TRIGGERnometry - Chris Williamson: Positive Masculinity

Episode Date: November 12, 2023

Chris Williamson is an English podcaster and YouTuber. Since 2018 he has hosted the Modern Wisdom podcast which has been downloaded over 200 million times. He discusses current events, politics, philosophy, science and hobbies with a variety of guests including Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Will MacAskill, Robin Dunbar, Michael Malice, Sam Harris, Eric Weinstein, and Patrick Moore. SPONSORED BY: AG1. Go to https://www.drinkAG1.com/triggernometry/ to get 5 free AG1 Travel Packs and a FREE 1 year supply of Vitamin D with your first purchase! Become a Premium Member to receive exclusive benefits https://triggernometry.supercast.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Get started today at IPVanish.com slash audio and take control of your privacy with IPVANFish. It's all out there for the taking right now. If you have a gram of talent and an ounce of hard work, you'll run these pussies over. And it's like, it's true. Like, there is, the bar has never been set lower. Whatever it is that you're worried about, think about how fragile the average person is and realize that half of the population is more fragile than that.

Taking the path that everybody else chooses may seem like the safe option, but it's actually a guaranteed route to a life that you probably don't want. I don't think there's ever been a time where there's been more opportunity and a lower degree of competition. Hey guys, Trigonometry needs your help. We took a big risk creating the show. And for us to keep doing the incredible work that you all love, we need your support. That's the only way we're going to stay independent and create content that you won't be able to find anywhere else. There is no other podcast where you'll hear interviews with Nigel Farage one week and the next week you've got

Aaron Bastani, the founder of Left Wing Show Navarra Media, on the same platform. You know the mainstream media aren't honest. You know they've been caught lying again and again. You know they can't be trusted. The only way to change that is to make a stand and support independent content creators, like trigonometry to produce better and more honest content. We have big plans and we'll shortly be announcing exciting new shows and more terrific interviews with huge guests. That isn't going to happen without.

your help. When you support us, you also get incredible extra content, such as extended interviews with none of those irritating adverts, and they'll be released 24 hours early just for you. We'll have exclusive bonus interviews that only you get to hear. Click the link on the podcast description or find the link on your podcast listening app to join us. Support us and help change the way we have conversations and make the world saner. Chris, it's so good to have you on, man. This has been in the works for a long time. I'm glad we've delayed it as much as we have

because you are absolutely blowing up, man. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's really good to have you on. There's really a couple of subjects we wanted to talk to you about. The first one of which is the reason you're so successful, which is mindset. And you not only are someone who works in your mindset,

you also interview a hell of a lot of people about how to be effective, how to be healthy, how to be kind of in the zone in many different ways. So what have you learned? What can you share with us and our audience? How do we get to a million subscribers is what I'm saying? No, just the arms. How do you get the arms, mate? The answer is the easy part.

An obsessive work, right? Yeah, it's interesting, right? So I got toward the end of my 20s and didn't really feel like I understood myself or the world around me. I think a lot of young guys and maybe girls to feel this way, they've absorbed desires and goals that are supposed to fulfill them and maybe they've reached them or they're on the way to reaching them and something doesn't feel quite right.

So end of my 20s, I've been on Love Island, you know, blue tick on Twitter, free charcoal toothpaste, all that stuff. And I haven't, I haven't, I don't know, like it was a promise that the world gave to me that it didn't feel like it was delivering. So I realized, okay, there's a mismatch here, there's something's up. I'm doing things that I'm told will make me feel fulfilled,

and yet the fulfillment doesn't seem to be coming. So it was a fortunate time getting to read and listen to guys like Allanda Botton from the School of Life, massively formative for me, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Rogan's Show, just real wealth of interesting individuals that were talking about how the way you see the world and the things that you go after can change the way you feel. And yeah, that I guess was just the journey,

the mindset journey that I've been trying to get on because in my 20s I thought I was depressed or I had technically like acute sadness for short periods of time and I just thought that was the texture of my own mind. I thought I was lonely, only child, so I was presumed that I was a lonely person and now I've got to, you know, 35

and the texture of my mind is unrecognizable to how it was back then and the sort of friend groups that I have and the support that I feel and the enjoyment and the enthusiasm that I have for life and the positivity and the hope that I have around things has also changed. So I think, you know, the proof is in the pudding that I went from someone who was like, not despondent, but pretty, I didn't think that stuff was like going that great. And this was kind of just life was here, right? And I wanted it to be here.

And it just never really seemed to wobble that much higher. Actually, I think you wanted it to be here. you wanted, because you showed one hand above the other, actually I think you wanted to be the real you. That's what, I think, that emptiness and vacuousness that you talk about, I think so many people experience that nowadays, especially in the age of social media where kind of what you're supposed to be

is constantly being beamed into your head by watching all sorts of other people. It's really interesting. But I will say this, of all the people in our space, you were the first person that we encountered who had a really healthy mindset about being friends with the people in your space instead of seeing them as competition.

And we've been good friends ever since, I think, because of that. Well, you guys have brought this up on Rogan, and I did as well last year, the difference between US and UK culture, right? For the Brits that are listening, the tall poppy syndrome, which is very endemic, this kind of zero-sum mentality, if you divert away from doing something that is the norm,

you're very quickly sort of shot down, that's stupid, that's lame, why are you trying this? And in the US, you don't quite have that so much. Now, you do have a problem in the US too, which is that children have promised the American dream, and when they grow up to become adults, and they feel like reality hasn't delivered that to them, they often feel a sense of entitlement.

Why isn't the world this way? And this is why I think that the victimhood culture seems to be more patient zero-e over here in the US than it is in the UK, because in the UK, what did you hope for? Everyone is... Of course you're a victim. Yeah, you expected nothing and nothing came to you.

Congratulations, you achieved your goals. And, you know, this is a really important rule, which is the difference between your expectation and your reality very much is determinant of how we feel about our lives. You know, desire is the thief of joy, a comparison is the thief of joy. Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.

All that it's doing is comparing where you want to be to where you are. And that's not necessarily a justification for having low expectations, but something like pessimism in practice, optimism in reality, something like that would be quite nice, like sort of high hopes, low expectations, something like that I think would be kind of cool. But yeah, man, I did this sort of very virulent strain of people being tamped down in the UK, I feel.

And I came up with this idea with a friend Alex called The Lonely Chapter. I think it's really important, so I'll teach you guys about it. So on your journey from being the person that you are now to the person that you want to be, especially if it's going to make some sort of a dramatic change between the two, you are going to have to go through a period where you have changed so much that you no longer fit in with your old set of friends, but you are currently not yet developed enough to have developed the new set of friends, right? And this is what we call the lonely chapter.

And I think it's very important because all of the Genesis origin stories of I decided that the sales job wasn't for me or that the girlfriend wasn't for me or that the life or the city wasn't for me. So I decided to go out, especially because that's dominated a lot by America, it seems like a very sort of smooth journey from making that decision in terms of commitment and self-belief. But the realistic experience of this is that if you want to go from where you are to where you want to be, it's going to cause you to leave friends behind. You're not going to get the new group, this bit in the middle, this lonely chapter, will cause you to be riddled with self-doubt and you will be uncertain about your future, you will lack self-esteem,

and you won't even know that there's going to be glory on the other side of it, right? You don't even know that it's going to work. And that degree of difficulty isn't a bug, it's a feature, right? It is built in, it's baked into the experience of going from one to another. And I think that that, like really viscerally understanding, okay, this isn't a sign that I'm doing something wrong. This isn't a curse. This is actually baked into the experience of going from where I am to where I want to be. And the friends saying, oh, he's on a diet again.

