The Iced Coffee Hour - “This Keeps 99% Single!” Chris Williamson on The Dating Crisis, Building Wealth, and Becoming The 1%

Episode Date: January 28, 2024

VESSI: Grab your pair now at https://vessi.com/ich for 15% off your first order! Free shipping extended to CA, US, AU, JP, TW, KR, SGP. NETSUITE: Take advantage of NetSuite’s FREE KPI checklist: https://www.netsuite.com/ICED STREAMYARD: Start creating high-quality content easily with https://clickurl.ca/ICH-StreamYard@ChrisWillx Here - Thanks for watching! NEW: Join us at http://www.icedcoffeehour.club for premium content - Enjoy! Add us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jlsselbyhttps://www.instagram.com/gpstephan Official Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeBQ... For sponsorships or business inquiries reach out to: [e-mail] For Podcast Inquiries, please DM @icedcoffeehour on Instagram! 0:00 - Intro 0:41 - Why Should You Listen to Chris? 3:22 - Chris's College and Club Promoting Days 23:53 - Love Island: Behind the Scenes of Secrets 38:16 - How to ACTUALLY Get Good Sleep 49:51 - STOP DRINKING 50:50 - Exploring Health Hacks: Caffeine, Cold Plunge, Sauna, & Fasting 55:51 - Embracing Discomfort - The Path to Growth 1:00:55 - The Mating Crisis 1:04:43 - Mastering Memorization and Critical Thinking 1:20:24 - Chris on Alex Hormozi & David Goggins 1:35:29 - Tips for Judging Online Credibility 1:40:59 - Chris on Hormonal Birth Control 1:48:19 - What You CAN’T Control Because of Genetics 2:02:47 - What You CAN Control When it Comes to Genetics 2:17:51 - Strategies for Finding the Right Relationship 2:35:47 - Did Men Have it Easier 50 Years Ago? 2:50:53 - Chris's Personal Insecurities and the Power of Therapy 2:58:10 - Final Thoughts *Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Graham Stephan will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Graham Stephan is part of an affiliate network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There is no safe level of alcohol consumption. Non, zero. Every single drink that you take is moving you closer to death. I wish I didn't think about things as much. I wish I didn't care about things as much. I wish I didn't worry. I wish I didn't have as much anxiety. Guess what?

You do. And the only way out is through. Your intuition is probably right about a lot of things. And it gets perverted by other people. How could guys increase their attractiveness? The age-old question. So I think the best piece of advice is. Chris Williamson.

Thank you so much for coming on the iced coffee hour. This means so much. I'm a huge fan of your podcast. I absolutely love it. It's a big inspiration for me and us here on the iced coffee hour. So thanks for coming on, man. Thank you for having me. Why should anybody listen to you? That's a great question. I came up with it. Thank you. Well, that was my question. I guess, I think a lot of people probably ask that question. I'm not really too sure. I'm a guy that follows his curiosity. And I started talking to people on the internet and accidentally made it into a job. I think that a lot of people, especially guys, toward the end of their 20s realize that they're a little bit confused about what they're supposed to want in life

and about what they're supposed to like. And maybe they have or haven't achieved success in a way that they think is supposed to fulfill them. And they don't feel that fulfilled. And that was me. And then I decided if I'm going to do this podcast, then maybe I'll find out kind of how the world works and understand myself and understand other people. And then 730 episodes later, I've managed to do that. But I have no authority. Like, you largely shouldn't listen to me. For the people that I speak to, you probably should listen to. I made a career out of being. the most stupid person in the room, like 730 times in a row. Why do you think so many people resonate with you?

I'm a pretty normal guy in many regards and have very open about my own flaws and shortcomings and uncertainty and stuff. Like a lot of imposter syndrome or lack of confidence or whatever it might be, despite having done 15 years running the biggest events company in the UK and Love Island and take me out and all of these reality TV shows and stuff, maybe there's something reassuring about seeing someone go on the same personal growth. journey that you are. Ali Abdal has this great idea where he says that you don't want to teach someone who's 10 steps behind you because you can't remember the problems that they're dealing

with. You want to teach somebody who's sort of two or three steps behind you. I've done this show for seven years now. So I've just left this huge trail of breadcrumbs. So now I'm like fighting with meditation. So guess what? Listen to a meditation guy every other week for like four months. And now I'm going to learn about dating or now I'm going to learn about evolutionary psychology. And now I'm going to learn about AI or whatever. And everyone's come along for the ride. So I guess everyone's following in my wake. Do you think now it's harder for you to relate to the people who are just starting out? In some ways, in some ways, yes, but I think the principles still remain the same. Sure. Like, you need to be consistent. You need to make it as easy as possible to do the things

that you need to do, which usually means finding something that's enjoyable. You need to follow your instincts as opposed to trying to compromise them for what other people say that you should do. And that works at episode 1,000 and episode 1. But through this process of personal growth. I see you now. Obviously, handsome man, you got everything going for you. You got a successful business. You got massive muscles. By the way, do you take creatine or no? Yeah, of course. Okay. Five grams every day. So you said, of course, we had Hormozia on here. He said, no, he doesn't take creatine. Yeah, that's true, but he's also like a super-fitting estrogen receptor guy, right? That's what he claims, yes. Homeboys got like 125 testosterone level and looks like an animal.

We want to know, because you said that in the beginning, you started out as like a somewhat insecure person. you had the only child syndrome, you didn't have friends and you got bullied and stuff like that. The whole process of obviously getting to this point right now where everyone sees you and you're like the looks maxing guy, he's got all the muscles and power. Whipping on the compliments. I'm just curious, man. That's fine. I really, I should sack the podcast off and be only fans. That's right. It would do well. Yeah, get through school being pretty unpopular, just a lot of people out there, especially only kids, will not have the amount of socialization that they need. So they don't learn the finesse of how to play the social game

particularly well. And ultimately, what you're trying to do is just relate to other kids around you during school. But you don't know how to do that. And you end up feeling disjointed in one way or another. And that was me throughout most of school. And I kind of got to university at Newcastle. and finally got the opportunity. You remember every summer you'd come back from being away and think, I'm going to reinvent myself this year. I'm going to be the cool kid or I'm going to be the sporty one or I'm going to be the smart one or whatever.

But this is like the ultimate version, right? Because there's no one that's going with you. There was not a single person that I knew from the first 18 years of my life that was going to Newcastle, which was the place that I went to university, which gave me the ultimate opportunity to kind of reinvent myself. And I started doing club promo straight away, flyering on the street.

So I sat down at a seminar. at my first ever lecture and said, I've spent all of my maintenance loan, which was like your spendy loan, during Fresh's week, getting drunk, sat next to a guy and he said, oh, well, I'm going to go and do club flaring, flying for nightclubs,

you should come with me. And 15 years later, that guy was still my business partner. If this is a problem that most people go through specifically young men, why do you think you suffered more? Yeah, I don't know.

Maybe how painful something is probably is a motivator, right? You can run towards something you want, or run away from something that you fear. And I think that I'd spent sufficient time getting toward the end of my 20s and realizing I don't really understand myself. I haven't really fully connected with the work that I'm doing or the people that are around me. And this felt like a legacy. This was a trend throughout my life, right, that I'd had it as a kid. And then I'd thought, well, I'll fix it by being successful and popular publicly. And then go on reality TV

and get a blue tick and run this at a huge events company and put a million people into Club nights and that didn't fix it. So I'm like, well, like, you know, I've looked outside a lot and I've tried to fix it that way. I guess I might probably be a good idea to try and look inside. Now, why do you think you had this like desire to understand yourself? A lot of people that I've met and I don't want to point out any names seem to be fine, seemingly mindlessly kind of just going through the motion. Why do you think you had all of these bigger, deeper questions that you needed to satisfy? Because the pain of not realizing them was way worse. There's this idea from Seneca. It's really brilliant. And he explains about a man who you would ask him as he steps out

of the door on a morning what he's going to do with his day. And he says, I don't know, I'll see some people, I'll do some things. And he describes him by saying they do not what they intended, but what they happen to come across. And that to me sounds like hell. That sounds like life happening to me, as opposed to me happening to life. So it's a difference of being a cork that gets sort of thrown into the sea and bobs around for a year and then you take the cork back out and you speak to the cork and you say, what did you do? And he said, well, I traveled to some places and I did some things. That's been on a journey, but it's not the same as being in a ship, right? Being in a ship carves its path and it actually goes from place to place under its own agency. So to me, I wanted to

be able to be intentional with the things that I do in my life. And I wanted to have life stop just happening to me. I wanted to happen to life. So this journey is you went to college, you started becoming a club promoter. Can we talk about how that ended up happening? Not everyone just goes to college, it becomes a club promoter. Did you went to like a seminar to do this? It was a professional training course. But how do you pick that?

That was one of those things where you heard about it and you show up on like a Thursday night? Sat next to a guy. I said I was completely broke and he said, well, if you want to come and give out flyers, you know, you'll have walked past nightclubs. Hey man, free shots tonight. Come on in. So I started doing that. And then within the space of six months was an event manager within the space of a year, got our first franchise.

It was a good time with a particular franchise. We picked up that at 19. So I started doing that. Then at 21, 22, we started our first weekly. And then we just built a portfolio of events out from there. Is there a catch? Because I walk down the Vegas strip all the time when I see these guys. You're coming up to me.

There's not a catch, Graham. There's not a catch. Coming to the club, man. Coming to the club. Like, why? Why me? I hate to say it, but if I want another state. You must look like an easy target.

Yeah, but I think if they want me, if they want me to go to the club, probably is not a club where it's going to. Well, they're not discriminating. You know, sales is sale. Yeah. So for them, they just want to get anybody in that they can. So they want to make it look busy? Of course.

Okay. Of course. Yeah. So here's something that's interesting about nightlife. Right. We're here in Vegas, like home of nightlife. Right. Events are one of the very few businesses where the other consumers of the product,

are the primary offering of the product itself. So we've all got iPhones. We don't have iPhones because Brad Pitt's got an iPhone. We have iPhones because of fundamentally, intrinsically what the iPhone can do. And there's a bit of fluff in terms of branding and like status and shit like that. Green text.

Yeah, a little. But mostly it's because what it does, right? If I ring Jack after he's been to a night out and I say, dude, how was the night last night? He goes, bro, it was insane. There were so many girls there. And I'm like, I asked what the night was like, not who are the other consumers of the event that you went to. And it's this vicious sort of cycle that occurs within nightlife where the key feature of your experience of the event are the other people who are also consuming the event, which gives it this like very mimetic upward trajectory, which means that you can start something in within three weeks.

It's the hottest thing in town and thousands of people want to go. and then also I've seen 200,000 pound a year businesses just go completely because they've been on the receiving end of the next new thing, which is then come and taking all of their customers away. So I'm someone who goes comfort over style any day. It's true. I've seen what you wear in public and I'd be embarrassed. All right, Graham. Well, at least with our sponsor, Vessi, I can be comfortable and look good at the same time. So on a serious note, I've been wearing vesees since that 2020 when they sent us a pair. And no joke, I've been wearing them almost every day since them. I still have the same pair of shoes that they sent me back then. I still wear them.

They still hold up. And what I like most about them and especially their Soho sneaker is that it looks like a really expensive shoe. Like I have some shoes that are worth several hundred dollars. And this one, in my opinion, looks better. It's more comfortable. And it's waterproof. So I got some shoes from Vessie back in 2020. I still wear those shoes to this day.

These shoes, though, on the other hand, they sent me these like a couple of months ago. And they're my favorite slip-ons I've ever had in my entire life. I wear them every single day. They still look as good as new. Obviously, the bottom. It's going to be a little bit dirty because I walk a lot in them. But it's amazing how waterproof they are and also amazing how comfortable they are. Trust me, I guarantee you'll love them.

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We'll repost that story, the first five people. Be sure to check them out. Thanks so much. So let's talk about where exactly you were in your life during that time. Were you in the gym? Yeah. Yeah. So I trained as soon as I got to university.

I wanted to stop feeling. I was bullied throughout school. and I was like 67 kilos, so I was like just tiny. And I wanted to feel more self-assured. And I wanted to feel like a man as well. I think a lot of guys, like deep down, when they start going to the gym at age 18, it's them wanting to kind of speed up that maturation from being a boy to being a man. Because even though legally you might be a man and, you know, functionally you might be a man,

like physically a lot of the time, unless you're Alex and you're like a super responder to testosterone, or whatever, it's still going to take you time. So you're trying to speed that up. So I was doing that. How did you reinvent yourself in that one summer between high school and college? What was that process like? Did you wake up one morning and just say to yourself, you know what? I'm going to change this. And what did you do? What were the steps involved? So it took two years of high school of me. I got my first girlfriend and started to hang around with people that were a little bit more like me. And so I was, I guess, a slow introduction to that. But there wasn't, the heavens didn't open. And I didn't go, oh, now you will be super Chad,

club promoter, extraordinary. That didn't happen. It was just one iteration at a time. But even within that, like, I found strange, weird quirks of club promo. Like, I'd not go out to the events that everyone wanted to go to to party and I'd stay in and read bodybuilding.com forums, which was like the equivalent of like,

it's big back in the day. Huge, dude, the MISC forum on bodybuilding.com is fucking, oh, geez, no. But, yeah, yeah, the world. It wasn't nothing, the skies didn't open. There wasn't like some moments that happened. It was very, very slowly, I just tried to craft myself into the sort of person that other people would want to be around. But that was also a problem. That wasn't me crafting myself into me. That was me trying to model what I saw other people wanting to be around and then becoming that guy,

which is also a problem. Right. Just more internal conflict, but less external. So was it like a bit of a fake, you fake it until you make it sort of like? It was just continue to fake it. Okay. Right. And then realize that you've just built up this huge persona about who you are, this party boy, this big name on campus. Well, Chris is always there. He's the guy that will run the, and again, it doesn't matter whether you are running club nights, whether you are the sort of person that is around a group of friends that you don't really resonate with. A lot of the time when you're with them, you would sooner be, you would sooner be accepted for a falsehood than be alone for the truth in many ways, which causes people to verge toward compromising themselves and playing a persona.

But it's not very fulfilling. So you went through this transformation. What is your answer to the people that are still stuck in phase one of wanting to change but not actually changing? What's your answer to the question of the age-old question, I'd say, of like, why do some people know that they should change and they know how to change, but they still don't? If they're watching this, then they know that they should change. Like if you've got two hours to watch us three waffle on about like psychology and life and things like that, you already know, right? I think it fundamentally comes down to people wanting to take action. There are people out there who are just blissfully able to coast through life.

And it's fantastic. There was this, the first time I ever went to go and see Peterson talk live, he got asked this question. And this person said, the depth of my consciousness causes me to suffer. Is it a blessing or a curse to feel everything so very deeply? I was like, fucking give that person a podcast. Whoever asked that question? It's a phenomenal question, right? Which is kind of tangential to what we're talking about here as well, right?

I know this thing, but I don't do this thing. Is the pain of insight worth the discomfort of being able to, so on and so forth? And Peterson thought for a moment, and he said, the only way out is through. You take more of the thing that poisons you until you turn it into a tonic that girdles the world around you. I was like, that's fucking awesome. I would say that. Yeah, it was like apocalyptic piece of life advice.

It's brilliant, right? And it really spoke to me because there will be a lot of people listening who think, in some ways I wish that I saw the world in less of a complex way. I wish that it was more like easy to me, whatever that even means. It should just be kind of, I wish I didn't think about things as much. I wish I didn't care about things as much. I wish I didn't worry. I wish I didn't have as much anxiety.

Guess what? Like, you do. So how are you going to? play the cards that you've been dealt. And that's a huge advantage to tons and tons and tons of ways, except for a couple. And the pains are very obvious and all of the rewards are very hidden. So you need to go through. The only way out is to find them. It's never too early to plan your summer story in Europe with WestJet, from rolling countryside to cobblestone streets. Begin your next chapter. Book your seat at westjet.com or call your

travel agent. WestJet, where your story takes off. Presents, Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero, more like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. Let's take it back to when you were doing the club promoting. Could you talk maybe about your income over that period

and how it changed with the different levels that you were at? And maybe your status as well? Yeah. Do you get paid like per person you bring in? How does that work? So very quickly, originally you would have done it based on commission. So a homeboy on the street that's trying to finagle you to go into his nightclub. He'll get paid $2, $5, $10 per person or whatever for the people that go in.

So first it's on commission, then you'll get put on a retainer with commission. For us, God, I think my original manager's fee retainer was $25 a week. And I was working like a dog, like going around halls, knocking on doors. But it was status as well. And there was this promise of promotion too. And also you're 18 and you've gotten a money. So 25 bucks or 25 pounds is going to go like not nowhere. So originally you would be on commission.

Then you'll end up getting a retainer. You also tend to be paid for shifts that are worked. So if you work on the till or if you work on the front door or if you work in VIP or you do whatever. And for most of that stuff, you're checking tickets, you're checking wristbands, you're schmoozing people, you're doing whatever. There are tasks that need to be done. So you'll just get paid a flat fee for that. I'm pretty sure it was five pounds an hour when we first started doing it. So not a fantastic wage.

But again, you're 18 and you're getting paid to drink. Sure. It's a dream in some ways. Then we span that up into the franchise. Our first ever franchise was called Carnage, which was a tea shop. Barkroll. Anyone who is over the age of 32 from the UK will know this. It was an institution. It was a license to print money when we started doing it. So you bought a t-shirt, wore the t-shirt, and that was your ticket. And that got you into all of these venues and those tasks on the back,

pulled a pig, swapped shoes with someone, like, you know, a bunch of different things that you needed to do. And you had to take off all of the different venues that you went to. And this is 2007 to 2012 Larry British drinking culture. So you'd write a the first half of the alphabet down the left half of your arm and the second half down the right and you have to kiss someone that's got the first name of each letter. So everyone's sprinting around looking for a Zara at like 2.30 in the morning trying to find someone with a name that begins with Z. And that was what we did. And we did that for a long time and that kind of established us. That was a franchise model. And we were taking 15% of that. So I think I was maybe making

three grand a term. So nine grand a year from doing that. But that was doubling my maintenance loan from university. So I basically had double maintenance loan, which was phenomenal. And that paid my way through uni. How would you balance your life at that point? Because I'd imagine the club promoting would be really late. College would take a lot of your time. Is there no time at all? Is it easy? It was a business degree. It was a business degree. Anybody that tries to tell me that a business degree is hard shouldn't be at university. Like, what are you doing? It's within the first four weeks of being at university, I completely fell out of love with academia.

