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Andrews. What's up, everybody? You just found the world's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is my pump today's episode. This one was awesome. One of my favorite conversations Chris Williamson. He's a one of the best interviewers on the internet and very smart gentleman. In today's episode, we talk
About a lot of stuff. Lots of controversial topics. He's very intelligent. If you want to hear an intelligent perspective on lots of tough topics, like dating men, women and more, you're going to love this episode. This episode is brought to you by the team over at dr. Stephen Cabral, this is equi, life is a company that works with functional medicine, they use supplements to help improve your health. And right now for mine pump listeners, you can get a free bottle. Okay, while supplies last a free bottle.
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You get yourself a free bottle. Also, this month, we have three programs that are 50% off. Three workout programs that are half off. The first one is Maps performance. The second one is Maps aesthetic. And the third one is Maps. It all of them. 50% off. If you're interested just go to Maps, Fitness Products.com and then use the code Coupe, Feb 15. Fe B 54 the 50% off discount. All right, here comes the show. Do you think that's potentially unhealthy for
Someone and do you think that we evolved to reproduce and have a family? And do you think that there's consequences that maybe they just don't foresee
yet? Yeah, I mean, certainly Different Strokes for different folks. Some people can make it to the end of life. Having not had kids or a family and say that. It's the right call. Yeah. But he had to beat the odds pretty hard.
I thought I wasn't going to your an outline and you've had. Yeah. I'm 41. Yep. And I have a three-year-old son now socialization, but me and my wife and I we've been together for
Thirteen years. And so there was a point where we are very hormones. She asked like we, she's part of the business like you built companies together before, like hardcore, motivated like that. And there was this thought that, you know, maybe we won't have kids and that changed. And now I look back and go like, oh my God
like imagine if we hadn't done this. Yeah it's very strange because it's hard. I think I'm not a parent not as far as I know and it's very difficult for non-parents to imagine the kind of
of enjoyment that they're going to get out of having kids because it's there's a lot of very obvious reasons about why you shouldn't have kids right here. All of the time that they're going to take up and the difficulty in the potential risk of them becoming injured or killed, and then you're going to be heartbroken and you'll never get over and all of these things. It's very hard for parents to actually, explain to you the meaning and satisfaction. They get out of having kids. Yeah. And the moment-to-moment experience if you do self-rated happiness of parents, the less happy than on parents, but they have much more meaning in their life.
Mmm.
So like you know, when you're up for the third time tonight with a one-year-olds it's teething or whatever's going on like that's not happiness but over time you start to accumulate North a lot more meaning. So I people can do whatever it is that they want. I am slightly concerned about childlessness especially in the west at the moment. The population collapse is fucking terrifying and it is coming for every developed country. I
want to touch on that because well, first off the data on this is actually pretty
Here that the people that do Find meaning and purpose that don't have kids typically devote their lives to something that they, it transcends them. So it's either something religious or spiritual or they volunteer for work or do something that they dedicate their lives to like Mother Teresa, for example. So, and it's hard to explain because you don't know what it's like to truly care about something more than yourself and I think until you have kids, otherwise, you really don't, unless you have that one purpose in life.
That was my experience. My experience was until that moment. I didn't realize that I had never truly love something more than myself. I love my wife. I love my mom. I love my city, I love 5, love my friends, and I say stuff like that. But until that moment of seeing another being a part of you that you're now responsible for all of a sudden that what I would say for me was real love for the first time something that I actually love, when you could have imagined it, otherwise Chris you mentioned population.
Collapse. So and I if you read about this and look at the data, this is a big deal and some countries are freaking out. I know, Japan is in a bad position and Italy where my family's from in a bad position. America's on the cusp, we're like the line or we may experience this China is suffering. Now for kind of what happened what why do you why are we getting the message that we need to have less kids? That populate that we're going to get overpopulated that we're running out of resources that?
Population is a threat to us in the sense that we're having too many kids. Why are we getting that message? When the data is showing the
opposite it's way worse than you think? However bad you think it is the current decline in birth rates is significantly worse. So there's a guy called Stephen Shore who's just released a documentary called birth Gap. He's been on Modern West and my show and this guy just totally blew my head off. He became obsessed by this question around about six or seven years ago. It's traveled to 24 different countries. He's a data scientist by trade.
And he has looked at the declining birth rates across the world first off. Why is it that people have a problem with the amount of people that are on the planet and say that it isn't an issue? Perhaps that the population is declining. It's because of a fundamental belief that the world's carrying capacity is already been breached, right? That we already have too many people on the planet, this ties into environmentalism and the green movement and stuff and no matter what you think about like parts per million carbon in the atmosphere, the Earth has way.
Way way more carrying capacity than we're at at the moment. Remember the population boom is going to be a population bomb or a population boom in the 70s and 80s well that never ended up happening. It looks like we're going to top out just under about 10 billion people but the fall off from there is going to be precipitous, you can have a declining birthrate whilst an increasing population because the amount of time that people live for is getting longer, right? So if you have a never aging population, you can actually drop birth rate and increase the size overall.
But what you end up with if you imagine a graph where you have a 0 years old 1 2 3 4 all the way up to 100 that creates a shape right of the demographic. Once you've had one year olds, there are no more one year olds that can be born right now. We know exactly how many there are. This is where the term demography is Destiny comes from. So we know exactly how many one-year-olds two-year-old three-year-olds and then in 80 years time, we know how many 81 year old 82 year olds, if you account for the drop-off. So you end up with this shape right to the demo.
Graphic, what you want is this, you want more young people than old people because they're the ones that drive Innovation, the drive GDP that are actually physically able to look after old people. If you have a shape like that, this sort of inverted, triangle shape. That's really not good. Because you have more old people than young people, that's the current situation. Seventy percent of countries worldwide are below. The birthrate Tipping Point. That means that the women in those countries are having less than two children. That's the number that you need in order to sustain Society. So if everyone remembers this on
Are not number right from the pandemic. If you have fewer children, that means there are fewer children to have fewer children. So you end up falling off a cliff or something.
It's just, you can't read, you can't
recover, it's very difficult. It's very, very difficult. Now, what you will end up with in America, for instance, certain sub cultures that are repopulating pretty well Mormons. For instance, you know, you have, within particular, mostly religious traditional, conservative sect, like, Matt Walsh has had like six kids. Yeah, I think.
Two sets of twins, right? So you know, there's gonna be a lot of mat while she's running around. But even in the places where people would say sub-Saharan Africa, everything's going to be fine every 15 years. The average number of children that each mother has is dropping by one. So, it's six hits five. Then it's for a at 625 now-ish, even in the places that everyone thinks I'm having it away, Japan, that you brought up 120 million people in it at the moment by 2050, that's going to be 60 to 65.
China, 1.2 billion people in it, at the moment by 2050, that's going to be 650 million. South Korea, same problem, UK USA, or at sort of 1.8 to 1.6 in terms of their birth rate. It's really, really, really not good. And the interesting thing about population collapse, in terms of demographics, it's the least exciting and least galvanizing of all of the existential risks, right? There's no super volcano, spewing out. Ash does no asteroid in the sky there's no Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Get crashing through the ceiling to Galvanize, this to doing stuff. There's no smoke from chimneys and stuff. It creeps up on you, one year at a time, one generation at a time, one Lost Child at a time. And before, you know, it there aren't enough people on the planet. So for the people that have, you know, legitimate concerns about what's happening with the environment and stuff like that. If you think that living on this planet is bad when you believe there's too many people on it. Wait until you see what it's like, when there's too few.
Now what are the attributing this to is this also the
Creating this with the fact that we've moved further away from religion because you mentioned these some of these religious cultures that are definitely still promoting having multiple
kids, third rela. So it seems like the two things that cause population birth rates to decline, the education of women and industrialization, those two are across the board and the reason that this happens, the reason you can tell that this is the case is that you have let's say Japan in Japan. I think all schooling is
And everybody pays for it and some of the Scandinavian countries, all schooling is supplemented and paid for by the state you have certain countries that are authoritarian, some the Democratic some that egalitarians, some the patriarchal, some that, you know, you have every different type of culture that you can. So you think, okay what is it? That all of these different countries, seventy percent of countries are below. The birthrate Tipping Point. What is it? That all of them have got in common? And it's been this increasing industrialization and education of women to put it out there front and foremost, I am not.
Saying that we should stop educating women, right? That's not my proposal at
already clip that but this is
this is where this is the correlation. It seems. As soon as you educate women, the birth rate Falls precipitously. That is a really uncomfortable truth, right? That's just what happens. Why is that what happens? It seems like if women are able to gain education and employment, they spend more time, learning, and then more time learning, which then squeezes that fertility window down, right?
If you've spent up until the age of what 23 in school, and then you go up, you know, spent 18 years in full-time education. I might as well go and actually earn. So then you talking maybe five years in a career before you actually start to probably look to settle down again. This is obviously, on average there's many students at University that will also have kids at the partner and get married and stuff. Then you talking 30
It's very, very difficult for women to understand just how limited their fertility window is and 8 out of 10 women who are childless, didn't intend to be childless, either, 10 8 out of 15. A time, I did not know that it's called involuntary. Childlessness. So around about 10% of women are physically, incapable of having kids for a variety of reasons, which is just brutal. 10% said that they actually didn't intend to have
Children, and that leaves a whopping, four out of five who didn't have children due to life circumstances, that's the most common reason for it. In the most common life circumstance is leaving it too late to find a partner and then have kids you break through that fertility window on the other side. And there is this is Professor ruska from Norway University was a huge meta-analysis done in 2010 and it is robust. It's been replicated. This is the case and the problem that you have is
These women who get into their 40s, who always intended to have a family who realize that they now can't, they go to support groups and Stephen, the guy that did that documentary went and these women are grieving for families that they never had, which is just brutal. Like, to think that you can grieve for something that didn't occur, and he went to this Undertaker's Funeral Parlor in Germany, which has got a birth Gap problem already. So, you're starting to see more and more single
People get to the end of life without any support structure, he told me the story where the Undertaker said for the first time in history, were doing funerals for these people. Both men and women and nobody's showing up. Mmm does no one showing to the funerals of these people, there's no one left and then when they cut the clothes off of them to embalm the body, or to dress the body ready for this event, which no one goes to, they find that they've got bruising around their wrists and bruising on her arms and it seems like in some of the care homes that these people have been.
Staying in that they've been abused by the carers. So you have this alone, elderly person who doesn't have any family in the final years of life that were abused by the people. They're supposed to look after them and then after they died, no one attends. The funeral. That's terrible also. So it's like the most fucking harrowing has on the back of your neck style conversation. Yeah, I
also think that we're sold that popular media in especially in modern societies. This is where the industrialization aspect comes in cells.
Having kids or promotes having kids as oppressive terrible. You can't do fun stuff anymore. It sucks. And so and that you'll get Find meaning and purpose with your career. So I think that's also plays a big role part. The other side of that conversation with population is that people say well we have limited resources, right? Well, how can we continue to just grow when we're only have so much food when we have so much oil with that? I like to point to how many times we've been told that we're going to reach peak oil production
Action like we only have so much oil but Innovation. Actually. Today we actually have access to more oil today, per person than we did 40 years ago, even though we've been using it the entire time, same thing with Farmland, we use far less land to produce for more food. So, the Innovation aspect people don't really consider. That's, that's also a big part of this conversation too,
right? Yes. And everybody always wants to be a Cassandra. Me included, right? I'm hopping on about the fact that population collapse is something that everybody should be concerned about. There is always going to be like a Nostradamus.
Pointing at the issue and saying because it gives them a sense of importance. But do you think the carrying capacity of the earth is not a concern? The population collapses?
Yeah. So I wanted to take a step back because you have a very interesting road to getting to where you're at now. Like first off, I want to commend you. When you do interviews, you're probably one of the most objective and just excellent interviews I've ever heard. You seem you. Listen. Very well, very objective. You can, you can kind of go on both sides, have this ability to see through the fog.
Fog a little bit. How did you get to that place? How did you get to what you do now?
So I was a club promoter for a long time. I run owned. One of the biggest events companies in the UK stood, on the front door of about 1000 club nights.
Sounds like a natural progression to being a great
interviewer. That's ok. As you can see it's a classic intake. So I do that for about a thousand different events that we run over the course of a decade and a half meat about a million people.
Run this big company and do some reality TV off. The back of, I was a professional party boy, right for a decade in a bit and get toward the end of my 20s. After I've done this second reality TV, dating show called love Island, and I kind of had a fatal dose of contrast on that show between the people that were there. And the person that I thought I was and I realized that it actually wasn't necessarily the scene for me and I had nowhere to hide because cameras were on me, 24 hours a day and I had no distractions and maybe being able to sedate myself with,
You know, YouTube and internet and books and bits and pieces, and this really just drove it home. It's like you're not supposed to be here that much was
there. A moment or was it just the whole
thing? So they kind of was it was the show, was a gateway drug that kind of made me, really start to question. Is this what I'm supposed to do? Because that was like the World Cup championships of being a party boy, right? You managed to get on this huge show that's on Primetime TV every single night for
A month and a half. And I was in there for about a month and that was supposed to be everything that society would tell you. You're supposed to work toward, right? This is what a young guy that values status and women, and renowned, and resources, and all that shit should aspire to do especially coming from a working-class town working class background. That's exactly what you're supposed to try and do and I found it lacking, right? Even though I really loved what the work that I'd done in Nightlife and
took tons and tons and tons away from it. And I'm very, very proud of what me and my business partner built there was something missing and this was a good time. 2016 17, Jordan Pederson, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris. Ben Shapiro. Alain de botton from the school of life. So I'm starting to watch and listen to content. That makes me think about the direction I'm going in life and what I really want to do and how I can contribute. And then I just spent a lot of time exposing myself to crushing volumes of content that made me do introspection realize that
Playing a role on a persona for a very long time, study to strip that back. Okay, if I keep on digging and digging and digging if I'll hit something solid which was curiosity and a desire to learn and it kind of like, so this nerdy angle which are very much kept away. Because on the front door of a nightclub, I can't talk to people about answers to the Fermi Paradox around, why, there are no aliens out there, they want them, the IP banned, and they want to fuck off inside the club, right? This isn't the environment in which I could do that. And part of this is a self-fulfilling prophecy because I'm sure that many people would have been responsive to this.