Wonder how long are you going to stick to this one. Oh, too good to drink with us, I guess, like not coming out tonight. I'm going to stay in and read your poetry. Are you, whatever it is that you're doing. Oh, go and do more paintings, bro. Whatever it is that you're doing, I think. that understanding this is part and parcel of life, I think is very important. It is very important. And also as well, it's when you're, what I notice is that it happened

kind of instantly. Like my old life, and it may have been because of the pandemic, just seemed to collapse pretty much over a period of a week. And that was a real shock because you think to yourself, I'm working, I'm improving, I'm changing, I can keep all of these balls in the and then very suddenly it becomes apparent that you can't, and then everything changes in a way that you can't predict. Yeah, it's scary, man. And that discomfort is what causes a lot of people to go back to their old life. You know, you guys, careers being able to do The Fringe

and however many hundreds of nights per year on the road, okay, well, that's safe to me. I have a community, I have people that know me, I've got status, I've got esteem within that. I need to let all of that go to then start. at the bottom again in this new industry that I don't even know if it's going to work. So some of it is risk tolerance, which I really struggle with. I struggle with taking risky decisions.

But yeah, moving towards things one step at a time, Ryan Holliday's got this great quote where he says, self-belief is overrated, I prefer evidence. Yes. And just one little step, okay, can I do this thing? Yes, I can. Can I do this thing? Yes, I can. I was riddled with so much uncertainty and self-doubt,

especially throughout my 20s, even though I distensibly achieved some success, which made the self-doubt feel even more shameful, right? Because I didn't even have the rampant poverty and like despondent lifestyle. I had something outwardly that looked like it was sorted, but inwardly felt like I was chronically unconfident of myself. And yeah, you can really, really break through

a lack of confidence by just doing tiny, tiny little things and keeping promises to yourself. And over time, Rogan calls it layers of paint. So each time you're just one layer of paint, one layer of paint. And it's so gossamer thin that you never even see it. But then when you turn around after a long enough time, you go, that's a big pile of paint.

And then it's a mountain. And I find that actually what really helps me is meditation. Now, I always thought that these people who were like, I meditate, I thought, all right, mate, you're a wanker, right? But it actually changes your life. If you meditate in the morning and exercise on top of that, what it actually teaches you is what you have is the moment. So you're not thinking about the future, obsessing about the future.

You're not regretting the past, which is frequently what we do. You're just purely in that moment. And if you're in that moment, you can dedicate every single one of your mental faculties to doing the thing, whatever the thing is, which means that the thing is going to be done to the highest possible standard that you can do at that time. which means that you are going to improve exponentially and also you are going to keep improving.

Yeah, I think a lot of what we do in life, especially when we have a goal that we're going toward, involves dressing up not doing the thing, right? Like, ultimately, yes, there are ways, for me, we both spoke, we both trained this morning, we both, like, whatever little routine that we've got, and I feel really, really great today. But one of the problems, the perils of over-optimization,

include someone believing that they can no longer perform unless they go through this elaborate routine beforehand. The goal should be for you to be able to perform whether you're in the middle of a war zone, whether you've not had any sleep, whether you've done whatever, right? I want to be able to work like this and then build myself off the top of that with, oh, I'm great, I managed to get my morning walk in

and I managed to train and I managed to do all the rest of it. But there's a degree of fragility that comes with over-optimization because people no longer feel like they're sufficiently robust to do this stuff. And, you know, I've got Andrew Huberman coming back on the show soon, and I'm going to bring it up to him and say, look, you know, you've given a lot of people science-based tools to improve themselves. But again, what did we say about knowing where you could be versus knowing where you are? If you feel like, oh, God, I didn't get 10 minutes of sunlight in my eyes this morning. My circadian rhythm's going to be messed up. I can't believe my

adrenals are all going to... That fear of under optimization, now knowing where you could be at is a discomfort. And I think for a lot of people that want that control in their lives, that's something that gets felt. So yeah, that's a, although I love optimizing and I love coming up with ways to be better, certainly one of the things I've tried to do over the last 18 months since I moved to Austin is like let go of that as well, let go of the need for it to be part of a routine. What is it when someone, a superstition? It's almost like a superstition, right. It's no longer a performance enhancer that you just feel. It's, oh, I've got to put the right boot on, then the left boot on, and then touch the door as I walk out. It's almost like...

It's a form of OCD almost. Yeah, a little bit. You know, like, when you watch that Beckham documentary and he was saying everything has to be like this, it has to be like this, in this particular way, it has to be structured like this. And, you know, that can be great in one sense because it makes you feel comfortable, but like you just said yourself, it's a complete prison, because then you feel unless you do the thing, whatever the thing is, you're not going to be optimum. So, you've already told yourself that you're not going to be as effective. Therefore, you're not going to do the thing well. Yeah, the doing the thing is just that do the thing is something that I must tweet out about once a week. And it's usually reminded to myself that I schedule in advance

for a time when I know in my calendar that I'll need to see it. And yet so much of our lives involve dressing up, not doing the thing that we know we're supposed to do. It's, think about when you've got a bunch of emails that you don't want to reply to, how ridiculous some of the things that you start. I'll clean the fridge. I haven't cleaned the fridge in six months. Why am I doing that? Oh, it's because I'm evading these emails, right? Oh, I'll get another walk in or I'll have another coffee or I'll make it. I'll better be hydrated or, oh, there's that one thing that I need to do before. It's like, you're just hiding from the work. Like, no matter how you dress it up, the work just fucking needs doing and there's nowhere to hide from it. One thing I want

to come back to what you guys were talking about just a little bit earlier is you were talking about burning bridges essentially. This is why I've never had a problem burning bridges because it gives you, like, there is no going back to the, you. There is no going back to the, comedy industry for me. It just isn't. You won't scorched earth with that. Yeah. And I have...

Fire a brimstone. Fire and brimstone and I did it on purpose because that's exactly what I needed to do to make this work. It's just what I needed to do in my own psychology. That's really interesting. I think that it's very much a quirk of your psychology. Oh, definitely. It's been very rare for me that I've not just let things sort of slowly slide away.

You know, the relationships or the connections or the places that I would show up or whatever it is, just kind of dissipated. And, you know, it's a lot less uncomfortable than people might think because everybody is so wrapped up in their own existence, they've got very little time to think about yours. No, in the comedy industry. No, they don't.

Okay, fair enough. They've got loads of time. I apologize. I apologize. And lots of things to say in social media. I apologize. The reason I bring it up is I think what you said about having to move on from past relationships, past friendship groups, et cetera, it is so fundamentally true. I mean, the stats

that you probably know this better than I do. Like your income is the average income of the five closest people you spend the most time with, et cetera. You have to, you're, the people who you're going to be friends with, truly, are going to be the people who are on your level, mentally, intellectually, in every way. It's just how it is. Otherwise, you're not going to be friends. I think there's a better version of that. You are the average of the five friends you spend the most time with, you are the average of the five podcasts you listen to the most. Probably. I genuinely think that for a good chunk of people, especially the people going through the lonely chapter,

you know, they will have a stronger friendship relationship. They will spend more time listening to your guys' show or Huberman's show or Lex's show or whatever than they will with any other group of friends. So be careful what you're putting in your ears, I suppose, too. I got this idea of post-content clarity, like post-nut clarity. And when we consume stuff on the internet, a lot of the time we don't really think about it reflectively. It just sort of comes and goes. And then if I was to say to you, what were the last five things you watched on YouTube?

You're going to really struggle. And if I said, what were the things you watched on YouTube first yesterday? It's basically impossible, right? It just comes and goes. But really what we should be doing is watching content that after we've finished it makes us feel better about ourselves, better about the world, more informed. You know, like you want to go outside and ring a friend and tell them that you miss.

