an idea.

Compared to lesbians, gay men were more likely to see bisexual men as having an unstable sexual orientation. And likewise, compared to gay men, lesbians were more likely to see bisexual women as having an unstable sexual orientation. Again, maybe this is just a little bit of fear. They're keeping their eye on them. I don't know what direction you're going in. Gay men tended to see bisexual men as being secretly gay, whereas lesbians tended to see bisexual women as secretly straight. Basically in other words, both groups perceive bisexuals,

regardless of their sex, as being more attracted to men than to women. I mean, that's fucking fascinating. Gay men tended to see bisexual men as being secretly gay. Lesbians tended to see bisexual women as secretly straight. I don't know, man. Uh, there is, there is, I mean, I saw this in club promo. We used to refer to it. There was a few girls that swung both ways. And if they were in a relationship with a girl, we would mention that

they were on a liquid diet. And then when they got back with a boyfriend, we'd say, oh, she's back on solids now she's back on a solid diet after she was on a liquid diet for a while, but she's back on solids. Um, so there is something in there. I don't know what it is. Maybe I think on average women's sexualities are a little bit more fluid. Um, so there's just this sense that sort of women will experiment a little bit, but

they're still straight. Whereas the guy that's experimenting, it's because of some, you know, internalized fear of homophobia or not being accepted by society at large. So his way to get around it is by, you know, dabbling, just putting a toe in or maybe more. Um, yeah. Uh, another insight was that lesbians greater negativity toward bisexual women, relative to gay men, was statistically explained by lesbians greater tendency to

view bisexual women as being primarily attracted to men. By contrast, gay men's perception of bisexual men as secretly gay didn't account for why they held more negative attitudes towards bi men than lesbians did. I don't really know what's going on there. I guess maybe some differences in intrasexual competition somehow. Yeah, basically it really shows that there is a bisexual prejudice that exists in the gay community and there's some interesting gender dynamics that are at play. So for all that pride focuses on the L and the G, like the B is the one which is the most persecuted even internally inside of the LGBT.

B is the one. I mean, what's the T fucking doing in there? Right. The T has nothing in common with the L, the G and the B other than they get to enjoy pride together. But yeah, poor Bs. Another insight kind of associated with this, there's something called the birth order effect,

which is kind of getting replication crisis a bit at the moment. It's kind of interesting. Birth order effects suggested that for every older brother, that a woman, for every male that a woman gives birth to, it increases the chance of subsequent males being gay. So men with more older brothers were more likely to be gay basically when birthed from the same mother.

Interestingly, some evidence showed that miscarriages also counted toward this. And it was, there was some suggestions about sort of immune system, some kind of immune system mediation going on here to how the, the womb interacted with the fetus and seeing it as a, like alien, alien, just a non-native part of the body. And then the, obviously you'd think, well, that why would that be the case for men, but not for women? And this guy, Jakub Fort and some colleagues looked at the fraternal birth order effect and they had a Croatian, Slovakian data and they found that the fraternal birth order

effect exists for lesbians too. Women with more older brothers were also more likely to be lesbian. So I don't know what it is. I guess it depends. If you want a gay son or a gay daughter, what you better hope for is a couple of boys first and then you're off to the races. You know, you've got like lesbian younger sisters and gay younger brothers running around all over the place.

Maybe that's the way it works. But then I think it got replication crisis, like the whole thing. So now I don't know. Um, and maybe I've just fed you, I've not fed you false information. I've just fed you information that might need updating. So come back to that, suppose a quick aside. Grooming isn't just about looking good. It's about feeling good and the right tools make all the difference. That's where Manscaped's Beard and Balls bundle comes in. It comes with

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Modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom 20 at checkout. That's manscaped.com modern wisdom and modern wisdom 20 at checkout next lesson, so I told this story a couple of times about a retreat I went to in California, but then I saw a Kurt Vonnegut quote that sort of Perfectly summarized it, zipped it down, uh, and it's easy to remember. So Kurt says we are what we pretend to be. So we must be careful about what we pretend to be. We are what we pretend to be.