I've had I've decided to open up in any case about my interests, but I didn't have the confidence because I decided that this was the way that people wanted me to be. This was the role I had to play and also being the leader. I'm sure that you guys feel this as well as the leader of any sort of company there is you begin to put an expectation about what you think other people want you to do on that. And you start to almost fulfill this role that you've created for yourself. So start the podcast about five years ago, just because I wanted to learn from people and you roll the clock forward now and it's whenever 600.
So dudes, Goggins Peterson Jocko hubermann,
yeah. How did you start getting guess at that level? I mean you've had massive guests on the show and we know firsthand what it's like to try and get a big name on the show even when after we've had traction and we're relatively big. So, how did you get to the level of getting that kind of guess? I mean, did the, did your show explode overnight? Did you have something that went viral? Like, how did you gain your Club promoting no experience at that, help you, correct?
So the networking, the
Ground of networking. Most people have no idea how to network effectively, and that was what I'd done for that, was my bread and butter for 15 years. So, being able to reach out to people, create relationships, maintain relationships, and then use those to build more. So that was really all that happened. I mean the show, dude, 95, 96 percent of my listeners came last year, Spotify gave me the end of your stats. 96% of people joined last
year, so you're working for years and years and years. And then it was like,
correct. Have you ever seen that Jack butcher?
Value graph. Yeah. Where it's flat and flat and flat. And there's a little arrow that points to this is pointless. And it's just before the hockey stick against I was at. This is pointless for three years basically. And yeah, I mean like we've done stuff. I think in a day in a day, a couple of weeks ago, we did more plays than the entire first three years of the show for together. Wow. Alright so for anybody out there, that is thinking, I'm trying to do this thing. I feel like I've Got Talent. I genuinely believe that my quality
E of content is ahead of the interest that it's getting might just keep going.
Chris did, what kept you going during that time? Was it just that there was a selfish desire for knowledge and wisdom and learning? So in other words, the first three years when you had no traction or it seemed like there was nothing happening where you just like well okay but I love this. I love learning. Like what what can you tell somebody who's like in that period? Because three years is a long time to plug away, invest money and time and energy. Yeah. And see, you know, nothing or
Little comeback in terms of financial
success, it didn't feel like look okay, that's why I would happily do this for free. I would happily do. It was 6:00 in the UK. It's 2:00 in in Austin where I am now, I would happily do that every single day for free. If nobody listened like that's what I want to do and it's very difficult to compete with somebody that's having fun because I'm going to outwork everybody else in the room. And it's not even going to feel like work to me for someone that wants to become a great podcaster. They don't have the same
Position, whatever it is that I have, which means that every time that they need to get themselves up and prepare for another guest and sit down and have the conversation, it's going to feel arduous. Whereas for me I'm actually compelled to do it because I want to write, it's the perfect intersection. What is it ikigai? What you need to do? Sorry, what you want to do? What Society needs and what you can be paid for right? Like that's slap-bang in the middle and that's what I've managed to find. So yeah, it didn't feel like work for all that it can be impressive to say that are you plugged away at something for three years and basically nobody took any notice so well.
I would still be happily doing that. Now, the only difference is now there's a lot more attention.
Would you compare? So, how are you as a student? I guess is where I'm getting at verses like because this quest for learning that it seems like it might have come a bit later for you, or was this always there even go to
school. Yeah, always curious, but just kind of hid it away. I think for a good chunk of time again like the
too busy being a party
boy, correct. Yeah, dude, you know, if you running nightclubs and constantly thinking about
About DJs and all the rest of it. There's only so much time in the day and it meant that. Yeah, that was that curious side of me was a little bit muted but it's always been there. And I think a lot of people are like this man like think about the entire industry of podcasting coming out of the whatever you want to call it. Like edutainment sector. It's people that want to learn about our today. I'm going to learn about lithium minds and tomorrow. I'm going to learn about human DNA for spaceflight and then I'm going to learn about what it's like to be a professional pain, start like Y, which is because we're curious and we want to learn about shit. And I think that following that
That curiosity is a pretty good strategy. It's also a great medium because
it's long form so we can have long discussions whereas that kind of ended for a little while where everything had to be. So short. Any any guests that really surprised you that you had on were afterwards. You were like, wow, that was different than what I anticipated.
So Goggins recently, I had him on he only did two shows which was very nice of him to choose me as one of the other ones that wasn't going to be Rogan, and he surprised me, because
Was he seems like such an extreme character. You can't believe that this guy is going to be actually that legit in real life and I was going in there wanting to kind of try and poke holes in it. So what do you actually spend each day doing what your daily routine look like? And why have you decided to go back to not doing any talks on? How come you're needing to podcasts and blah, blah blah? However, legit and hardcore. You think that guy is it? He's even more legitimate, it's terrifying. How hardcore that dude is and that surprised me.
Because I was expecting there to be a at least one chink in the armor and I didn't see anything at
all. So very authentic correct. Yeah, anybody that you, that shifted your Paradigm, we've had guests on the show where afterwards, we all sat down and talked for another hour or two and it just changed our our minds or how we thought about certain things. Can you think of a time that happened for you? Where afterwards you were like, okay? I am totally different after that interview
all the time.
Man. I mean, Stephen show that both gasp think the declining birth rate stuff. I'd known that it was a problem for a while but I didn't realize just how bad it was so that really opened my eyes, a bunch of conversations with evolutionary psychologists about the imbalance in the dating Market at the moment. So this mating
crisis, explain that, that's interesting. I just I've been hearing stuff about this is kind of fascinating to me.
Okay, so third rail again at the moment
There is a massive reduction in the amount of short-term sex that people are having and also you have declining marriage rates and a family rates. Write the number of man reporting No Sex in the last year has tripled from 8 percent to 28 percent from 2008 to 2018, this is men between the ages of 18 and 30. So short term sex has declined. This is also declined for women as well, but a little bit more of a man for the first time in history. 50.1 percent of women are childless at 30 and a report from
Reuters says that 45% of prime working age women between 22 and 45 will be single and childless by 2040. For the first time in history, you have 51% of chin children being born outside of marriage or civil unions. That's to either single parents or two people that are just in a relationship in the UK. So what that map shows is, short term, sex, and long-term mating seem to be on the decline, right? We have greater rates of singleness you think, which is
crazy in a world of
of tender in Facebook and Instagram. Direct is super fascinating that that, that would be declining.
How is the ease of access to other partners increasing wild? What? Actually occurs in the real world seems to be dropping down. And are they connected correct? Yes. Oh, yes, they are. So, that's the okay. There's something happening here and I think that everybody, every young single person that has an idea that, you know, the dating Market seems a little bit different now, very different, all of the advice that my parents can give me doesn't really
Seem to apply anymore. So you would think what is it? That could be happening here. Hypergamy is the tendency for women to date, what called up and across. So on average women want to date a man who is as educated or more educated than them and as employed or more employed than them. So that's wealth levels, right? This is Harkens back to our ancestral Roots, which would be that. Women want a man who has status and resources, not a problem at all? Why should women try and like, settle or not? Get the best that they can be?
Shoe that you have is that women. Have been outperforming man in both education and employment for quite a while now. So two women for every one man, will complete a four-year u.s. college degree by 2030 women on average between the ages of what a 21 and 29, and 1111 pounds more than men do. So you can see a potential issue here, you have an ever-increasing cohort of high-performing women that are educated and employed competing for an ever-decreasing cohort of ultra high performing, man. So this is what I call the tall girl problem, so every guy has
A girlfriend who is six thought without heels, if you want to wear heels and look nice on a night out you're stuck dating professional athletes, right? Because your capacity in terms of height has selected for a very small cohort of man that are taller than you. This is the same but it's in terms of education and employment. So the ability for women to outperform man, remembering when Title, Nine came in, which was the affirmative action thing, that helped women to get into higher education. The percentage Point swing was 13%.
In favor of man. Now in 2023, it's 15 percent percentage point in favor of women, we overcorrected. So there is nobody no one that thought when Title Nine came in that they were going to not only reach parity but blast straight through it and then over correct. Nobody thought that that was gonna happen. So again, like you might say why is it a bad thing that women have got access to education employment? It's not like women needed that for a very long time. The brutal
ground truth is that when you match up this increase educational and employment achievement with hypergamy,
Women who are better educated and better employed reduce down their mating pool. So what's good for their educational and employment? Achievements is not necessarily good for their dating Prospect and this gets born out in a ton of data relationships where the woman out earns the man of fifty percent, more likely to end in divorce relationships were the woman contributes more than 80 percent of household. Income are twice as likely to end in divorce relationships, where the man is not the primary Breadwinner he is 50% more likely to need to
use erectile dysfunction medication. Hmm, women are three times more likely than a man to say that important educational achievement is something that they would judge a partner on. Basically, guys, don't care if their partner has got a PhD and owns a hundred grand a year, but women would care more, right? And this doesn't need to be huge effect. They are quite large effects, but it only needs to be relatively small effect to nudge people's preferences. Okay. So we have this problem in terms of short-term and long-term mating. We have this imbalance
Terms of female achievement and Male Achievement, May labor force. Participation has declined by nought point one percent every month since 1950. It's gone from 87 percent to 68 percent. And by 2040, it will be 65 percent, 65 percent, labor force, participation amongst man. So you can imagine the dynamic. You have this group of Turbo, Chad's at the top, right? The sort of 8 out of 10 and above they have this wealth of options, the guys that are super wealthy well-educated and
Tall. Usually they have this big, big, big block of girls that they can run through. If they choose to these women sometimes get used and heartbroken by the guys at the top that causes them to be bitter. And resentful of all men, the group of guys at the bottom, the, you know, 5 out of 10 cm below are essentially invisible to most of these women angry but they get the these men aren't worth shit. Like Guy, where all of the good man at, they believe that the one of these good men but they are being sort of tarred with the same brush.
As the guys that used and run through women. So those women Retreat into careers and lean into some of the boss, bitch lifestyle, these men Retreat into porn and video games. These guys at the top that do have the turbo Chad access. I don't think it's necessarily even that good for them either. Like having a wealth of options is a man who wants lots of sexual variety doesn't encourage you to be a good man and many men can't control their sort of desire for sexual Variety in the way that they might want to like,
In their best moments or whatever. So you end up with both sexes, moving further and further apart from each other, the men that Retreat into porn and video games are less attractive, potential mates to this group of women and the women that lean into a boss. Bitch lifestyle make themselves, even taller and taller with regards to the tall girl problem. So you end up with a situation in which everybody resents everybody this you see this online with you know, make Tower
On a sphere red pill, black pill in cell culture, or on the women's side with boss bitch, culture with pink pill, with female dating strategy. All of these are coops for. Why can't I find a partner from women that I'm attracted to or from Man 1 that's attracted to me?
Well, in these apps, he's dating apps are showing like that. There's a small percentage of, man something like in the single-digit percentage of man who are getting all of the matches, all of the conversations, all of the women who want to talk with them and then the
Arrests are essentially as you said invisible and these dating apps are showing this now historically, evolutionarily speaking. Because I feel like this is a sounds like, a relatively new problem. It's not if there's monogamy argument, right? Because there's arguments that we created monogamy or monogamy, although now in every successful Society, this is what's practice. But for a lot of human history that wasn't the case. And you had the man with the resources and the military and the Harem, and then you had the, you know, the peasants. And they just
Did Stan have accessible women. And so, the argument is that we created monogamy. It was a way to keep us peaceful and not killing each other and all that stuff. So it's like we've now this kind of natural tendency where all the women want these few men and all these other guys are invisible. Now, it seems like we've Amplified that with technology and accessibility, and that's what we're kind of seeing right now. Is it, that guys are just giving up and that women are working harder? Is that part of it? Or is it more than
that? There's an awful lot going on.
So Richard Reeves guy that wrote of boys and men, really great book, Shield read. Everybody should check it out if they're interested in this, and he talks about the structural problems. Mana dropping out of education, employment and family life why it's happening. It seems like girls mature more quickly than boys. Everyone knows that they hit puberty earlier than boys, but there's other things that are on average more conscientious which means that when it comes to sitting down and doing homework, that better more boys have got add more, boys, are restless and boisterous when it comes to class that doesn't engender a very successful like education.
Outcome for guys, there are four times as many female fighter pilot in the US Air Force. As there are male kindergarten teachers by percentage in the u.s. two percent of kindergarten teachers am an 8% of fighter. Pilots are female, I'm happy to have a discussion about whether there should be more female fighter pilots in the US but they're absolutely needs to be more males kindergarten teachers because they understand how to deal with boisterous boys, right? Oh, I see. So, the monogamy argument is an interesting one.
It seems to me that almost all human history's, human civilizations throughout history ancestrally were monogamish, right? So, this like polygyny argument really only begins to make sense, once you've got Agricultural Revolution because no one man can accumulate sufficient resources to be able to look after more than just him and his local family. So, for anybody that says, you do have this like huge polygyny thing going on and everyone's again, everyone's want to be Genghis Khan? No, no, not up until
Till 10,000 12,000 years ago and you can tell by the some genetic records, the some anthropological data that suggests that it's just not the case. It's not most of human history was monogamish serial monogamy, perhaps, but it wasn't this polygyny, where it's one man with an entire Harem of women because how would you in a normal local tribe if you don't have tons and tons of resources? How are you not going to stop all of the other men? Just tearing you apart and and this is a problem called Young.
All syndrome. So this is we've spoken about individual happiness and stuff. We probably need to justify why people need to get into a relationship at all. We can do that in a bit but societal stability is something to be concerned about if you have a ton of man who are not bought in to the local Society.