Like, that's how I want to feel after content. And yeah, not all content can be lovvy-divy, and there's things that people need to learn that are uncomfortable. I want to feel better once I'd finished consuming something. And I realized that so much of the content I consumed was like fast food for my amygdala rather than spirulina for my soul, right?

It was just hijacking me limbically in the most bottom of the brainstem way that it could. I'm like, I shouldn't watch this anymore. So yeah, post-content clarity. If someone that's listening thinks, oh, I feel a bit uncomfortable after I use my phone. Maybe it's the amount of time you're spending on your phone, absolutely. But very much, I think you can change what you're choosing to consume. Oh, definitely.

I would modify that slightly, though, because I think I didn't feel good after watching Schindler's list. But I think it was important to watch, you know what I mean? So when we have someone on to, we had Maggie Oliver recently to talk about police corruption and grooming gangs in the UK, we cover those issues because other media outlets won't cover them properly and won't keep that conversation going. I don't know anyone who tuned into that. And fired up after that. That being said, the way that you guys, I haven't seen that episode, but the way that you guys probably approached it isn't in some like tribal limbically hijacking way.

It's in a luck. This is a really important thing that we need to be connected to that we're not sufficiently aware of. So even in the framing of a difficult subject, what I'm talking about is any show, that begins by calling out an out-group. Yeah. Right? If any piece of content on the internet, and whether it be a book,

whether it be a creator, YouTube, Twitter, if that person's group is fundamentally held together by the mutual distaste of an out-group rather than the mutual love of an in-group, that's a red flag. It's a huge red flag for me.

You know, I always compare this to, because I used to get eczema a lot when I was a kid, scratching your ex-ma. When you scratch your ex-ma, it feels better, but then you stop and it's worse. It just makes you more itchy, it makes you more uncomfortable. And I think that's something more and more that people just need to understand is

what you do in the moment may make you feel good, but later on, it's just going to make you feel worse. And I think so many people, they go online and they almost get this, this almost drug-like hit out of a piece of content that will make them feel something. But then you see them like an hour afterwards, and they're still ruminating about this thing. And it's just, it's completely wrecked the next couple of hours. Think about a little bit more, I guess,

close to what some of the subjects that you guys talk about are, the desire for performative empathy that is very prevalent on the internet, what people are actually optimizing for with performative empathy or you should post a black square and silence is compliance or violence. All of these sort of things. Silence is consent. That's my favorite.

Silence. It's Jimmy Carr in the room. But they had that slogan going during BLM, silence is consent. And I was going, have you thought of applying this to other situations? Very dangerous rule. So, yeah. Sorry, he does nowhere to go with that.

No. So one of the problems that you have, the reason that I think that this is tied together is an over-prioritization of the present moment, of the now, a fear of discomfort and a pushing away of it, you know, given the fact that there are many problems that people feel internally, their internal state, the existential crisis, am I really living my life in the best way? There's something called intergenerational competition theory, which is if each generation does better than their parents, then inherently everyone feels good. you know, millennials and especially Gen Z are probably one that even materially has done worse than their parents. So yeah, you're comparing yourself to where your parents were at your age and you're feeling like you're falling behind on average, really, really not great. And what does that mean? It means that when you compare that with a world in which everything can be convenient and you can Uber eats yourself, a Michelin Star meal while you sit on a couch, you Amazon primed

and watch a Netflix documentary that won an award, you are very bereft of most immediate discomfort. And when you face them, it feels more like a perversion of how reality is supposed to be, rather than just baked into the existence of things get hard sometimes. So what I see with the, this sort of the victimhood culture, and then also people's desire or push for performative empathy, is the opposite of not giving Nikolai your son ice cream every night. It's like, maybe he's not at the age you eat ice cream, but whatever, like some treat that he would like. He would, it would be something he would enjoy but not be good for him long term, but when people optimize the thing that they enjoy

over what is good for them, and they refuse to believe that there can be anything which is not enjoyable but good for them, you end up with an entire society that's basically mentally always eating ice cream. Well, and when it comes to food, I like the use of the ice cream metaphor, it's what Rogan calls mouth pleasure. And I like that he calls it that because that's what it is. You're buying a little bit of pleasure, but doing something that's actually harmful to you. And so many things in life, they're not supposed to be easy. They're not supposed to be pleasant or comfortable. And I always say this to people. It's like, everything you want is by definition outside of the comfort zone that you're in, because otherwise you'd already have it.

If you could have what you want by being comfortable, you'd have it now because you wouldn't need to do it. And you also wouldn't value it. Yeah. Right. That's the other thing. There is one of the really interesting realizations is that a lot of the things that people want to get easily are only valuable because they're not attainable with ease, right? So if you end up trying to do this, if you did dial down the difficulty of achieving the thing that you say you want to achieve, you would no longer want it. Baked into the difficulty is the value of the thing. That's right. Yeah, and we don't talk about it enough. And also, we talk a lot about being kind to ourselves. But actually, being kind to yourself means going to the gym when you don't.

don't want to go to the gym, not indulging yourself, doing something that is actually very difficult that you run away from, but you know that you must do. What if a better definition of self-love would be holding yourself to a higher standard than anybody else? Yes. Yes. Like what if you are your own biggest champion? Yes.

And then what if having friends, good friends that care about you, are people who believe in you more than they pity you so that when things get hard, they don't pat you on the shoulder. Lex won't mind me telling the story. You came to Malice's house where you guys had a party this week, and I sadly missed. Lex came, and I think maybe the Ukraine war had just started out, and he was trying to keep an ear on that, and maybe he's going to go out and speak to Putin or somebody else, and he's trying to build robots, and then he's trying to do his podcast, and he's doing all of these different things.

and he was talking about how he was lamenting, juggling all of these plates to some of his friends, or maybe even just somebody. And he said, a lot of his friends kind of patted him on the shoulder and said, oh, man, you work so much already. You know, this is, like, you should be, you should go easier on yourself. He turned and looked at me and he went, I wish people would stop saying that. I wish that they would say, yeah, this is tough, but you're tougher. And I thought, wow, that's so cool.

for someone who seeks in their friends, people who believe in them more than they pity them, is just such a... And you know, self-love. Self-love is holding yourself to a higher standard than anybody else does. That is just such a powerful idea and functionally much more useful as well.

It is. The challenge comes when you've been raised by parents who, you know, coddle you, teach you that... Never had that problem. Teach you that. that actually, you know, you are a victim, and for people, other people will sort out your problems.

Other people will rise to the challenge for you. And that becomes a learned behavior. And I think that what we need to do is empower children to make them realize that that facing a challenge is life. Life is a challenge. If you, as somebody who may be a little bit cynical, slightly blackpilled in any form of the word, whether it be through dating or personal development

or career development or finances or social mobility, whatever it is that you're worried about, think about how fragile the average person is and realize that half of the population is more fragile than that. It's a great rewording of, I think it was George Carlin's line. Think how stupid the average person is. Now realize half of them are even more stupid than that. Yeah, right?

So 50% of the population is more fragile than the average person that you know. And you have to work really, really hard to be able to find friends that are super robust and anti-fragile. And he goes, oh my God, this is such a rarity. Okay. So what you're telling me is that the bar is set low. I don't think the bar's ever been set this low

for people to be able to separate themselves out from the pack. The average American is obese, divorced, with less than 1K in the bank. So taking the path that everybody else chooses may seem like the safe option, but it's actually a guaranteed route to a life. that you probably don't want. Wow.