So we must be careful about what we pretend to be. So I'd gone to this retreat in California and I met a business owner who had a big YouTube channel that I used to watch a lot, a long time ago. And then I asked him why he'd stopped making videos. And he said, I started feeling like I had to live up to in private the things which I was saying in public. And I think about this quite a lot. I've come to sort of realize there's two sides to fake it until you make it. And one is positing an ideal or a better version of yourself, which you're

motivated to live up to due to the need for social consistency, but that stake in the ground acts as much like a tether as it does a finish line. If you commit yourself to some worldview or life philosophy, what happens if you stop agreeing with it? Sure, you might want everyone, you might want to change, but everybody around you has grown accustomed to the previous version of you. Whether it's lifestyle changes like your dietary approach or your training methodology, or worldview changes like a religious belief or political affiliation, or personality changes like commitments to growth or going sober or changing friend groups.

Social consistency bias is a double-edged sword. A while ago, some of the leading influences of the ex-Paleo diet movement, then the carnivore movement, started to add fruit into their food and the aptly called meat and fruit diet caused uproar, not because of evidence that the diet is based on, but because its new proponents had ardently stated a different belief in the past and the change caused the people around them to feel uncomfortable. This is the danger. The social incentives align for you to not change in public even if you grow out of your beliefs in private.

Stupid people see someone changing their mind as an indication of unsophistication because they don't understand that updating your worldview when you grow is a sign of intelligence, not fickleness, and that an unwavering commitment to a narrow worldview is not cleverness, but a substitute for it. Which, unfortunately means, that after changing your mind in public, it often results in you being attacked by a large number of mostly stupid people. And the more public you are about it, the harder it is to reverse. Perfect example of this. Alex O'Connor goes vegan, is convinced about the ethics, the philosophical underpinnings of veganism does not want to contribute

to animal suffering, but as a by-product of that, his health suffers and he is struggling to keep his health to where it needs to be whilst eating a balanced plant-based diet. It's not something he says that he doesn't think you can do, but something that given his level of conscientiousness and preparedness, it was something he was struggling to do. So his demeanor was incompatible with the challenges that his new diet, informed by his new philosophy had given to him.

So he went back to eating meat. challenges that his new diet informed by his new philosophy had given to him. So he went back to eating meat. He had to announce in public something which he had changed in private and he got fucking castigated on the internet for it for ages. I mean, he's now out the other side. I don't think anyone really brings it up anymore, but that was uncomfortable to watch, especially when you think this guy's doing it for his health and he said it. He told you. He made this change and, and he told you about it.

He didn't lie. He didn't continue to get those sweet vegan dollars if they ever existed. He never did that. He told you as soon as you changed. And people still had a problem with it. So be careful of the things that you say in private, uh, not being able to be compatible with the expectations people have of you in public and, um, yeah, that stake in the ground versus finish line. Am I positing an ideal or am I attaching my self-worth to an expectation that I'm

then going to have to rip off me? I'm going to have to sort of peel this fucking skin off me that everybody else expects. It's difficult. Personal growth is hard enough as it is without all of the expectations. It's why, you know, to be honest, what are we 45 minutes in? I can talk about this now. The reason why I don't talk about like deeply talk about my relationships on the show, you know, even though I talk about relationships and

dating and a lot of the dynamics, it's evidently something I'm interested in. I'm obviously, you know, on the path toward trying to build a family and do all the rest of the stuff. But I think it's fucking so hard to have a relationship full stop, having a relationship with even a couple

of thousand people observing it. You remember what it was like when you used to get the, um, uh, Chris Williamson is in a relationship notifications on Facebook or whatever. You would see it from your friends and people would be able to like it and comment on it and so, and then it would tag the other person, but then it would also show, uh, Chris Williamson is single. Fuck. Like you've only got what I think a thousand friends or something on Facebook.