Why should they behave? Why shouldn't they cause Havoc? If they've not got a partner? And they've not got kids, their testosterone is higher because getting into a relationship drops testosterone and then having kids drops it again. Which reduces risk. Taking Behavior. Why shouldn't they just go around and push over granny and set buildings on fire and stuff? They got nothing else to do and this has happened throughout history. Portugal in the 1700s. They actually shipped off all of the Suns, that weren't the first son, the first son got married off and the rest of them were put on Galleon ships and they got to explore the new world. What they were doing was they were Outsourcing
This potential these roving bands of like future miscreants. No, just exporting them out of the out of the country. So young male syndrome is this situation in which a proliferation of childless sexless, young man cause Havoc for society given that we forgot ever increasing rates of sexlessness amongst young men and young people generally, where R is all of the writing think that's a valid question, you know, in cell killings for all that. A lot of the killings that do occur especially mass shootings, do come from
Young lonely, man. There's nowhere near it hasn't tripled in the last ten years, right? So why is it not going up in line? And this is a theory that I've come up with which is the male sedation hypothesis. So, it's my belief that men have been sedated out of this state of seeking and reproductive Behavior through pain and video games. I think that video games gives them the team bonding goal-seeking forward oriented satisfaction that they need. And I think
Like that porn is giving them a very, very, very slight titrated
dose care for you. You're touching her third rail. That wasn't a third rail that long ago. You know, we touch we talk about video games the other day and a lot of guys come after the pornography conversation is interesting because this is relatively new. I mean pornography has existed for a long time but not its access. I make the joke on the podcast all the time that you know, when we grew up in the 90s, if you had a dirty magazine in the 90s, you could literally
You can trade it for some kids bike. That's how hard it was to come by and now it's so accessible. It's interesting. I have you interviewed anybody to talk about the impacts of pornography on men and society and what that could potentially do to
us? Yes, I've had to cook a couple of conversations to actually contradict each other. So, dr. David Lee is very anti pain panic and I need to dig into a lot more of what he talked about. He said that people are over blowing the concern when it comes to pain, really? Yeah. Yeah. Which is
Is the first guy that I've ever heard to talk about this, but he's deep in the research on average, I think that porn is a pretty destructive force for men. And the main reason that I think it is, is that guys who are in relationships and use Pawn are less likely to have sex with their partner, right? So you're less likely to satisfy your partner because you are able to satisfy yourself. Aside from that Downstream from that your partner may start to wonder and worry about. Why are we not having as much sex? If you're single, it's going to promote you to go out and
Actually get laid less. Like if the only way that you can get sex is by finding another woman. You're going to be very motivated to go out and find that woman. Mmm. Whereas if you can get your rocks off at home on your own, then that's not going to be the case. Andrew human said to me on a really great episode that people should check out about how Pawn watching can train people to become aroused when they're watching somebody else have sex. But that doesn't necessarily translate over into when your one-on-one with somebody in the real world.
And so you can actually, there is a potential concern that you could neurologically program yourself to become a Voya. And that is a pretty big concern. I mean, there's all sorts of things that are happening as well with like young kids. That learn about sex through porn and then have super skewed perspectives of what sex is supposed to be, how you're supposed to do it at such a this is, I guess more of a concern for women about how men treat them. But like if you're a guy you want to treat a woman well, right? You do and be doing something that she's going to absolutely detest.
Or heard her. So, um, yeah, the pomp anything, when it comes to video games again? I don't know. I haven't seen the date on this. I do need to speak to some like gaming addiction people. However, it wouldn't surprise me if the question Still Remains, if young man aren't having that much sex. Where is all of the up, unrest, right? Yeah. Manifest online in forums and stuff like that, but it's not happening in the real world and it should be. So prolific, this isn't me like campaigning for go out there and
Burn down your local fucking CBS, but something's happening and the two things that men would typically want would be camaraderie goal-seeking and reproduction
look when I was younger, which wasn't that long ago. If you were at home by yourself you there was nothing to do. You had nothing to do now. It's hard. I have kids. So I have two teenagers and I also have two real, you know, much younger ones and in anybody who has kids now will tell you look when I was a kid, if you got
Miss you were sent to your room now. It's almost the reverse it's like, get off all your electronics. You gotta go. Gotta go outside and I'm not even joking. Stand on that grass. Yeah. Still hot fucking Christ. It's true. It's so true. It's like get off your stuff and they're like, I don't know what to do. Go outside, there's nothing to do outside. Yeah. So I think I agree. Kind of with what you're saying. This kind of all speaks to, in my opinion, this bigger thing which is we seem to be more connected. It's easier to talk to people. It's easier to meet people yet. There seems to be this epidemic of lung.
Loneliness. Correct. And that seems to be across the board, especially with older people, but across the board, we're we're more anxious, more depressed, and More Lonely than ever before. What have you, what have you read about
this? It's terrifying, man. I mean, the most common answer to the question. How many friends do you have that you could call on an emergency is zero?
That's the most common answer. That's not the average or the mean, but it's the most common answer. Wow, that's fucking terrifying. Wow, in a world where we are more connected than ever before, people are feeling more alone. Being lonely is, is bad for your health as smoking a pack of ten cigarettes every single day, people that are alone have quicker, onset of dementia, they have quicker neurological decline, their health Spanish shorter, the life span is shorter.
the problem is,
Everybody as far as I can see and this is the sedation hypothesis is being sedated. Out of things that are good for them. What is convenient is not always what's good for you in the same way as a child, might always want to have ice cream for dinner. They need to be told that they can't, even though they want it, it's not necessarily what's good for them. But when you create a world where convenience is Paramount, when you can, you know, ubereats a Michelin star meal to the couch that you Amazon Prime day yesterday to be built by some guy that you paid for on taskrabbit.
To then watch Netflix from the comfort of your home. All of this is constrained just described my last
Saturday. Fuck. It's true though. You know what I think is interesting but this conversation is and how powerful all these things are as how much you can even creep into someone's life who's aware of it? Correct. I mean, we talk about this stuff all the time and it's like, man, it's it's wild to me how easily you can get kind of roped in we're such. So we're social creatures at the very least you have to be around people. In fact, it's been
It's been acknowledged as a cruel form of punishment that you could isolate someone like capture a prisoner in war
was thing that you could do to them
is to put them alone. You know, that's considered, cruel and unusual punishment and in major world countries have said, we will not do that. If we go to war to each other's you know, captured to captured enemies so it's pretty wild. I did read that talking with people online gives you the same dopamine.
As meeting them in person, but what you lack is, the oxytocin. So you get the dopamine, which is the driver, but you lack, the oxytocin. So it's like, it's like the you get a drug. It's like it's like getting high from a drug versus getting high from doing something, physical and active. The work isn't there and the meaning isn't there. And so it's just a hit of dopamine. So in essence, it's it is what you're saying, sedating. I think is the best word. It's like we're satisfying the driver.
And so we're lose the driver but we're not getting what we really need and without the driver will never get what we really
need. Yeah, and with that titrated dose, it's enough to just keep people Comfortably Numb but it's not enough to actually motivate them to go and do something. So, I learned about this concept called the region beta Paradox last year and the region beat Paradox. Imagine that if you were going to go somewhere you would walk if it was less than a mile. I just share this with you. Yeah. But you would drive if it was a mile of Greater, right?
Paradoxically what that means is that you would drive somewhere drive two miles quicker than you would walk one mile. Now, the problem that you have is that if people can get themselves into a situation where things aren't quite that bad, that it'll activate them to get out the bottom there. Comfortably Numb there in this region beta in the middle so you can imagine someone that's in a relationship. It's not abusive it's not that bad but it doesn't fire them up. They've probably settled or someone lives in an apartment where the landlord isn't that much of a dick. But there's maybe a bit of mold and maybe it's a bit expensive and it's a
If area of turn all of these people would actually be better off if their situations were worse because it would motivate them to do something about it and come out of the bottom. If your situation is good, fantastic, good for you. If your situation is bad, okay? You're going to do something to change it. If your situation is just about possible, this is how you end up being comfortably numb and that's the sedation in the middle. And I think that a lot of people, whether they know it or not, they just feel like life is kind of here just this sort of gray vanilla.
Whoa, pumped into them, kind of dopamine Flex up and down throughout the day. Don't really know what's going on. They're not super connected to the things around them. They don't feel or they don't feel dread. They don't feel a massive amount of fear but they don't feel a massive amount of joy and this is the world that's been created at the moment. I mean, this is like fucking super black pilled stuff, right? Like it's not I'm not exactly being the most positive vibes offer. However, here's the fucking thing that I would say.
In order to transcend your programming, you have to become aware of it. And the choice that you have. When it comes to happiness, in life is between becoming aware of your mental afflictions, or the discomfort of becoming ruled by them. The only way that you can get past this stuff. It is. We are in Uncharted Territory here, folks. No one has been here before, the ease of access to dopamine, the lack of connection between humans. No one's been here before, in order for you to deal with this problem, you have to first become aware of it.
How much your what you're talking about right now is
One of the things are, one of the main reasons that we attribute to the rise in the Spartan races, and these Ops these things were. And you see a lot of these guys online now that are selling these groups where they go, you know, you guys are, you know, young men are paying thousands of dollars to get, you know, beat up for
a week in the face and basically like Navy Seals selection. Yes, saying yeah.
So it's and so this is what we attribute to that is that we have this desire for struggle and to go through these things, and no one ever one. I agree with you is that this kind of
Yeah. Even kill the fucking proliferation of I Stubbs.
What are you doing here? Yeah.
But what do you what are you doing? You're saying my life is so comfortable. Yep, yeah. Day to day that, I have to go out of my way to buy a five thousand dollar custom piece of equipment, in order to be able to artificially inject some difficulty into my existence, that's what's happening. Yeah, your life has become so comfortable and convenient that you have to create a room in which
Each heavy things are attached to a long thin thing, and then you have to pick it up and put it down because you have to pick up and put down nothing else in your life. That's what's happening. People are artificially re-engineering. The stuff that you would have naturally done as a course throughout your entire day and they're having to do it in little blocks.
I mean, I've seen this with the creation of gyms and getting rid of a lot of manual, labor and hard tasks. I mean, isn't this where it's just going to get more crazy with AI and everything solving all these other problems of
Also, where do you see us being able to address this in another form?
It's fucking difficult, man. I mean the AI thing is terrified.
Are you going down the rabbit hole chat?
Gbto. Yes, it's been like if you guys spoken about it much. Oh
yes, it's been a hot topic for the last couple months,
man. Okay, yeah,
we've I've called it a genie. It's like it's some point in was gonna have a genie and be able to get whatever they want. That's
terrified and if you think that social media at the moment is bad, wait, until almost all of it is
Not only driven to you by algorithms that know exactly what to give you, but it's written by algorithms, that know exactly what to say within the next 10 years. Over 90% of content that's produced on the Internet. Won't be even made by humans. At least at the moment when you read something, that's either useless are interesting and you regret reading it afterwards at least, you know that someone somewhere wrote it. But imagine when it's become automated, imagine when the content that you read on the internet has become automated and then imagine when they can deep fake videos of
People. So I was with Tom bill, you yesterday, they're training, an equivalent of chat GPT on every conversation that he's ever heard on everything that he's ever written so that you can have a permanent virtual Avatar of Tom, in the matter verse that you can go and have a conversation with at all times. And it'll accurately tell you what time it somehow. And if it's more you than you are, if it knows everything that you've ever said.
What you see you now. What what does that even mean to be you? If I can have a permanent 24/7, unlimitedly, scalable, every single person that wants to have a podcast? Hey, come and have it come and do a podcast with Chris. Come into a pocket with virtual Chris, Chris, a I come and do that fucking terrifying. Now, there's an article from a friend that I want everybody to go and check out its by a Gwenda Bogle on sub stack, go window, dotsub stock.com. And it's about tick-tock
So I pulled up. Oh, I think I saw this. Yeah, it's fucking terrified. Read, half of it. I had to start Pace pretty bad, so, in a survey asking American and Chinese children, what job they wanted? Most the top answer among Chinese kids was astronaut. Yeah, the time hands are amongst American Kids was influencer. There is a substantial body of research, showing strong association between smartphone addiction shrinkage of the brains gray matter and digital dementia. An umbrella term for the onset of anxiety, and depression, and the deterioration of memory attention.
And self-esteem and impulse control the last of which increases addiction. Indeed, many habitual. Ticked us at Tucker's can already be. Found complaining on web sites, like Reddit about their loss of mental ability, a phenomenon. That's come to be known as Tick-Tock brain. If the signs are becoming a parent already, imagine what Tick-Tock addiction will have done to a new developing brains a generation from now tick-tocks capacity to both stupefy people acutely by encouraging idiotic Behavior. Like getting people to drink bleach out of a toilet which actually happened to girls iPods. Correct. Yeah. Which gave people brain.
Image. So you've got a cute stupidity and then you've got chronic stupidity through atrophying the brain. This should prompt consideration of its potential use as a new kind of weapon. One that seeks to neutralize enemies not by infecting plane pain and Terror but by inflicting pleasure. Yeah, last month, FBI director. Christopher a 12 Tick Tock is controlled by a Chinese government. That could use it for influence operations. So, How likely is it that one? Such influence operation might include addicting young westerners to a mind-numbing content?
Right? A generation of nincompoops, it's happening.
Well, universities we return. How many universities are already banning at now.
UT Austin. Spend it on
campus. Yeah, there's there's a handful. We would use it. Are CIA would use it. So of course, they're going to use it on us. You know what, this great this is, you know, this makes me think is two things. One, is that we think we know what we want but we really don't know what the hell that we want. And so we're getting everything that we want but it's not really what we need and then to is humans. Fundamentally don't understand that there's a trade.
And they think if they get this thing that there's no potential traits, I'll give you an example. If you look at the statistics on kids today, they're doing their let their other having less unprotected, sex less sex, they're doing less drugs, they're doing having less risky Behavior, that's great. But what's on the other end of that is more anxiety, or Depression. More loneliness less connection, right? So we tend to forget that, we're not realize that there's a trade like, you know, we work in the health space, right?
We don't have to break our backs working so it's not hard physical labor. We can you know nobody starves any more food is really accessible and easy and we've engineered it. Make it super desirable and tasty. All sounds great except on the other end of that is obesity and chronic health problems. So it's as if we, it's like a lesson, we have to keep learning. We want this thing. We don't realize that when we get it, there's a trade-off and the trade-off to all of this. Because look, I can stay in my house alone.