We'll be back with the interview in one minute. First, we want to talk to you about the sponsors of today's episode, AG1. We take AG1 to stay healthy and stay off illness whenever our schedule gets really busy. We used it on our last America tour where we were constantly on the move,

living out of a bag and working every day. One scoop a day meant we knew we had all the vitamins and minerals needed for the day. We invested in our health and had a hugely successful trip, as you saw. AG1 is a simple and easy way to get all the nutrients you need. Each serving contains 75 high-quality vitamins, minerals and whole-food sourced ingredients. If you're looking for a simple

and cost-effective supplement routine, we recommend you try AG1. And they're giving you a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. To claim them, just go to drinkag1.com slash trigonometry. Go to drink. AG1.com slash trigonometry. That's drinkag1.com slash trigonometry to claim this special offer. That's such a profound point, man. That's such a profound point.

And actually, when Jordan had me on his show, he did this paywall section that they do at the end, and he was asking me about my background or whatever, and we talked about when I was homeless. In the secret said, oh, too. We talked about when I was sleeping in the park, And I told the story about I used to smoke back then. And I was just, I had nothing to do all day because that's what, that's what it is to be homeless and not to have a job at that time.

And et cetera. I was just walking around. And this guy was waiting for a bus and he lit a cigarette. And I was, oh, fucking hell. And the bus came. So he got upset, dropped the cigarette. I remember picking that cigarette up. And in that moment, it was the lowest that I've ever felt ever.

And that was the moment I decided I'd never be there again. I'm never coming back here. And he was like, that's right. When you want to do things in your life, it's helpful to know the heaven that you're going to. But it's also very useful to have a hell behind you that you're moving away from. And that's what you're talking about. This is why I think that's such a great reframe because the alternative to going for it and trying things and doing your best and actually attempting to achieve the thing you're meant to achieve.

And I really believe in that sense of destiny in a way. It's not comfort and sort of everything's all right. It's fucking terrible. And that's a great reframe, man. I love that. Yeah, you know, Dana White said, I fucking love that guy. Me too, man. We're both big fans of him.

Dana were coming for you. He had this really great reel that someone repurposed that said, I think he's got sons. He has. Yeah. I tell my sons, it's all out there for the taking right now. If you have a gram of talent and an ounce of hard work, you'll run these pussies over. And it's like, it's true.

Like, there is, the bar has never been set lower. And I understand, you know, if you wallow in Reddit and the dark recesses of Twitter, that you can believe that you are a genetic dead end as a man and there is nothing that you can do. Or as a woman, that the culture is, you're kind of at the mercy of the country of the culture in a way and you maybe feel like you missed a time of glory or that was more appropriate for you. Maybe it was the 1950s or maybe it was the fucking middle ages. I don't know, right? You feel wistful for a life that you never got to lead. But the truthful fact is, I don't think there's ever been a time where there's been more opportunity and a lower degree of

competition. Agreed. That we've just said, the average American, that's the average American, right? Yeah. Obese, less than one. came the bank and divorced, right? Like, just, it's so low. And I understand that it can seem like you're talking from an ivory tower or, well done, you had this sorted. But I didn't have it sorted. I didn't have it sorted for a very long time. No, I had days where getting one foot out of my bed onto the floor was a task so great that I couldn't do it, right? That I just couldn't bear to open the curtains. I couldn't bear to speak to anybody. And ostensibly outside, I had the entire life sorted. Okay, so what does that tell you? It tells you that material.

material conditions don't actually always determine your internal state. So don't presume that the things that you're chasing for are actually going to fix whatever your internal problem is. And also don't use your external state as an excuse for the way that your internal feelings are. That's not to say that you can't get to a state of destitution where it's pretty much impossible to be happy. Yeah. But we all know what you mean?

You know the one thing that I worry about is having kids? And I'm sure the two of you will have kids at some point as well. is how do you pass, like, we were talking earlier before we started about, like, you're a dog, you were saying this to me, like, you have really high standards. It's true, I do. And that's partly because, like, I've been right at the bottom and I'm never going back there. I'm just not. But how do you pass that on to somebody whose your entire mission you think is to provide a great life for?

I love this. I love this question. And I've asked it to a lot of successful young dudes who've got to. young kids. Ben Francis, CEO of Jim Shark, his net worth is three times Drake's, right? He's tripled the net worth of Drake, like

2.5, 2. Something billion, sorry. Ryan Terry, another guy, both working class backgrounds. Ben Francis's grandfather still works, I think, in like some smelting place in Birmingham, like it's fucking peeky blinders.

And then... It would have been enough just to say Birmingham, mate. Yeah, true. then Ryan Terry's dad and then him both plumbers, I think, like really bad plumber. He's a bad plumber, according to some friends. And both of them really, really valued the lessons that their working class upbringing gave them, you know, really like spit and sawdust and you like eat what you kill type mentality.

And yet, what was the point in working this hard if you're not going to, give your progeny the benefits that you have worked for. Like, what was the point of doing this? Yeah, there's legacy and impact and all that sort of stuff. But presumably the greatest impact you want to have is the people that have your genetics, right? Your kids, the people you care about the most. Okay, so tell me, how are you going to balance this?

I want them to learn the lessons of things being hard with, I want to be able to afford them the opportunities that I never had. And these two worlds, I genuinely don't know how they fit together. I don't know how easily they do. I guess this is going to be a challenge that you're going to have to face in some regards as well. But I know for a fact that Ryan pulled his kid out of private school. His kid was going to a private school. I think he's maybe only like three or fours of preschool, private school or something. And there was like a non-zero number of children that arrived by helicopter each day. So kids like just getting dropped off by presumably the fucking nanny or the assistant or whatever it is ushered off and then they'll fly away. and he was like, I just can't, I couldn't, I couldn't do it, I couldn't, I didn't like the work ethic of this particular school. By helicopter?

By helicopter. That school's like a cuck factory. Just stamping them out. Guaranteed we're not going to get monetized on this episode. No, we're going to bleep that out. We won that sweet, sweet advertising dollar. Kevin Hart has got a great story about this. Obviously, Kevin Hart came from a really, I think it's Chicago, really poor part of Chicago,

go really desperate poverty there, made his way to Hollywood, comedic comedy superstar. And he said to his kids, right, I want you to understand where I came from. I want you to understand daddy's struggle. I want you to understand how daddy worked. I'm going to take you back to where daddy came from. So he took him to what he calls a ghetto, showed them around. They did a two hours. They went and met people.

And he went, right, what do you think? And they both went, we love the ghetto. And he's like, no. That's not what you. you were supposed to take from this? Because, yeah, because to them it's novelty. It's novelty. And the worst part about growing up in that place,

isn't that you grow up in that place, it's this knowledge that chances are you ain't going to leave. It's the difference, it's fundamentally the difference between going camping or being homeless. Yes. Yeah. Right, one is a choice. The other is a necessity.

It's homeless face. Yeah. It's like homeless face. Was it Christopher Hitcher? Hitchens that got waterboarded, or Peter Hitchens, one of them. It was Christopher who got watered. Peter did by Alex O'Connor. That will be out soon from what I gather.

Or by the time this has gone out. Or did he waterboard himself? By the time this has gone out, this will be super viral. Everyone will know. That'll be old news. But yeah, Christopher Hitchens was like, let's check if it's torture. I'll go and get waterboarder. And I'm like, you can stop it at any time.

And you know it's going to end. It's completely not the same thing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So how you do that with kids, probably not, But short of that is how do you create that? And I genuinely don't know. Get divorced.