I was like, I'm seeing in the real world what HR are marketing or B2B or B2C or any of this stuff. I'm seeing what it is. And then I'm being taught something and what I'm being taught there's no resemblance to what I'm seeing in the real. What are they teaching you in regards to that?

Like Henry Ford's models of scientific management, lean, Kaizen, like all of the, like just dog shit. Like I'm not, dude, I'm not going to go and fucking design a Nissan factory. Right? And if I am, am I going to remember what I learned at undergraduate? There was nothing about the key skills that I was learning, which were networking, sales, copyrighting. There was none of that stuff, which I'm going to guess that you guys would agree are like real high leverage, a huge high leverage things. I don't care about Japanese workplace culture for lean management. And I'm never going to use it. So I just was like, well, I guess it became very transactional. I did a master's. I did five years at uni. I did a master's in international marketing. And again, I submitted my master's dissertation completed in 36 hours

by doing three grams of what was supposed to be cocaine, but my dealer was having a bad week, and a case of Red Bull. And I still managed to pass that degree. It was a joke. But I got the piece of paper, ticked it off, and it was done. So why do you think college is just,

it seems to be more of a hassle and a problem than what it's worth? Where do you think that change occurred? seems as though maybe 50 years ago, 40 years ago, the college actually really taught you something, do you think that maybe technology is speeding up faster than people could teach it? But before we go into that, as Chris will tell you, running a business could be tough. And it's even harder when you're using multiple softwares, trying to compile everything together. It's often a waste of time and energy. But thankfully, our sponsor, NetSuite is there to help. And all you have to do is remember these three

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Once again, guys, it's netseweed.com slash ICE to get their popular KPI's checklist for free. It's absolutely free. Just try it out. Okay, guys, you don't have to spend a single cent at NetSuite.com slash iced. Thank you so much, NetSuite, and back to the episode. It seems as though maybe 50 years ago, 40 years ago, the college actually really taught you something. Do you think that maybe technology is speeding up faster than people could teach it? Yeah, perhaps.

the world of business is moving and the world of work is moving way more quickly than the slow lumbering institutions that are trying to play catch-up and trying to teach people how to do it and the best way to learn how to squat is to squat, right?

And you can watch all of the videos in the world that you want, but ultimately it's just go and do the thing and you'll find out how to do it. For me, at least, when I was at university, I wasn't engaged with the lectures, the 300 people in the lecture. It was super popular course.

right business management at newcastle university which is what we would it's like a red brick university it's one like the top sticks or whatever in the in the UK i just wasn't learning anything i didn't care about the lectures i didn't respect the lectures i didn't think i was learning anything that was interesting it wasn't engaging and yeah the world continues to move more quickly than academia can catch up to it so it doesn't surprise me that people are disenchanted with it that being said i am way more pro university than almost any of my friends i still think that i gained huge huge huge amounts of progress from it, but it was almost exclusively from the lifestyle that I had outside of it. It's like you condense 10 years of living into three years. You need to learn what it's like to have

an argument with your friend at 3 a.m. in the morning when you guys have all traveled to some other city to go and party or to do something or you need to both like the same girl that's on the hockey team that you're playing with or whatever. Like it's important to have those formative experiences and university condenses all of that together. So, So for me, that really sort of sped up my maturation, although that might be partly due to the fact that I was so back, like socially backward coming in, that that ended up being my training ground. That was like my Navy SEAL Hell Week the last for five years on how to be a social, socialite.

I could see that. How did you then go from doing that to being on Love Island? That seems so random to be able to flip the reality TV. Club promoter to Love Island pipeline is well known. This is a common pipeline. is a common pipeline. Don't forget I didn't, I was a commercial model for like a decade as well, right? So model, DJ, club promoter, reality TV star. That's the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Okay. Like, that's the big four that you need. Um, yes, I did this show called Take Me Out,

which is kind of like a more fluffy dating show that happens before the watershed, which is like, so there's no swearing. There's no like, lewd shit. Um, I did that when I was 23, I think, and I had a huge Afro, white guy Afro. And that was like fun. I just wanted status. I still was chasing so hard for people to recognize me, for people to respect me, because I realized that if people needed me, that was the same as them liking me. It's not, but it's close enough.

Functionally, it ends up kind of being the same thing. Like if they need me to get into the nightclub, or if they need me because they think that I've got a big Twitter following, or if they need me because I was on that reality TV show, that's kind of the same as them liking me or wanting me. And maybe those two crossed, but that was me trying to reverse engineer. I wasn't popular in school. Let's work out a way to be popular. And a routine is to be a useful conduit between them and something that they want, even if their thing that they want is to be associated with. So did you purposely seek out a show and then apply to be on? Or did they come to you and say, hey, we think, how do they find you?

Modeling. So they go to modeling agencies because they need to look for people who are comfortable being on camera. who have got some level of looks that they think is like going to suit TV or whatever. So take me out, did exactly that. And then the same guy that cast me on, Take Me Out, Three years later rang and said, Hey, man, I've got this new show. Would you mind coming in screen testing for it? And I was like, oh, yeah, cool. Like I catch up with this guy that I knew that I respected.

And I thought was interesting. And go to a hotel in Newcastle, sit down in front of him. He's feeding the answers behind the camera of what he knows that the, producers and the execs will want to hear. So it's evident that he wanted to put me on. Literally before I knew, I was in an open top Jeep driving toward a villa in the middle of Mallorca. They'd taken my phone off me. I've been on media lockdown for an entire week with supervision from a chaperone. And then, yeah, I was away for a full month. No contact to friends, family, no distractions, no books, no TV, no internet, no nothing. And you're like just...

How much of reality TV is real? Almost all of it, in my experience. I can't speak all shows. And here's the litmus test. The reason that you know reality TV, for the most part, is real is because all of the people that are on there are way too stupid to be able to act the things that you think that they're acting. What you think that Joanna, 18-year-old hairdresser from Wigan, is going to be able, right, Joanna, thank you for that one. Just going to run it again, but can we get a little bit more emotion out of you this time? Dude, no. Like, no. that the people that are on there are there to just enact their

life forward. They're not actors. I mean, maybe some of them are able to do like a little bit of turn it up, turn it down, do all the rest of it, but they're not, they're not contrived enough to be able to do that just on command, especially if it's a show like Love Island, which is every single night,

I think it's 4 a.m. is the cutoff. The next day, the full 24 hours is condensed into 45 minutes of like 100 camera angles and stuff. what so they would be able to every single day like create some narrative and play some role like no way sure there's no so for me there's something called a villa producer which will come in and this will be the same on the bachelor it'll be the same on whatever

they'll come in and they'll say we think it would be a bit more exciting let's say that mean you like jack right and i fancy him and you fancy him and we're like the producer will come over and go Chris how do you feel about the fact that Graham's been chatting to Jack earlier on today. You know, like, I got to be honest, like, it really pissed me off. I thought we were friends. I really thought that he liked me. You go, well, why do you go and have a chat with him over by the fire pit?

And you go, all right, yeah, cool. And over by the fire pit, there's a fucking ton of cameras set up, and everyone's, like, ready to go. So then they're poking, because they can't wait three weeks for you to pluck up the courage to say, like, will you hold my hand? They need it to happen now. Yeah. So they're like, they catalyze stories.

But they don't fabricate stories. And the reason they don't fabricate stories is because people don't have the skill set to be able to be like, oh, and now I love fucking, like, Jonathan. And now I'm out of love with everyone. It's like, you're just there doing the thing that you do. But how do they get people to be so, like, confrontative? Because it seems like if they were to ask me that question. Very good selection process. Really? So they just purposely pick people that are going to, like, on a dime, let's lose it. Of course. Of course. Yeah. It seems like alcohol, too. Because I noticed on Netflix, they all have

those golden cups. And everyone, you know, there's always alcohol in that. From what seems to be, the moment they wake up until they go to bed. So that'll help. It's drinking all day long. One of the things I really respect it, and I got in trouble, I got in a bit of trouble because I did this big podcast. The first ever one that I did that blew up seven years ago was what it's really like to live on Love Island. And this is when it was still a huge TV program. And I like opened the door behind the fact that we didn't ever know what time it was. They didn't give us watches and the clocks inside of the villa were the wrong time.

And when the sound guys came in to change your sound packs, they changed their watches. And when you got in a car to go on the location, they changed the time. They never wanted you to know what the time was. What? Yeah, I think they wanted to control our sleep pattern more than... It's like inside of a casino. Yeah, they want you to like... And there was a ton of other things, right?

Just like little shit. But it was fun. Like, it's not malicious or it's whatever. Anyway, I did this thing. They weren't too happy about it. The alcohol thing is interesting because it catalyzes the story, which is exactly what they were looking to get done. But the problem is it causes everyone's behavior to kind of like gravitate toward the same type of stuff.

It's always going to be Larry. fighting, aggressive, kind of sloppy. And what I respected about Love Island, despite the fact that I got them in a bit of trouble, was they limited everyone's alcohol to two drinks a day, which is like a noble thing to do because they could have given us more alcohol and had like more storylines, but it would have been, this is coming out the back of our equivalent of Jersey Shore, which is called Geordie Shore. That was where I was from. That was Newcastle.

And they didn't want that. They didn't want people to be fighting and puking and pissing on the floor. They didn't want that. That didn't look fun to them. So they decided to make it a more like romantic love island right they wanted to make it a more mature kind of thing and that was the same throughout one problem that they didn't foresee is I don't smoke, so this isn't an issue for me. But a lot of people who do smoke, apparently, when they get in the sun, all that they want to do is just fucking rip-darts all day. And one of the problems was, as with everywhere, you need to have a smoking area.

Can't have people smoking all over for health and safety and fire hazard and all the rest of it. But it meant that like 50% of the scenes from my season were done in this one like two-meter-by-two-meter smoking area. Because like half of the guys were going through a 20-pack a day. is they were smoking these cigarettes. But you also know if you are, I was 27 when I did it, like if you're 27 full of testosterone and around a bunch of girls,

all you want to do is like, drink, right? Like you're there to party. But you're permanently being limited to two drinks a day, like two 3.30 mil cans of stubby beer, which was just like, yeah, it was,

it agitated a lot of people in some ways. But it was fun, it was fun. And fewer people have been to the top of Everest than have been in Love Island. Wow. I'm not equating the two. Okay. But, you know, there's not many things you can do that not many people have done.

Yeah. And that's one of the things. And I'm like, hmm, okay. At what point do you forget that there are cameras there? Because I hear a lot of people say that at first you're nervous that there's all these cameras, but then after like a day you forget they're even there. And I see some of these shows and I think, why would you do that on camera? But you know what? Before we go to that really quick, I think podcasting over the next few years is only going to get bigger.

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what you think. And now let's get back to the episode. At what point do you forget that there are cameras there? Because I hear a lot of people say that at first, you're nervous that there's all these cameras, but then after like a day, you forget they're even there. And I see some of these shows, and I think, why would you do that on camera? Well, the whole point of reality TV is to make things feel naturalistic, right? It's to, so let's say that this was, we were here and the pools over there, they'll have, like, one of these light bulbs will actually be a camera, and there'll be a little CCTV sort of swivel thing, like a security camera you'd have, and there'll be a couple of big booms, but the guy will be on one of those bazooka things, you know, I could get at sports matches,

where the guy like sits in it it's like a fucking 50 Cal machine gun there'll be that and it'll be that'll be my shot and then there'll be another one here and there'll be some other stuff and there'll be one inside of a bush the whole point is to make it feel naturalistic and people do forget and after a while to be honest you kind of just get Stockholm syndrome

you're like well this is life now I don't remember what life was like without this so I guess I'm just going to crack on Was it weird for you finishing the show and going back to real life and seeing a clock and just looking around no one's recording me The first couple of days was strange. Yeah, I think I was there.

I'd had one week of media lockdown where I'd had that chaperone. I read Paolo Qualo's The Alchemist, which this is a niche piece of advice, but if you're about to go on a reality TV show, do not read Paulo Coelos, the Alchemist, before you go on, because you just end up in this, like,

psychedelic fugue state. And because it's all about this guy, and he's traveling through the fields of Spain, and I was in Spain, and he's on his own, and he's going on this journey of self-discovery. So I was just, thinking to myself the entire time that I was there.

It's just like me, like, I'm doing this there. Like, that was me. It was strange coming out. Thankfully, thankfully, and I say this with all honesty, I gained 5,000 followers being on that show. So it was nothing, right? It was like a fully paid broadcasted dress rehearsal to what the rest of the seasons were going to be like.

Season two was 10 times bigger. Season three was 10 times bigger than that. Season four was 10 times bigger than that. Now it's kind of plateaued out. But it meant that I was very quickly able to go back to my life. helped the club business a bit when people came down to see me. You often get bookings of reality TV stars at

nightclubs and we basically had one every night of the week for free, which was me which is great. But I was very quickly able to go back to my normal life which I appreciate because we lost a deal for the podcast with a large airline that was going to

host our episodes so that people could watch them. And in the final meeting, the final final pitch meeting, one of the main execs came in and googled my name and one of the things that will come up if you go sufficiently far down or it might be a suggested thing on google will be love island and he put that in and immediately said why would i want to put the podcast of somebody that's been on love island on as like a philosophical psychological psychological insight uh and that killed the deal so wow like just that one

thing has been like i'm still wiping some of the reality tv slime off me in some ways because like at the time when you're 27 it's cool but there's also a degree of cringe and you can't kind of quite project where that's going to be what effect did alcohol have on you socializing and did you ever use that as a crutch i watched your video about you and your relationship with alcohol yeah yeah so i was like a like a classic club promoter drinker so it'd be once every other week hard very hard and then a couple of weeks off get back into a routine and then send it again that was what it like for maybe a decade from 18 to 28 something like that so I never had a dependency I never used it as a crutch for anything but I realized that

I was basically resetting my progress each week so yeah when I was 28 I decided to do six months sober and now everyone's doing elective sobriety or what's called low and no but then it was especially as a club promoter like as the guy right the guy that stands on the front door of all of the nightclubs It would be like me saying, oh, I don't believe in neutropics and having a fucking nitropic drink. That was kind of a, I think, a shocking thing, like quite a surprising thing to do. But I just, I fell in love with what the progress I was able to make when I had focus in my

life. Honestly, for a lot of the guys out there, and maybe the girls too, if you're struggling to make progress, especially in your 20s and you keep on thinking, I keep on making these promises to myself about starting meditation routine or journaling or improving. improving my mindset or getting better sleep or going to the gym or doing whatever. It's like, you need to go sober. Because even if you're drinking once every three weeks, it's not just that. It's that day. Then it's the day after is a wipeout, right? Even if it's a like only moderately heavy night, day after is a complete write-off. But then you've already killed the streak that

you were on. So you now need to like restart the engine of your momentum to go, okay, well, like, yeah, I'll do my meditation. Sam Harris, I'll do the waking up. I'll do that. Like, on Monday. You know, okay, so there's like two or three days. And you're like, well, you know, the gym. I'm still feeling a little bit like, I'm a bit hungover. I'm a bit whatever. So I, alcohol is a big part of my upbringing.

And I think anyone that says a night out can't be improved with alcohol hasn't had a sufficiently good night out. Like, I'm still like a club promoter through and through. But also as a tool for productivity and self-improvement, going sober is like literally unrivaled. Like that and sleeping with your phone outside of your bedroom are the two highest talking about that, yeah. I'm terrible about the phone. I sleep with it under my pillow so that that way I could hear the vibrations of what of the alarm in the morning just dude radio alarm clock sunrise alarm clock there's like a million I like the vibration alarm clock because sometimes they'll sleep next to me and I wake up early and I like that little all right so this will do a vibration on your wrist eight sleep can wake you up by heat like there's a million solutions that aren't having your phone in your bedroom dude honestly if there's one thing that I can do with our new burgeoning fucking friendship.

Get that thing out of your bedroom. I know. It's check that and then it's go through emails and then it's checking what the stock market is doing. Now, I don't check Slack. It's always that stock market, CNBC, Reddit, then texts. Loop back around. No, but then usually I'm awake at that point.

Then I get up out of bed and then I feel, but here's the thing I feel accomplished because I'm like, I went through all my emails. I checked the market. I see what's going on for work. come up with some ideas and see NBC for video topics. So like I'm planned out. So that's how I kind of justify it. But I would be interested to see what would happen if you could do like a 30 day sabbatical and go, okay, I'm going to get up and go for a walk. Yep. First thing you've got, you know, sunrise is pretty early here. It's nice and bright, which is phenomenal. Nice 10 minute,

15 minute walk come back, then do it. Like just see what change you have there. But the thing is I'm open to that. The main reason that I don't like it is because of what it does on the night before. that if you can't sleep, you always know that you can roll over and YouTube's there or Reddit's there or whatever's there and you go and then it's three in the morning and you hate yourself and you've ruined tomorrow before tomorrow's even begun.

I have an easy time going to sleep. The one thing that's honestly really helped me is a dog in the bed. It sounds so weird. Dude. But like Bailey goes to sleep consistently at the same time every night and the fact that she's going to sleep

makes me go to sleep. It's oddly calming because it's like 11, 1130, she's asleep. And I don't want to be like up there my fault. Ficking about. Well, on top of that, there's some pretty good evidence that suggests the sound of a fire or the sound of a snoring dog improves sleep depth for humans.

Really? Yep. Yeah. So think ancestrally, right? Yeah. If you are sleeping in any environment, whether it be one that you're familiar with, the one that you're not familiar with, fire will scare off predators and keep you warm. Dog will also be early warning system.

So those are cues that you, human, does not need to be as vigilant during your sleep. So during sleep, there's these things called micro-awakening's, right? And you can judge the number of micro-awakening as a proxy for vigilance. It's like, this is one of the problems with comedians and people that go on the road or me. Like right now, me and my team are on the road. We filmed in Vegas yesterday. We're going to L.A. tomorrow. You can have the most dialed bedtime routine with the blackout blinds and you've got the face mask and the nose strip and everything else. But you're not in a place that you know well. And that alienation causes you to be more vigilant, which means that you will. do more micro-awakening. You were tracking some herd of whatever the fuck 50,000 years ago, and you sleep in an unfamiliar cave. You don't know what's around. You don't know if this predates is around or another tribe. So it's in your interests to not go into his deep sleep. This is the same thing that happens when you're away from your normal bed. So you can optimize your sleep environment as much as possible, but you can't really work around that problem unless you bring a dog with you and set something on fire. So I'm curious. I listen to like sleep sounds in addition to the

dog and the sleep sounds are like, you know, a nighttime forest. Sometimes it's like, no, just one of those little speakers. Okay. So it sounds like a forest and you hear sometimes like rain and stuff like that. Would you say it's better to listen to a campfire instead? Maybe. For me, personally, silence, like really, really good quality sleep earplugs, which are only like 20 bucks on Amazon, the ones that I use.