And I definitely won't get into a car accident for sure, or you can get my car and try and drive around and meet people. And my car accident risk, skyrockets in comparison. So there's always going to be a trade in the trade, is the tough part. We don't realize that we think it's this is better. So it's better but there's a traitor right now. We're experiencing the other end of what we're getting and the other end is loneliness, anxiety. Depression, or listless? Yeah, you know, now, you made earlier, you brought something up. You said were comfortable?
Enough that we don't want to make any change. So we got to get worse. Maybe that's the good thing. Maybe we're getting to the point where it's worse. Like, for example, there's groups we talked about. Pornography earlier, there's groups on the internet of guys that do this, like nofap, like all we avoid that happens spontaneously, from young men who saw what pornography was doing to them and they all decided themselves. This was not government-controlled, their school didn't do, it was in their parents. It was them saying I'm going to quit porn. One of the
problems that you have with nofap is
that people become obsessed about fapping.
I do like so no flap.
Is it got a raise as obsessive around fapping as someone that is pathologically touching themselves. Like they're constantly thinking about it and I've not been a part of the nofap community, but Hamza who's a good mate? Who kind of TAPS into this Jen's Ed young men's space, says that there are huge, huge swaths of guys that feel completely disgusted with themselves because they touch the penis like if you break your Fab streak, you
Just feel like a total piece of shit to extremes. You're totally worthless so
classic overcorrection, correct? Yes,
yes, yes, it's this binary thinking nothing can be in the gray area but dude, I mean you know would I rather somebody obsess over that personal development and fear touching the penis compared with spending two hours a day watching porn fucking hell. I mean that's a pretty difficult. I both of them sound like a kind of Hell, yeah to me so yeah, it's a difficult one and then when you think about
Out how super convenient life has become for everybody. It doesn't surprise me that people aren't bothering to go out. I mean, you know, talk about another overcorrection me to what it did Downstream from that, which was needed policy to bring powerful men to account for the way that they were using power to leverage women into doing things that they didn't want sexually. But now there are huge, huge numbers of young men. That so
Terrified to go up to a girl in the gym or in a bar that nobody is even approaching anyone 86 percent women say, that they want their male partner to make the first move but a huge cohort of man are so terrified of being called a creep. I was out in London, a little while ago with a friend, young guy successful, dude, big on, You Tube, and we'd finished having dinner and he was boring me. And there was a group of girls over the far side and I was like, oh my whoa.
Why don't we go over and say hello to that group of girls? And he looked at me like I'd suggested that we go over and like strangled them and put them into a body bag is like you're not being serious, right? Yeah. Is that dude. I've been told never ever to approach a girl in a club for any reason at all I'm like, holy shit, overcorrection yet again. And that's the thing. Like anybody on the internet that wants to kind of get
Rallying cry is like, make women feel safe. Like that's an easy cause to get behind, right? But also like, make women feel safe and have some men approached them that they're attracted to. So maybe they can get into a relationship like blending. Those two worlds together is actually kind of difficult. It's very difficult. We're like, it doesn't fit into a
tweet. Know your reason that skit with Tom Brady, I think it was on SNL and remember, but it was like this is sexual harassment and it says like an attractive guy he's like, hey, you know, you look pretty today so they are.
Oh my God. And then Tom Brady shows up and he likes Max on the bunches like oh, you know. Yeah, it was just this hilarious skit that kind of showed up the challenge with an obviously it's comedy. So it's a little extreme but interesting. So do you see light at the end of the tunnel? Because I do also see people who through technology, you mentioned, a few people that have been on your show that I don't think would have gotten traction without the internet without podcast. For example, Jordan Pederson wouldn't have gotten any traction and he's
Some good stuff. Do you see the light at the end of the tunnel? Because I also on the other hand, see people who are saying, stuff, like you're saying listening to your show who are reaching out and saying, you know, I do need challenge, I do need struggle. Wow! This maybe, I do need to go make things hard for myself or go meet people or try to grow. Like, what does that look like to
you? The internet has created both good and bad things and what we're trying to do is create a world in which we can have all of the good without any of the bad, that's what working toward right.
Yeah. I mean it's helped people that help people reach those people. You know, the humans of the world. A guy that essentially came out of this sort of Dusty old lab in Stanford and within the space of whatever, two or three years, he's probably the number one Health and Fitness podcast in the world. Just relaying an endless list of interesting shit that people can use to make their lives better. That wouldn't be facilitated without the internet. Can you have both the good and the bad? That's the
Balance that everybody's trying to strike at the moment. I don't know. What do you think?
Yeah I think I think it's going to get a lot worse before it gets a lot better, but I do see light at the end. If the problem is historically, the optimistic view is that things happen. And travel so fast. Now that these over Corrections seem to be crazier, it's good, but they get balanced faster to that's. So I feel like, I mean, even I know we haven't, we haven't touched this third rail yet either. But I mean, I feel like I'm starting to see a rise in religion, again, where I felt like, just
Just a decade ago. We were on the complete opposite
truck. So what's that? Um what's that denomination of Christianity? That's all done in Latin.
Oh well there's a form of Catholicism that's done. What's that one called? I think I'm not quite sure I shall about. If I think was talking about going to mass words all
done. I'm definitely be the same answer to the fastest-growing sector or whatever like subversion of Christianity. I don't know. And the whole service is done in Latin.
Yes.
Shyla bow talked about, he talked about it, and he talked about and I could make sense, as to why it would be appealing. It's like the more things seem structuralist sin crazy. The more we're going to want the structure and the rules, right? And the ritual. So, to me, that seems quite
obvious. Yeah, it's so strange, man. I mean, think about how idealistic and Progressive and smart and clever and rational and scientific it seemed 20 years ago to listen to Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Yeah, tear down, some religious zealot.
At that didn't know what they were talking about and then you roll the clock forward, a little bit now and Douglas Murray, who is a good friend, who wrote a book that was very critical of a bunch of different religions. Then wrote a book called The Madness of crowds that was fundamentally based on the collapse of grand narratives. Hmm, his concern was that there are no more Grand narratives, that bind us all together as a country. It's okay. How much baby has been thrown out with the bath water here. Like it's really, really
Evident religion, independently arose, all over the world, right? Why we're has to serve some sort of adaptive purpose. It has to be useful to people
and also wouldn't have lasted that many
years precisely. But I mean, think about the fucking rise of stoicism man. Stoicism is modern secular religion for people that don't want to have to believe in a higher power. So true. Right yoga is exactly the same thing, psychedelic, psychedelic culture, like the religion of Austin, where I'm from
That is exactly what is exactly precisely. You know, there's a cool me my saw the other day that said, man will literally fly to Colombia to drink Amazonian mode rather than go to therapy.
That was what it's so when we. So, so funny touch on that, it's funny that you're pointing out Austin because that was where we were in our experience of this was, you know, almost what 77 years ago. When we started to get connected to more, influential people in the fitness space, and there's this big
Big movement in the fitness space around the Ayahuasca and the psychedelics and everything like that and it's from a kid who grew up in a very religious home. It's just to me it's just religion packaged
differently, right? Yeah. Feels the
exact same way when you're around all that but it's interesting. It's like we have this desire, we're searching for it. So if whether you're, you know, you're you believe in a higher power or you want to say you're atheist, you still we still have this natural thing that we gravitate if you feel more comfortable,
Or saying crystals and mother Ayahuasca but it's the universe. Yeah, the
univer act. Yeah, I mean, even Roll It Forward into the Fitness World, right? Like CrossFit CrossFit. You know, you'll have like, sermon Sunday's is a non-ironic type of workout. That a bunch of places do Friday Night Lights, what is it? It's ritualistic, you know, you have the guy that stood at the front, that's preparing. What's going to go on? You have reverence you have silence. You have all the rest of it that people are repurposing. This kind of structure into a bunch of different ways.
What is, what is your
personal Journey been, like, for that? Or did you grow up, religious? Do you believe in God, where are you at with that? And how is that? How is your journey been like
that? Very secular upbringing, the northeast of the UK, the UK in general is ahead of America, in terms of being non-religious. So, I really hesitate to use the spiritual but not religious crowd. However, I'm interested. I'm open to the idea that there might be more going on than I can see with my own two eyes.
Eyes.
But I don't have any proof for it
yet. So tell me how that has. How's that? How that's come to be for you because if you come from a place that is very secular. I'm a mayor imagining that you probably would have claimed that you were atheist in your younger years and now you're a little more open to that. So we're did that transition happen for
you. That would probably be about correct.
I think
I don't have it. So atheist is having an active belief that there is no God, right? And the difference between that and agnostic is, I don't know. There's this line from Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, and Tom Hanks is in the movie and he's speaking to you and McGregor, who is the acting camera lingo and he wants to get into the Vatican archives. He wants to get down there to find something that DaVinci Road or Michelangelo or whatever because it's going to tell him where the next clue is and he's trying to convince you and
Gregor's character to let him down there and the camel anger turns to him. And he says, do you believe professor? And he gives some like wishy-washy wanky answer where he's trying to evade? What said he said? I didn't ask you that. I asked if he believed and Tom Hanks, all turns and looks straight at you and McGregor and he goes, faith is a gift. I'm yet to be given
And I fucking love that line, I absolutely love that line. I don't think that most people who are convinced of a higher power of religion, of the ideology that's behind. It would discount it especially not now, especially when we have this lack of meaning, this dearth of existential crisis and stuff like that. I think people would be pretty happy to accept that that would be something that would be pretty cool for them, but
There is a sort of scientism. Rationalist approach is creating a very high bar for people to have this proved to them. So for me, my mom is a Reiki master of 20 years. So she knows she's spent a long, long time doing distant, healing crystals, all that sort of stuff. And I enjoy, hearing her talk through her stuff. I don't know how much of that, I fully subscribe to, but I enjoy the process of a enjoy. Hearing her talk with reverence about the practices that she goes.
Through and stuff like that. Yeah, so yeah, for me I was never like a card-carrying atheist. I thought it was cool to be like all cynical and kind of staunch and rational and stuff, I thought that it was a bit of intellectual posturing probably that that is seems like I'm real rational and you're not going to believe what these hokey kind of stories about fucking, which is
probably why you were attracted like a Sam Harris type of
posture. Yeah, although even with some dude, the stuff that I love to do with him was to do with the nature of your own mind and he's got
Amazing talk called death in the present moment and now along it's like 12 years old and people should go and check it out on YouTube. After they've finished with this podcast, it's just outstanding. You just explains that a lot of your life is going to be spent waiting for the next moment to come. And when that moment finally comes, you'll realize that it was the moment ready for your death. People are always looking past, the present moment shoulder, just peering passed. It to see what's coming next. Hmm, and you will realize when
money care about dies or you get sick or someone close to you get sick.
That you wasted your time thinking and worrying about things that ultimately didn't make any difference to you. And we all know that this is coming, we are all able to prepare ourselves for this to happen and yet people don't decide to fix it. So that for me was like, where some really came into his own, but with the religion thing, man, I'm perfectly open and I've been meaning to go to one of these Latin Mass things that a bunch of different fronts. I play Pickleball with go to and they've been singing the Praises of it in Latin and
Yeah, I think that it's something that more and more people are going to lean into now.
Yeah, atheists are real. Atheists are actually closer to believing in God than people who are just don't think about it. All. Because real atheist is constantly thinking, I was an atheist for a long time and it was at something that I pondered and thought about. And that's how I got to that point.
Think about how that relates to know
that mmm. Yeah, just just extreme
correct. Its the obsession it's the inversion of the
obsession but it brought me it meat because I thought about it,
I was doing more than a lot of people which is they don't think about it at all. All right. What's the difference between wisdom and knowledge? You know wisdoms in the title, your podcast, you talk about that. What is what is wisdom,
wisdom would be knowledge applied to me. So a good definition of wisdom would be something like understanding the outcomes of your actions being able to accurately predict what's going to happen based on what you do. Knowledge would simply be an understanding of the actions and what they mean. Hmm. And
I think.
trying to,
Understand myself in the world around me was a question. I ask myself a lot, you know, guys guys I call it the man Opals guys, get toward the end of the 20s. I like fucking what like what's going on here? All of the values. All the things that I thought and was told I should really take pride in throughout most of my 20s. They just really don't seem to be serving me and they change their training style at how many guys are on a push-pull leg split or like five by five or like German volume training or whatever.
We're doing a bro thing up until 25, 26, 27. And then they go, you know what it is when I can't touch my toes and I get out of breath, going up a set of stairs. I really should start doing yoga or CrossFit or fighting or Brazilian jiu-jitsu or whatever. And it's just this period that was the fitness manopause that them translated into the manor, was the me and I think that as that gets thrown up in the air you become a little bit more aware of like is this really what I want to be doing? Does it is the peak of my life to get a
Again with the boys on a weekend like, is that really what I want to do and wisdom for me is about understanding yourself and the world around. You understanding how your actions will have outcomes in the real world knowledge. You need to spend that time absorbing it, but I mean everybody has a friend that smart but not wise, right? Everybody has a friend that smart but not
wise. We're gonna have a lot more of them with chat gbt and the direction
of virtual virtual people that was lot of people that have all the answers. Yes. And what will allow that?
It would be, that would be stupid but not wise, right? I don't think they're even going to be
smart right by extension. I mean, if you considered your chat, gbt or AI is an extension of you, you'll have all the knowledge you want but 0,
wisdom and zero knowledge. Yeah. At least in yourself, I mean, we was on the plane coming over here last night and I sat next to this guy and we were trying to remember a movie that Bruce Willis had been in. And I caught myself saying,
Can. What was that movie? It was an unbreakable glass the one where he's with Samuel L Jackson and the guy had like real brittle bones unbreakable unbreakable, thank you? But I was like, what the fuck's up, what the fuck's the movie called that's like this is why we need Wi-Fi and that, oh, you just out sourced part of your brain to the internet. How many phone numbers, do you remember a nun? I can remember my parents home phone number which is just a world that they never moved and I can remember mine and I can remember my old business partners and the only reason for that is because the number of times that he's I've hit voicemail with him.
And I can only say it to myself. If I go like oh double 795 3, double 8. I don't know if I can do it in the Cadence that the lady on the fucking funded. But yeah, I the wisdom thing.