That was a huge deal. I mean, I dunno, maybe I'm speaking, depends how young you are. You might not have ever seen that on Facebook. That was fucking revolutionary by the way, bring back Facebook, uh, dating shit. But that was hard. Just doing that was hard. So how hard is it when you're posting photos of you both? And, you know, that's the reason why I've kept that area of my private life private because again, you've got this like expectation, the stake in the ground, additional scrutiny.

You know, do you stay in relationships for longer than you should because you're scared about what people are going to think? Do you leave relationships more quickly than you should because you're scared about what people are going to think. You're never existing for yourself, you're always existing for this version of what people who don't necessarily have your best interests at heart think about how you should behave. And yeah, digital hijab as Mary Harrington calls it. I've got my digital hijab on. Next oneington calls it. I've got my, I've got my digital hijab on. Next one, this is a Mark Manson insight, which I fucking adore.

So he says, neediness occurs when you place a higher priority on what others think of you than what you think of yourself. Anytime that you alter your words or behavior to fit someone else's needs, rather than your own, that's needy. Anytime you lie about your interests or your hobbies or your background, that's needy. Anytime that you pursue a goal to impress others rather than fulfil yourself, that's needy. Whereas most people focus on what behaviour is attractive or unattractive, what determines

neediness and therefore attractiveness is the why behind your behavior. You can say the coolest thing or do what everyone else does, but if you do it for the wrong reason, it will come off as needy and desperate and turn people off. Turning people off is definitely not optimal. I like turning people on as much as the next guy. But I think there's an even bigger price to be paid here, which is your own self-worth. So imagine for a second a world in which you are unanimously adored by millions,

but you hate yourself. Are you happy? Is it worth it? And now imagine a world where you're disliked by everybody, but you love yourself. Are you happy? Is it worth it? Now imagine a world where you're disliked by everybody, but you love yourself. I propose that self-love you would be happier. Because ultimately in some Taoist roundabout way, the reason we want validation from others is to give us a good enough reason to validate ourselves. And if you compromise yourself in order to gain favor with other people, you'll know. Even if you think you're not keeping score, your subconscious is.

And given that you're the sort of person who listens to this show, you probably keep score a lot more accurately than is typical. How can you expect to have faith in yourself if you can't even keep your own word? So the problem is we sacrifice the thing that we want, which is self-worth, for the thing which is supposed to get it, which is validation. Sacrifice self-worth to get validation in the hopes that if we have sufficient validation, we will finally be able to have some self-worth to get validation in the hopes that if we have sufficient validation, we will finally be able to have some self-worth, sacrificing the thing that you want for the thing that's supposed to get it. Yeah, this neediness insight that, you know, it's kind of, it's not too

dissimilar to that point from before, from Sam Ovens where you think, fuck. We have these expectations, public expectations, familial expectations, people don't like change. There's also another reason that people don't like change, I think, is because we want to be able to predict, project out where somebody is going to be in future. And the more easy they are to predict, as in the more reliably they fall into our model of them, the less we need to sort of worry

about what's going to happen. You know, I don't worry about Chris. He's a good guy. He'll be on board with the next whatever Trump policy or he'll be on board with the next Kamala policy or he'll be on board with the next whatever because he was with the last ones. But if you start to deviate a little bit, whether it's political ideology, philosophy, life direction, career, uh, you know, temperament in its extreme, this is sort of bipolar, right?

It's, oh my God, I'm so scared of whether or not this person's going to be high or low or whatever it might be, but in smaller ways, the same discomfort comes through, it's because we like, I don't know if they're still going to sort of be here in a year's time. What if they outgrow me? What if they outgrow our friendship? What if they start to disagree with something that's really sacred to me? Uh, so in that way, people who don't necessarily go along with the crowd

are seen as a threat in many ways. Uh, so yeah, I think just something to consider. All right. Some more dating stuff. Uh, this is insight from Chris Bumstead, awesome episode just something to consider. All right. Some more dating stuff. Uh, this is insight from Chris Bumstead, awesome episode with him last year. And I was asking him about how to choose a good partner, how to know when you've sort of found the one. And Chris said, find someone who you just feel safe being a burden to.