That is just a complete game change. Like, absolute silence. I could never do that. So I'm paranoid, and I've always been paranoid that someone's going to break in at night. Dude, you're in a gated community. Doesn't matter. There's a scary man at the front. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter.

So I like to be able to hear the alarm go off in my sleep. He's a very high anxiety person, just for the record. Only the paranoid survive, man. Yeah, but we also have cameras also that give me a notification if someone steps foot on the property within like 20 feet. And you've got a dog. Yeah. So, but if someone steps foot, then I get the notification on my phone first, and then if anything opens, I get a beeping or an alarm.

And I want to be able to hear that. So if I'm, like, totally tuned out, I never want to be in a position where it's like I open my eyes or someone there. One of my old business partners, Dave, who was the guy that was one above us. So he lived in a place in Leeds, which is working class town similar to Newcastle. He had a brand new Audi Q7 outside. And it's what, maybe like an 80,000 pound car, 100 grand car, USD. some guys managed to break into his house

his bedroom was on the what we would call the first floor not the ground floor and then his brother's bedroom was on the top floor so these guys had spotted the car seen that they had it went into his house had a look around in the kitchen couldn't see it in there went upstairs into his bedroom where he was asleep

took the car keys from the bedside table beside where he was sleeping but didn't go oh we've got a hundred grand Q7 we can leave then went upstairs to the next floor to open his brother's bedroom door, take the laptop out of there, close the door, go down, put the laptop in the car and drive off. That would be, well, actually, that's not your worst nightmare, because

you wouldn't have woken up and no one would have been there. You'd have just walking up and not had a car or a laptop. Yeah, I don't care about stuff like that because everything is insured, but for me, it's more so like physical safety is always like, that's paramount. If they take anything, I don't care. I'm sure that we can come up with a solution that doesn't involve that guy being into the pillow. Yeah, I can take it out of the room. We'll work it out. I have a question, because for my sleep, I've always struggled with sleep my entire life. It takes me like an hour and a half, sometimes two hours, sometimes like four or five hours, just lying in bed. Because my brain is just moving so quickly to be able to calm myself down enough to actually fall asleep.

Sometimes when I notice, like, you know, because obviously I don't want to look at my phone and see what time it is and how long I've been awake because then that makes me anxious that I'm losing sleep. So sometimes after I know some absurd amount of time has passed four or five hours or whatever, I'll just be like, you know what, screw it. I need to go on my phone. So I go on my phone. I open up Twitter. I do something that's mind-numbing. Something that, like, decreases my level of stress or just like the deep thoughts that I'm having about my career, my purpose, why I exist, how I'm supposed to do sponsor reads, all of these things. I'm trying to tune that out for something that is so superficial and just like surface level.

And that actually, I've noticed, decreases my heart rate and dumbifies my brain. Have you tried reading fiction instead? I've read fiction before. On an evening time? I used to actually read fiction, but I, I used to actually read fiction. but I selected fiction books that are, like, I was reading Dostoevsky, and that's not like, you know, that's one of those books where like, or crime and punishment where you just think, and you're like, oh, if I do kill someone, I suffer a lot from that rather, and then you get

all these like philosophical things going on in your brain. You need to be more, you need to go for like a midwit approach here and be more basic, like the basic bitch approach of like, I don't know, like a nice, the midnight library by Matt Haig or something. It's like chicken soup for the soul. I don't know. I also struggled to get to sleep, which is why it's something that I've, paid a good bit of attention to. Best thing, best stuff that I've realized for the people who are interested, the 3-2-1 method. So three hours before you go to bed, stop eating two hours before you

go to bed, stop drinking one hour before you go to bed, no more digital lights. Seems like e-readers don't have the same effect on melatonin production, especially the new Kindles. You can turn it very warm. So they don't have the same issue that you would get from using a phone or using Netflix. Do you say drinking water? Two hours before, no more water. I've never heard about that. Yeah, well, I mean, do you go up to get up to the bathroom in the middle of the night? Sometimes. I try to go right before I go to bed and then just like pray that I don't have to wake up.

Trying to cut your fluid consumption will help. And then there's all the basic stuff about sleep hygiene and going to bed at the same time. But ultimately, like, what you guys do are like high performance problem solvers that see issues before they happen. Like, so ultimately there's always this degree of like paranoia that's happening. And that is a massive competitive advantage, huge competitive advantage, as is portrayed by the, like, wall of plaques. What are your thoughts of melatonin or products that are designed to help you sleep? Derek, from More Plates More Dates and Me had a discussion about this a little while ago. One of his products from Gorilla has melatonin in.

I said, I thought that that was bad to take consistently. He said that all of the studies from mice or rats are completely overblown. I use it still sparingly. I do find that if I've used it consistently for more than a few days in a row to, a week that my sleep latency, time to bed to time to sleep, that starts to increase. So I go careful with that. But Momentus have got a phenomenal sleep product. That's Huberman's Supplement Company. They have a thing called a sleep pack. It's like tear the strip off the top and it's got magnesium L3 and 8, apigenin and althene. Does seem to help. But the main thing is like,

go to bed at the same time, dark room, cool room. If you've got, if you've not got a temperature controlled mattress, like an eight sleep or an ulla, cooler or something like that will make a huge difference. Yeah. I worry that sometimes people are getting too reliant on like when they wake up, I need a coffee to feel energized. And then it's like, I need to go to bed. I need this to go to sleep. And then people are like trying to find all these fixes. And it kind of reminds me of the story I heard about Michael Jackson, who like throughout his day needs like different things, like one to bring them up and then one to kind of bring him down and want to, you know, hit the side effects of that. But that has side effects. So he needs another one. And then it becomes this concoction of just like all these things

just a function in a day. Have you ever looked at what Hitler was on during World War II? Dude, anyone wants to go down a rabbit hole once you finish this podcast. Dr. Theodore Morel was Hitler's physician, and this guy was a fucking quack. Absolutely insane. By the end of World War II, Hitler's on injectable cocaine, bull semen. Like, he's basically on amphetamine and speed the whole time. He's got a pre-Parkinsonian tremor, and he puts one hand out to shake, and he can see the other hand behind his back.

So it looks like he was early Parkinson's. But he always had bad gut issues and just found this doctor before he was fully Hitler. And this guy helped him. And then he brought him into the inner sanctum. But they hated him. He ate like a pig. He was smelly. He was very uncouth.

You know, for a doctor, you'd think he would have a clinical manner, but he didn't. But Hitler was adamant that he was, you know, a complete wizard. But yeah, yeah, there are a lot of people that become very, very reliant on them. Alex has got this great insight where he talks about routines become superstitions and as soon as it does that it's dangerous

you should be able to perform no matter what the precursor is to the thing that you're trying to do you should be able to get up and do the podcast without a kind of new tonic and that can make you better you should be able to get up and write for two hours

without the coffee or the elaborate morning routine and the cold plunge you should be able to do those things and then you get extra but a lot of people turn routines into is superstitions. And I can't do this without. And that's basically a form of fragility. You really,

really want to lean away from that. Like, that routine fragility is something that I've had to learn the hard way. It's amazing to me that something like cocaine was so prevalent back in those days. And they just used it as a medication. And you would even see for kids. It's like they would use, like, put cocaine in the mouth. Make cocaine great again, man. What fucking telling you. What products do you think we're using today that could be the cocaine of the future? I think that we're going to see. It's still the front wave of alcohol hasn't hit most people. As Huberman said, and there is a massive study from The Lancet that I used to medically justify to myself some of the additional reasons that I was put. I did a thousand days without alcohol. And if you can do a

thousand days whilst being a club promoter without alcohol, it can't just be like, I want to improve my meditation streak. It needs to be a little bit deeper than that. The Lancet did the largest ever study on alcohol consumption. And they came up with the result that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption. Non, zero. Every single drink that you take is moving you closer to death at a more expedited way. Now, is that a cost-benefit analysis that you take? Yeah, absolutely. Everybody does that all the time. That cheeseburger that you just had, like, is that going to move you closer to health? Probably not. But it was nice. So I'm going to do it. So I think alcohol is going to be one of them. I think an over-reliance on caffeine is also going to be one of them as

well. I think that people are so dependent on caffeine. I did 500 days without caffeine as well, separately to the 1,000 days without alcohol. Doing those both at the same time would have been fucking miserable. 500 days without caffeine, and that taught me so much about when you observe other people's language, they don't say that I'm tired. They say, I need a coffee. So caffeine papers over the cracks of your poor restorative practice, your lack of sleep and recovery, the fact that you're not actually looking after your fitness. And you never ask yourself the question, well, why am I tired at 11.30 in the morning? Like, I shouldn't be tired at 11.30 in the morning. Maybe it's because you insist on having a massive high sugar breakfast every single day.

You get an almond quass on every single morning when you go to work and you spike your glucose up through the roof and maybe that doesn't make you feel good. So that's one of the reasons why when we put new tonic together, we want you to like not rely on caffeine. Most people just have that. one lever to press, right? Which then becomes a harder lever to keep on doing because you become less sensitive to it, which means you need a higher dose in order to get the same effect. So that was one of the reasons that we tried to move away from that. So I think that people will realize alcohol, I mean alcohol caffeine are the two big ones. Will we see more popcorn lung and shit coming through from vapes? Do you watch a big vape about Jewel? Mm-mm. Dude, get that on Netflix.

You guys would love it. Yeah, it's awesome. Awesome. Like just business behind the scenes tells you about all of their financials. And, uh, but I think, I mean, what else are people taking? Those cold plunge. Yep.

That's what people, there was this huge X threat or Twitter, formerly known Twitter. Oh, that I said it. Yeah. It got like, you sent it to me.

Did you see that? Got like 20 million views, basically just hating on the cold plunge. Okay. Do you cold plunge? Yeah. Yes. Of course you do.

I saw your morning. Not super regularly, but we want, we want to get you to react to this. Okay. I would love to see you absolutely destroy this. I got it up here. Here's what they said.

cold plunging daily is one of the dumbest things that you could do. Sure, do it every now and then. But it's not the pastia it's made out to be. Cold Punging is the most stressful thing you can do to yourself. Your body doesn't know you're in a nice L.A. Studio Cold Plunging. It thinks around the Titanic Sinking. It's a lot of Titanic sinking. In nature, falling in cold water meant that we were going to die. As a result, it massively spikes adrenaline and all of your stress hormones. Right when you get out of a cold plunge, it feels amazing, just like how surviving a plane crash would. You thought you would die, and then you didn't. This is coming at a massive cost. Injecting, injecting animals with mimics. You're basically aging yourself faster for a mood boost. You're basically faster for a mood boost. Inflammation is how your body is how your body is how your body to corrupt the symptoms. We're warm-blooded creatures for a symptom. We're warm-blooded

for a reason. We're warm-blooded creatures for a problem. We're warm-blood of reason. and six degrees for everything to run optimally. And most people today are already cold. The last thing they need is more. Yes, when cold plunge, your body will heat up with brown fat. But what that means is that energy cannot be used for other things like your cognitive, function, reproductive system, et cetera. Wimhoff, God bless the man, is the poster boy for cold punching, and I hate to say it, but it's very evidently not saved off.

aging. Just blindly hop on the bag. This guy's on fire. And then just to top it off, they had to throw in this photo. Oh my God. Those things can cut diamonds. Wow. We'll throw it up on that.

Poor Joe. Poor Joe. Those are. He's getting a solid like half inch on that. on that length, right? That's impressive. What's the background? Is that a person and MD, have they got any credentials?

Or is this them just making a critique from? Technically, they're verified on Twitter. Okay, well, okay, so even better. Even more. Alpaca Aurelius, followed by Joe Rogan. Oh, no, it's Alpaca Aurelius. Aralius. He is a guy who's like pushing back.

There's a bunch of these different accounts, one being Carnivore Aurelius. I don't know who Alpaca. packet Aurelius is, that person might just be a critic of this stuff. Look, I cold plunge once a week, maybe. I think that the advice is to try and accumulate nine minutes of cold per week. There's a few things that you can't deny the benefits of fasting, sauna, and cold plunge, and all of them are the same. And it is the sense of accomplishment when you've completed something hard. Like, being able to deal with difficult things is something that everybody needs as a skill. Like, it wouldn't surprise me if that same account will also lament the fact that everyone is

like a soft pussy nowadays and no one can deal with discomfort and everyone's got trauma or everybody's got some self-diagnosed issue or everybody is a victim or everybody's externalized their locus of control. Okay, well, one of the ways to overcome that is to set yourself something difficult that you can do and then do it, which could be a workout, which could be sauna, which could be fasting. You know, if you fast for 16 hours, by hour 14 or 15, you're pretty hungry. And like, you need discipline to keep yourself going through it, especially if you do like a 24 hour fast or a 20 hour fast, like, that's huge. The sense of accomplishment that you have around that, what does that trickle into? It tells you that you can do other hard things.

Outside of my domain of competence to start critiquing whether the homesis effect is, like, the dopaminergic seesaw is offset with the fact that you've got more stress hormone and cortisol is all going through your body. I don't know. not my not my place to do it i follow a few guys huberman being one of them and if until the people that i follow say stop i'll just keep doing it now and then so you just talked about everybody being soft in these younger generations and i completely agree and i think that's realistically i would argue that could be the biggest problem for my generation i say maybe your guy's generation as well you said that you thought it was the mating crisis for the younger generation. That was the biggest problem that they're facing.

Can you maybe differentiate between the two? Because I feel like it's hard to argue that being soft isn't the biggest problem. Everybody, my age, you know, Gen Z, et cetera, they're just, they can't do anything. They can't suffer. Suffering is bad. Suffering equals evil to them. Well, the two are intrinsically linked, right? What you have is a broad culture of risk aversion.

You can just call it that. It's like people just don't want to do risky things, largely. People are getting their driver's licenses later. They're moving out of the house later. They're getting full-time employment later. They're not having as much casual sex. They're not having as much party time. They're not going out and drinking. All of these things would have been moral panics had they've been the other way around. But I think people are just interested about, okay, what does this suite of traits, this suite of changes mean? And I think it's pretty evident that it's called extended adolescence. It basically makes adults into children for longer and people don't end up growing up. How this relates to the mating crisis is that if you are still living at home, which is the most common living arrangement for men under the age of 35, if you're still living at home with your parents, it's going to be very difficult to date. If you don't have a reliable job, it's going to be very difficult to make you an eligible partner. If you don't have your driver's license, it doesn't make you seem like an independent person. So all of these issues are all interwoven. But the mating crisis and victimhood culture are like two distinct problems that need two distinct solutions, but they feed into each other as well.

So why do you think it is that people are so comfortable, constantly being comfortable, and they can't ignore the elephant in the room that they can't put themselves in a position of voluntary suffering? Because you don't need to. There's no reason to put yourself through suffering. We can go from an air-conditioned house to a heated seat car. We can Uber eats ourselves a well-cooked meal while we watch Netflix on the TV that we Amazon primed to ourselves. Like so many of the rough edges of life have been eroded. So why would I need to do any? At what point do I find something difficult to do?

People have built buildings inside of which there are heavy things that you pay to have access to so that you can go in and lift these heavy things up and then put them down in the same place. And it's called a gym. We've had to artificially create discomfort in our own lives because it's been completely eroded from our normal existence. Does that make sense? Like, life has been made incredibly comfortable and convenient, and it's fantastic. And why shouldn't it be? Like, is that not what progress and technological advancement is supposed to do to improve mortality,

improve quality of life? But there's a difference between what you want and what is good for you. And what people want is often immediate comfort, and what is good for you is some degree of resilience training. And also, like, I'm not a, even though we're in his city, I'm not like a David Gogginsite, like, never find time to watch Netflix, never find time to chill out. Like, that's not me. that's not the way that I'm wired.

I think that it's important to have a chill-out practice as well as it is to have a training practice. So do you think it's just people are becoming too complacent that maybe things are too good? Maybe they're not bad enough to change, but in a situation, just good enough. It comes at a massive cost to do what feels good rather than what is needed at a given moment, right? It comes at a huge cost. Why can people not see that one is, in the long run, just overall objectively better for them? And they're fine making that sacrifice. How do people get fat?

One meal at a time. Like one day at a time where they eat 200 calories or 500 calories or 1,000 calories more than they expended over and over and over again over a very, very long period of time. And the same thing goes for this. Like, you've read atomic habits. You know what? Like, you know how it is. Things that are good for you typically have pain immediately and pleasure in the long run. The lead measure is discomfort and the lag measure is progress.

why would you not optimize for the other one? You never actually see the lagging progress until it catches up with you and you've got 30 pounds overweight and you can't fit into the old set of genes that you used to have, right? Everybody is going to optimize for what's exactly in front of them,

which is usually comfort. And it's not going to be discomfort. So I think that is it a byproduct of what I've called the male sedation hypothesis, which I think works for women as well, screens, social media and porn, sedating people out of what would have typically motivated them to go out and do things. Yeah, I think that that contributes an awful lot because people can get titrated doses of community through social media,

entertainment through screens and sex through porn, so that they're not motivated sufficiently to go out and do what would have had to have happened a hundred years ago, which is entertain yourself or find friends yourself or have sex yourself. So you always speak about casual sex, or I shouldn't say you always. but it seems as like... I just can't stop talking about it. It can't stop talking about it. You're like, you're like, yo, man, casualty. It seems like you're speaking about it in a positive light.

That is something that's needed in some capacity. Hmm. Because the way that most people, I feel like see it as like, you know what? It's me getting that instant gratification. It feels awesome, although it's probably not a smart thing. They're STDs. There's a scare, the risk of pregnancy. There's also just, you know, putting, knowing that my eventual soulmate is going to know

that I've been in bed with 100 people. You know what I mean? Like there are certain sacrifices that you make with casual sex, but you always speak about it like casual sex is an all-time low. Casual sex isn't an all-time low. The solution to that isn't have more casual sex. It's low, so we got to make it high. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, fucking make casual sex great again.