People want answers, they want to understand how to live a good life. What it is that they should focus on and that was the main reason that I started my show and that was the reason that every time I sit down with the Jordan Pederson or whatever, if I've had him on the show twice and he's become a good friend. Every time I speak to, my do want to talk about cultural stuff, I don't wanna talk about Sports Illustrated models, I don't wanna talk about like Canada, Justin Trudeau's, new overreach of whatever it is, that's in. I'm sure that they're important conversations for John Harvey.
On time, I want him to help me deal with the existential weight of existing, because that was the problem that I struggled with toward the end of my 20s. So, for me, getting that knowledge, putting it into practice, understanding your outcomes, understanding yourself in the world around you
wisdom. So being as I guess, I'll wear as you are because you obviously are very aware, how was the last few years for you. Looking at the just how people behaved the behaviors. The fears. The, you know, just what you like.
Like, for me, looking at the whole thing and going through it, I just couldn't believe the insanity and how crazy it got? Were you in the same position? Where you going through going? Okay? Is this at some point? People can like that's enough or were you just like? Well, it's human behavior. It's probably get much worse.
Good question. So I really didn't get too emotionally invested in any of what happened between 2020 and now at least with regards to the response to the pandemic.
It was the first time in my adult life that had a stable sleep and wake pattern ever, right? Because I was working until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning two or three nights a week. Oh as for forever. So I got to go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time and I was like, what the fuck is going on? So I used the pandemic, probably quite selfishly to just better myself. I spent a lot of time doing meditation, doing reading growing the show, I stepped up the show from too weak to three week, which I've now maintained even though the pandemic is over,
Figured that people would be more alone or whatever. And even my like poultry audience that I had at the time I was like, looking, I can, I can do something to help people, but
I really quite fortunately managed to avoid having my brain turned inside out by anything that was going on. I sure I didn't want to be told by Boris Johnson, three days before Christmas, that I wasn't supposed to go home to see my parents, right? I'd ruptured my achilles out of full Achilles Detachment during that summer. So I was already in like a bit of a like a no down place. I didn't want to hear that but I was really really happy with how I didn't let those.
Things get to me now. Some people perhaps rightly might say, well, that's because you didn't, they put your money where your mouth is and you didn't stand for something or whatever. It's like I did other stuff. I supported people with interesting conversations that distracted them away from it. There were enough people talking about that over the last few years. They didn't need another person going like, putting my completely uneducated. Completely unprofessional opinion in just like horse shitting my way through like hot takes to do with stuff. I wasn't prepared to put
Work in to get myself to the requisite amount of knowledge to be able to have an opinion that I would feel comfortable standing
behind before we. Everybody thought, like you actually did the right thing as you stay focused on making yourself better. Yeah, if everybody here that's yeah, it would Jordan Pearson say right. You cleaned your own room. Yeah. So tell everybody else. What they need to do
Douglas Murray. I was in New York with him last year, and he was saying to me, I mentioned, why he hadn't really commented on uncovered all that much and was sad that it's like two in the morning and New York and he's drinking a Manhattan. He said, you know, it is Christopher, I
It's something which is very rare and the online world now which is not to contribute to something which I know nothing
about
and you think fuck. Yeah. Like one of the problems that we have in the modern world, with hot takes coming from everybody. And with this ubiquity of ease of access to Give opinions is that everybody believes that they're supposed to have an opinion on everything. So bro, I really, really love the way that you can talk about personal development and
And set I don't respect or care about your opinion on Ukraine. Right why what what makes you think like is it that you're not supposed to have an opinion on stuff? No, obviously not but you know, that's needed to the global policy experts. Right. Let's leave it to the people to understand international relations and like, cold war Warfare, and Game Theory and systems theory and shit like that. Like that's for them to do. You can have your little hot take or whatever but don't make it your new Hill to die on unless you decide you're prepared to go through.
Ooh, all of the requisite work to get there, but the problem that you have is people very much are their opinions now, right? Yeah, like in a world where your words are more important than your Deeds because nobody sees your Deeds, but everybody sees your words, you are your opinions. The problem is that this precious few original thinkers in the world. So what happens is a large cohort of people repurpose opinions from whoever, their favorite thought leader is. So you could argue that the culture War. Sorry.
Largely is largely two armies of NPCs being ventriloquist by a handful of original thinkers, right? You have these guys at the top they repurpose opinions down to all of these people below and then they just spew them back up.
Yeah. And what's the worst part about that is when you become your opinion, change your opinion is death. So you're stuck, you're literally stuck. It's so hard to and I see this with people now with, you know, what's happened and you know,
in changes and they just get can't possibly change their opinion because it changes everything. Well, who am I then? And I'd, you know, it's like killing
myself, dude. That's such an amazing point. I talk about this all the time and you're so, right. The fact that
Your side sees, an absurd, ideological belief, as a show of fealty, right? Could imagine how ancient tribes and ancient armies and stuff. I'd have to show fealty to the local king or Lord or Baron or whatever. Right? What you're doing when you take on an absurd belief is saying I value adherence to the group ideology over what my own eyes and ears. Tell me the I will push aside rationality in reality
In order to show to you that, I believe, whatever it is. If for instance, somebody is adamant that everything is sis, hetero patriarchal, superstructures, misogynistic Lee keeping everybody down despite the fact that it doesn't really say, oh, somebody believes that the world is the worst it's ever been. Despite every objective metric that we care about showing that that's not the case, right? What you're saying is, I'm prepared to push reality to one side to show my fealty to this particular belief.
And what that means is that other members of the group can see you as a reliable Ally. Well, if this person is prepared to fucking Nazi, what evident the in front of them? We probably don't need to worry or scrutinize about them with anything else so it's loyalty display to your own side and it's a threat display to your enemies. So I do you think that you're going to convince me with that? This is how certain I am above my stance. And the problem that you have is twofold. If you do decide to have a non-typical opinion or some sort of new one,
By the other side, it's seen as a chink in your armor. Its seen as a weakness in terms of your adherence to the group and by your own group had seen as a lack of loyalty. So there is very, very few incentives for people to not just adhere
wholesale, the Griffin term, for those people are called useful idiots. That's the greatest criticism you'll get. And I mean, the most heat, you'll get if you change your opinion on something are from the is from the group that you originally aligned with. So you see some political, you know, commentary all time.
Or somebody's on one side and then they go against their side on one topic destroyed, it completely destroys them. And that's the biggest fear that we have is to be ostracized by our group because for all human history that meant death, you know, if you got up and said something to your tribe and everybody don't like what you had to say, you're out, cast aside and your
dad. Well if you know one opinion that a person holds and from that one opinion you can accurately predict everything else that they believe they're not a serious thing, right?
If I know you'll stance on abortion and from it, I know your stance on immigration and gun rights and the first amendment in the Second Amendment and on Taxation and on capitalism and unbidden all the way down. Yeah, but you're just a, you've just taken this cookie cutter. Yeah. Pre prescribed like onesie outfit, right? Zipped it up and gone like, hey, that's me. No, everybody is so idiosyncratic or they should be? I mean, there are some people out there. I'm sure there happens to be some people that just land perfectly.
It's slap bang in the middle of Republican or Democrat beliefs. Group Christian, a moment of fucking whatever it is, right? And they just that happens to be genuinely where they come from. But for the most part, it's not right. For the most part, somebody should be like a pro gun. But a pro-choice, let's say that would be something that wouldn't
necessarily know whether they're even. It's like they have nothing to do with each other and yeah, correct. You would find that. You could probably accurately predict that somebody who's pro-choice is is for lots of gun control.
In those are two topics that don't seem to be connected. It is very interesting. It feels like it's going to implode eventually because of that, because you have to believe that at least a large percentage of those people that are putting that onesie on deep down. Don't really believe they should be wearing, you know what Thelma, what I think when I look at it all as just, it's human behavior and human behavior doesn't change. Our environment changes technology, changes circumstances may change, but our behaviors remain the same and unless were aware
R of our Tendencies. Then it's just going to fall. I mean, you know, people look back. I mean, how many times have you heard people say if I lived in Nazi Germany, I totally would have rebelled and fought. No, you wouldn't. You would have been, like, 99.9%,
everybody carrying Nazi along with the
rest. Yeah. Like everybody else like you, most people would have, would have been doing that or if I lived in the Soviet Union, no, you wouldn't be in the gulags. You be doing exactly what they told you. It's all human behavior. So in my opinion, the key is to, we have to constantly become aware.
As up, be objective, have discussions. Otherwise you will fall back and you in me included, you will fall back in human behavior. It's just it's just the way we're wired. Yeah,
it's wild to Eakin have truth and accuracy in an individual, but lies and falsehoods in a group because group dynamics, cause people to compromise on something that they know individually
proven. By the way, this is proven Studies have shown this time and time again. That groupthink mob psychology is very different from an individual. It's
It's very
strange. But they brought us that they did a study in classroom University classroom, which you might be familiar with where they asked students to put their hands up based on which line. They thought was shorter between a choice of three and everybody else except for, maybe, one person or a couple of people in the class what plants that were all saying that in evident Lee longer line was shorter. Yeah. And sure enough people just fucking, am I missing
some? Yeah, it's so busy that we and the Hand goes up. That's like the one though.
The other study where they have them waiting outside in a waiting room. So it's a doctor's office and there's an elder like you're like, 80% of them are plants and so that you like a bell goes off and they all stand up, you know? And so then before ads how many you just do it. Look how crazy is that you know what? Justin brought up was the elevator where everybody's facing One Direction, single-file line, and people walk in and they get really serious we're all looking in this direction. Yeah, you know, evolutionarily speaking there was I mean all of these behaviors had, you know, some purpose, right? And evolutionarily speaking.
When you you know, we lived in tribes for most of human history. I mean it makes sense for preservation, you got to do what everybody else does because you don't know that there's a snake over there or there's a lion or there's gonna be a, you know, a ditch that you're going to fall in. But with large societies, just can become toxic and poisonous and easily manipulate very easily. Manipulated Chris, I'm going to change directions. You have a long history of fitness and exercise you've mentioned earlier in a podcast splits and five by five. So you have some knowledge with exercise, you're very growth minded.
What role for uses Fitness, play in all of that and has how you view fitness and exercise for yourself. Has that changed through that process? Like, was it for one thing before and now
something totally different. Correct, that would be right. Yes, so as most guys, I'm 18 years old. I'm super, super skinny, and like 63 kilos. I don't know what that is in your mother 130 pounds. Yeah. Super super small, right. When I get to UNI and I wanted to be more attractive to girls. I wanted to feel more confident. So I started training
We'll just total bro. Split and this is what 2006-2007. So this is like even before the bodybuilding.com forums or maybe just at the very very beginning of that. So it's like the wild west no one knew what they were doing. Knowing you want a macro was this was before If It Fits your Macros, right? So I had no idea. So it's just you go in, you left things, you like, eat a lot of Subway and hope for the best. I remember one of my housemates was adamant that like breaded chicken goujian's were the best way to get protein in.
So and then I just kept raining. And I was training for very the way that I looked very much so and then that carried me through a good way accumulated, a good amount of size pretty like relatively quickly I remember the day that I broke, 70 kilos, I was like 21 or something as I wow, like I'm massive 7170 Kayla. 71 kilos is fucking huge and yeah, I just kept on going kept on going and then it got to where
Towards maybe 24 25 and I was just a bit sick. I was kind of bored of doing more bro, split type stuff. So I went on to do Thai boxing white. I went out to Thailand and fought out there which was fun then came back. Did some more boxing stuff got into CrossFit 2000 and sort of 16 17 and the change whatever you want to say like philosophically was that previously. It was something I did to just look good whereas now it's something that I do to feel good.
And I'd still want the byproduct of looking good from it but I just didn't care how I felt previously if I was jacked but felt like shit that was worth it. Yeah. And it didn't care what my blood sugar was doing. I didn't care about how its performing mentally. Well as for me now, my main Pursuit is the podcast, right? I want to be as dialed in as possible, mentally for the podcast and whatever can support, that is good and the gym supports it.
Yeah. Fitness has you mentioned this earlier to about, you know, Sunday, you know, Sunday sermons? Yes, it there is you know when you
Review, Bishop Baron a while ago is a Catholic. Bishop very smart man and I asked him some questions about other religions. He says, you know, their spiritual truth and lots of different practices. And after that podcast, I thought I think there's some spiritual truth in Fitness not necessarily because you're seeking spiritual enlightenment but because the discipline and the process of it, I mean, the squat rack has been, you know, called The Altar, right? Go to the altar of the squat rack or, you know, Jim is my church. There's definitely some spiritual truth, and I think you figure this out after doing it for a long.
Long time because we all started like you did you know wanted to look good but you stick to it long enough and it kind of becomes this like practice it's almost like this spiritual practice have you found it to be coming out every other
rituals around it as well, right? This is why I've always struggled to train in the house. So we've got a ton of stuff in the garage where me and my housemate live but there's something about getting in the car with you boy and you pre workout or you na koa wood, kill, Cliff, whatever. You're drinking putting the music on arriving at the gym. Putting you back done speaking to the
Yes, it's ritualistic, you know, it's party, do it at the usually? At the same time each day there is a prescription. So yeah, I mean, it's very Transcendent. That being said, since I've been in Austin, I have become the equivalent of polyamorous with my gym memberships. So this is a, this is a
you're not monogamous gym, memberships. Yes.
This is a fucking great hack and it only really works if you're in a place that's got a ton of good gyms but I must have I think
Three or four different gym memberships. Now so I bring
Fitness Community out there. Fucking lot of people very active,
absolutely phenomenal. So lift ATX great. Jim indoor/outdoor garage old school style bodybuilding gym but a really good split of guys. Two girls, which makes you feel a little bit less. Like I dunno in Sally by going that. You know what I mean? Like you're going to a bodybuilding German. There's like half a woman in there. Anything like Gods. Like this is, caiied you go in there. It's a good split, guys. And girls Gold's Gym, I use if I'm prepping for a gas and I
I want like a quiet session where I can just chug away and do bits and pieces on. It is really, really fun. They've got a ton of unorthodox equipment in their reverse. Hyper's belt squats, all sorts of fun sharbel spell. Yeah, exactly. So having a bunch of different gym. Membership is a hack, if somebody's feeling like the training is falling off a little bit. At the moment, I would highly recommend just switching the facility that you go to, and that's been really good for me to have different locations for different.