You're not going to intentionally be a burden, but sometimes you suck, you know, sometimes you're a burden. And even if you don't feel safe being like that around your partner, if you have to withhold things from them and put on that show, you're never going to feel safe around them and you're not going to want to be there for them as much when they're being a burden as well. You just become these two people dividing and conquering all of your problems rather than taking on the world together. I think I always felt like I wanted to be great at everything I did and great

at what I pursued and I never expected to be as good as I was. So it would just be such an interesting relief to be able to give myself to think you are going to be great. You are going to have all these things that you want, but you're also going to realize that they're not as important as you think they are. You're going to come to the realization where your relationships and your values and everything you enjoy and experience aren't going to come down to spectacular moments on stage.

They're going to be much simpler than that. They're just going to be these moments where you're being yourself and the people who love you for that are going to be everything. It's awesome. You know, this guy who has conquered the sport has sort of defined an entire generation of bodybuilders and then bowed out at 30 is able to say completed it, but even in the process of completing it six times in a row, the big wins weren't the big wins. The big wins were the little ones and they were the shares and the opportunity

for me to celebrate what I'd done with people who cared about me, who knew me. And it's great and magnificent and impressive and all the rest of it. But it wasn't what mattered. Um, you know, a successful career in a terrible marriage can make your life miserable and average career and an amazing marriage can make your life delightful. So you need to choose wisely. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Look, it's officially 2025 and

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five questions to ask yourself if you're unsure about your relationship. If someone told you you're a lot like your partner, would this be a compliment to you? Are you truly fulfilled or just less lonely? Are you able to unapologetically be yourself or do you feel the need to show up differently to please your partner? Are you in love with who your partner is right now as a whole Those are absolute hammer blows. I think almost everything in here, if someone told you a lot like a partner,

would you, would this be a compliment to you? Um, are you in love with just the idea or would you want your future child, imagine child to date someone like your partner? Those three are sort of taking you out of the situation and imagining that you're somebody else, you're something else. Um, it's for a different person. So that's creating a little bit of psychological distance.

Are you truly fulfilled or just less lonely? Is, you know, a fantastic insight around the reason that we suck so much in relationships is that we're terrified of being alone. And that means that we stay in relationships or we accept relationships that we shouldn't do because familiar loneliness or familiar partnership is more enjoyable than unfamiliar loneliness. And that's not good.

Are you able to unapologetically be yourself or do you feel the need to show up differently to please your partner? I think that a lot of that is around the level of openness, the level of comfort that you have, how much do you need to self edit? Now the question around the person that's your best friend is the one that you have the least filter with and that you can sit in silence with without having to fill it, so it's the person that you can talk the most with in an unencumbered way. And the person that you can shut up the most with in an unencumbered way. Um, and if that's not your partner, then you're struggling because.

Your relationship should feel like home. It should feel like a house with a sturdy roof and strong foundations and shit gets thrown at it all the time and rain comes down and there's weather and there's heat and there's cold, but inside of that house is the one safe refuge that you have. You can lose your job status. Your financial position can fall away, your health can break down, your friends can leave you, but you have this one safe place and it's in another person.

It's in them. And if you can't be yourself with that person, the entire house does not exist. It's fake. So you need to make sure that you can be yourself with your partner or else you have no safe refuge from the world, which is fucking terrifying. On the dating line, Hormozi dropped a fucking slammer the other day, which I want to talk to him about the next time I speak to him. If you find a girl who believes in your dreams more than you do, who makes you want to be a better man, who's willing to work alongside you to get

there and is grateful for whatever you have, just marry her. That's how you make marriage an easy yes. How you make marriage an easy yes is by having a girl who has those. Find a girl who believes in your dreams more than you do, who makes you want to be a better man, who's willing to work alongside you to get there and is grateful for whatever you have, just marry her. The rest of the stuff will sort itself out, man. I really do get that sense.