So, no, I'm not, I'm bringing up, and I do bring this up quite a bit, that 50% of men say that they're not looking for short-term or long-term relationships, right? Like between the ages of 18 and 30. we have all been through a good chunk of that period, and you know what reality distortion field the male sex drive is like during that period. I think it's an interesting comment on,

oh my God, guys aren't looking for long-term or casual relationships during the period in which your sex drive is maybe at its highest. Wow, like isn't that an interesting cultural comment? The solution isn't like just, you know, turn it into a playboy mansion free for all

and like people just fucking on the streets. Like, that's not what I'm proposing. but I do think that if you were to look at the problem of victimhood and the problem of the mating crisis, i.e. people not getting together and not being bothered about doing it. Maybe victimhood is upstream from the mating crisis, but I think the mating crisis is going to kill people more quickly. Dr. Robert Waldinger, the guy in charge of the longest ever longitudinal study on what makes people happy, the single biggest predictor of what keeps you living the longest are the number of relationships that you've got. More than stopping smoking, more than going to the gym, more than changing your diet, the single biggest predictor is how many close friends you've got. Doesn't that mean instead of focusing on, let's say, optimizing going to the gym or not drinking or no caffeine, we should optimize instead on friendships and relationships? Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm totally on board with that. One of the problems that you have is you need another person to do that. Like you're not, you can go to the gym on your own and you can do

the ice bath on your own and you can do the sleep on your own. But you need to find other people. But I wouldn't disagree. Maybe one of the things that was lurking below the surface, what was it, nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, loneliness. Yeah. You know, maybe that would be something else that would get thrown in as well, almost certain. Where do you see the future of that? Because it seems as though we're not going in a direction where loneliness is getting any better. It only seems worse, and it seems as though different apps are really designed to keep you on the app as long as possible, and they're only getting better.

Like, all the algorithms that I've noticed for shorts and TikToks are only getting more. potent. And so it seems as though at this, at the current rate that we're going, they're only going to continue to get better and better, better, to the point where you're going to go on TikTok and it's going to be so perfectly curated that you can't possibly get off of it. Because the cliffhanger after every single one is going to be so great. I don't disagree. It's scary, man. If you think that the algorithms are compelling now, at least they're restricted by most of the content having to be made by a real person somewhere. When you've got AI, feeding the front end and algorithms pushing out on the back end, you basically have an unlimited

amount of ultimately split-testable, limbically hijacking content that will just continue to race to the bottom of the brainstem. So yeah, I don't disagree. I think it's a massive concern. Huge, huge concern. How much time do you spend researching and remembering quotes and studies? It's amazing your ability just to be like, I got a quote on. I just want to say, like, my Reels feed, my YouTube shorts feed, back when I had TikTok, that feed was just inundated. Every swipe, it would show you in some, like, hyper-granulized, like, have you seen? Oh, and the music in the bathroom.

And the music in the background. And it shows your face, and you're like, no, no, no, no, no. And then it shows the guest, and it shows you and you go, oh, that quote is so good. There's a fucking army of Vietnamese repurposes somewhere that we just recorded with Homozy yesterday so that one's going to go out soon and we made a joke at dinner last night like the vietnamese repurposes are going to be like winding up there oh they're going to be so stoked getting ready for it yeah um i don't know i think remembering concept and remembering philosophies is hard and one of the easy ways to do it is to have mantras or little way markers in the ground and that's one of the reasons

that maxims and aphorisms are so useful because it's not just this sentence right it's not just you don't become confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror but by having a stack of undeniable that you are who you say you are, outwork yourself out. That's Hormose's conception for confidence, right? That you need to do the thing. That's what you remember. But what it means is this whole concept that sits outside of it, which is I should focus on doing things and earning my stripes as opposed to just like shouting at myself about how brilliant I am when I wake up in a morning when I'm naked. Like that's not the route to do it. I was really embarrassed about my memory when I first started doing personal growth like eight or nine years ago. Because

I was watching a Sam Harris or a Rogan or a Shapiro or a Peterson or whatever, and their recall ability just seemed to be unbelievable. I remember reading books and thinking, why can't I recall any of this stuff? But over time, just crushing volumes, like tons and tons and tons of exposure, ends up with the good stuff rising to the surface, and you can't not think about it. Tim Ferriss has this idea called the good shit sticks, and basically it completely relinquishes any need that you feel of having to remember anything. All you remember are the things that you care about. Like, what was the thing that you had to send a screen recording to your friend about? Like, that's the thing. That's the thing that you can't stop thinking about. So just remember that thing and forget

all the rest of the stuff. If you're a doctor training for medical school, this doesn't work. Like, you need to know all of this. You can't just be like, I'm only interested in the tongue. And like the rest of the body gets forgotten about. But for personal growth, just allowing that stuff to rise to the surface. But I don't spend, I don't have a ebbing house forgetting curve, Anki flash card spaced repetition thing for anything that I do. I spend a little bit of time reading, a lot of time listening, a good bit of time talking, and then I write once a week. So I have this little notebook that I write down some of the most impactful quotes that I've ever heard. And one of them I heard from you. And I think I researched and found the like where it came from. And it was like a

Stanford, Stanford College professor or something like that. And I'm going to totally butcher this. But I want to hear you say it. Okay. It's the, have like firm convictions loosely held rather than loose convictions firmly held or something. What is that quote? Strong beliefs loosely held, not loose beliefs strongly held. Yeah. I think that's one of the most beautiful things. And I think every single person right now listening to this should 100% practice that.

I think that is one of the biggest faults currently, at least that's facing society. Yeah, well, a lot of people will die on a hill for an idea that they don't understand. But how do they know they don't understand it? It's a sense of self-aware. They don't. But I feel like there's got to be like a point where you could say, I believe in this, but I'm self-aware enough to know that I don't know enough about it. How do people just get this undeniable confidence?

It's way more complex to be able to work out that you to not just parrot something and then say, oh, I actually don't fully understand this. I should maybe fact-check this thing. Think about what we're doing when we absorb ideology or when we absorb a worldview wholesale, right? what we're trying to do is signal our loyalty to the tribe. Trying to say, so an ideological belief is as much a show of fealty to your on side and a threat display to the other as it is anything else. And you can tell this, I call it monotheinking.

So you can tell how shallow of a think of somebody is by, first off, how predictable all of their perspectives are, if you only know one thing that they believe. And secondly, how many different incidents they explain. with the same phenomenon. So if I know your perspective on gun control, and from that, I can accurately predict your perspective on abortion and immigration and the Second Amendment and the First Amendment and everything at global politics, you're not a serious thinker, because all you've done is put this onesie on that is, oh, that's exactly my worldview. Yeah, they'll correlate together. People will tend to lean left or lean right, and a good amount

of that's genetically predisposed. And the other thing is, if everything is because of climate change, or everything is because of capitalism or everything is because of Donald Trump you're also not a serious thinker because the demand for answers outstrips your supply for them so you just retrofit the one answer that you have for one thing

across absolutely everything else but for someone to ask themselves the question okay so why do I believe that why do I think that thing you don't need to do that you've already done the show of fealty you've got acceptance from your own side and this is why it's so rare to find people

that sort of move back and forth left to right, most people pay an unbelievably high price by doing that. Because if you're all the way to the right, at least you guarantee agreement from one side or all the way to the left, you guarantee agreement from one side. If you're in the middle, you guarantee disagreement from almost all of both. But ultimately, that's, it's a much harder path. So of the quotes, I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry. Keep him coming. When I ask for the one that made for you, the number one biggest impact. I'm so sorry. How to ask it. Which quote made the biggest impact on you? Local news is in decline across Canada. And this is bad news for all of us.

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ultimately happiness comes down to the decision of choosing to become aware of our mental afflictions or choosing to be ruled by them. And that to me explained why I was so, compelled to work out why I am the way I am, that if happiness is choosing to become aware of your mental afflictions or choosing to be ruled by them, I like the only way out is through that all day long, right? Like I'll take more of the thing that poisons me until I turn it into a tonic that girdles the world around me. And that's like the common thread in a lot of the different quotes and and insights that I have, which is your intuition is probably right about a lot of things and it gets perverted by other people. It's this great idea called the Abilene.

paradox. So the Abilene paradox explains how people in a group can have their truth perverted, even though on their own, they believe something accurately. So for instance, let's say that you're getting married and you think that I want to be invited to the wedding, despite not wanting me there. So you invite me. I accept your invitation to the wedding, despite not wanting to go because I think that you want me to attend. Neither of us wanted either of us to be at the wedding together, but both of us end up at the same wedding together because we both thought that that was something that we wanted to do. Same thing goes for North Korea, right? Like everybody supports the regime. And yet, if you were to ask them on their own individually, completely isolated, they all probably have a lot of criticisms, but they're all too

scared that somebody else who they don't know also has criticisms is going to call them out about it. And this is how people's intuitions become swayed to one side or another. But dude, like the mantra thing and like the quotes that I love change all the time. Like one of Homozes, like, this is what hard feels like. Like, I think about that all the time. This is what hard feels like. Did you think the thing that you wanted to try and achieve was going to be easy? No.

Okay. So what's the entry price of trying to achieve this thing? Well, it's hard. Okay. This is what hard feels like. This isn't a bug in the system. This is a fucking feature. Like, you are here to be.

challenged by things. This is what hard feels like. A couple of Peterson's where he talks about be precise in your speech, he says as he misspeaks it. Be precise in your speech is one of the most important things that I've tried to do. That and pay attention to, I don't know whether they made it into the books, but the original 12 Rules for Life was built out of 40 rules that he wrote in a Quora post. Oh, it was like 120. I think it's only 44. We're going to fact check this. Send it. But anyway, I had 40. I had 40. I had 40. on my wall. And the two that always stood out to me were be precise in your speech and pay attention because they seem to be the highest ROI things that I have relied on. Alanda Botan had one that

really really spoke to me sort of earlier on in my journey. Loneliness is a kind of tax you have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind. That basically the more deep of a thinker you are, the fewer people will be like you. Dot, dot, dot, dot. And that's fine. These things are, they kind of like, they make it, in my mind, they kind of feel like little, little holes in a membrane. And they're things that you can remember. And then if you decide to open that up and go down whatever shoot, whatever cave that is in there, there's this entire idea that sits below it. But it's reassuring to me, especially as someone who had and still has a lot of uncertainty, are I doing it right? Can I be doing it right? Can I be doing this better?

Is this the best way that I could do it? Um, those things are a little way. markers in the ground that help to sort of remind me that things are going well. How often do you trust your intuition? Is that something you always follow? No. Way less than I would like, which is why. How many was it? 120. 40. Go fuck. Dang it. I thought I was, I read the book three times. Go fuck yourself. All right, you went. No, it's something that I try to spend a lot of time, like, working on. I'm actively trying to work on, like, bringing my intuition to the more. Yeah, yeah. Because, like, the line between is this my intuition or is this just an unthoughtful emotional reaction is a really delicate one. Especially for the people that are listening to this podcast, they probably respect their cognitive

horsepower, right? They like the fact that they're cerebral. They like the fact that they think about ideas and that they, you know, they get to listen to these interesting people have come back. Oh, what do I actually think about alcohol? Oh, yeah, that's cool. I've never really thought about the thing like that. Like, that's something that we're all proud of. But we become trapped. we become obsessed with that to the point where everything is so left brain, if you've read The Master and His Emissary by Ian McGilchrist, a fucking phenomenal book. In ancient Confucian times,

there's this piece of advice for an aspiring Confucian gentleman. They say, the aspiring Confucian gentleman, his mat should always be straight. He must know the exact number of steps that it is from the edge of the room to the mat, and his bow must always be done at the perfect angle. All of this rigor and restraint, however, is aimed at cultivating a crafted but nonetheless spontaneous form of naturalism.

And what he's trying to do is basically work incredibly deliberately for a period of time until that deliberateness can completely get out of the way. And he can just embody this stuff. But the deliberate, like learning the rules of the game before you break the rules of the game. If you break the rules of the game before you know the rules of the game, that's just not playing. Right? Like you can't be a savant. like creator, if you don't know any of the principles of the thing that you're doing, you have to go through the deliberate thing first. In Daniel Kahneman language, it would be like type one and type

two thinking, right, that you have one that's very deliberate and you have one that's reactive. And the goal is to make the reactive thing be the thing that was very conscious by working incredibly hard on being deliberate in the first place. Got it. I want to talk about the difference between being alone and feeling lonely. Do you ever feel lonely having such deep thought being so cerebral in the way that you approach life and being that sailboat that crafts your own course and seeing so many other people all around you doing the exact opposite and being a cork? Sometimes it used to be worse. Now that you have the podcast, I'm sure you talk to a lot more. It's better.

You know, it's like multiple hours per week where I get to speak to people that think like the way that I do. And then I've built a team out of people. I'm starting to build a team out of people who think the way that I do too. And also it attracts in, like all of the people that listen to the show are people that I would happily go for like a coffee with. They're all interesting people. So by being whatever the little hub in the middle and all of these spokes coming off, you attract. attract the community of people like the person that you want to be like. So it was a lot worse. Like I've got in my journal on my phone, I've got like a multiple entries throughout my 20s just saying like,

I think I'm lonely. And that was it. That was all I put. Because I just didn't really understand, but I wasn't resonating with with people. And that was almost exclusively my fault because I wasn't being my true self, right? Like standing on the front door of a nightclub isn't exactly the right time to work out whether the Fermi paradox about why we haven't seen aliens, but there's a ton of habitable planets is like, why is that not happening? It's like they want to just get the wristband off you and go in the nightclub and start kissing someone, you know what I mean? And also, I wasn't exactly putting that version of myself out there. So, yes, it is not so much anymore. How do you apply all these quotes in your own life? And how do you test what works and what doesn't? Because

some of these quotes sound amazing, but maybe for some people, it just, it doesn't hit with them. It's not for them, right? Like, you know, the one from Alanderbotton about loneliness is a kind of tax you have to pay for a tone for a certain complexity of mind. If someone isn't particularly lonely, they're going to go, I don't know what you're talking about. Well, that's not for you, right? But it describes a very particular type of human experience.

But how much of that do you think is similar to like a horoscope where you tell a big group of people this and they find ways to relate that to their own life? And they're like, oh, yeah, you know what? I'm a really deep thinker. That explains it for me. And they just find whatever it is you tell them, they're like, oh, yeah, that applies to me.

I don't disagree. I think that there's many ways in which people can reverse engineer themselves to be in the center of almost all stories. There's this idea I came up with a couple of weeks ago called the narcissist's bedpost. So when you're having a conversation with somebody, listen to how many times they use the word me, mine or my. And that is directly correlated with how completely obsessed they are with themselves because they can't imagine any story that doesn't have them in the middle of it.

And I think for the most part, people will try and find a way to make sense of what is in front of them. and it's hard to be a critical thinker. It's hard to not just like drink the Kool-Aid, so to speak. Oh, yeah, like Alex Hormosey, like this is what hard feels like. Like that's good. But for the people that, again, it's the good shit sticks, right? Like, if it resonates with you and you go, oh, holy fuck.

Like that really explains quite a lot of my experience, then there you go. That's for you. And if it doesn't, then just like let it slide. Now, what is it about Alex Hormosey that people really seem to resonate with? It is consistently, anytime we go out, especially at the gym, people come up and say that podcast with Alex Ramosi I love that

I've been addicted to Alex Ramosi since then we don't we have never had a guest that has that level of conviction like Alex Ramosi has why do you think that is what is it that Alex Ramosi is talking about that resonates with so many people that just clicks

it's a degree of self-belief I think and hope that you can do hard things and he's very honest I think he's very very honest about the fact that he is fallible and flawed and it's empowering. It's like it's in the actual definition of the word. It's like it's an inspiring message to hear that someone who is trying to do very, very difficult things can go

about them. And like, here's a roadmap of how they did it. And it's synthesized down into a way that's easy to remember. Like Alex is basically an aphorism machine, right? But the reason that he's an aphorism machine is he's obsessed with words. He's a writer first. People think that he's like a businessman or he's a podcaster or he's a like a YouTube person, but he's not, he's a writer. He was a writer in college. He writes for six hours every single day and he's obsessed about words. So he's worked out what words mean to him. And once he's got that, the ground truth of his reality is always based in something very, very, very solid, which means that when he talks about something, he has a first principles approach to like, what do you mean when you talk about confidence?

He says, well, it's not that, but it is this, right? Self-beliefs overrated, generate evidence, basically is his philosophy. There's confidence for you. Oh, okay. Well, that's interesting. But it's not been swayed. He's also somebody that is highly disagreeable, unbelievably disagreeable, which means that he is able to arrive at conclusions without having to think, without having to wipe off all of the opinions of other people, quite as much as someone else might do. So it's very first principles based. There's like a degree of purity, which I think people admire. It's like something admirable about that. You did a collaboration with David Gagins. One of the very few people that he finally agrees to go on and collaborate with. I know that that's like a very rare once in a blue moon thing. What was that like meeting David in person? What was it like before?

What was it like after? Was he very strict with his time? So about a week and a half before we thought that the episode wasn't going to happen. And then I basically said, look, I will move heaven and earth. Like if he wants to do it next week, next month, next year. If he wants me to go to him, if we want me to change the times, I'll do whatever it takes to make this happen. And there was only Rogan and me that he did for the never-finished tour.

Like the never-finished tour was finished actually quite quickly. And meeting him was interesting. I always try and look for inconsistencies in people's behavior. I try and work out, is this person full of shit? And I got pretty good at doing that. Like being on the front door of a nightclub, I'm a million people. so high intensity people exposure and however legit you think David Goggins is

like he's more legit than that the guy is just so straight down the line but also in like very giving so he said before we started that however long it takes basically there'd been some restrictions maybe in his calendar and like some scheduling email before

and I was like hey man like I heard that you might have you got a hard out today and he's like I'm here for as long as you need me oh, by the way, you can ask anything you want. Nothing is off limits. We can go anywhere that you want. It's like, oh, fuck, okay. And then I asked him a question.

Obviously, you'd had this, like, very bad childhood with his father physically abusing him and stuff like that. And I said, do you see it as part of your role to not let that go on to the next generation? You know, if you were to have a child, would you choose not pass that down? You're kind of like a dam that stops this. intergenerational mistreatment going on. And he didn't need to, but he just said, I've got a daughter. He's got like a 22-year-old daughter. And he just said it on the podcast and didn't need to, but just did. So, yeah, he's a very, very legit human. Like, people want to find ways that he's full of dog shit or whatever. Like, I would believe that all of the things that he said he's done, he's done.

Now, where they're coming from and, like, how healthy the motivations are and whether or not, there would be a quicker route to him achieving the outcomes that he might want without like blowing his knee cartilage out and all the rest of the stuff. But that's not his solution. That's not the way that he works. He's a guy who is just built by like forged by discomfort. And that's the solution that he's found. So I have a theory on this. And I want to know your opinion. I think it would be really valuable. Certain people do things that by the general public, Like they would probably ascribe the word extremely uncomfortable to those things. So, for example, like Graham works nonstop.