Some days, I want to go to and especially in Austin memberships, aren't that much. So, 40 bucks, 50 bucks a month. You can accumulate this for the price of one bigger named it one like, Anna Lifetime Fitness, or whatever. You can accumulate,
what Adam did that? I share, I share this hack, I used to have like, depending on where I was in my training cycle where my mindset is like it would I would choose the gym based off of that. It's like, oh yeah, I need to be more in think more inward. I'm going to be go to this place. It's so quiet. So, older population. I like going there.
For that. I sit in a sauna afterwards. Oh, I got to get after it the Gold's burnell's. Got all the competitors. I need someone to push me and see someone else lifting heavy. So I love that. I think it's a great hack to rely on all the. I like the old dungeons. That's my favorite kind of workout. I like to go in and feel. I don't like it to be too new. I mean, I work out in a gym now that's like that because that's its accessible and convenient, but if I had a choice and I have four kids and, you know, have work and I could just go pick. I would drive to an old dark Dungey chalk filled dungeon that just feels better.
Sodas. Yeah. You know like like Dorian Yates your watch, his old videos of him working out and right? Yeah, like that. That was a basement. He worked out. There's no windows in that. I don't know if people knew that or not, but you actually had to go downstairs,
Blood and Guts. Yes Series.
Yeah, that's a great now, and I really want to work on the place like that. I'm on diesel epic,
bro. There's never been another training Vlog like that. Again, every single YouTuber has tried to recreate, Dorian Yates Blood and Guts training Vlog, and everybody's falling short,
know, the intensity.
And those is just palpable an original to,
you know, watch needs that guy. Is that training partner?
Squeeze it in if anyone hasn't seen Blood and Guts on YouTube and that's you, you mentioned, your housemate. Is that your business partner?
No, no. So business partner, me and Darren my previous business partner. Have parted ways because I exited the club stuff. So he took back all of the chef. I worked an exit from that last year. He's absolutely flying. I caught up with him of Christmas was still
Friends other words like tell under weightlifting YouTuber, okay him coaches ET, he's phenomenal as well. He's a big stiff idiot, but he is, he's great and we very much get on. What I like about America is that positivity and kind of the outgoing extraversion that just seems to be a bit more than it is in the UK. And he has been a very good counter balance to my British.
Stoicism me, ask you about that. Stop, my wife's family is from England and one of my best friend's was
He's from the UK and one thing I appreciate especially one of my best friend's. What I appreciate so much is your sense of humor and you, I mean you guys basically fuck with each other or are you just did right now? You were just talking about your housemate and you had to throw in
is a Big Stiff. Idiot is it best? If idiot?
Like I feel like there's some value in that because here it's like rude to do that or people don't get it all the time. I mean my friend his name is bad. It's endearing though. When you say oh he used to say oh my God he's the call me all kinds of shit and
It was great. I
absolutely loved it. Yeah. What keeps people down to earth? So this this like it a little bro sciency theory that I've come up with about the way that the UK and the u.s. differ so tall. Poppy syndrome is a big deal in the UK. If you diverge from the norm, you're going to be called out quite quickly. Like if you start doing anything different in school, you're immediately going to be called Gay. Okay? Like that's fucking gay. Like, why are you trying to do that so different time. But people going to point at you and say, that's something that is is from
the norm and it's not going to be super encouraged. What this means is, as you grow up, you kept incredibly humbled by a crushing amount of piss taking right now. The disadvantage running grow up is that this can lead to some quite sort of limited thinking, and a little bit of a scarcity mindset, the alternative. When you look at America is that there is still for all that, America's the worst cishet row country in the world. It still has a big blue sky Vision, right? People believe that they can be largely.
Is they want to be there, a, the American dream is still very much alive. And well, I think culturally, and that means that when kids do try something new or do decide that they're going to become a business person at 12 years old or whatever, that's like applauded that's raised up both amongst our local friends, circle, and and online. Now, the problem that they encounter when they grow up is that the world doesn't necessarily delivered to them that, which they were promised as a
kid. Everybody doesn't think you're special
correct. Correct. And this is why I think that the gesture
mom,
the victim Hood Mentality in America.
Is largely contributed to by this blue sky Vision, that you guys give to young people, which is not a bad thing. But if you could somehow blend the feet on the ground, spit and sawdust work hard mentality, that the UK has with the helicopter Blue Sky Vision thing that the US has. I think that you end up with the really really nice blend and piss taking is like the enforcement mechanism that keeps people's feet on the ground but blending that. So that you don't constrain what someone
That they can achieve is that's the delicate balance,
right? The value of bowling. Right? Justin. Oh I like listening to you. It like I think this is a recent phenomenon. That was definitely my experience growing up was, you know, everybody taking shots and it was very brutal, right? You know, pretty much the same but I think I'm sure that's in Pockets around the u.s. and yes terms of how I'm sure there's
some positive punks in the UK as well.
I'm sure it exists. Well, what South South, South has an evolutionary theory for it, right? That we that was implemented to
test other men to make sure if I was going to go to battle with you, I didn't know you could take a little insult to what do out that my evidence for that is just look at the nicknames that men give each other versus the nicknames that women give each other. Like, I tell the story, I had a friend who owned the restaurant and he was turning me around his new restaurant and I'm walking around. Good friend of mine, is David Shapiro, Rick? I own, some Greek, Greek restaurants and we're walking through and he's like, oh, this is John, this is George or Susan. This, that's nine over there. Here's Fred and I'm like, nine like
These look German like it's weird because if not, I guess that goes, hey 9 and he looks over. He goes, shall we call you nine? It lifts up his hands. He's missing a figure. Yeah, and I and I cracked up because that's how guys give each other nicknames, you know, my father-in-law, he was B normally after an insecurity, you probably have, he was born without he was born without one eye. So he wears an eyepatch or a glass eye and his nickname, you know, with his buddies was one eye. I was a big dick, one ball, Pat. Yeah, testicular cancer. Terrible thing to call him and see him.
My theory is that and I heard Jordan Pederson, kind of talked about this and it, you know, it kind of strengthen. What. I think that men do that with each other because we evolved to hunt and go to war and do a lot of stupid shit and risk-taking, and you want to mess with each other to see who's going to crack. Because, however, hard I'm going to tease you is nothing compared to when we're out there, right? And we're trying to, you know, hunt or go to war, like you got to keep going. Otherwise, I'm going to die. So if we poke at you now and you cry, you're not coming with us, you can stay over here, we're going to go over there.
Go hunt does a rule in intrasexual competition when it comes to friendships that men will in seat insult, each other and not mean it and women will complement each other and not mean
that's my wife's. Like someone will say I like a woman when we give a compliment and afterwards she like what a bitch like what she totally meant this. I'm like she said, something nice. She said she had nice hair. That's like know what she meant. Was that her hair looks shitty?
Yeah. So I've spent a good bit of time learning about
Intrasexual competition. So this is how men compete with men and women compete with women. And frankly, all of us in this room should be very thankful that were not women because female friendships are fucking vicious. Yeah, way way, way more vicious. What have you found? So, let's share some of the stuff. Fucking hell, man. This is, oh, I mean, this has been this two episodes of people should go and check out dr. Tanya Reynolds, which just came out very recently and Joyce benenson both of them are on the Chris Williams on YouTube or modern wisdom Spotify, whatever. One of the interesting ones is the effectiveness of sexual gossip that women use
Right? So if you look at on average, how many derogate each other, they will derogate each other through.
Pokes at that level of masculinity and sexual prowess. Mmm, so you'll say like you're a soft small cock bitch like that would be the sort of
thing I'm going to use that.
Where is soft smile cockpit? Whereas, if you were to look at what women will do, they will turn to derogate Chastity, right? So Chastity. And and youthfulness / attraction. So, like you're a fat slag, how your fat whore yeah. Like, that would be where they would go and this is so funny, right? Because it identifies just
that little thought experiment, think back to what you was a guy, call your guy friends or if you were a girl, how are you would insult a man that you didn't want to feel good? You would start to try and poke at his manhood in his sexual prowess, and if a guy wants to make a girl feel bad, even if it's just someone that cuts him up on the street, right? Like was the first place that you go. If you're going to like shout an expletive and a woman, you're going to call her like a whore. I like a stupid bitch or something, right? As opposed to. So you have this, I've urgent the reason that sexual gossip is so useful. Is that Chastity is something that
Really value in women. They don't want a partner that is super promiscuous. Because male parental uncertainty, IE not knowing whether the kid is mine or not. Means that I need to have the greatest sense of loyalty and certainty that have that this woman is not sleeping around. The more comfortable I can feel.
This is why in studies that show that women would be more upset if their Partners fell in love and didn't sleep with someone else. Correct manner the opposite.
Correct, that's correct. Yes and
The interesting thing that you see with this sort of sexual gossip is that it is a Precision targeted tool that women can use and it works within all of their intrasexual competition. So women don't want to have upfront, physical violence with each other. They want to be a subtle and safe other. The two things that they'll try and do safe as in no, one can see that. It's actually them. That's delivered it and subtle as in, it would be very hard and obvious to point out, so sexual gossip.
Say that I'm going on generally, there's I'm really worried about Mary, she just keeps on spending all of this time with different guys and I'm just so worried that she's going to get hurt. And I keep on asking a to go out for dinner but she keeps blowing me off for all of these different dudes and I'm just I'm just really worried about her. What she's saying is Mary's a whore and she's sleeping around. So venting is a very specific type of gossip and it is this sort of exasperated person.
All complained that very subtly delivers a message about somebody else. If I say marries a whore and you should avoid her, that's quite open face, right? That's neither safe. Nor subtle. However, if I vent, it feels like me just naturally letting go of some discomfort that's occurred. Now what it does, if you do that type of sexual gossip. As a woman about another woman, it broadcasts, your sexual Chastity because you immediately, because worried about it, you immediately posit yourself as I'm worried about Mary. But me, I
I would never ever consider all of these different games to Pure ended up just here, looking out for my friend. So, first off it broadcast yours, secondly, it's almost impossible to disprove, like, you can't run around town showing people. All of the sex that you're not having. Like, that's not a thing that you can do. And then finally, it really points. A finger in daraa Gates, women that are the biggest competitors. So men, it seems infidelity from man is done with women that are sexually open.
And like visually provocative, those are the women who are precisely the easiest targets of sexual gossip because it's like it makes sense. So I don't know. Does it like this? Maybe this girl just doesn't like wearing a lot of clothes but doesn't actually spray it around. It's like been tons of girls that I've known throughout my time in Nightlife will go out dressed provocatively, but no one ever goes home with. So, it's not exactly a one-to-one correlation but yet sexual gossip, is this, just this Precision targeting tool broadcasts the gossipers
Sexual Chastity. Derogate something very important about the woman that they're talking to and also is this sort of safe and subtle thing as well.
Yeah, when you have, when you have kids of both genders, you see this when they're really young. Like I remember when my older kids were younger I, you know, I'm talking like first grade and you'd see the little boys running around playing and then one boy would like push another boy down and they cry and then the teacher would separate them and they go play again. And then another boy would take something.
From another kid and then they, you know, find then they start playing again. And then I remember this like it was yesterday and then I'm looking at the little girls and there was this one little girl that the other girls weren't playing with. And I walk over and I kind of listened and I can hear these first graders first grade and they're saying, don't play with someone, so I don't like so. And so don't play with her. They had organized a group to ostracize this one. Little girl wears with the boys. It was like, I'm gonna punch you in the face. Take your stuff teacher comes over and then we'll
Best friends after that, we're okay. Yeah, well, this is why male and female friendships are so fascinating in their differences, that men need to be able to get on very, very quickly with other guys within that group, right? Yes, I need to trust you. I need to trust that you've got my back, but if we're going to it's like me, you grab spear, go get Mammoth like we're going to go take this fucking thing down together, which means that you need to very quickly, be able to bond together and you need to not have any underlying nasties that are lurking within this whereas women who would
I've done what's called a low parenting? Like this sort of Distributing shared parenting of non-kin children. Amongst friends Auntie's Etc. I'll go get some berries, will bring them back and then you can look after the kids for a little bit and do all the rest of it. It's much more important that women know, a small group of incredibly tight friends, but that they ostracize the ones that aren't a part of that group. An interesting thing that you see for the denial of sex differences crowd, which is just the most insane. So,
The most insane philosophy that I've ever heard. Joyce Pattinson did this research, where she looked at kindergarteners. So three years old as three, and four years old and she is observed. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours of these kids and the girls, if you look at what the girls are doing, and what the boys are doing, it is precisely getting themselves ready for the sort of roles that ancestrally. They would have done. So the boys, they will create an enemy of some kind. Maybe it's another group of boys that they're playing some sort of team sport with maybe it's aliens, maybe it's cow.
Boys, maybe it's whatever. What is that welfare? They're practicing Warfare as children, right? We will ban together over the and we will overcome an opposing tribe. If you look at what girls are doing girls are keeping something alive that keeping a pretend rabbit alive, they're playing nurse, they're playing doctor, they're doing some sort of teacher role. They are keeping things alive. That's the fucking world that they're going to grow up into and boys are showing something killing something. Like the guns, in Spears, precisely correct.
Yes. And you think okay, this is at age three or four, it's cross-cultural it. This is not socialization. This is what boys and girls are disposed predisposed to do another really interesting thing. So the discussion about trans sports, right, let's fucking kick this third rail. This is something that nobody ever talks. I don't
know why. This is a third world, by the way, this is so ridiculous to me. But anyway,
so this is something that no one ever talks about. Everybody relies in the discussion around trans athletes in sports.
It's exclusively on the power thing, right? Almost exclusively on the power, its bone density, its muscle, mass. It's all the rest of it. Nobody bothers to look at the different mental capacities that many women have, because even the most Ardent anti-trans in sports promoters, haven't done the work to look at the fact that men and women mentally are incredibly different in terms of their capacities at Age 3, there is a fifty to seventy percent disparity in throwing accuracy between boys and girls at age three.