That would teach, that'll teach him. You've got the material conditions, but you're going to be bereft of love. Yeah, exactly. Daddy doesn't love you. Here's your porst. No. No, I don't know because I think your point about Kevin Hart and going to the ghetto is that reality is you have to have difficult experiences. And this is a big source of tension between my wife and I,

And for women, it's like she's carried him inside her for nine months. And then he literally fed from her breast for however many years. And after that, you want him to go and get smashed over the head by life? That's fucking hard. Especially when you have the opportunity to stop it. Right. But on the other hand, if you've never been smashed in the face by life, how are you going to deal with the inevitable fact that life will smash you in the face?

It doesn't matter if you're a billionaire. Life will smash. Someone's going to die. Someone's going to get injured. Some accident's going to happen. You're going to get a disease. Your business might fail. Your business might fail. Someone's going to leave you. Global pandemic happens. Global pandemic. Anything. You're going to get smashed on the face by life. There's no getting away from it. Right. And it's probably not helpful that the first time that truly happens is when you're 30. It's probably not helpful because you want a little bit of life smashing you on the face when you're a kid so you know how to deal with it. How do you build resilience without being tested? Yeah, I've thought about this a good bit. I was quite heavily bullied when I was a kid and I was an only child and I didn't fit in. What I realized, reflecting on that experience, which I held as a chip on my shoulder for a long time, like I proved these people wrong or just like resentment or bitterness or still feeling like they were right about me, right, that they had some sort of perfectly balanced insight into me. The first thing I realized was I probably should stop caring about what other people think about me,

given that most people don't even like themselves, right? Most people don't even like themselves. Why on earth would you give anybody else that power? Secondly, the blame finger, wherever you point the blame, this is why I am the way I am, that's the same place that you point the power, right? Oh, right, okay, so the reason that I don't have confidence in myself is because of fucking Tom at school. So I guess Tom's opinion of me is more important than my desire to have confidence.

Third thing, and this is from Rick, from Rick and Morty, he walks into this big, like, rock festival. It's kind of like a Tony Robbins thing, but it's an alien, obviously. This alien, and he walks in and everyone starts going, boo, boo, Rick, boo! And he turns around, and he says, your booze me nothing. I've seen what makes you cheer. You go, oh my God, it's such a mic drop. My point being, I went through this period of thinking, like, right, okay, I'm kind of at the mercy of these people's opinions. I've got this chip on my shoulder, all of these things.

I've been held back by even the negative experiences. But when I look at so many of the things that I care about and I value in myself now, they're the light side of the dark stuff that I developed in that in any case. Like, the only reason that I was able to make the move to America on my own to see if this thing would work is because I'm so used to solitude,

because I was so fucking lonely as a kid, right? The only reason that I pay so much attention to the different things that are going on into conversations is that I obsessed over why other people had friends and I didn't when I was in school. I used to believe that it was because of the particular way that they tied their tie or the type of shoes they had or they carry their bag on their left shoulder and I carry my bag on my right shoulder. That's why. So I was so, I just couldn't understand why other people had friends and I didn't. So I spent so long obsessing and deconstructing them, even though I wasn't

purposefully doing it. It was just like a byproduct of wanting to be wanted and wanting to be part of something. And I rolled the clock forward and I think, well, so much of my childhood was spent listening to story tapes in my room playing on my own. What's the 2023 equivalent of a story tape? It's a podcast. I'm still doing, I'm still that kid in my room. I've got to do, I've got to do it on my own terms now. So I, when we're talking about difficult situations, would I go back and say, save me from those experiences? That's a really hard comment. Because I know I suffered. I know that it was uncomfortable. I know I was sad. I know it made my parents sad for me to be sad. I know they felt like it reflected on them somehow that I wasn't able to connect and I wasn't

happy with kids and stuff like that. And yet, there's no way that I would have managed to get to the point that I'm in a life that I really value had I not have done that. So I think we should be cautious around the impact of bad and good things. And this is one of the reasons that I really don't like people that use the word like, it was meant to be, because it completely removes the agency from the situation. Okay, you get into a car accident, you lose one of your legs, and you meet the love of your life, who's the nurse that treats you while you're in the hospital bed, you get married and you live a lovely life together. It was meant to be. Had it not been for that accident, I would have never met the love of my life. Okay, how about this? You

were in a shitty situation, and you managed to alchemize it from lead into gold. You managed to turn something that could have been a destitute situation into one that was beautiful and one of the most important things that's happened in your life. And that's a much more powerful story. And I think internalizing this locus of control, super important. And not being too concerned about, fuck, I'm going through something bad.

All right, this is maybe your hero story, right? Like this is main character energy fuel for you. Agreed. Yeah. And it's interesting what you made the point about only child, because I'm an only child as well. And I think with only children, we spend so much time on our own that we tend to go one of two ways, which is the,

because you're a sense under-socialized, you either become more of a loner or you become hypersocial, which is what I did. And that's where the humour came from. And also things going on when I was growing up, I got very, very good at walking into a room, testing, seeing what the atmosphere was like and knowing how to diffuse it.

quickly all the time, all the time, all the time. Now people will say, go, well, that's not healthy. A kid shouldn't have that. A kid shouldn't be, you know, experiencing that on a day-to-day basis. Probably not. But actually, what has given me is the ability to walk into a room. I'm a very, very good judge of character. I look at people.

I can, I got to be vigilant for so long. Yeah, so you have to be vigilant for so long. And you know when there's attention in the room or something happens, bam, you can say something. Laughter, it calms it down. Do you find yourself people pleasing? Yes. Yeah, me too, a lot.

I work all day, every day, to unknit that from my personality. I've only learned about this about myself over the last month or so. So this is like my new thing. You know, like that availability bias, like the thing that you've learned about. You just bought the car,

and now you see the car everywhere. This is like my mental model that I've just learned about myself and now I'm seeing it everywhere. But yeah, that people pleasing nature comes from it. But it's so interesting to think about you deconstructing a room and going in and realizing, okay, exactly, like, what am I attuned to and then like playing that game? It's kind of like speed running likeability or growth hacking resonance, right?

That's what you're doing. And although it sounds great, what it can end up and what it did for me was I got toward the end of my 20s and the persona had subsumed the person. I was playing this role so frontward facing that felt discordance with who I was really. And I would run these club nights. I met like a million people on the front door of nightclubs and run a thousand events across my career as a club promoter. I loved my business partner. I loved all the guys that I worked with.

But I'd met a million people and had a handful of friends, right? So my funnel of friend exposure to conversion ratio, there was something off there. And there was a period, especially toward the end of my career, where I would set the club away and I would make sure that the boys were happy and, like, all the managers and stuff that we had working for us. And then I'd go and sit in my car and I'd, like, watch School of Life videos. How was I not screaming to myself? Like, this is obviously you, there is a discordance in the force, or, like, there is a murmuring in whatever the Star Wars references. It wasn't right. And it wasn't right, because I, despite being in a crowd,

I felt lonely and despite having victory, I often felt hollow. So it's like, yeah, if you don't have that resonance. And there's something, again, to kind of hammer it home, there's something particularly shameful about knowing that other people have it way worse than you in terms of their material situation and you're still upset or unfulfilled or whatever because there's no glory in, I know there's not much glory. picking up somebody else's cigarette but off the ground but there's something that feels like it's actual rock bottom right there's something there it doesn't feel as like bourgeois and fucking high

feluting like oh the existential weight of living bro like am i enacting my logos and the shame that you layer on top of yourself maybe almost as much as the shame of of picking up someone else's cigarette off the ground absolutely you mentioned the word lonely a lot and one of the things that you talk a lot about and interview people a lot about and think a lot about and you and now I've talked about this privately as well, is the dating situation and the men and women's situation at the moment. And when you had me on your show, you sort of playfully accused me of giving trad-con talking points about it.