We just did a shoot. We flew somewhere where we were New York. And we shot two episodes. We were off a very bad sleep. And the entire flight back, he was working the entire time. And my brain was dead. I couldn't work. A lot of people would see that and be like, dang, Graham.

That's extremely challenging. Kudos to you. You're a very hard worker. You put yourself in very uncomfortable situations. Same thing goes for David Goggins. He goes and just on a whim decides to run 100 miles, right, for no apparent reason at all. He just wants to put himself through this discomfort. I have a theory that it would be more challenging and more uncomfortable for someone like David to sit and do nothing for a week.

Absolutely. And to eat bad food. What would happen if you took, like, if all internet access was killed for you for a week? So I might like it. If the internet is out, then it's out of my control. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's something I could control that's different.

If it's like the internet's out and I could fix it, I'm going to feel. fix it. I know, become a Wi-Fi engineer for the next seven days. I'll find a way. But the point being, it's like, it's applauded because it's hard and it yields a positive result. But the same thing goes if he goes and not works for a solid week or something like that. He's challenging himself and putting himself in voluntary suffering in the same way. So for him, it's easy. For David, it's easy. It's comfortable to go around 100 miles. Maybe not, right? He would probably argue the contrary. What are your thoughts on that? People always choose things that are difficult, but usually within their control, right?

Like, you're totally right. The crossfitter that says, I'm going to send it, this is an unbelievably hard workout, double day trainings, triple day trainings, whatever. But if you were to tell them that, oh, you need to lie in the couch for two weeks, there's a degree of discomfort outside of their accepted zone of comfort, right? Like, they can get, I mean, it's literally the tagline of CrossFit,

get comfortable being uncomfortable. So, yeah, I mean, people have things that they do that are hard, that other people applaud them for. and in retrospect they give them props for. Like, that's exactly where people find the intersection of what they love to do, what society needs, what they can be paid for, and what they're good at, right? Like, that's literally the middle of the Venn diagram.

That's what they're trying to aim for. But do you think that it would be productive for your own personal growth and development to step outside of that and do something that is extremely uncomfortable that may not be seen as something that's productive or rewarding? I guess it goes both ways. So for the person who loves working,

is it good for them to, put themselves in discomfort by not working and for people that don't work, is it worth it for them to try to do something uncomfortable by working? It's a good question, man. Is that like a muscle to eat? Is that even worthwhile to like just try for the sake of trying? Well, I mean, you know, you could put yourself through a lot of discomfort by sticking pins into the back of your hand. Is there anything good on the back of it? What we're looking for is an effort to return ratio and what are the returns that you're looking for. Just arbitrarily doing hard things for no reason at all. Let's say that you are a competitive powerlifter,

and you decide to also start running 5Ks on a weekend. That would be hard, especially if you're 300 pounds and used to deadlifting all the time. That would be really difficult for you, but it doesn't actually contribute to the result that you're looking to try and get. Now, if there's some ancillary benefit where, oh, well, by running 5Ks, it gets me out of my own head, or it helps improve my HRV, or it gives me time away from the gym or it does whatever. Like those things, oh, yeah, that's interesting.

I would be interested to find out, like, what the person that lies on the couch for two weeks would get. But I do think that it's just useful and humbling to remind us all that the thing that you do that you think is really, really hard is usually something that you've chosen to do that's really, really hard. It's within your control defined by the fact that you chose to do it. and most people don't broaden that scope as much as they think. And I don't even know if you need to.

Like, you have a goal, you're doing a thing that is an intermediary between here and there. Just keep moving through. The idea would just to be questioning your goals and to get a fair assessment of like, how happy are you truly, right? So if like a big part of who David Goggins is is going and doing these incredibly challenging things, from an outsider perspective, I should say, questioning that and trying to chill out and do something and seeing what life is like on the other end. And also voluntary suffering, I think is very important for people to put themselves through.

Well, the question would be, how much is David going to enjoy the other thing? But we don't know until it's challenged. The part that makes David David is saying. I hope. You know what you know. You know what you like. You know until you try something different. I look forward to you telling David that he needs to spend more time on the couch and seeing how that goes.

That's a Jack tells me all the time. He's like, Graham, you're working a little too much. He should take some time off. And I tell Jack, dude, you're taking too much time off. You've got to be working a little more. But the thing is, like, recently, Graham has been taking a little bit more of a backseat approach to his whole career, and he's been drawing and painting. And he's been thoroughly enjoying it. And this is something that he would have never considered outside of the scope of his daily life. Are you trying to get better at drawing and painting?

Are you taking classes? Are you following stuff on YouTube? No, I'm learning on YouTube, to be honest with you. So one of my friends did a training course thing of some kind. He's got a coach. Yeah. And the coach said that he needed to do something. that he thought he would enjoy but would suck at. And painting turned out to be that thing. And he gave a caveat, which is,

but you're not allowed to try and get better at it. Because what he wanted to do was just do something for the sake of enjoying doing the thing, not do something so that, oh, well, if I get a coach, if I get a painting coach, and then actually what's the exact best kind of brushes that I need to you? It's like, that's just another fucking pursuit. You know what I mean?

That's not a restorative practice. That's you just becoming obsessive about a new thing and layering that on top. I was talking to Alex about this thing yesterday as well, which is fucking awesome. It's like 15 years old. It's called 100 days of rejection. So every day for 100 days you do something different that you're almost certainly going to get rejected for. One of them is ask for a free coffee.

So you get to the end of the line in Starbucks and they say, that's 11 pounds, please. And you go, can have this for free? I would just see what happens. I would just do that regardless. And just see what happened. Oh, yeah, true. Finance, bro. But then 100 days of that.

And it just made me really think, oh, yeah, that's it's a lot. That's a really interesting way to get over some of the predispositions that we have that we really don't like. But yeah, I would be interested to see what happens if David Goggins spends two weeks on the couch. I don't know what goes on. It could be transformed. Imagine if you just does a 180. It's like, guys, I'm done with everything. I figured out right.

I found a really great TV show. Yeah. It's reality TV. Just goes full Charlie Hooputton and starts taking psychedelics and playing. Dungeons and Dragons on an evening time. Yeah. You had mentioned that you had gotten really good at reading people as a club promoter. How do you read people and what signs do you look for?

And what could the average person take from that to imply in their own life? We're looking for incongruities between what somebody says and the way that they act. So paying attention is the first thing. I did a podcast a while ago, a long time ago, like five years ago, with this guy that was kind of interested in, I was curious about for a while. I don't know if I respected him or not, but he was an interesting guy. And we'd done this entire episode. and there's just little sort of glimmers of like narcissists bedposts came in a little bit

a lot of stories that didn't need to be brought back toward him were and then at the very very end of the episode after we finished recording i said uh dude just wanted to say like you know followed your stuff for a while and you know it was really great to meet you and there was this sort of half microsecond like flash where obviously his ego got really really inflated and then he tamped it back down again because he didn't want to show me that what i'd said had inflated his ego. I was like, huh, I don't trust you. I don't trust you. You're trying to play this strange role and it wasn't coming out of some degree of vulnerability or whatever it was. Like, I've got friends that are shit at taking compliments. It wasn't that. There's people who

play a role because they're trying to get something on the other side and those are people that you need to be really concerned about. Like, I struggle to be myself. I'm still discovering what that means to actually be myself. That's a process. of discovery, and I'm trying my best to move forward toward that thing. There are other people who want you to see them in a certain way because they want a particular outcome, and everything below that is contrived, and those are people that you need to be really concerned about. Paying attention to body language, paying attention to rigorously scrutinizing whether or not the things that they said previously align with the things that they're saying now. That's interesting,

because you said that thing now, but this seems to really contradict what you just said, and you haven't called that out, and you said that with loads of certainty, and you're saying this with loads of certainty. Like, just be really, the strong beliefs loosely held, not loose beliefs strongly held. Like, be concerned about anyone who says everything with conviction. Like, you should have some degree of caveat or uncertainty just baked into the system of you. There's, you know, Peter Zion, do you know him? No. Geopolitics expert. Fascinating guy, being on the show, I don't have the geopolitical expertise to be able to assess how accurate he is about all of these things. But that man has the most conviction of anyone I've ever heard. Like,

just fucking everything is the way that it is. This is the way that this thing is. And I was just famous of being so seduced by this, the way that he put things across. And if he's right, and if what he's saying is backed up with the stats below and I have no reason to presume that it's not, I'm like, wow, like that is the way that you want to get this thing across. There was no ifs, ands or buts, there was no caveats. There was no nothing. It's like, this is the way that this thing is. But if someone who maybe knows their industry is able to, to be that convincing. Someone who doesn't is also able to create a simulacrum of that, like to do the posturing thing without any of the research done before. So you just need to be

really, really careful about people like that. How are you cautious about people coming onto your show and saying certain things with super high conviction on something that maybe you haven't researched a bunch? And you can't really fight that perspective. Because we've had people on this podcast before, for one, fresh and fit. They came on the show. They were saying a bunch of of things about dating that we had no idea about. They have all these statistics and studies and resources and et cetera. We can't combat that because we don't have the data. At what point do you draw a line? Do you think that you need to know the other person's argument inside and out to have them on your podcast? That's unrealistic. You're always going to be the most stupid person in the

room when it comes to pretty much any topic unless it's your wheelhouse. Someone comes on and starts talking about like real estate in Las Vegas. And you're like, hey, L.A. in my phone. Like, step into the fucking ring, my friend. Like, step into my office. It's unrealistic to expect anybody that hosts a general show to be an expert in any of those things. In my experience, like, if you give people enough rope,

they'll end up hanging themselves. People will say things that are like, I don't feel like that's true. And if you've got an even remotely smart audience, they're able to scrutinize that stuff for themselves. Now, it's your job to say things like, huh like where'd you get that from like what stats that what is that is that a pew research is that gSS data that's interesting hmm and like what ways might you be wrong like here's a few things right

to work out whether or not the creator that you are slightly skeptical about or anybody that you follow me included is telling the truth when was the last time that they publicly admitted that they were wrong when was the last time that they changed their mind on something when was the last time that they surprised you with a take. Like Roe versus Wade happens and you go, wow, I wasn't expecting that. That's interesting. Or Israel-Palestine occurs or Ukraine or like Lizzo's in the news. And you go, huh, that's a surprising take from that.

That's interesting. Even if it's like not something that you agree with, but it wasn't what you predicted. And the reason that that's important is it shows that they're thinking for themselves. And you can have high conviction that that person is actually doing some work as opposed to, again, the monothe thinking, just let's put this ideology on as a onesie and just proceed forward. Like, that's not what you want. The problem is you can't really argue with anecdotal experience. So if they come on and they say, we've spoken with 2,000 women and from our experience that we've seen firsthand, this has been

true in the overwhelming case. And I could say, well, maybe that's not a scientific study, but from your perspective, that works. From my perspective, you know, my experience works. And then there becomes a bit of a stalemate to whoever sounds more confident, wins. And it seems like no matter what you talk about, whoever's more confident, even if they're wrong, wins the argument in the eyes of the audience. Absolutely. It wins the debate.

Fluency is a proxy for truthfulness. If someone is able to just deploy words in a slick manner, it's the classic salesman charlatan that encourages you to get your drive paved, even though you don't need it doing. It's like, oh, it'll protect from the frost and blah, blah, blah, blah.

So, I mean, with that, there certain things that you could do. You could ask a question like, do you think that, um, the show that you're doing is swayed at all by being in Miami and by you sourcing a lot of the girls from a city, which is known for, uh, partying and stuff like that. Like, we did ask that. Yeah. And what did this? And they said, no, we fly out women from all around the world with different degrees of education. But the selection criteria is still usually, they've asked to come on to this sort of a show. It's the same with Brian and the whatever podcast. Right. Like, it's the same

that cohort of women, there is a very specific, I don't know what the unifying thing is, and it's not like there's a single unifying thread that ties them all together, but there will be a number of things that motivate girls and guys to go on to these sorts of shows. So it's the same reason.

What makes someone comment? Why a YouTube comment threads always kind of the same? They always have the same tenor. Well, we don't know what causes someone to be motivated to comment, but we know that it's happened to all of these people. And there can't be an unlimited number of things

because it's like, out of, hundreds of thousands of views, only a very small number of people comment. Okay, so there's something, which is a selection criteria, which encourages those people to comment. The same thing goes to that. But yeah, with anecdotal experience and stuff like that, you're like, oh, well, that's interesting that that that's the way that you see it. But for me, in my experience, that doesn't seem to be the case. Like, do you think, but asking people like, what ways might you be wrong? When was the last time that you admitted that you're wrong? When was the last time you changed your mind? When was the last time that you said something that surprised your audience in terms of a take? Those are really good ways.

So I want to turn that back on you. When was the last time you were wrong about something? I've had a couple of big ones. So for a while I was parroting, I was regurgitating GSS data from 2018. From 2008 to 2018, the number of men that reported not having sex in the last 12 months, age between 18 and 30, went from 8% to 28%. Right? So massive increase. New GSS data came out and it completely. completely reversed that trend. It's like way fewer men were sexless. So I put a post out on Twitter and I was like, I was wrong about this. I've been quoting old data. I didn't see the 2019 data and the 2020 data was skewed because it was COVID. But 21, 22 and I think 23, I'm not sure if that's out yet. The trend doesn't seem to be there anymore. I'm like, all right, well, this is

interesting. This shows that something else is going on. I was very pro hormonal birth control for a long time. It came out of the nightlife industry, a lot of casual sex, so on and so forth. Like you don't want people to be having unwanted kids. And then there is like some real nasty shit lurking in hormonal birth control that impacts girls' psychological behavior, their physiological behavior, their preference for mates. Have you seen any of this? Do you know what I'm talking about? Could you go into this because it seems a lot more prevalent. It seems as though the TikTok algorithm has taken this and has just... Birth control? Yeah, birth control and has just magnified it. And I'm not sure. I have a really tough time telling the difference between what's being magnified on social media and what's coming out from Harvard and Yale studies.

Legitimate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it seems as though the stuff sounds really good on TikTok. It sounds really good. And, you know, but then I'm research. I'm actually doing some research on this for like Harvard studies. And it says, well, yet this is true. But when you look at it in context, it's not a big deal. Like I think one of them was it increases the rate of a certain type of cancer by like 200%.

And the Harvard study says, yeah, well, it goes up 200% because it's like one and every 500,000 people gets it. And now it's like two. And it's not like that big of a deal. Yeah. So what is your perspective? Dr. Sarah Hill wrote a book, This is Your Brain on Birth Control. And that's kind of the one-stop shop for this, as far as I can see.

She's an evolutionary psychologist. There are some things to be worried about, like when it comes to, especially young girls taking hormonal birth control. It can lock in a certain type of protein folding in the brain that predisposes them to anxiety and depression for the rest of their life, even if they then choose to come off. So these formative years of brain development seem to be particularly susceptible to these sorts of, drugs. And what age is that? Throughout puberty, I think, for girls. So, you know, let's say age 12 to 18 or something like that. Would it solve it to start birth control, let's say at 25, when a brain's developed? Well, you would at least, I think, evade that issue, which is this sort of lock-in. And this isn't for every single case, but there's a risk of that happening. I mean, there's some

pretty good evidence that suggests that women on hormonal birth control opt for different types of men. They opt for providers rather than protectors. So they tend to deprioritize the masculinity of the men that they're dating and they tend to over-optimize for their ability to provide for them. So levels of wealth and academic achievement. One of the things that everybody that's listening to this, if you're in a relationship with a girl who's on birth control or if you're a girl who's on birth control and you're thinking about getting engaged, come off birth control for six. months and see if you still love your partner. This sounds so stupid, right, if you want to have, we're such a great match and all the rest of it, but your hormones literally create the physics

of your system. Like the internal experience is completely dictated, very largely dictated by the hormonal profile that your body is going through. And every girl listening to this knows, because what's it like when it's that time of the month and what's it like when it's not? You know that your mood and the way that you feel wax and wane, but birth control is something that's just this sort of permanent underline that you can almost not remember what it was like before that. So that's something else that people should be concerned about because there's an awful lot of data from natural cycles, I think it's called, which is like a cycle tracking thermometer that you put under your tongue so that you know when you're ovulating and when you're not. As a woman, it links up with

your phone and all this stuff. And women who met their partner when they were on birth control and are now off birth control have the same level of sex drive, but much lower levels of attraction to their partner than women who met them when they were off and are now still off. So they're selecting for a type of mate that when they get released from this hormone-induced stupor are not quite what they want. And this can be like how many relationships have fallen down the pan that someone's gone through six years of dating, then they get engaged, then they get married, then let's try and have a kid. And you stop taking birth control and you're like, huh. Part of me thinks how many variables are there though. I mean, just getting to the point of, you know, getting married to someone, you've been

with them for a long time. At what point does maybe the excitement and mystery wear off at that point that also contributes to that? Having a child, is that a stressful thing? I think 30% of pregnancies ended in a miscarriage. What told does that take? I think there's so many things coming down on people. It could also be the pressure to have kids after getting married, you know, all the comments from friends and family. So how could we isolate it to just birth control? Well, that's, that's what natural cycles did, right? They've isolated the other variables. My point is that that path of engagement, marriage, then come off is very typical, I think. So you have this coinciding of reduction of birth control and then, huh, but that's what natural cycles precisely did.

How attracted to your partner are you? Like, level of sex drive was the same between women who met when they were on and are now off and women who met when they were off and are now off. but the level of satisfaction with their sex life was significantly lower, which suggests that there is something about mate selection under the condition of hormonal birth control, which is suboptimal

when you then come out of it on the other side, regardless of relationship status, regardless of how long you've been together, regardless of marital, all the rest of the stuff. That's something. So that was something else that I was pretty wrong about. What else to have? Last year was epigenetics.

Like I thought epigenetics was dog shit. I thought it was like the god of the gaps of like behavioral genetics and I thought that what do you mean you're telling me that like my behavior changes my genes and downstream from that it's going to impact like my kids when I have kids like that's the way that I behave like no that's it's just it's raw DNA data and that's it but since having a bunch of conversations this year Dr. Robert Sapolsky, Dr. Paul Conti I am on board with that like women who enter poverty during pregnancy negatively impact the trajectory,

like natal development gets negatively impacted compared with women who don't, because being in poverty is such a huge stressor. And it's very hard to get out of it. You're always thinking about, where's the next rent payment coming from, and so on and so forth. And here's the ruthless thing.