Maybe I'm getting soft in my old age. I don't know. Um, I guess there was one final element. I got asked a bunch of questions about the black pill and stuff and sort of incels the last time on a Q and a some point recently, and, um, uh, it's kind of an unfalsifiable philosophy in a lot of ways, because there's many kernels of truth in it, you know, realizations about what women want physically in a partner and the fact that some men just, no matter how many pushups they do, they're not going to get them.

It's tough, you know, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard what women want physically in a partner. And the fact that some men just, no matter how many pushups they do, they're not going to get them. Um, it's tough, you know, it's a hard biological limit. Um, but there's a, there is a very specific cohort of men, frustrating men, guys who have got nothing going for them, no drive in their life. They're uncomfortable in their own skin. They're endlessly miserable. They keep complaining about women having too high standards.

It's like, bruh, your standards for yourself are through the fucking floor. Your friends don't want to hang out with you. You don't want to hang out with you. Why do you think a woman would want to hang out with you? And how is this their fault that they've got too high standards? You suck. You suck. You suck. Your friends don't want to hang with you.

You don't want to hang with you. Why lay at the feet of women? The fact that they have got too high standards. I am all for it. I will fucking die on the hill of fighting for more empathy for men. Right. And I have been thrown under the bus many times for doing so. I'm again, be able to walk this tightrope where I'm so soy-cucked that the Manosphere

considers me to be blue-pilled, but I'm also such a misogynist that Guardian readers think that I'm Andrew Tate from Wish. And... I don't care anymore. Like I don't care about being misjudged by people who don't understand what I'm trying to achieve. And there's a group of people out there, maybe the large majority who are reasonable and who understand that it's not zero sum when it comes to empathy, who realize that you can raise up sum when it comes to empathy.

Who realized that you can raise up men without dragging down women, that you can support women without forgetting about the challenges of men, that you can tell men that they need to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and actually do some work without forgetting that those men have got challenges that need structural support from society at large, and we need initiatives and we need investment. And that some women do have too high standards. Some women do have skewed perspectives of what they're worth, but you're not going to get into a relationship with them in any case. What's your goal with screaming at these harpies on the internet, these like retarded women

who go onto these dating shows and like, I'm going to get a guy who's got like six, six feet six, and he's got like six figures and he's got a six inch stick. Like what are you really, really going to go and change them? Are you going to U-turn them and turn that chick into wifey? No, you're not. You're getting frustrated because you think that they are a representation of women at large. But that woman by design sucks.

So you're not going to hang out with her. So just don't pay attention to her and move toward the chicks that are perfectly normal, that there are so many fucking awesome women out there who want to get into a relationship, who just want a man who's got those traits that we talked about before. Yeah. I, um, that special category of men who don't have anything going for them. No drive, uncomfortable in their own skin, endlessly miserable, complaining all the

time and laid at the feet of women. Dude, point the fucking finger in the mirror. Like I will give you as much social confidence, training, diet, hairstyle, advice, until the cows come home. And I will continue to do it. But if you're not doing any work and you're saying that it's the fault of women, that you're not getting dates, how can that's on you guy? Anyway, what a wonderful, positive tone for me to finish this 900th episode on. But I love it. I mean, some of these lessons there, I really, I'm fighting with the moment, mold and EBV and Lyme and all of that shit.

So if I can pray for Chris, if he would. I'm going to be doing a lot of stuff for the health, but I'm going to be doing a lot of stuff for the health, so I'm going to be doing a lot of stuff for the health, so I'm going to be doing a lot of stuff for the health, so I'm going to be doing a lot of stuff for the health, so I'm going to be doing a lot of stuff for the health, so I'm fighting with the moment, mold and EBV and lime and all of that shit. So if I can pray for Chris, if he would, pray for this mustache as well, because it's probably not gonna be here the next time that you see me.

But I appreciate you all. Roll an episode 1,000. Peace. When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best books, the most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting. But there wasn't a list of them.

So I scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own. And then I made a list of 100 of the best books that I've ever found. And you can get that for free right now. So if you want to spend more time around great books that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention, just trying to get through a single page, go to chriswillx.com slash books to get my list completely free of 100 books you should read before you die. That's chriswillx.com slash books.