Or a trad-con, yeah, yeah, yeah. I probably am a trad-con, to be honest, when it comes to that sort of thing. But I'm also open to the possibility that, well, it's not a possibility, it's a reality that I'm 40 years old, I've been married since I was 20, I may not know all about it. So, what's going on? Am I the canary in the coal mine? Yeah, it's a... I don't mean with you, personally.

I understand. Why aren't you married? Make children now, we need your genetics. It's very fascinating. It's a very interesting time for dating. I think it's probably by far the most interesting time for human mating dynamics that there's ever been. Because...

And this is shown in how many people are talking about this on the internet. even though it's largely still a subculture, a lot of people are trying to deconstruct exactly why is it that marriage rates are down and birth rates are down and coupling is down and happiness is down and all of these sorts of things. And there's a bunch of different flavors

of what's happening. So I think before you even get to the topic, talking about who's talking about the topic is kind of important because I have to wipe a lot of manosphere slime off me before I have to counter-signal with and I'm not saying, and we must remember that women are able to, and da-da-da-da-da,

I have to, like, prostrate myself on the fucking, like, crucifix of I'm not a bigot before I can get to my talking point, right? My point being, both sides, as far as I can see, the big broad buckets, that would be kind of like whatever the newest wave of TikTok feminism, boss-bitch culture is, and the manosphere breaking into red pill and black pill, like positive view transactional and negative view like avoidant. Both of them, I think, are missing the point here, which is largely... Chris, before you delve into it, just define a little bit more for people who are maybe fresh to the conversation.

Red pill and black pill. The black pill is the in-cell type stuff where we're drawing, we're not going to connect with women. The red pill is a little bit more difficult because it's a broad church. There's many people that class themselves as that. So yeah, it's from the matrix. The red pill is seeing the truth. The blue pill is kind of living the lie. So in dating hierarchy,

blue pill is guy doesn't understand how mating dynamics work. They don't understand that women have a hypergamous nature where they want to date up and across socioeconomically. They don't understand. They believe kind of in the one truitis, one true love thing. It's this sort of renaissance delusion that they have in a little bit of a way about kind of like sacred love. Then taking the red pill would be,

seeing the world for what it is, but in between those two is the purple pill, which is people who know the truth but refuse to accept it. That's what I get accused of being a lot. Somebody who still has, that is seen by the Manosphere as being too pliable when it comes to not pointing the finger at women, which is bullshit, because I'm so bigoted that I'm a misogynist to Guardian readers, but I'm so cooked that I'm like a purple pill wanker to the Manosphere people, so I managed to split the difference. You're a dating centrist.

Yeah. So the red pill would be people seeing the world as it truly is. That is understanding mating dynamics, understanding that women are fundamentally attracted to super Chad at the top and that they're going to leave the guy that they're with if a better option comes along, so on and so forth. And then the black pill at the bottom would be, they would see it as being even more truthful. Like the black pill, the self-identified black pill guys genuinely see their worldview as being more accurate than the red pill. And in some ways it actually is. But the net result of the the black pill is very much often a super avoidant relationships specifically with women. Mig Tao, men going their own way, is a part of this. A lot of those guys are men who have been in relationships and maybe suffered with divorce court, separation. Some of them are people who've just had a lack of success with women generally. But the main reason that it's interesting is you have a huge changing of the guard socioeconomically between. men and women. You know, fundamentally, I think the biggest change that's occurred has been liberating, having sex from making babies and women entering the workforce. Those two things

changed the dynamic of mating forever, because before that, marriages stuck together, and no one wants to talk about, very few people want to talk about this, many marriages stuck together because the wife was essentially like a financial prisoner of their husband. If you can't support yourself and potentially loads of children as well, guess what? You're staying in that marriage no matter what happens. Then the pill comes along and liberates women from having to have children with men that they didn't want to. Interestingly, I'm sure you've spoken to Mary Harrington about this. It increased the number of single mothers. The introduction of the pill increased the number of single mothers because prior to the pill, a man getting a woman pregnant was

seen as his responsibility and after the pill, a man getting a woman pregnant was seen as her choice, right? You could have been on the pill. Okay, so now we've decoupled having sex from making babies. The next thing we need to do is decouple this like pesky, historic, vestigial attachment that women have. So even though they're having sex and the making babies has been separated, it's still, it's frustrating. They keep on getting attached to these men that they have sex with. So we need another technology, which is a cultural technology. And that one is sex positive feminism. You can, like true liberation for women, is working like your father and having sex like your brother. That's truly what it means to be,

and you can be free to do it as much as you want. Articles in Cosmopolitan, I know Louise Perry talks about this, like how to sleep with him and not catch feels, basically how to disembody yourself from doing something that previously was seen as sacred. So we've used all of this. And what it's resulted in is an awful lot of men who feel like they're invisible to women,

an awful lot of women who feel used and discarded by men that they pine after, or struggle to find men that is sufficiently mature, and both sexes continue to move further apart. This is reflected in the numbers on dating. It's like huge percentages of men under the age of 18 to 30, like 60, 70 percent of men aged 18 to 30, aren't in any kind of committed or long-term relationship. Like nearly half of men in that age bracket say they're not looking for it. 45% of men aged 18 to 25 have never approached a woman. Human. Huge. It's just it's two broad buckets of people that have very little interest in trying

to talk to each other, whether it's because of fear or avoidance. Can I go full tradcon here? Never go full tradcon. I always thought, and I know this is not a fashionable view, but I don't give a shit. The point of dating is to find that romantic blue pill one true love for you, right? and then former bond and then stay together for the rest of your lives. That does not preclude me from recognizing that men and women are different, and many of the things that Redfield people say about relationships between men and women are simultaneously true.

So you can be in a relationship where it's your one true love and recognize that your wife will want you to earn more money than her, and that in certain situations she'll want you to lead, and in other situations, she'll need this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What's wrong with that worldview? Nothing. Nothing. And this is why I agree with many of the things that are put forward by guys that are in the red pill.

The main issue that I take with the red pill is not their insight around evolutionary psychology, which is largely accurate. Hypogamy is a genuine thing. Women prefer a man that is decisive. Women date up and across socioeconomically. My main concern and my main issue is that they treat women like an adversary like an adversary. to be used and discarded or avoided entirely. But that ignores the first part of what I said, which is the point of dating is to find your one true love blue pill style, right?

What's wrong with that? Is there anything wrong with that? Nothing in particular. I don't think so. I mean, if you, I certainly do think that if you take the genuine red pill, which goes all the way down, which is humans evolutionarily weren't wired to be monogamous for life, were wired to be serially monogamous. It's monogamish, it's called, which is why many couples will feel a three to seven year itch.

It's a very difficult period for a relationship to get to. Why? Well, it's because around about that time the child is sufficiently grown that the man can move on, or the mother can move on to another partner. It seems like that is the way that we are evolved to be. For a very, very long time, it would have been just straight up polygyny, and then it pivoted into this sort of serial monogamy thing. So a genuinely uncomfortable red pill is that we are fighting our natures by having lifelong commitments,

but we have an awful lot of control over the way that we feel. And when you weigh up, do I want to be 40, 47, 54, 61, still getting back out there onto the market because I can? Is that really the life that you want to lead? think on balance, you end up in a worse position as a man. Like, make no mistake, marriage for men is one of the best deals that you can get from a physiological perspective. Married men live so much longer than single men. The problem that gets put forward is divorce courts are really prejudiced against men as a child's, whatever it's called, like, whoever...

custody. ...custody, child custody courts, too. So, you're rolling the dice. The argument against the red pill argument against your blue pill wantruitis viewpoint would be, yeah, that's all great, well and good, but only if you thread the needle through this minefield of potential risks. Half your money's gone and you're never going to see your kid and blah, blah, blah, and this many percent of marriages end in divorce. So it's a bad deal for men.