While a woman has a daughter inside of her, remember that every female baby is born with all of the eggs that she will have for the entirety of her life. So a girl's behavior and her, genetic predisposition can be influenced by the way that her grandmother was living her life when she was pregnant with her mother. Does that make sense? That's crazy. Wild. Absolutely wild. That's something I've never even thought of before. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So while that grandmother is

pregnant, you have this growing girl inside and that girl has every egg that she's ever going to be able to give birth to. So you, like first, second generation person down, are at the mercy of what grandma did while she was pregnant and what she did throughout her life it's wild man so behavioral genetics that was probably the one from three and a bit years ago i'm big into agency i like being able to believe that i can take control of my life i like through sheer will being able to make changes to the things that i do and yet 50% of everything that you are psychologically is based on your genetics have you ever look at have you seen time lopez was very big on this and we had a really interesting discussion with him about how much of you is genetic versus how much of you is the environment.

And Thai, I think, even took it to an extreme and said that almost all of you is genetic and that you're going to get a lot of the same traits from your parents and grandparents. Very little is actually influenced by that around you. All right. So I want to do an experiment with you. All right. Cool. I'm going to give you a bunch of traits, right, different things. And you are going to tell me the difference, how much of these traits influenced by genetics. And this is out of Dr. Robert Plowman's book Blueprint. Okay. So what percent do you think this is influenced by genetics? Eye color. 100%. Yeah, 100%. 95%. height. 100%. Say 85%. 80%. 80%. Wait. 50%. 50%. 60%. So 70% of why you weigh what you

way can be explained by genetics. Now, this isn't to say, if you get born on a desert island where there's no food, guess what? Like, you're going to be thin. But on average, 70% of your BMI correlates with your parents. And they've done this, the way that they've been able to do this, is by doing twin studies that are separated at birth. So you manage to keep the genetics the same, but put them into different environments. So let's keep going. Okay. Breast cancer. Oh, I have no idea. 60% 10% stomach ulcers

30% 70% schizophrenia oh that's that's gotta be pretty high I'm gonna say 80% 50% autism

I think that's kind of genetically I feel like that's also high 35? 70 70 I was going to say 70 I'm sorry school achievement 60%

I would say low 60% I'm okay verbal ability 80. No, 40%. 70. 60. Remembering faces.

Oh my gosh. So, it's 70%. 80? 60%. Spatial ability like navigation. Say 60? I'm going to say 80. 70%.

And the big one, general intelligence, IQ. Oh, wow. They have data on this? 85%. Say 75. 50%. but by the end of life, your IQ correlates with your parents 80%. Wow.

So that's all the school, all the prep work, all the nutrition, all the late nights, all the reading, all the coaching, all the everything for 20%. That's unbelievable. Remembering that height is 80%. How is height 80%? Is that also like your diet and stuff like that? Of course. Of course. So how well fed are you? How well rested are you?

Think about all of the things that impact like... I think sleep correlates with height actually quite significantly. Almost definitely. So are you saying I could theoretically be taller had I eaten better and slept more? Yeah. But what if I did both of those perfectly and I still end up at the, do you think then I would be even shorter? So yeah, maybe. You might be at the upper bracket of exactly how tall you can be.

But this is the interesting thing, right? And this is why people that learn about behavioral genetics become despondent. Yeah. The reason is they realize that there is a bracket that they exist within. and that no matter how well you'd eaten and all the rest of it, something tells me that you couldn't have got yourself to six, six, right? So, oh my God, there are restrictions placed and in a world that's a meritocracy, that feels unfair.

It's like, hang on, I thought I was supposed to be able to be anything that I wanted to be. I'm big into agency. I don't like the fact feeling like the world happens to me. I want to happen to the world. So people feel sometimes disempowered by that. It's difficult. Destiny was the guy that actually framed this. the best for me, which is there is a range that you can exist within. And that is usually

determined by things that are outside of your control. But within that range, it's all down to you, exclusively down to you. So your personality is 50% inherited by your parents, including your happiness set point, is around about 50% genetically determined. Boo, that means that 50% of me is genetically determined. Well, yay, that also means that 50% is in your hands. Now, how much of that truly is genetic versus being brought up by your parents who act a certain way. Genetic. Genetic. Outright genetics. Pre-disposition. And they've done this by separating out. So you get two twins and they're adopted into different households. You have, let's say, one that gets adopted by a family which is quite fat and one that's adopted by a family which is a healthy BMI. Neither of them correlate

with their adoptive parents. Both of them correlate with their birth parents, despite the fact that They've never lived with them. Why? Well, because there are lots of different things that influence the way that you go about the world. Like, what if your ghrelin release is just high, that's the hunger hormone? What if you really don't like exercise all that much? What if you need more sleep to feel rested? All of these things are going to contribute to you being the sort of person that is going to gain weight more easily.

Living in an environment where you learn healthy habits and all the rest of it, yet these things are important and amazing. but the most important decision that you can make for your future child's outcomes in life, happiness and everything else is who you choose to have them with. And not because they're going to influence the environment that they live in. They will do that, which is super important and shouldn't be misstated, but mostly because they create the raw materials that this person is going to be built out of. There's this great story from Alanda Botan where he talks about the trajectory over time of the ancient world to the modern world.

So in the ancient times, the people that were the beggars on the streets would be referred to as the unfortunates. Lady Fortuna hadn't blessed them. And the reason that Lady Fortuna holds this set of scales is that she gives and she takes away, right? They were seen to be a scale that somehow balanced the unfortunates on the street.

Now, who is someone that doesn't fulfill their dreams? They're a loser, right? It's no longer because Lady Fortuna hadn't blessed them and because there are a large blend of different ways that people can come into this world, it's because if winners in a meritocratic system are worthy of their successes, the people that lose,

they're also worthy of their losses. And we all know that people that try hard and continue to do things in an effective manner get great outcomes, but it's a hard circle to square as a bunch of people that want to say, I'm in control, and yet there are things that are outside of my control,

and some of those are genetically predetermined. Like this is really difficult and it's messy and I still haven't found my position on like how do you empower people? How do you teach them about behavioral genetics and say that 50% of your personality including your conscientiousness, your industriousness, your neuroticism,

your openness to new experience, all of those things. Your political ideology is like 50% influenced by your parents. Your politics. How do you teach someone that and then still give them this sense of agency over their own life. It's a difficult circle to square, but it's one that that was 2020. That was like the thing that kind of like came and hit me in the back of the head. And like 2021 was maybe birth

control and then 2022 was epigenetics or whatever. So how do you approach that with, I'm assuming maybe one day you want kids, like who you would have kids with and what do you look for in that? And do you approach it in the same way that you approach this data and just say like, you know, I want someone who is, you know, all this down the list so that my kids have the highest chance of being like the best that they could be. I think the best piece of advice, and this is from Plowman as well, is choose carefully.

Like choose carefully. Choose your partner very carefully. And that's not just for some utilitarianism, Machiavellian, raw genetic data thing, right? It's that you need to spend the rest of your life with this person. And if you care about your kids, it's going to be 50% of you. You know that it's going to be 50% of you.

The other 50% you get to, you get to choose what that's going to be. One of the best things I think that everybody should look for in a partner, and this is pretty much universal, is something called psychological stability, pretty self-explanatory, but the best way to gauge it, it's kind of hard to do, the best way to gauge it is,

after you've had a disagreement or an emotional perturbment of some kind, how long does it take for them to get back to baseline? Just get back to normal. if it takes them a day and a half, that's not someone that's not particularly psychologically stable, because things are going to continue to happen. You can't stop the psychological perversions coming in. You can just deal with them more quickly. Like if there's an incident, if something happened, you're late for a flight or something like that. And that's the rest of the holiday completely wrecked because this person simply can't get over it. That is going to be a very difficult relationship.

and it's very poorly predictive of relationship satisfaction. So psychological stability is not only something that you should select in other people, but it's something that you should aim to cultivate in yourself. It's going to make you a better partner. It's going to make you a more attractive partner. It's going to actually improve your own life as well. Like the most altruistic, selfish thing that you can do. I'm going to make myself better and enjoy my experience of life,

and it's also going to help make you better as well. But yeah, when it comes to choosing a partner, like, you have to choose carefully. So what if you pick someone that's not super psychologically stable, but you both work together. together to improve that. Yeah, well, that's the Michelangelo effect, which is in a relationship, both partners craft each other into their desired version. I see in you the person that you could be, and I help to bring it out of you, and you

help to bring it out of me, and together we become something which is even better. That's what you want from a partner, which is why having a growth mindset is another one of the best predictors, right? Like, somebody that believes that they can change and someone that's prepared to work at changing and help you to change as well. you're essentially unbeatable, right? Because any problem that you come up against, it's okay, how hard do we need to work at this

in order to be able to overcome it? Now, if the thing is, we need to be able to get Graham to like six foot six, like that's going to be a very difficult thing to get to. But there are, presumably, that's not going to be one of the challenges that you need to try and get over. So you're like, okay.

Yeah, well, you know, people are going to Turkey and getting their legs chopped in half so they can get femur extensions or whatever it is. So there's something that goes on there. Quick side tangent. What do you think of that surgery, by the way?

I see gnarly videos on this. It's wild, dude. It makes me feel sad. Like, it makes me feel sad that we have got to a stage where the culture has convinced men, maybe in some regards rightly, but I think it's been overblown, that height is one of, it's so important to your outcomes in life that this super dangerous, dangerous, very new, very experimental surgery is something that you should go for. Because it's extending, I'm pretty sure it extends the shin.

both. And the femur? Yes. So they break both of them and they could extend both I think it's like three inches each. So you can get six inches of height? Yeah.

It's pretty substantial. Now, I, because I don't want to say I looked into this, but I was very curious. And I went down the rabbit hole of exactly like how much it costs. Like, I wouldn't do it.

How much is it? Hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on what you want to do. I think the cheapest ones are like 50, 60 years. But it also depends. Bro, if you're getting the fucking, if you're getting the cheap leg extension, That's not where you should be scribing.

It's cheap in the sense of like it's a big difference increasing your height by an inch than it is by six inches. And because you basically separate, you break the bone and you separate it just a little bit. Gross. And you kind of let it heal. You break it again. Separate it. Let it heal. But it's breaking it in such small segments that over time, it could be over years, then you get taller.

So like the more height you want, the more expensive it's going to be. What if your torso is already short and all of your heights in your legs and then all of a sudden you turn into like a sponge bob or something like that where like your legs are like five feet tall in your torso is like a foot and a half? I don't think people are doing that.

Well if you're adding six inches, that's an extreme. But who's to say you can't add five inches or four inches or three inches? Your arms are going to be like what would that be? Like hanging super low. So I'm a good example of this.

My torso is the same as Macy's. Her legs are longer than mine. So like I'm losing height because of my legs. So I think some people, yeah, you know, their legs might be long. Tors really small. But I think for a lot of people, it's mostly in the legs. It's just a, I mean, you know, it seems like height is one of the things that women want. Like, on average women want to date a man that's 21 centimeters taller than they are. And what is that in inches? Like seven. Seven inches taller? No. That can't be right. What's 21 centimeters an inch? No, that actually sounds about

8.2 cents. What? On average. Men want to date a woman that's on average 16 centimetre shorter than they are, which would be like four and a half, I think. Now again, like this is a little while since that date has come out, so it may have updated a little bit. But like the bottom line is that guys understand.

What is it? I think out of every presidential election, only one of them hasn't been won by the taller candidate. Interesting. Almost like some insane. disproportionate number of CEOs and millionaires are over six foot. I've heard about it. That can't be a coincidence.

I heard that if you're over a certain height, you're like 7% more likely to make over six figures a year. Like there's so many correlations, it seems, with income and height and confidence in height and respect and height and authority in height. I think there's a lot of things. Which directions this going in is the question? Is it that tall people are sufficiently confident that they can ask for that raise and be commanding?

or is it that because the world respects told people in a way that they just give stuff to them? I think is a second because it's also with attractiveness, that attractive people tend to get their way more. And they tend to, yeah, exactly. And they tend to make more money because they get more opportunities because they are attractive. One of the big things that no one really ever talks about is dominance and intimidation. So it seems like a lot of what men are optimizing for isn't necessarily attractiveness. it's their ability to intimidate other men.

So there's this really, really interesting study done by David Putz, and they brought men and women into the lab to look at photos and videos of guys. And they asked the women how attractive they thought they were and asked the men how likely they thought it would be that they could beat that man in a fight. Twelve months later, they assessed the men that were on the iPad and asked them how many sexual partners that they'd have.

had, the female rating of facial attractiveness had zero predictive ability in how many mates they had. But the man's intimidation metric was very correlated. So men who are most successful in the mating marketplace, at least in that regard, are doing it through dominance rather than through attraction. So a lot of the things that guys, like when men are in the presence of other women and other men, they lower their voice. Because a lower voice, larger voice box, vocal folds is a sign of high androgen response. So like more aggression and being bigger. Like just being bigger is good and protective for you. So David, the same guy told me about when he was in graduate school and he was waiting at the checkout to be served at the supermarket. He could hear these two guys

behind him and they were speaking super low and he thought, oh my God, like the jazz singers behind me as this two old men. He turned around and it was just, two guys around about his age, you know, like early 20s or something, but in between him and them was a really hot girl. And both of these guys' voices were super low because that's this sort of, this posturing thing.

But you also see it very interestingly, men, when they're in communication with other men that they think are more intimidating or dominant than they are, they'll actually add, they'll raise their voice up a little bit, and they'll speak around about here. And that's because, you don't need to worry about me. I'm not going to threaten you at all.

and it's just baked into the way that we see the world. Like, we don't want to get on the wrong side of the hard guy that might piss us off. I'm one of your allies. You don't need to worry about me. But you got nothing to worry about. But it's not always the same when it's the reverse. And for the sexual partners, I think you saying dominance was a big correlation on that. Or intimidation.

Couldn't those be the people, though, that are more likely to make moves and, like, more likely to go up and talk to the girl? Remember, this is only the way that they look. this is literally just the way that they look. I understand that, but when you say, when you come back a year later and you correlate that to how many partners they've had, the people who looked a little bit, or the people that were more, what were we saying, more intimidating? They looked. So the men said, do you think that you could beat this person in a fight?

Right. That was the, and the more people that did say that they could beat them in a fight, presumably they look less intimidating. Fewer people that did, presumably they look more intimidating. It's just, the interesting thing is that you think, oh my God, how is like male ratings of intimidation more predictive than female ratings of attractiveness. Like, how is that? How does that

work? And it just seems like, I mean, Peterson's talked about this for ages, right? That you have a dominance hierarchy where the men compete between each other and then the women pick off the top. Okay, and that's why wealth is the best mating game ever created. Because it's one single unitary number that's like, oh, that's how competent

you are. Women don't care about the money. Some care about the money. Most women aren't in it for the money. What they're in it is the predictor that allows men to achieve that amount of money, which is their competence and their hard work and all the rest of the stuff. So I think about the gym. Most people think that going to the gym and building a big body is it's just about the way that you look.

But I think the signal of I'm someone that is able to make sacrifices. I'm someone that's reliable. I'm somebody that cares about themselves. I'm someone that can overcome hard things. I'm someone that can deal with discomfort and pain. That's kind of sexy. like upstream from you being in good shape are all of these other traits that people probably want in a partner, right? That's why, like it's, do you know the difference between proximate and ultimate reasons for behavior?

No. Fucking awesome. Such a good frame. Okay. So the proximate reason for having sex is sex feels good. The ultimate reason for having sex is we make babies, right? So there is a outcome that you're looking to get and there is a motivation for why you do the thing. Why do we eat sugary fatty foods? Because it tastes good. Proximate. What is the reason our body wants us to eat those? They are calorie dense and usually rare in ancestral environments. So proximate and ultimate reasons for behavior. And as soon as the veils fall from your eyes and you realize that the reason that you think that you do a thing often isn't the reason that you actually do the thing and that you've got this sort of set of genes that are pulling the strings and marionetteing you, that's why I think evolution.

psychology, the two most banned, or the two most distasteful subjects in all of psychology. And this was an email sent to every psychology professor in the US. And not everyone replied. The two topics that you shouldn't speak about the most. As rated by psychologists in universities, professors in America,

behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology. They were the two. Why? Because it takes the sense of self-authorship out of your hands, it proves that people aren't infinitely malleable, and in a meritocracy, that's something that people really don't like. Any kind of determinism, whether it be genetic, in terms of somebody's sex, in terms of somebody's race, in terms of somebody's background, in terms of somebody's anything, they hate that idea. And that's got weaponized by like some pretty fucking nasty philosophies, but there's also a ton of ground truth in it. And like telling you,

the only reason that you aren't a basketball player that's six-foot-six is because of something that you did is not true and unfair and disempowering but like feeding someone chicken soup for the soul and saying no no no no like you you can get there and the reason is because of something that it's this structural issue or this whatever i don't think that that makes people feel more empowered i think it makes them ultimately feel more fatalistic. That's crazy that in academia they were optimizing for empowerment rather than truth. It sounds

so contradictory. I could see a perspective where they think we're not going to teach people that they can't be in direct control of their life and that we want everyone to believe that they have a chance at achieving whatever they've set out to do. And that maybe there's some power to that

in making people believe that they could do anything that they want to and not feeling restricted. Like saying, I can never be a doctor because my parents are not smart. And therefore, I am destined to be dumb. And why should I even try? Because both my parents, they never amounted to anything. They're stupid.

So I can never do that. Like, what does that serve society? How is that better? I agree. But the converse is also unkind in a different kind of a way, which is, oh, the reason that you didn't become a basketball player is exclusively because of you. Like, that's your fault.

And pick your other professional. or outcome equivalent that people wanted. So this is Corey Clark that did this particular piece of research. One of the other reasons that she puts forward is that you have an increasingly feminized higher education system. Very, very high number of two women for every one man completing a four-year U.S. college degree within the next couple of years. And then who become the lecturers?

Well, the college students. So you are having an increasingly female-dominated staff in higher education as well. And if that's the case, women tend, based on Corey's research, to opt for things that, outcomes that don't make people feel uncomfortable, even if they have to skew the truth a little bit. Whereas male teachers seem to disregard the way that things make people feel and optimize for truth instead. And this is where especially behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology get a really, really bad rap. What's the outcome of that what you're saying is more female teachers and maybe skewing things to not make people feel uncomfortable? Where does that leave us? Where do we end up if that continues at the same, at the same right? You optimize for not necessarily telling the truth all the time. And there's tons and tons of caveat, caveat, caveat.

Like there's lots and lots of female lectures out there that are bothered about the truth, that prioritize that and all the rest of it. But based on the data, it seems like you begin to skew toward a world that doesn't want to upset people. And that eventually, like, you can't repurpose reality in order to fit what you want it to be. Like, the facts are the facts. And if you start trying to couch things, like, it's not happened, but everyone claimed that the reason that door came off the Boeing jet a couple of weeks ago was because they'd had like a ton of diversity highs. And I'm not saying that that's... I've never heard of that before. There was like a...