Brain scans can determine somebody sex up to a 96% accuracy by knowing nothing else about them just through their brain scans. Right? So man males have better. What's called spatial rotation. So they are able to manipulate 3D objects in their mind and you can imagine my disappear useful. I've got some wildebeest going left to right. I have a spear in my hand and I'm running in this direction. I need to be able to work out how fast, it's going, how fast I'm going, how fast this Spears going to move and I need to get all of them to intersect perfectly, right?
Right. Women have better memory localization so this is why men lose their keys around the house and women find them, right? That they are very good games where you have, you know, cards down on a table and you've got to turn to over and and match them. Women will piss all over you. When it comes to that, they will wipe the floor with you, with regards to their ability to do locals locals memorization just is phenomenal. Why would that be well, women wouldn't range as far as men would they wouldn't need to know.
How to navigate themselves back as well. Men over the long range finding have better return accuracy in terms of whether going, which is why I like women don't know where they're going. Without GPS is like a bit of a meme in a cliche, but it's also generally, true. But also guys don't know where the fuck they put their keys in their can't keep the house. Tidy is also true when we need to know that bush is good in June but it's not very good in August because the berries become bad and I need to know where the best water is why the best rocks are where the best cave is, where the place that we're not supposed to go is and that's this. Local,
Ian. So, when it comes to trans athletes in sport, everyone can say we don't want fighters in the UFC because fundamentally, you know, person that's grown up as a male for almost all of their life is going to smash seven shades of shit out of some poor. Unsuspecting girl quite rightly. But when you're talking about athletes going into especially throwing sports or kicking, Sports a ball sports, like does the reason that the WNBA isn't quite as exciting as the men's and it's that mentally, the capacity of the athletes is optimized for
Something else.
You did touch the third rail here. This is great. Well, you know why, okay, so the physical change. The physical differences are obvious and I think that's why people focus on them. All right, you're talking about is doesn't seem as obvious, although, when you discuss it and think about it, it is quite clear. Now, what does this mean what this means is, and by the way, just to be clear. Generally speaking men and women are far more similar than they are different, correct? It's at the ends of the extremes where you see the
like in professional spoons.
Yes.
Yes. So when you if you look for like the most empathetic nurturing, you know, person who can read someone else's emotions from a distance, you're going to probably see mostly women. If not all women, if you're looking at for the most violent, most single-minded, you know whatever. Then you're going to probably find most men and sports is the extremes professional sports is the 1% of the 1%. I mean, you know, I've never competed at high levels in sports, but I did do martial arts and I did.
You know, go against black belts who were local black belts and then I would go against black belts, who are world champions, and it's like a different. It's not even the same species, correct? Like, a normal black belt versus a world champion. I might as well have been going against a child versus, you know, a gorilla. It was so different. So these are good conversations that have precisely because I think it helps us understand each other like I'm married. Okay. And if you're married, it's very important that you grow with each other and try to understand each other because you're going to communicate to First.
Your two individuals but then you're also a man and a woman in many cases and it helps to understand how women think and how men think so that when you communicate you're not thinking that you're talking to your girlfriend or your guy friend, you're like, well, I'm talking to my wife and she's explaining something to me and she's telling me how she feels and she didn't want me to fix it. She just wants me to listen to her track. Whereas if Justin comes to me and tells me how he feels, he wants me to fix it. He wants me to give an answer.
He's got you can empathize, but not sympathize and the reverse is true as well. There's this thing called
The cross-sex mind reading which is what you're talking about. The failure of cross-sex mind-reading and it happens a lot in mating you have an over perception and under perception bias of Attraction right men on average. Believe that the woman that they're speaking to is more attractive, she is and women on average believe that the man that she's speaking to is less attracted to her than they are. So even just in that one example of, let's say an awkward encounter in an office, right? Where the guys like, well she keeps on lingering her eyes at me and the
Woman's like Disney nice. Like she's
like, I got something in my eye. Exactly. You know, the
mean and even in that situation you can see one person sees one world and another person sees another world. It very much is two different existences that are going on and yeah, absolutely the way to transcend. Your programming is to first become aware of
it. This is, this is one of the reasons why among other reasons why you see like that the popularity of things, like only fans and the big, big money makers are women.
Part of it is the that men are more visually stimulated but a big part of only fat because pornography is free. So you think why is only fan so popular? Is because guys think that these girls actually like them. Oh you know I send her stuff and she comments mean you know she actually kind of it's like back in the day when you go with your buddy for the Scripture A syndrome and you leave and your buddies always a she actually yeah but you know what's most ironic about that point that I think is crazy or that I think is just the the person who goes to the strip club and the person that goes on the only fans I actually think they
I know that and yet, still partake. Yeah. Like how often have you met somebody who goes to a club and really believes that he's coming home with one? The stripper's? Like, no, no, everything's believe that. You like them and then same thing goes with the only fans. Like, I mean, do you this this girl's in Australia? You're in the states and I think they're actually even aware that it that's happening or the assistant is actually probably, but it's like you wanted,
bro. You want to fucking bring this full circle? Yeah, imagine when chat GPT deployed onto the back
And of only funds and they don't even need some Vietnamese virtual assistant to do dirty talk because you're just going to be speaking to chat GPT, imagine how scalable it's going to be for. They're going to have a 24/7, dirty talk sex, partner
program, that and sex robots are ready to be able to sex to you.
Does a guy that married this dude in Japan? That married a hologram. Oh, Holy
Ground. Oh, that's gonna happen. What? He's married. A hologram. I'm gonna make, I'm gonna make a prediction right now. I'm going to predict that the
Germans are so weird. The next civil rights movement. The next big crazy Civil. Rights Movement is going to be people demanding rights for artificial intelligence. Robot lives matter. Yeah, that's a good next, big one because they're going to be somewhat indistinguishable if not totally indistinguishable from humans. They'll say everything you want with very Charming. They will have the technology to read your pupil size and pulse and skin temperature know exactly what to say, what to do. And people going to love them. And we're
Fight for their right to have rights and get married and do that kind of stuff. I think that'll be the next big, huge
a decade ago. A robot was given citizenship, I stopped Singapore, that gave it full citizenship and that was really dangerous. I had a couple of great conversations around robot, ethicist. There's a lot of people that are working very hard at this, right, to like really think like I'm gonna hang like, fucking pump the brakes on this stuff, and he said that it was something that nobody, it's created a precedent, which is actually pretty fucking
Concerning like being able to give a robot citizenship, what does it even mean to? Okay, so that robots are person we can write. What does that mean? Yeah, it's really, really strange.
Yeah, I think they did it kind of like as a publicist publicity thing that really realizing what it could potentially mean but that's like, like what are you doing? That's going to be with, I feel like the future and I feel like there's gonna be a future market for
I don't know what you would call it organic you know media organic content. Like now you go buy a car that's made by hand. Even though it takes way longer and machines, probably make it even more precise. It's more experiment crafted. I feel like we're going to have to eventually make our podcast. It's going to say you know mine pump organic by real humans and people going to listen to, but I all these guys mess up all the time. They're not as good but you
know, yes, it wasn't people. It wasn't like mine. Pump AI? Yeah, dude. It's really really fucking concerning but I
Again, it comes back to that convenience thing, right? You know, if you can get more better crafted, only funds quicker response better nudes or whatever it is that you want out of it, it's gonna be difficult for people to say no to.
Yeah, they won't. They won't for sure. You know, I wanted to ask you some questions around business and I haven't actually heard you talk much about your business. What does that Journey been like for you? Did you have any monetary motivation behind everything that you did? Are you trying to scale and grow?
Is it just you and a partner? I haven't heard you. Talk about anybody else. Like, tell me a little bit about the business behind modern wisdom.
Cool. So it's very, very strict back. It's a straight-up Creator economy at the moment for me. I work with a bunch of partners that I absolutely love crafted London number ones, men's jewelry company in the world is a sponsor, Jim shark, my protein better help, athletic greens, such a tone of partners are apps that you do, but I'm not monetizing with my own products. I don't sell anything.
I don't have courses, I don't have coaching. There is basically no back end, there's no members area, there's no nothing and the team consists of me a video editor and an assistant and the assistants only been with us for about 18 months to two years. I
so I assume. This is by Design,
correct? Yeah, it's very lean. I'd spent almost all of my 20s managing teams of between 500 and 1,000 people. So, when you run a nightclub in order to fill a nightclub with about 2,000 kids, you need a thousand people to bring one friend. So it's you need,
A lot of staff and I enjoyed learning how to manage people but it was something that I was really ready to kind of step back and I very much enjoy me and my editor Dean just, it's us to making everything happen, making sure that the episodes are up getting the edits in there. Now, when it comes to the Bigger Productions, we've got a team that we come in to do this. This Goggins thing I keep on harping on about that, we can put in the show notes, whatever people are interested. We fly in entire Cinema crew out with the Director of Photography and they build
Custom sets in the middle of Sound
Stage. I was going to ask you about that. That's set. Look way too sick to be just like throwing
together. It wasn't, it didn't exist his custom-made. Everything was custom. Wow, custom light and custom backdrop, custom-built boards with the brick. That's not real brick.
Would you spend put that all together but 20 grand? Yeah. Yeah, it's actually not bad. That's not bad for what I saw.
It's not, but that is because I've built up an existing relationship with all of the different guys. So, I know this person and this person, and this person, and this person, this person, and then there's one guy in the middle, who is able to
Wrap it all together and make it happen
because originally organizing that probably was a monster but now you've got your
system correct. Yes. And that's unbelievably powerful and we're gonna do some more cool stuff this year. You know, if and when I get the next whatever the next big guest is that comes on will continue to do that and to really try and push the limits in terms of production like how far can we go in terms of cinematography? But when it comes to the business man it's just, it's good affiliate deals. I'm going to start releasing some products this year. There's some stuff that I think that's missing in the market. I really want to do so, we are part way through
Moving that along I think I'll be writing a book this year as well which will be fun, but I don't know this. I'm not really materialistically minded and it's like an ongoing debate in my mind at the moment that is probably quite timely to talk about.
I don't have massive material goals for my life. I already earn like fucking 50 times more than I ever. Probably should have done coming from the place. Like the most working-class town in the UK, which was famous only, for having the highest teen pregnancy rate in England. Like, and I'm already what part it's called, stockton-on-tees, T, sided, 50 miles, south of Newcastle, which is where I went to University just below Scotland. And
I'm already so far out ahead. But since coming over to America,
That blue sky Vision that I talk about with you guys, his don't leave it on the table is the thing that keeps coming to mind. It's like how much of this you just, like, just leaving out there because you don't, it would be easier for you to not push. It would be easy for you to not monetize more effectively. To not write the book because everything is comfortable. We've been talking about Comfort, lot throughout the conversation today. My okay, fucking hell right? Well, maybe maybe I do need to write a book, maybe I do need to, to try and release some products because it
Value and maybe would, you know, generate some revenue and maybe it would take people away from other either products or courses or learnings that I think would be suboptimal. I think I could maybe even add more than whether going at the moment, but I'm not. I've realized, I'm not actually all that massively business-minded even though I was a bit business owner managing director for a decade and a half, I was just really good at doing a thing and that grew and it's the same with the podcast. I'm really good at having a conversation with
someone and it grew. So, I'm probably going to need to get and need like a business manager or something. You can just come in and, like, work out, what would be really aligned? Really virtuous with high integrity but also monetize more effectively and spread the message more, but my own, the only thing that I'm bothered about is good conversations conversations, interesting people. Yeah. You can't, you
come off that way. That's why part of the reason why I asked well share with me then your relationship with money because actually, someone who comes from small town also, I'll come from
Small town. I actually had Big Dreams and wanted so much more and I. So I have an interesting journey of not having having not being happy, then coming full circle. So tell me about your relationship and journey with money coming from small town.
Yeah, so, um, just your entire perspective of what is a good wage is so skewed. So like let's say that a pound is like 1.2 dollars, something like that would be like 1.05 at the moment, but
Or me, anybody the earned more than 20,000 pounds a year like 25,000 dollars. Thirty thousand dollars was like insane. Like absolutely crushing it. And I'm thinking to myself, wow. Well, you know, if I come out of University, even when I went to UNI, right? If I come out of uni, and I got in a graduate scheme that pays 25. Remember, I've done two degrees did a bachelor's and a master's both in business, like, come out and start working for Accenture and maybe if I get paid to have 28,000 pounds, that would be. That's like an insane starting wage. I remember one of my friends, you know, one of my housemates started working to
Just a little it's like Aldi. Okay? And that graduate scheme is the most trial by fire thing ever. It's like 80 hours a week for two years but you get it free, Audi A4, and it's 40 Grand a year. So this guy just crushed himself for like, 24 months, hated his life but he's only 40 Grand a year, and we all thought he was the shit and relationship with money is just, I'm really not very materialistic. Most of the stuff that I wear has either been gifted to me by companies or is like stuff that I've had to pick up what I'm going away on.
Um, some trip or whatever. Yeah,
house down from parents. Or I mean, where does it come from? I
actually really, really like it. It's one of the things that I'm happiest, I inculcated in terms of a value in myself, mom and dad were never very keeping up with the Joneses e, it was birthdays and Christmas celebrations, weren't particularly big occasions in terms of the presence. It wasn't really about the presence and I think that I can see in
With my other friends parents, who were more about keeping up with the Joneses, that they gave love through, showing gifts, right? They showed love through giving gifts. And that means as they grow up, that they are a little bit more finger on the pulse of maybe I do need the new car. Maybe I do need a new shoes, maybe it does matter what watch is on my wrist, maybe. And the way that I see it, if you are someone who is similar to myself and perhaps you would
not being super materialistic, it's a competitive Advantage because the amount of money and possessions that I need in order to make me happy is like 10% and some of the friends that I've
got, that's the number one, common thread found actually in millionaires, lot of people don't realize that, is that their ability to live significantly below. Their means not their job or profession or their degree or any of that other shit. It's literally the ability to live. Well, below your means that's the most common thing amongst all millionaires.