But again, as soon as you move that to college-educated men, everything changes. As soon as you move that to people who have got a good thing. like at least quasi-religious worldview that changes again. You can stack a number of worldviews on top that actually helps to get those numbers to change, but it's a mess at the moment. And it's also, there's this thread I've seen in modern women of misandry, which is, you know, all men are bastards.

I heard that, I remember towards the end of my time in the comedy industry, where women used to drop that, literally in front of you, just got, yeah, all men are bastard. Who's that Australian comedian lady that's not a comedian? Hanne Gatsby. Thank you. Yeah. Her.

Yeah. And I was just, and I just used to listen to this. And everyone was like, yeah, they are. Or, you know, they just used to brush it off. And I just found that abhorrent. Is that your worldview? Is that the way you see the world? And then you get you go on stage or you talk to your mates

and you complain how old men are bastards and yet you're single. Do you not see why there is a kind of mismatch here? Yeah. Well, I mean, the women who are saying in the same sentence, that men control the world and have everything sorted and are also all bastards, but where are all of the good men at, are committing, like, dating, logic, sepuku, right? You're going, okay, the exact death of eligible partners that you're complaining about is facilitated by the lack of sympathy that you're giving that helps to raise men up.

Make no mistake, men are really, really struggling at the moment. Like, a man under the age of 40, the single biggest risk to a person, his own life is his own hands, right? Why? 1990, the average number of close friends that a man could call on in an emergency, the percentage of men that said it was zero was three percent. 30 years later in 2020, it's 15 percent. It's five-xed, right? The most common answer to the question, how many friends do you have is zero, right? It's not the average, but it's the most common answer. More men say they have zero friends to call on in the situation that would be an emergency than any other number. It's fucking terrifying. And yet, yeah, the punching up, punching

down thing, men have been in this position of power for sufficiently long, therefore we can continue to push back. And it's just, it's childish thinking. It's not realistic. It doesn't reflect the experience of almost all of the men, I think, that are suffering. And a lot of men are being made, or they feel like they're being made to pay for the benefits of a patriarchy that they no longer are a part of, right? That their fathers and grandfathers got an advantage that they no longer are, and yet they're still having the finger pointed at them. And they go, well, look, like, I haven't been able to get a girl to go on a date with me for however long. We're just clipping that.

Good, rightly so. That being said, and, you know, this is why it's very difficult to kind of get this point across perfectly well because it's nuanced. I can say many men are suffering and it is really, really hard and we need to give them sympathy. And in the same breath, I think that many men have a victimhood complex and that they're too cynical and negative about the world. I think that many men would benefit if they had a more internal locus of control, all of the stuff that we talked about in the first time. Well, this is what I was going to say is, is it sympathy that men need or do we need to be that friend

that goes, you are stronger than that? you're better than this. There's never been a lower bar. There's never been a situation where it's been easier for you to stand out. This was the point I was making on your show and we were having it back and forth about because ultimately, like when I look at my son, I'm not scared of his future because if I can, I'm going to teach him this is the moment in which it's never been easier to stand out. One of the problems, at least that some guys would say is that's all well and good for you. It's somebody that's a learned, well-rounded father. I didn't. have that father. This generation... I didn't have that father either. And my father didn't have a father

at all, right? So... But you have to be a breakwater at some point. A breakwater at some point, right? It's like one of my friends, Corey Allen, he does, he's a meditation coach. And a lot of the time when he sees somebody that's angry, he sees that anger and wonders where is that trace back to? who gave it to the person, they gave it to the person, that gave it to the person, that gave it to you. And I asked Goggins this.

You know, like, David Goggins had this tyrant of a father, you know, like really abusive, awful, awful guy. And I asked him, you know, do you see part of your mission in life to be a circuit breaker for this generational aggression and mistreatment? And he's got a daughter,

and he said, yeah, like, you know, that's a big part of what drives me. So I don't disagree. But, yeah, so, you know, Men, absolutely, maybe encouragement rather than sympathy would be or belief would be better. But on that point, 45% of men, aged 18 to 25, have never approached a woman. It's like even more for 18 to 30 that haven't approached a woman in the last year. It's up above 50%, I think.

Okay, if not getting a partner is the thing that makes you feel really bad about yourself, it doesn't matter how much you think that the world is out to get you and all of these problems and culture and feminism and all of this stuff. It's like, dude, you're not doing anything about it. Like, you haven't approached a woman in the last year? What did you expect? They're just going to waltz through the living room. Fundamentally, not going to happen.

Through your parents living room. Yeah. But it's like you have to be out there and you have to be doing things and be excited about things and be creating things. Like, I'm married, but I don't have that. many problems like meeting interesting women who would date me if I were single, because I'm out in the world doing stuff. You know what I mean? That's really the answer. I think finding a partner that you admire is just such an amazing heuristic that downstream from it, almost everything. Because

admiration runs, you can admire somebody that's really great with people, you know, that's really nurturing and caring. You can admire someone that's really competent at a sport, admire someone that's really dexterous with their thoughts, admire someone that's really virtuous and tells the truth, many different ways that you can find someone to admire. And ultimately, your goal should be to craft yourself into someone that is admirable, right? As opposed to trying to...

This was fundamentally the problem with the Pickapartist movement. So Pickapartistry in sort of the 2006 issues when the game came out from Neil Strauss and it had maybe about eight years or so of, like, really high popularity. They used neurolinguistic programming and a bunch of other kind of interesting. to personal tools to be able to get women to go to bed with men that they otherwise wouldn't have done. And the problem with pickup artistry was it taught men that the person they needed to be in order

to get women to sleep with them was so far away from the person that they were naturally that it made them despondent. In fact, the original, I think the original Mig Tower Blackpill subreddit was called like Red Pill, P-U-A hate, because it was men who had been through that and had either found out that it didn't work for them, which made them super despondent, or found out that it did work for them, and they were so distraught at, oh, my God, this is what these bitches, they don't like me for me,

even though I can do it, I'm not that person. And again, we were talking about the persona subsuming the person. It's very uncomfortable when you realize the world wants this and I am this, and oh my God, what do I do about it? Yeah. And that is such a profound point because if you feel that the world only wants this from you and you're this, and what you're essentially perceiving is that you have no value unless you lie. And that's a pretty desperate place to be.

Albre Marcus, the guy that founded on it with Rogan taught me this on the first ever episode that we did, stuck with me. It's such a good quote. He said, the persona is incapable of receiving love. It can only receive praise. And I think that this is precisely how you feel alone in a crowd and Halloween victory, because if you're only playing a role, people aren't applauding you. It doesn't ever hit you, right, emotionally, viscerally, on an existential level, what it feels like is well done reading that script, right?

Not you. It doesn't ever hit you. And this was the sort of vacuousness, I think, that at least contributed in my 20s to me being like, I've done the Love Island thing, kind of like the, you know, championship league final of Champions League final of being a fuck boy and like I've done it and still nothing, right? There's still no there there. Because I, there was nowhere else for me to go on that journey beyond that. And then I thought, fuck, I thought this was going to be the thing and it wasn't the thing.