What was it? L.A. to Vegas? There was a flight from L.A. to Vegas. I've heard of the door coming off. I ended there. The point being that that talking point can be weaponized by, look at all of these diversity hires, that's the reason that you can't make a door stay on a plane. That's not necessarily the truth.

I'm not saying that that's the truth. But the point is, if you continue to optimize for making people feel good as opposed to, okay, what does reality say? You can imagine where there will be a time where you need to make a choice between those two. And if the implication is we don't tell people about this psychological study, it's like, well, it probably doesn't matter. If somehow the implication was the door on the plane doesn't fit right, that's a big deal. Something tells me that Boeing is sufficiently smart, that that's not what's going on.

And also, who's to say that you can't get like perfectly competent people that are diversity highs and all the rest of it? But, yeah, when you optimize for not necessarily telling the truth and trying to make people feel good with insights like that, you can quite easily see how it's a slippery slope that could, end up with basically research not telling you about the world, just telling people what they think they want to hear. How could guys increase their attractiveness? The age-old question. So, look, there are some immutable fact about the way that you look that you can't change, shy of snapping your legs in Turkey. You're not going to get much taller. I apologize. I think that some of the easiest ways to do it is to go to the gym. It seems like a man's ability to protect a woman, which is seen through dominance, intimidation, muscularity,

the V-taper, those are really, really strong predictors of female attractiveness, a female attraction to men. So go to the gym three times a week for a year. Like, you're in the top percentile of all fitness people on the planet, if you do that. Like, that's how low the bar is, right? Also, the average American man is obese, divorced with less than one K in the bank. That's, the average, right? That's such a high barman. Dude, I have no idea how I'm going to be able to, you know, like women don't just want average. Yo, that's average. Is that an unrealistic bar for you to get over? Obese, divorced less than 1K in the bank? Go to the gym three times a week. I think spend time around places that have women in. Low stakes, CrossFit Gym, ping pong club,

book club, comedy club, like yoga, Pilates, Reiki, whatever you are painting, watercolors, whatever you're interested in. Because if you can finger painting, is that what you're doing? If you can have low stakes interactions with women, I think that you will build up the ability to communicate with them and not feel the pressure a lot of the time. Like Destiny, again, really great piece of advice from him.

Like a lot of people said, like, how come you seem quite confident with women, despite the fact that he's not like some big hulkin dude. He said, I had a lot of female friends when I was in high school and college, and that resulted in me just learning how to talk to them. I think that for guys, just learning that they're not quite as scary as you think, is really close to a proxy for confidence. Like, it's not that you're not confident around women, although it might be. A lot of the time, it's just you're fucking terrified of them.

And if you can get rid of the terror, the confidence, whatever confidence, even if it's a small amount, should blossom an awful lot. It's like lots of guys are just so scared of talking to women. spend time around women, find a place where your unique characteristics are an unfair competitive advantage. So people like competence, right? People that are competent as sexy, whether it's man or woman. Let's say that you played tennis when you were a kid for like six years. Everyone did some sort of a sport, usually. Say you played tennis. If you go and play pickleball now, that muscle memory will kick in. And within eight weeks, you'll probably be one of the best pickleball players at your local park or whatever.

guess what hot chicks in skirts play pickleball go play pickleball is that true jack no i mean but then again are you derogating the las vegas pickleball talent jack i don't want to say anything every girl playing pickleball in las Vegas is hanging on every word here first of all i want to apologize to all the ladies that play pickleball at sunset park pickleball complex here in vegas uh not my cup of tea i don't find that there's a lot of girls and skirts that are attractive playing pickleball there. However, move to Austin. When there are, I would love to, maybe.

When there are girls that are attractive, they're accompanied by a harem of men. Oh, interesting. So a lot of the times, like, I will see, like on the occasion where I do see an attractive girl there, she's got like six dudes. Okay. So what do you do in that circumstance?

Do you... I go in and I swoop the girl. I say, no, guys. I got this. Work on your drive and drop shot for six weeks and then come back. It possibly can be improved at this point. Or, Jack. You could be her friend until she breaks.

up with her boyfriend and then you can get in there. That's genius. That's a long play. Yeah, so go to the gym, spend time around women. Like you think, no one expect they're going to be good at doing something without practicing. But one of the weird things about dating is that there's no such thing as game tape, right? You don't get to practice chatting up a woman.

It's like the competition floor and the sandbox practice thing, are one and the same. So if you can remove some of the pressure by just like having conversations with women at work or when you're at a bar and not trying to chat them up, just being like, hey, do you see that whatever, whatever thing? Like you're not there to try and get the outcome. Because I think a lot of the time, the reason that guys get nervous about trying to talk to women is that they feel like there's this very binary success failure thing. It's like either I got her number or I didn't get her number. But what you're looking to do is accumulate the skill of just communicating to women in a way that doesn't make you seem like a weirdo. And you can do

that with way less pressure if you just get rid of the binary of that. Oh, this is now like actual practice. This is me sandboxing whether or not this is going to work. Inhabit places where people value your unique talents, right? You're really great at yoga, like, whatever, finger painting, pickleball, CrossFit, whatever. Like, go do that thing because people respect people that are competent and you're going to, oh, like, yeah, Jack's like real good, like, I really love the way that he plays pick-up, he's yeah, he's kind of sexy or he's kind of whatever. Like, that's the sort of thing that I think you don't really think about. Everyone has something that's in there. Everybody has some of these unique assets that can be valued. One of the ones for women that I think is

like not spoken about is learning to be receptive to guys. So in a post-me-to era, let me give you this one. 86% of women say they want a man to make the first move. 76% of men say that they are terrified of making the first move for fear of being seen as creepy. 90% of Gen Z say that a man approaching a woman in public always are usually constitutes harassment. Square that circle. 86% of women want a man to make the first move. 76% of men are terrified of making the first move. So what that means is guys know if they don't make the first move, nothing is going to happen.

But that if they do make the first move, they're going to maybe be seen as creepy and they're terrified of being me-toed. Women know that they want a man to make the first move. but if they like only 14% of them are actually going to go out and do it on their behalf. So women cultivating receptiveness I think is a good way to do this. There was this idea from like Renaissance Europe and the aristocracy in England where ladies would drop a handkerchief. Like in front of them are oh, mom, mom and go back over. Oh, thank you. Jack, thank you so much. and that would begin, that would instigate it.

I think in a post-Me-2 world, it's important for girls to realize that, like, guys are on, like, it's not no means no. It's anything that isn't, fuck yeah, with a sign held above their head. This is for any normal, respectful guy. It's just terrified of being on the wrong side of some, like, fucking Me Too drama.

So, like, cultivating receptiveness, I think is something that would make it way easier for guys from a mother. Like, treat every guy like a golden retriever. Like, total idiot and probably needs, like, broader signals than you think that they do, linger the eyes for longer, and then, yeah, they'll end up eventually coming over.

This could be dangerous, but what do you think about the people that say it's only harassment until you're an attractive guy? Well, I think it's very short-sighted to presume that someone who looks like Chris Hemsworth and someone who looks like a normal guy in the street is going to get the same reaction when they go up and start talking to anybody,

a guy or a girl, right? harassment I think is like at least in that regard cat calling whatever what that yeah but that is like it doesn't matter whether you're chris hemiswith or not the culture has now said that if you wolf whistle at a girl on the street regardless of who you are that's beyond the pale if you just treat people like people and go up to them and say hey I just wanted to say I hope you're having a really great day and like I'd like yeah exactly yeah well look it's working it's working already you riz me up man anybody that does that, anybody that responds to that in a way that this made me feel and say, presuming it's not in a dark alley at 11 p.m. at night and you're the only guy

with a hood up or something. Again, like context matters. Anybody that has a problem with that, like it's unreasonable. Joey Swole did like a service for the world when he started calling out those crazy gym TikTok things. Some girls were saying, a guy glancing over three times in 90 seconds constitutes harassment. And that went out on the internet. And the internet said, we don't think it does. We think you're full of shit. So now guys are like, oh, okay, well, there is a, I know that if I glance over no more than three times in 90 seconds, that's probably okay. And girls also think, I'm not being harassed unless the guy glances over four times in 90 seconds. Or, you know, it created a barometer, it created a box for this sort of a thing.

But that was the world saying this hypersensitive concern that you have about guys looking over to you during your training session is unwarranted and that guy did nothing wrong. Like, that to me shows that if someone isn't being creepy, for the most part, and yes, is this mediated? Absolutely. Are you going to get, if you come over and you're Alan Ritcher from fucking Ritcher, like this just jacked dude, six foot five looking like a Greek god, are you going to get more leeway? Yeah, absolutely. Of course you're going to get more leeway. But if you just presume don't do something stupid and don't do it in a dark alley, yeah. See, I was saying how much of that is social awareness where people are losing that touch of being able to tell if someone else is.

uncomfortable. There's some situations that I could just intuitively feel. This person isn't feeling it right now. Maybe they're not as receptive to what I'm saying. I'm going to back off. And it's just a, you know, I guess a body language thing or you just kind of sense it. And it seems like some people are completely oblivious to this. And I could just, I could look at the conversation and say, I know this person's not enjoying the conversation. This person has no idea. How could they not see that? But I'm looking at this thing is so obvious. So do you think it's just a lack of social awareness that Maybe people can't pick up on these cues. I think definitely downstream from spending a lot of time on social media and video games and porn and stuff.

We're just not as adept socially. Like everyone's become 12-year-old Chris in some regard, right? Just like ungainly and I don't really know what I'm doing socially and stuff like that. And yeah, like flirting especially and making new friends too. It's like a delicate dance. There's this sort of push and pull and there's like teasing and there's not. And there's, you know, it's like it's a real delicate skill to build. And if you don't have that, if you're not sufficiently dexterous with that, you can quite easily find yourself.

I didn't, I didn't even mean to do anything wrong. What did I do? And it's like, people didn't see it necessarily. And it's that, that's the concern. That's the fear that people have. People are more clumsy socially than they've ever been before. And the world is more sensitive to their clumsiness, that if you do something which you didn't mean in a bad way, but it oversteps some sort of a mark socially or romantically or whatever it is, like, You're going to know about it. It's the most sensitive we've ever been. And maybe everyone's the most clumsy they've ever been. Like, it's literally bull in China shop. Not necessarily good.

What are some of the red flags you see for dating when it comes to both men and women? Psychological stability is probably the biggest one. But that does, take someone that's psychologically unstable, does that mean that they're unfit for a relationship? How do they fix that? There has to be some sort of solution. Well, they can self-regulate, right? There's no reason that the person who's psychologically unstable. I'm not saying like, oh, you, you, if you're psychologically unstable, you're unworthy of a relationship. Like, that's not my point. But what I am saying is...

They're ready once they stabilize? Well, no. Like, I mean, dude, people... Again, the Michelangelo effect. People get into relationships all the time. It's not that they're not going to get into a relationship. It's just going to be painful for the person on the other side of it

and probably them as well. Right, but then you take a psychologically unstable person and what does that mean for them in their dating life? Does that mean that they will just continue to get involved in toxic relationships? or how do they like recognize the fact maybe that they they should stabilize? Like are we saying psychologically unstable as though they're just not mature enough to stabilize that? It's just how long does it take them to get back to baseline?

Right, but let's take someone that takes a long time to get back to baseline. So they're not psychologically safe. If you are the person that's choosing, I would move on. That's what I would say. Unless you are like, I'm head over heels with this person. I can't like there's just everything else about them is so great that I can't not see them as this phenomenal human being. Maybe that's the person for you. I've got an interesting study here that I want to take you guys through.

Research has polled over 1,000 registered US voters aged 18 to 34. A majority of both women and men consider far-rightism and far-leftism to be red flags in a potential partner. 76% of women and 59% of men consider identifying as a Maga-Republican to be a major turnoff. 64% of men and 55% of women said they'd also swipe left on someone identifying as a communist. 55% of women said that listening to Joe Rogan was a red flag, 35% for men. 41% of women said the same for a woman being into astrology. 20% of women.

33% of men say, they say Black Lives Matter, 14% for women. 53% of women for they refused to see the Barbie movie. 31% for men. So basically, there are lots and lots of very arbitrary rules that people are putting in place about dating. It's like they listen to Joe Rogan, whatever, 50% of women say that that's a red flag. The real ones are psychological stability. For me, I think a very important one is how much do they value intrinsic versus extrinsic reward? So, like, are they doing something because they want to be seen by other people? They want to gain status. They want the adoration

and the validation of the crowd versus how much they just want to do things with you for their own reason. Like, do they want you to be on their arm as the guy or the goal so that they can show you off to everyone else? Or they want to be with you in private because they just love your company. Like, those are two huge, like, huge predictors. And you can go down, oh, just body count matter and like, what's the level of, like, actually one of the one that I think is almost like universally agreed on is what are their core values? Like, you can have two people with the same values and different interests that get into a great relationship. If you don't have the same values, it's almost impossible

because you're permanently going to be coming into conflict what sorts of values political ideology would be one but isn't a political ideology a like on top of your value system so like the value system? It's born out of the value system though right like if you but it could be misguided

it could but then you're going to have to be like hey have you ever considered that your far leftism isn't actually what you believe and you're basically rehabilitating this person my belief we're on dating is that you meet the person where they are if this person has got a amazing raw materials and you think, I'm pretty convinced that I can turn this person into the sort of person that I want them to be and they're not that far off. Fantastic. But if you see someone and

you're just like, they're hot but crazy and it's a meme, I can fix her. I can fix it. It's a fucking super meme because people know that on average it's not true. Like, I think meet people where they're at. Like try and find so, they don't have to be the finished article. They don't have to be absolutely perfect. But you have to see something in them where you're like, yeah, this is, this is good. Dude, if you marry somebody, you have strong political views and their political views don't align with yours, you're in for a rough ride. You're in for a really rough ride because it's born out of your values. It's like, what do you think about the sanctity of life? Like, let's say that someone gets pregnant. Like, you're literally going to have that argument front

and center. At least if you guys both agree, you're not going to have that conflict on top of what is already a pretty, like, difficult conversation that you're going to have about what's going to go on. The same thing goes for literally everything else in your life. Like, do we think that our kids should go to private school or be homeschooled? Like, that's something that's pretty important. What do we think about child rearing? What do we think about gender roles in the household? What do we think about breadwinners? What do we think about financial goals? What do we think about that? Like, all of these things are borne out of your values. And if you've got value alignment, pretty much everything else, psychological stability, all the rest of the stuff. As long as you've got those things,

you can usually work through most of the other stuff. But if you haven't got those and you're just like, we both like playing pickleball. Good luck. Now, it seems like from that study, a lot of it really comes down to someone's agreeableness or disagreeableness. And I know you talked about this in another podcast where people want someone who's malleable in the middle where you're not going to hold these extremely firm beliefs either way. And it's more about the person being able to see the perspective of another side. So how much of this for men and women comes down to whether or not they're disagreeable and they're going to be difficult in a relationship. Well, don't forget disagreeability can be sexy, right? Like disagreeability is, it's like push back. That's what

flirting is kind of a little bit about, right? Like someone doesn't quite fold to what you want. And they go, no, like, you do it. It's like, oh, right, okay, that's kind of, there's something, there's something exciting about that. In my experience, guys will tend to have an easier time with women who are agreeable. Like, if every single thing that you do is a battle to like, why don't we go here for dinner? I don't want to go there. So, okay, why don't we go there for dinner? Oh, I don't want to go there. I guess you're just going to choose everyone. It's like, okay, why don't you choose? I'm not, like, you want me to choose. That, and that is just the predisposition of certain people, right? And the The same can be true in reverse as well.

If every single thing that you do with your partner is a battle, if every single thing that you do is a war, it's not fun, right? Conversely, if that person is so placid that they always just fold to whatever your desires are, why do you want to go for dinner tonight? Oh, I don't care. What do you want to do tomorrow? Oh, you choose. Like, why don't we do this thing?

Yeah, sure. Well, like, give me something here. Because if someone is permanently just agreeing with what you say, it's basically the same as not being in a relationship with anybody. So again, as with everything, it's like, where's this nice spectrum that's in the middle? Now, there's some people that prefer Jeffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist. He's married to Diana Fleischman. Diana is like one of the most disagreeable people. Like she is a self-identified like female tetrad. So like dark triad, psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism, although I don't know how much she's got on the narcissism. But she's like kind of waved her finger in the air a little bit

and being like, yeah, like I'm pretty high on psychopathy. I'm like, wow. But that's what Jeffrey likes. Jeffrey likes the fact he's got this really high IQ, quite disagreeable woman that he like contends with. Right? He contends with his wife. But that's because of him. Like he's this like even like more crazy IQ like super super smart dude. So that's what he's about.

But I would say on average like agreeable, especially agreeable women seem to be like my friends that are in relationships with them seem to have like an easier time. and it's that if everything is a battle for all of the decisions that you have to make not very much is fun who is working pretty hard to try and just get the smallest thing across the line you want to have battles about the big stuff

not about all of the stuff that's just like literally just being in a war and that doesn't sound good why does it seem like masculinity shunned lately I think modern men are being made to pay for the advantages that their fathers and grandfathers had and in a world in which we've moved from a brawn base to a brain-based economy,

and you don't need protectors and providers that much. We've allowed women to access education and employment and become socioeconomically viable on their own. They literally don't need no man for many of the women, two women for every one man completing a four-year U.S. college degree, women aged 21 to 29, earn 1,111 pounds more than men on average. So they're literally like ahead by most of the key objective metrics that people under the age of 30 care about.

What's the role for men in that? And it's also, there's a current trend of it being cool to dunk on whoever was seen to have had the advantages in the past, right? It's like straight white male syndrome. Like straight that had advantages in the past because people who were homosexual were mistreated. Fucking Alan Turing was chemically castrated.

White, slavery wasn't that long ago. Like, yes, also had some benefits. male women women weren't allowed to go to university until not so long ago they would etc etc etc but it it uses errors of the past to make compensations in the present and that fundamentally means that like men as one of the biggest groups that have seen to have had some kind of benefit immediately get dunked to the bottom of the pile and yet if you look even remotely closely at the outcomes that lots of guys are getting. I don't think that there's much evidence

that guys are flourishing at the moment. I think it was the first quarter of last year. I think like 33% of new CEOs were female. And that was heralded as like New Frontier, but until it's at 50%, it doesn't matter. It's like, oh, God. Do 50% of women want to be CEOs?