Yeah, that's interesting. But it's so yeah. And then, the journey now is
Any kind of coming out the other side of this and thinking, right? Stop leaving so much on the table. Let's really try and make a good impact. I enjoy raising up other people along with the show because for a long time, and you guys know this, right, that your slipstreaming in the wake of other people who've got as much cloud or more clout than you do, right? I'm holding onto John Peterson's. Cartels are under humans, cartels are Jaco's, cartels are Goggins is or whatever. And after a little bit of time, you generate your own momentum to the stage where you can move under your own Steam.
Team and you can be that springboard for other people. Yeah. So Gwenda, the guy that I said that wrote, that amazing Tick-Tock article eventually get that article in front of Rogan and then he tweeted it and it's like that's where I read it. Yeah. That's like, fucking like millions of people. I don't know how many Impressions like 5 million, 10 million people or whatever they've seen this article. And I was like hey dudes. Like by the way I think this is ended up in front of them and then sure enough. He tweeted it that night I'm like that's fucking like that makes me. That's a really cool feeling to do so fucking gas. Yeah my editor as well Dean. He got to leave a job that he wasn't super happy and he's a
Believable creative, fantastic photographer, left out and got to go freelance, doing whatever you wanted. And then the other half of his week is spent doing the podcast. And, you know, the first year that he was working with me. I think we both earn because we were 50/50 on AdSense together from YouTube. He made like 50 bucks and then the secondary may be made like a thousand bucks. And then two years ago after we had a little bit of take off and up to. Now he's driving around in this BMW M1 for t.i. with a straight through.
Sauced, V6 turbocharged, Batmobile thing. And that's been funded heavily by the podcast and that gas is me up to think that because we decided to take a chance on this thing that he's
not a problem,
being very dangerous when he drives in this rear wheel drive, 400 horsepower car, so that's great. And I think, okay, well, if that makes me feel so good, maybe I can do that a little bit more, but it's, I've had to, like, reverse engineer it. You know, I'm having to almost artistically.
Step my way through. Why should I try and earn more money? Why should I try and monetize more effectively? Because I just the standard of life that I have at the moment is already great. I live in a house, that's gorgeous with a cold tub outside. I've got a house make that call. I do a job that I really love I can fly wherever I want, you know, I get to. What would I do? I do? I have like a slightly more expensive coffee, like what am I going to? None of the things that I take my value for my Uber everywhere in Austin, right. But then on the
Flip side since being in Austin and being around guys like Tucker, Max who started scribe media, good friends, with all Bray good friends with Michael cashew and Addy from working against gravity. That pool is fucking nice. That pool is really nice and that new brand new Porsche Cayman is Freddy fucking sweet. I know you've got a ranch and a you've got a holiday home up in Vermont and that's cool and that's cool but it doesn't feel like I'm compelled and that's really
what's your it?
One of your great strengths, but I always say that your greatest wrinkle I
want to know about your, you'll sort of little reject well II. So I we bounced
around and nine different homes growing up. Most of them, we were evicted from my dad committed suicide when I was 7. My mom remarried into abusive relationships too. So to summarize, I had a less than privileged Rocky. Yeah, growing up, right? So and a lot of that was routed from root of the lot of the arguments and fights were rooted in us, not having not having enough, not be able to pay.
And so that really motivated me and so all through my I was working at a very young age and all the way through my teens and early 20s. I worked really hard like you my number was 50,000 thought they made fifty thousand dollars a year. I'd be rich because I was like more than my parents made combined with real raising four kids. So I thought I would be Filthy Rich making that and you know I had this arbitrary number in my head that once I reach that like that was the number and I actually
Reach that about 27 28 years old and for about a year or two, I'd probably would have told you during that time this is the greatest arrows flying to Vegas and paying for all my friends that do shit. The cool cars, all the cool stuff. I woke up one day about a year to two years later and looked at myself in the mirror and I was in the worst shape of my life. I had two very close friends of mine from childhood. We fell out of a relationship. We're no longer,
Friends more the girl. I was dating. Dating had just cheated on me, I wasn't seeing my family so I that and I realized like holy fuck on the most unhappy I've ever been in my life and I have this dollar amount. I'd all of the wealth. Yeah. And so now the cool part about that was it allowed this time that I didn't have to go work. I had enough money stacked up that I could live for a while and and not worry about making a paycheck. So it really allowed me that time to self-reflect and go. Okay, what does make me happy?
What I want to do, and I remember that health and fitness is always good to take a little Hiatus from it to chase money from Fitness. And I have man, I've always loved that. I've always loved health and fitness and maybe I'm not going to be rich doing it. But that's where my heart is my passion. I love helping people. And so I went back into pursuing that it was right at the height of when Instagram and Facebook and YouTube was like 12 years ago or what that was really starting to blow up, you know, and you're starting to see people and so I turned on so,
Shal media. I didn't have any of it. So I was like a people person and didn't really mess around online at all, turned it on, with the intent to build a network of people to eventually build some sort of a Fitness business and that's actually how we all get connected. So we got connected and we're all we're all doing different things. But actually all came together at one point and had a conversation in my mother-in-law's house in the living room and we all hit it off and we started the podcast, not with Annie.
Not necessarily to monetize and make money. But because we had this information and content that we wanted to share with the world and especially in our space, that we felt was so convoluted with all this bad information, we saw the rise of that. And we want to disrupt it, we thought and then hopefully, the other people would glom onto it and want to listen and share with their friends. And I mean, that's how mine pump really started to go and take off. But during that time, I went from being the kid that was so driven and wanted money had reached out.
A point. And now my relationship has changed with. I still enjoy the Finer Things in life, like, I still like having a nice car. I still like the nice watch, I still like some
of those never going to be boring to fly business
class. Yes, right. That's right. So and I appreciate those things I actually really liked like that I had that Journey that I went from being very driven by that getting a chance to reach it and then realizing it's not all it's cracked up to
be. Does it quote from Nevada County? Larry says, it is far easier to achieve a material desires than to
renounce them. Hmm,
and what he means is that you can drive a be
Uh, pakora if your last car was a Ferrari, but if you go through your entire life, wondering what it's like to drive a Ferrari, it's going to be an open loop that you just never get past. And I think that Transcendence include is a nice way to look at a lot of the things that we've spoken about today, right? Okay, I have this endless list of guys and girls on the internet that I could date, right? I need to accept the fact that that is there, but I also need to transcend it. I need to understand that money might not be everything that is going to make me happy but
But I have this bias where if I don't achieve some of the things I want to do, I'm always going to have that open loop in the back of my mind about, what if? Yeah and most people regret the decisions that they didn't make their own rather than the ones that they did.
The most interesting part is in the ironic is that when I let go of the, chasing the
money, while money came,
more money, came, so that's the fun. The funniest thing about it is that I finally made that that switchover of, like it's not what's important to me and then it all came in.
So it was really funny how that happened. Yeah, well, I
mean,
The other thing is that what we said at the very very beginning it's super hard to compete with somebody that's having fun and be very, very difficult was this study done on Steffi Graf German tennis player like Savant German tennis player and they rated kids in the German kid's tennis program on motivation to train and skill aptitude and she came in as a 10 on skill and aptitude and attend on motivation to train. So even if your as skilled as she is, she's
going to artwork you and to her it's not even going to feel like unbelievably difficult to compete with somebody that's having fun and nobody can beat you at being, you either, right. There is one version of you, every single different iteration, and different encounter between all of your ancestors from the you cryotic. Double cell bacteria, 2 billion years ago, right up to now it had to be that animal at that time in that ovulation period. With that particular sperm had to be those two over.
Over and over, and over again for two hundred thousand Generations or however, long it is right? In order to be able to create this particular unique combination of genetic predisposition. And then the way you've dealt with past traumas, your environmental programming, that all of the things that you've gone through has created you,
you know, it's most crazy about that to me though is how many people think they want to be that person like you mentioned like a superstar like tennis player? And you I think of like the Stephen Curry's, the Michael Jordan's the Tiger Woods.
Yeah, these people that that we see just the highlight, reels of the, the fame, the money, the cool cars, the girls, all these things like that. But don't realize how potentially tortured they are inside and the formula. It takes to be that that great at that, at that support one thing. And I've been lucky to have been around a lot of these athletes, and it's very, very rare that I find one that I would want to trade places.
Most of the people that you admire on superheroes that normal humans, that have sacrificed pretty much everything in their life to be good at one thing. If you had the opportunity to look at the inner text, you have an Elon musk's life or Kim Kardashian. When she goes to bed, you probably wouldn't want to trade places with them. You don't know if Elon Musk hasn't had an erection in fucking six months because of how stressed he is. You don't know if Kim Kardashian can't bear to have a conversation with any of her sisters because I've tortured her and her family life is, you don't know all of these things, right?
You only get to see what is shown to you and Eddie Hall. I always use this example of Eddie Hall. Eddie Hall wins world's strongest, man in 2018, I think. And he says, straight after that he quits, right? He leaves strong man on the stage and he says, it's for his grandma. He's sort of holds the thing up and he's crying. And he says, this is for you. And then he immediately retires from competitive strongman and somebody asks him like, you know, just one
Do not want to go for the like, 2, Peter 3 Pete. And he says, if I keep on doing this, I'm going to be dead single and with no relationship to my child because his he was like what 64 200 kilos like 440 pounds. This guy Wade is blood pressure was through, the roof is heart rate was all over the place is Health, the probably the drugs in the steroids that he was on. Wouldn't have contributed what very well that died. Everything is fucked. He said he was training so hard and he was so obsessive about winning that his relationship with his wife was breaking down, his relationship with his
It was basically non-existent. Okay, I want to be the world's strongest man. I want to be able to be the guy that can stand on stage. Hold the trophy in the air and say mum Grandma. Thank you for helping me. This is for you. Okay do you want to have no relationship with your kid risk, your health, and also your marriage. In order to be able to do that. Conor McGregor is another example. Everybody looks at Conner, this sort of savant martial artist that's having an unbelievable career. I actually think, I mean now he's kind of embarrassing. It looks like it's going down soon.
Super, super who like the most cringe guy on the internet. However, when he was at his prime, he would say that's the guy that I want to be is walking out on stage and he's like an artist, you know, he's sort of this like demigod fucking artist. Charismatic guy. Okay. Do you want to spend the first decade of your career living in the Attic of your parents house in Ireland, with your girlfriend. With no idea about whether or not things are going to work out. Going to the gym and rolling the same sequences, throwing the same combinations.
For hours and hours and hours, and nobody picking you up having self belief but not knowing if it's going to go anywhere, that's the price that you pay in order to be Conor McGregor and most people wouldn't pay that price if they had the opportunity to do it. If you got to see the inner texture of the people who you admire as Minds, you wouldn't pay that price.
That's what I tell people. When they say I want to have a six-pack now, you don't you really don't want to have six pack abs fucking miserable for, what is required of it. You don't want a
room of people who've all had six pack abs? Yeah, it's fucking
miserable, it's just nice and this is a car.
Reason why you if you don't know how much you went through our stuff but you don't see any transformation photos, you don't see us doing all kinds of stuff like that is because we don't think about balance. We just well we just don't think it's a healthy message for a majority of people because you're not presenting the other side of that, of what it takes to do that. And I went through what, three, almost four years of dieting for bodybuilding, became a Pro men's physique athlete and I'll never forget Katrina my wife looking over to me and she goes this is going to be our life and I was like, fuck no, we're going to reach a point.
Point him out of here. Yes. And it was really just to help catapult this to use my name that I was building in the competing world to Pivot over this because but I could see how many people get trapped in that. I mean, it's
crazy but it's the it's far easy to achieve you material desires and to announce them thing, right? But if someone continues to okay now I've achieved one goal but oh well, I've got a local Championship. How about I go for like a regional? Okay, well how about we go for a national? Well, how about I go to Worlds? How about going to ifbb, like you can continue, there is always,
Going to be another motherfucker out there, that's going to be better than you. And even let's use this as an example. Tom, Brady. How many rings? Do you know? He's only got 10 fingers and he's got seven championship rings. Yeah, okay. So let's say you just three more and then he's out of fingers. Is that enough? Yeah, the gold medalist syndrome is a big deal. What do you do after you've done that? Well, if we
broaden, was your identity outside of
that, who are you? Who are you, when you let, when you let
this with her,
When you let this thing, well, imagine trying to reverse that do after you've already doubled, tripled down and committed like someone like him. I mean you're already you've been all in for decorations? Yeah isn't it? I've talked we talked about this your IP probably someone like that would probably rather die on the field well because it's like once you stop who are you? I mean you know we talked about this all the time that the value comes from the journey and not necessarily or almost never from accomplishing the
goal. We haven't spoken about him yet today but under root 8, one of my favorite
From him that he's got, is having things. Isn't that fun? Getting things is really fun and you realize that he is a man that has got essentially unlimited material wealth as far as he's concerned and his only enjoyment in life comes from getting more. He can't be happy with the things that he has, but that's the same with regards to, and it's one of the beautiful things about podcasting, curiosity learning skill development. Is that, it's an endless game that you can.
Actually, enjoy the process of there is always something new and interesting for you to learn about the world. Like today, the sexual gossip think it's, it's almost everybody, it's kind of pointless, but it's kind of interesting as well. I never knew the way that women use venting as this and then maybe you see it and you go, oh, fuck, it's like unlocked. This other area of life. And if you are the kind of person that listens to your show, I listen to my show, you take pleasure in seeing code where they previously.
Used to be computer program, right y'all? Fuck like, that's why that thing happens. Are you watching? Eddie whole documentary? You go, oh shit. I didn't realize that he was actually on the cusp of this thing. And it was kind of cool because if he hadn't won at that, maybe he would have ended up being a really bad Health crisis or he would have been single or whatever and you get to that. For me is that's what fires me up, what fires me up. Is understanding the world with greater resolution, like understanding it with more detail and that's just it's just endlessly interesting. And I think
Think that the game of satisfying curiosity is such a beautiful endless game to play or a, an eternal game to play
Pursuit of growth, the pursuit of personal growth, if you fall in love with the pursuit, you're just always going to have a good time. Yes, absolutely. Well, this has been great. Chris. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. Having you on the show, man? I appreciate appreciate you coming into the studio, and doing this with us. Been awesome. My pleasure. No, thanks. Thanks again for listening to me.
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