But yeah, rolling into this, I think online dating has done an awful lot of damage. There's certainly very poor outcomes. both men and women on online dating, women, it's unpopular to say this because it seems like women's issues aren't issues of scarcity, their issues of abundance, just the very wrong kind of abundance. But if you want to see what it's like to be a normal woman on many dating apps and just get them to go through their message requests, you'll see just how, like, awful and juvenile many men can be. And it doesn't need to be even most men, right? It only needs to be a relatively small cohort that smears the rest. And this is the whole, like, not all men, but always

a man thing falls down because it misses the fundamental point that sex offenders, it's one man in a thousand doing a thousand things, not a thousand men doing one thing each. This is David Buss's work from bad men. Such a small number of men are predileged. in that way, and yet they commit such a huge number of incidents, and also they're so disproportionately painful. And these news stories, you know, quite rightly, cycle around. I mean, here's another thing. There's something called gamma bias from John Barry.

Have you heard about this before? Okay, so this is really interesting. It's kind of something that once you see, you can't unsee it. In the media, if a woman does anything positive, it will be sexed. If a woman does something negative, it will be desexed. If a man does something positive, it will be de-sext. If a man does something negative, it will be sexed. So Sarah Everard is killed by a British police officer, as she's walking home maybe five years ago, something like that.

And it is all over the press. And quite rightly so, it's horrific. And there are placards in the street and people walking, we do not feel safe on our shores, and we should not be made to men, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. One week later, a man drowns saving a woman. jumping into the Thames, so he jumps in, saves her and dies. Londoner dies saving like somebody, right?

So the sex of both of those were hidden. Sarah Everard case, police man kills innocent woman. And what you get is this skew, which I really don't think is very beneficial to women either, that the world is a scary place. These gym TikTok videos, right? Where girls are doing a glute bridge And in the background a dude glances over three times in 90 seconds And she says this is

Predatory behavior, the male gaze Toxic male gaze There was even a thing on the London Underground I think men were told that they shouldn't look at women For longer than some amount of time Or else that was predatory I'm pretty sure that Netflix has got a policy That you're not allowed to have your eyes linger

For more than a certain amount of time too So they're really trying to like Nerf down the male gaze and see it as something that's that's really, really concerning. Now, that video ended up, the big video on TikTok, maybe two years ago, ended up with most of the internet saying that's out of order to the woman, right? That this poor man is in the background of your video and you've used him for clout. I don't think that what he did was predatory. But if you'd shown me the video in isolation and not shown me the comments and said,

how do you think this was perceived, it would have been a coin toss for me to go, it could have gone either way. I could have seen this guy getting flamed. Yeah, he's a predator, all men, blah, blah, blah, this is an unacceptable behavior. But here's a really important thing. A situation like that happens, which is a cultural flashpoint, downstream from that, many women will use that as a formative experience to set a bar

for what they should and should not see as acceptable behavior from men. Had that have happened, many women would have then gone into the gym and said, if a man glances at me more them three times in 90 seconds, that means that he's being a pervert and I should feel unsafe, which is kind of like a one-way street that permanently makes women more and more fearful of the world, a sense of vulnerability, a victimhood mentality. And forget the fact that it pushes them further apart from men, just their felt sense of life is much more scared. They're ambient anxiety

all the time, because this is going on. And this shows up in sort of the post-me-to dating world, is kind of a difficult needle to thread, but I'll see if I can do it. So 86% of women say they want a man to make the first move. Seventy-four percent of men say that they are afraid of making a first move for being seen as creepy. 20% of Gen Z say that a man approaching a woman always or usually constitutes harassment, and 50% of 18 to 30 men haven't approached a woman in the last year. So let's square this circle, right? Women want to be approached, but are scared of being approached. Men know that if they don't do the approaching, nothing is going to happen, but if they do, they're maybe going to make women feel uncomfortable and potentially be part of

some Me Too scandal. There's some good cohort of young people that believe that any approach from a man is basically unacceptable, and yet the outcomes from online dating aren't particularly good either. So this is a very uncomfortable realization that I think Me Too sought to sanitize the toxic elements of male behavior and instead it just sterilized all of it. So that all being the case, Chris, what advice would you give young men nowadays? First thing would be find a group of people near you that want to grow and want to change, especially for the people that are in the UK. I think that's very important because, again, as we said, the tall poppy syndrome thing can drag you down. The internet is a negative

enough place already. So find a group of people that want to grow with you and make the statement almost public like a credo between you, right? Like this is, we are here because we know that we all want to try and make this progress together. Maybe it's one friend, maybe it's a couple of friends. I would be hesitant about making it a very big group because someone will drag that group down. So I would keep the circle small. That would be the first thing. The second thing would be trying to overcome approach anxiety. There's some really great science-based tools like cognitive behavioral therapy. The guy that created CBT made it for overcoming his approach anxiety. I thought he was actually designed for in the first ever. That's fascinating. Yeah. So it's purpose built for precisely

this problem. On top of that, realize, again, how low the bar is set. Forty-five percent of men 18 to 25 have never approached a woman around about 50 percent of men 18 to 30. You haven't in the last year. Okay. So that means that for you to approach a woman, you are already 51 percentile, 51 percentile, right? of all of the guys. If you do that once a year, like, okay, bar is set low. Great. I think that there's something interesting for women here that they can, if they want to be approached, receptivity is something that I would probably try and promote in them. You've heard about, like, the handkerchief, a woman would drop her handkerchief, right? In the, like, the aristocratic world in the UK, in Britain. Why would that happen? Well, it's because it gives the man like an opportunity,

it's like an inn. It gives him permission as well. Yeah, precisely. So, it's a you know, if as a woman you're thinking, why is it that guys aren't approaching me that much more, but maybe try and like, if there's a dude in the bar that you like, like let your eyes linger on him a bit more. You cannot overestimate how dumb some guys are, especially ones that are scared of women from these kinds of signals. So being a bit more forthcoming, again, for both men and women, go to a place where your skills are valued and your qualities are valued. So if you played tennis in college to a moderate standard, you're probably going to be better than almost anybody at pickleball within two months, right? So maybe join a pickleball, especially if you like hot guys and girls that are athletic

and wear shorts and go outside and get a tan and stuff. If that's your sort of person, crack on. Or if you've got an interest in ancient Eastern philosophy, find a book club wherever it is. Like you want to inhabit places that have people like the person that you want to inhabiting. And then a final thing would be the sex ratio is very important. So in any local ecology, the rarer sex always has the power. So if you are a woman at MIT, guess what? You get to determine the rules of the game. If you are a man at some liberal arts college, guess what? You get to determine the rules of the game. This isn't an argument for me to

say move your career around. But certainly, you know, if you live in a city, I think New York is very heavily skewed toward women, there's other cities that are very heavily skewed toward men. If you're really serious about this and you want to become an intentional data and try and find someone to build a life with, it's a small price to pay, right? Go to a place, find that, be certain that you're going to be able to then make the life work once you found the person. But that would be a final thing for everybody, right? Like date intentionally. Right? You just, no one presumes that their career is just going to fall into their lap. No one presumes that they have to turn up to work and acquire skills and qualifications. And they go to

college or university for years to be able to do this. And yet we just presume that serendipity will give us our partner. It's like, I think that a bit more intentionality would probably be useful. Chris, it's been an absolutely superb into you. Thank you for coming on the show. And join us on locals where you get to ask Chris your questions and we're going to talk even more fascinating things. But before that, we do always ask our last question, Chris, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Birth rate decline. We are talking about it. Yeah, but not many people are.

No many people are. Yeah. Yeah. Get dating. I nearly said get shagging. Get shagging. Make some babies. Make some babies. Don't use protection. What?

Well, you want babies. I mean... Sure. It's a great way to sign off. Of the people you've interviewed, who calls you to change your mind or to opt all your outlook the most? This episode sponsored by IP Vanish.

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