Like, really? Is that a life that you aspire to? I don't fucking aspire to be a CEO and I owe my own company. I don't want to be a CEO. It sounds like it sucks. I'm looking forward to the day when someone else steps in and takes that role. So guys have had it. Guys had it good in some ways for a while. And it's just like, it's like cultural reparations for men to pay this fine that certain areas of the world believe that they owe to people.

And that means that like mistreating them or considering them to be in a privileged position is something that everybody should focus on. How do you navigate that as a guy? not self-pitying, I think. Like, would it have been easier as a guy to have been born 50 years ago? Maybe. Like, maybe, because you would have been able to out-earn and out-educate most of the women in your local village or whatever pretty easily, because 50 years ago was when Title IX was introduced, which was to get more women into universities. So it would have been, you would have been the highest-performing,

person in hypergamy would have allowed you to have risen to the top and women more women would have found you attractive but it's not and pitying yourself or pitying the world are like screaming and and creating a victim mindset around yourself is literally just giving the power to somebody else this is Alex's thing right it's like wherever you point the finger of blame or wherever you point the finger of responsibility is where you point the finger of power it's like if you do that it's like this is you this is it's only you you that's going to come and save you with regards to this. So navigating it is difficult. I think that being open and honest as a guy as well, like, look, it's fucking tough. It's tough in many, many

ways. And even if it looks like guys have got it all sorted from the outside, I think that there are so many that are struggling. And that's something that there needs to be like a big cultural shift around, a massive cultural shift. So you talk about suppressing men, right? What's the word that you use? What do you mean? Like how masculinity and men, like you go into war mode, and then when you're not in war mode, you're suppressed or something like that. I'm not sure if that's me. Well, you used a different word rather than suppressed, how like masculinity or whatever is diminishing. Okay. Or how it's a point right now where like it's kind of being hidden.

Okay. I would say it's being eroded, yeah, for sure. Eroded. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. So that is a product of the environment that we're in. So if that is the case, you can't necessarily change the environment. no government body is going to step in and change the environment.

And that's just going to be a byproduct of the environment that we are placed in. How do you then necessarily like change that? Like are you supposed to just accept the fact that it's an issue? Okay, it's an issue. And it's because of some external factors that we can't necessarily change. And if you look at data, it shows that like you said, or you've claimed or whatever, testosterone is like decreasing in masculinity, decreasing and stuff like this.

What do you do about? Yeah, testosterone's dropped 0.1% every month since 1950. That's crazy. That's the way that people get prescribed TRT from doctors. So a lot of the time, there's a bunch of places in Austin that do this. Doctors will use the normal range for testosterone levels for men from 1950 to gauge off whether or not you've got low testosterone. Could they have just been high in 1950 or is it like? No, it's just, well, maybe, I don't know.

I guess we didn't have the levels in like 1850, but I would want to know what happened between 1850 and 1950 from. to be like, oh, men all had this huge surge in testosterone. That doesn't seem like it's going to be too likely. But yeah, dude, I don't disagree. Like if any other group has a problem, we ask, what can we do to fix society? If men have a problem, we say, what is it that men are doing where they can't fix themselves? Like, we spend billions and billions in taxpayer-funded money to set up charities and initiatives and research to try and help groups that are struggling.

like the biggest risk to a man under the age of 30 in terms of his own mortality are literally the hands that he has. Like you're more likely to die by suicide than any other way under the age of 30, by 18 to 30. Like that's a big deal. It's a fucking big deal.

That doesn't sound like privilege to me. Oh, well, you know, guys have had it good for so long. Yeah, well, like, fucking apart from the war and the dangerous jobs and the like 40% of us Only 40% of us reproducing. It's like 60% of men not reproducing. Like, that doesn't sound very good. In terms of how you can at least begin to change the culture around it,

I think that accepting that guys are struggling and like changing the narrative, the deadbeat dad, like the Homer Simpson, the Peter Griffin, the like sort of stupid father role. If you ever watch any kids TV show as well, it's always that the boys are kind of boisterous and clumsy and try to sort of cheat or use their size or their group numbers in some way. And the girls are smart and like clever and more dexterous and they end up winning because they're more like noble and inventive in the way that they come up with stuff. It's like, all right, well, what's the subtext that that tells young boys? Not to say that like girls shouldn't win shit like they should.

But I'm not convinced that like an entire generation of people that were brought upon Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin have got high expectations for themselves. Again, if you're taking your role models from that, and this is one of the other things that come across, like, look, should you really be looking to Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin for your, like, father role model advice? Probably not. But in a world that's got more single-parent households than ever before and more absent father figures than ever before, where should they look? All of the people that had problems with Jordan Peterson's ascension or Andrew Tate's ascension, where should the guys that followed them got their role models from? Genuine question.

Where should they? Well, they should have got it from Dad. What if Dad wasn't at home? Because that's a huge percentage of young boys. They should have got it from, I'm yet to hear from the people that are usually critical about that stuff, like a good answer. Yet to hear someone say, hmm, yeah, like whatever,

an initiative this is, sports stars or superheroes or something. It's like, all right, well, like that's what people see their public figures on the internet as. They see them as like, what, thought leaders in some way or another or a surrogate father figure. You talk about the tall girl problem. Can you elaborate on that? I said before, women are out educating and out-earning men. The problem is that women are fundamentally attracted to men who are more educated and wealthier than they are. This amounts to a ever-increasing group of high-performing women competing for ever-decreasing group of ultra-high-performing men, right? If more women have education levels of undergraduate or above, or even college level or above, if a high school or above, and of a high level of earning,

you have this decreasing group of guys that are above and across from them. Women have this vestigial hypergamy, which is like an ancestral hangover. They want to, on average, date men who are at least as educated and at least as earning as they are. This causes a problem because it results in this group of men kind of being invisible to women, results in a large group of women competing for a small group of guys who don't need to commit so they can use and discard this group of women who end up being either chasing guys down for a very long time or melancholy and just exiting the dating world entirely. Couldn't you say the same thing with guys just in general wanting to date someone who's more attractive than they are?

do you find anything like that? And wouldn't the same apply to, to women that guys would say, I want the most attractive women? They want the most attractive women that they can. But on average, men and women end up matching off in terms of, like, out of 10 rating. They tend to be like five state fives and eight state eights. That seems to be the way that they match off. But we're not talking about the way that people look. We're talking about something which is much more malleable than that through culture. Like it hasn't been the, that. as women got socioeconomically more successful, guys managed to get more good lucking or something. You know what I mean? You were talking about motherhood. And you were saying that it was very underappreciated. And I tend to agree with that.

It seems as though people were shunning motherhood or not taking it as seriously as they should and thinking, why would you want to just be a mom? You could have a career. You could do this and do that. Think about that sentence. Just be a mom.

Like literally creating the future of our species isn't a big deal. Yeah. Just be a mum. Yeah, man. I mean, that's how powerful the patriarchy is. The patriarchy is so powerful that they've managed to convince women that they can both be the breadwinner and the mother and that we just get to stay at home and play Xbox

all day. Like, that's fucking, that's impressive. Like, that that's managed to occur. But, dude, like, come on. Modern women believe that true freedom is having sex like their brother and working like their father. I'm not convinced that that's true. they're not culpable to their husband in the way that they would have been before.

This is something that like the Manusphi never talks about and a lot of dating online never talks about. Look at how low the divorce rates were 50 years or 100 years ago. Look at how more effective it was for people to get married and stuff like that. Yeah, but how many women stayed in relationships with men because they were literally financial prisoners? Like no one really ever talks about that. And it's like, women have now been liberated to make that choice, but they've also been encouraged to believe that motherhood makes them a second-class citizen. I don't think that that's true.

There's very few women that I know that have said having a kid was like the worst thing that I ever did. Or I'm so glad that I worked more and spent less time with my child. Very, very particular woman that says that. Now, maybe you could say, wow, that's because like who's going to say that they hate their kid? I don't know. Like there's a few people on TikTok that do that. It was like that girl with a list. Did you see that?

I didn't. I've seen a lot of ones on Reddit though. Dude, it's fucking weird. There's like literally women taking videos of their newborn child and saying like, I can't believe that I brought this thing into the world. Like I don't like this girl made an eight page 350 item. It's called hashtag girl with a list. You can go and look at it on TikTok right now.

Yeah. She made an eight page list of all of the different reasons why she didn't want to have a kid, including like can't wear cute heels anymore, won't be able to go. to brunch with the girls, literally a parasite growing inside of my body. And then the list of reasons to have a kid was like half a page long. So there's just this very, like, averse to motherhood culture at the moment. Chelsea Connoboy wrote an article for the New York Times, maternal instinct is a myth that men created. Okay. Is that the same across the entire animal kingdom? Where we, like, what, what do you mean here? Like, just how powerful is the patriarchy

that we managed to convince women that they want to have kids? How the fuck do you think we got here? like how do you think that we manage to survive all this time? It's very strange. It's very strange. It seems like we're coming back to that though. It seems like I've noticed a traditional movement that I haven't seen 10 years ago

that's coming back to people saying, you know what, I don't want the career, I want to be home, I want to have kids, I want to raise a family. And it seems like now people are really standing up to that and saying, I think it's really noble. I think it's not easy to do. It's very difficult.

And the sacrifice that way. would take, I think is significant. Well, downstream from anything new, like something that's new and novel, people get excited about. Oh my God, like women have got access to the workforce. And you test it for a good while. And again, we don't always do our own sense making. We have to learn by failing. And you outsource some of that to the rest of the world. That's the Abilene paradox in some regards, right? So like, lots of women being told, this is something. And again, the loud, the CEO, boss bitch, like lean in sort of girls, like, maybe it is great for

them. Like maybe that's the perfect life they could lead and if they were a mother, they'd be fucking miserable. Totally fine. But you can't use that and whitewash the entire rest. It would be the same as saying every dad should be a stay at home dad. And like, no. Very few people would agree that that's the optimal life setup for every guy. But yet it may be for some. But you don't use like even major cases, like majority cases to smear the entirety of a group. You use like each different person tries to work out what it is for themselves. But yeah, man, I do think that the motherhood thing is swinging back around. But this is still the aftershock, the after effect of the introduction of reliable contraception. You know that after the introduction of the pill, single mother

pregnancies went up, not down. And why is that? Because prior to reliable contraception, and out of wedlock birth was seen as the man's mistake and after reliable contraception it was seen as the woman's choice so shotgun weddings went down single motherhood went up the number of abortions went up

after the increase after the introduction of hormonal birth control like who could have predicted that I don't think that there's anybody on the planet that would have been able to work out like the downstream before then the consequence was so big that if you're going to sleep with somebody there's a very high likelihood of ending up pregnant

and because of that you're very careful of who you're with. After that, you don't have to have that same level of care and accidents happen. Not only the same level of care, but also the same level of obligation. Sure.

Like, do you know why it's called a shotgun wedding? Well, because the dad sits there as like, you better get married to my daughter. The dog gets kicked down. Yep. When's it happening, son? Yep. Well, and you go,

hey, hey, hey, hey. she could have taken the pill. Do you know that she could have, did she decide to, she's decided to keep this. Like it made it the woman's obligation and not the man's mistake, or the woman's choice and not the man's mistake. So, yeah, dude, we're still playing with an awful lot of technology, like reproductive technology, what does this mean?

What does it mean to split off and bificate having sex from making babies? And then what does it mean to do it again and split off having sex from being in love, having sex from being married, having sex from having feelings? There's articles in L and Cosmopolitan How to Sleep with Him and Not Catch Feels Like, how do I disembodied myself From literally one of the most sacred things That I can do with another human

Like that's what that article could be rewritten as And again, like, dude, I come from a nightlife background Like fucking, that's what we literally What people were going out for for the most part You would lose entire networks of people Because some key guest lister had got into a relationship It's like, oh, for fuck sake Like Jonathan's back in a relationship again

God damn it. Like we're going to lose, wait, well, in four months' time, we'll be out of it and it'll be fine and we'll, like, get his group of 15 friends

that would come out every Thursday back, whatever. But yeah, I think that the trends are moving in the right direction overall. I think that we've got reason

for help, and I don't think that people should be too cynical about the way that the future's going. Hmm. To end this off, I have a few personal questions.

What is your biggest insecurity? That I'm not good enough. Period? That I'm not good enough. That's a thought. At everything? At everything.

Okay. the same way as you being driven by the paranoia of whether the S&P is going to move like aggressively tomorrow or whether someone's going to like break into the house one of the one of the thoughts that I have a lot of the time is like what if I'm not good enough like what if what if this failure is some sort of judgment on me as a person what if that lack of performance what if that lack of recognition what if that lack of actualization what if that poorly spoken sentence. What if that? All of those things. I'm like, what if I'm not good enough? I'm working through it. What if? Well, if you actually run it down, I mean, it's a completely

a logical fear. Like, because the fear is, if I'm not good enough, I'll be cast out and no one will like me and no one will care about me and I'll be on my own and I'll die. Like, that's the, that's the embodied sense, right? That's the limbic feeling. But if you actually step in and fact check it, you go, nothing, nothing. But overcoming the way that you feel when that thing happens and actually allowing yourself to have that equanimity to be like, ah, I'll be fine. Like, there's nothing to worry about. But yeah, that I'm not good enough is a big one. And when is the last time you cried? Oh, dude. I had shed a tear yesterday when I told Alex's story on the podcast. therapy week and a half ago

watching Klaus the Christmas movie watching an adaptation of a Christmas carol I cry pretty regularly I'm pretty emotional person I would love to hear that story but I'm afraid which one? What's the one you cried

when you were telling Alex? It wasn't anything big it was just like me I think it was something that I really cared about it was like I was reminiscing about some some like person that inspired me and uh i i cry pretty regularly i'm still like that's another degree of like i still haven't got to that stage of being able to do it on the show like i just it makes me feel so like weak and vulnerable and i hate it i hate that like oh fuck

like yeah my emotions arising to the surface again because having emotions to me is at least in some way seen as being like oh this makes me weak or vulnerable or or less do you think guys should be forthright about their crying? Should they cry in front of girls? I think they should be forthright about whatever they are. Because anything else is just fucking posturing. Anything else is just you performing? And is that what you really want?

Like to look back on life and go, I was never myself, but at least no one ever saw the failings of me. Is that really like fucking heroism to you? Because it's not to me. And that's one of the things. Like if I could change one of the things, if I could give a piece of advice to me from 10 years ago,

it would be feel less. because I fear a lot. I feared a lot. And that's still one of the, like, recurring themes. Even now, fucking two million person YouTube channel and Peterson and Goggins and Rogan and all the rest of the stuff, it's still there. And I'm like, right, okay, like, how can I continue to unpack this? And maybe that, you know, we asked at the very beginning, why should people listen to you? And it's a really good question that haven't been asked before. Like, I guess first off, I didn't ask anyone to listen to me. Like, I just did it because I wanted to learn. And then, people seem to like learning along with me too.

But the other reason maybe why they do listen, at least in some regard, is like I'm failing forward, learning out loud, practicing in public. Like I'm doing all of this in as open of a way as I can. I could still be way more open. I'm not destiny open. But I'm like, I'm as open as I can be about this. And maybe people like, I don't know, see a version,

like see some ongoing on a journey that they can resonate with and maybe that helps, I guess. Amazing. Quick thing that I saw on Twitter that I wanted to get your opinion on because it has to do with therapy. This is, quote unquote, a super hot take.

It got millions of views. And it says, the normalization of therapy is becoming a bad thing for society. I'm seeing more and more people. One, use the fact that they are in therapy as a get out of jail free card for awful behavior.

Two, believe everything their therapist says as gospel truth with no further research required. Three, equate the act of going to therapy with the actions of being a good person. I'm not saying therapy is bad for everyone, but I am seeing a trend of less people, less personal responsibility for bad behavior and a lot more talk about therapy as the only solution. And it got commented and replied to by an Elon Musk, and this is what he said. The dot emoji. Dude, I think that's a great take. I don't think that's particularly hot take at all. I think that therapy culture and the normalization of therapy languages is dangerous.

Like people have mistaken going to therapy for doing the work. Like even your therapist will say it's integration after you have these conversations, right? For me, it's been very, very, very illuminating. I've not been doing tons of therapy throughout my entire life, and I maybe should have done more. It's been very, very illuminating. There's very few places, and this is like, I'll fly the flag at least a little bit. there's very few places where you're allowed to be boring. You're not even really allowed to be boring around your friends.

Like if you're having a conversation and your thoughts are messy, one of the things that you learn in therapy is to pay attention to fleeting thoughts and to not believe that you're supposed to have a cohesive narrative or sentence when you open your mouth. Like you're trying to get stuff which you haven't formed an opinion about or haven't really understood. you're trying to like get it into something that's out there. And that results in you making lots of U-turns and messing up

and not really knowing where you're going and maybe circling the same point for like 20 minutes. Even the best friend in the world is going to be like, dude, this fucking sucks. Like I'll sit here, but like it, they would say, is this a therapy session? There's very few places that you're allowed to be boring, like emotionally boring and repetitive and messy.

And there are very few places in which you can actually actually be completely 100% this person would be fucking canned by their psychology, psychiatry board, license board, if they said the things that I'm saying to them. Like being petty about stuff or talking about things that are unbelievably embarrassing. Like those things are important. And it's not for everyone. It's not a panacea. Maybe I'm going to find out, maybe I'll change my opinion in like five years' time or one year's time or six months' time.

I don't know. but at the moment it's interesting and especially if you spend all of your time talking to other people and like being on, being in a place where you don't have to like oh and Winston Churchill once said like this fucking thing like is

really really really important and good so not for everybody but neither's a knife bath. Cool. Thank you so much for coming on the ice copy. I really appreciate it. You have to remind people to subscribe because they're not subscribed. We're on a race to a million subscribers. We've got to beat Caleb Hammer.

Who's Caleb? He does the financial audits on YouTube. Okay, he's got a cooler name, but a worst channel name. I like it. Okay, so subscribe to the ice coffee hour, and Graham will sneak into your house late at night. Check out, Chris. He'll be linked down below guys. Also, got a shout out.

These are really good. You sent me some. I absolutely loved it. I was wildly surprised. You can't? Sold out across America. Sold out in some flavors in the UK. Go to Newtonic.com.

You can sign up. Modern Wisdom on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Chris Williams. on YouTube. Boys, I really appreciate you. I love what you're doing. Massive fan of your channel, massive fan of the podcast. It's been fucking awesome to catch up. We're going to go okay.

And then I've got an hour and 40 minutes to get on a flight. All right, we got to go. Thanks. Thanks, yeah. Oh, yeah.